Projected Backwards into the Future--Cinemedia's Platform 1.0 on Federation Square

An institution called Cinemedia is fashioning a presence for itself on the site of a new cultural precinct called Federation Square in Melbourne, Australia. The Square, in part, is a commemorative project marking the cycle of time--one hundred years ago the nation of Australia was constituted at the turn of the century. At the time of federation, 1901, a community was attempting to envisage itself. One hundred years later, as Cinemedia moves onto the Square, that nation is trying to redefine its vision and thereby envisage its place in a radically redefined system of global status and fluxus.

Cinemedia is funded principally by the Victorian State government to produce and analyse screen visions of existing and possible worlds. It does this by promoting the creation, exhibition and analysis of all kinds of screen culture, be it cinema, television, video or new digital media. Many features of Federation Square are without precedent, but the most striking aspect may be the digital database that will allow curators and members of the public to search out and combine a huge program of moving image and sound that will be arrayed within an active "datascape" of screens both inside the precinct and around the networked world. By pulling material from this central core, visitors and curators will be able to develop an evolving and ever-relational understanding of the histories and grammars of world screen culture.

Federation Square will be more than a place therefore; it will also be an endlessly re-edited event, something transformative of itself and of the people who encounter it as it produces itself moment by moment.

A facility known as Platform 1.0 is being created for Federation Square. Existing as both a physical entity and an elaborate online presence all over the planet, Platform 1.0 is an exhibition "gallery" but it is also a generator of programs as well as a broker of material within Cinemedia's own collection and across a confederacy of screen-culture custodians around the world. When I refer to Platform 1.0, therefore, I am imagining not only the physical space on the site of an old underground railway but also all the online manifestations of Cine- media's audiovisual curation. At the same time as it will be a physical location on Federation Square, therefore, Cinemedia will be a digital generator, a research lab, and an exhibitor all over the data-linked world.

When I accepted the job of providing creative direction for Platform 1.0, I offered a "curatorial philosophy" to all my colleagues. Less a manifesto than a basis for continuous discussion and negotiation, the philosophy has already gone through several iterations and will continue to do so as long as our experiment in "convergent mentalities" remains productive. With this notion of continuous productivity foregrounded, I can emphasise that Platform 1.0 (due to open midway through 2001) is best imagined as a studio for assembling and disassembling audio-visual intelligence. To this extent it is an idea guided by a purposefully utopian aim: to reconfigure some of the systems of knowledge that presently contain and constrain audiovisual intelligence. As the project gets constructed, my philosophy will be kept as lucid and practical as possible but my arguments should also be continuously negotiating with the countless cultural and political forces that will always move within, around and out from Federation Square So, without further ado, here is the latest version.

To get started, I can affirm that our fundamental precept is the idea of FEDERATION. Everyone working on the Platform 1.0 should think of "federation" as the activity that we will perform every day.

FEDERATION: it's a term worthy of precise definition. Let's understand it as a word energised by the verb inside it. FEDERATION is not a finished event, it is not something done with and past. Rather, it is a...