An
elemental force, water has an immutable and transformational property that makes it a necessary
part of life. Given the ambitious aims of Women’s Access to Electronic
Resources (WATER), it serves also as a fitting acronym.
WATER, a project of the progressive feminist Foundation for a Compassionate
Society, seeks to educate and empower women artists and activists in the use of
audio, visual, and electronic media. Housed in a residence just off of South
Congress, the outfit provides training and production in two audio studios, a
video room, and e-mail and World Wide Web connections. The facility also lends
equipment such as video cameras and audio recorders to any woman (or woman-led
project) who expresses a vision in line with the Foundation’s goal of social
and environmental justice. While most of the projects assisted by WATER are
one-time arrangements, there are ongoing projects as well. These include
off-the-air production by the Women’s Collective of KOOP (91.7FM) and two
projects by Frieda Werden — the syndicated radio service WINGS (Women’s
International News Gathering Service) and the public access television program
“Women’s News Hour” (see accompanying story).
It was Foundation director Genevieve Vaughan who co-established WATER House
with these sorts of projects — those opening avenues for women’s voices — in
mind. “Media are very important for women because, historically, women and
their points of view have been excluded from mainstream media,” Vaughan says.
WATER volunteers offer a variety of classes for women who possess little or no
media experience. For instance, audio training covers field recording,
telephone interface recording, microphone and interviewing techniques, and
audio editing; video training focuses on camera techniques, editing and use of
a character generator. Women with demonstrable technical experience, on the
other hand, need only complete a project proposal form, which is reviewed by
WATER director Fern Hill and two staff members before they are given the
go-ahead to use the facilities. And all it takes for a woman to get involved is
a phone call or an e-mail message.
Just who are these
women getting their feet wet (and giving swimming lessons) in technology?
Amanda Johnston, who is completing a master’s degree at UT, came to the group
in 1994 after attending a presentation given by director Fern Hill. Johnson’s
interest in feminist media led her to an internship at WATER, and she has since
become responsible for one of the organization’s most recent major-growth
areas, WATER’s Web presence. Not only has Johnson created the organization’s
site at http://www.monsterbit.com/water/, but has also made herself invaluable
as the chief Internet trainer, offering individual instruction in e-mail and
Net access, and this month will begin conducting small group classes in
introductory Net access and development of Web sites using HTML language.
“There’s been a lot of variety as far as age, ethnicity, and occupation,”
Johnston says of her students. “They tend to be women with activist
inclinations, women with not very much computer experience.”
Other women who have used the group’s facilities express a delighted
comradeship with WATER. K. Bradford, whose documentary White-Out: The Outing
of Whiteness recently screened at the Dobie Theatre, says WATER’s video
editing suite provided double support for her film. “I don’t know how much
longer it would have taken, but it would definitely have taken longer” to
finish, had she used other, for-cost services. As important, however, is the
fact that WATER’s services were constituted as “in-kind,” making Bradford
eligible for the city’s Cultural Contracts program. “I could say, look, I have
all this backup in-kind support for the project, and that helps get additional
funding,” she explains. “I couldn’t have gotten funding from the City of Austin
without support from other places.” The documentary, about the legacy of white
dominance in Namibia, was shot in Namibia and the United States and features
two Austinites — poet Sharon Bridgforth and Reagan High student Brian Hoyt.
Bradford’s film will have a special screening at the school of communication at
American University in Washington, D.C. on September 24.
Moreover, Bradford has started a new project that she believes will bring a
whole new crew of women to WATER House. Her “video arts training and production
program” plans to attract women and girls from community organizations and
schools, who will then learn documentary and narrative filmmaking skills. Teams
of participants will produce short films to be aired during an International
Women’s Day. “They’re providing editing and training at WATER, and once the
women and girls break into teams, they’ll edit the productions at WATER,”
Bradford says. Bradford became WATER’s video trainer while interning at the
facility and editing her film a year ago, and has trained hundreds of women
with twice-weekly classes since.
Jessica Bega’s Worthy Mothers, a video about multicultural lesbian
parenting, is another local production being screened at festivals nationwide.
She says her project, which employed WATER’s videotape editing facilities,
“originated at WATER, as far as having the facilities and a place for me to go.
There were other facilities I was using, but WATER was tremendously useful to
me; I was able to complete it in two to three months.” In fact, Bega’s
documentary was just awarded a $1,500 grant from the Texas Filmmakers’
Production Fund, to be used toward distribution efforts.
Tammy Gomez, a member of KOOP’s Women’s Collective, explains that her group
uses WATER for feature interviews, which constitute from 10 to 15 percent of
the collective’s programming. It’s the facility’s “warm and congenial”
atmosphere, Gomez emphasizes, that really adds fluidity to the group’s
programming. “It takes a lot of pressure off of people who don’t like to do
live radio,” she said. While KOOP recently acquired in-house recording and
editing facilities, Gomez said the collective will stay at WATER House.
WATER also recognizes that products go nowhere without distribution. While the
organization does not distribute any material itself, it directs interested
women to such media outlets as public access televison and the Net. Women may
also use WATER’s duplication facilities for limited self-distribution, as did
Bega in sending her video to festivals. “It’s easy to train people to do it;
it’s not that hard to get people enthusiastic,” Hill says. “But once they get
something made, the main problem is distribution. The cable system and computer
are other ways in which people can really be in control of their own
communications.” Noting that she was one of the first people involved in public
access in Austin, she continues, “My dream was to always have community access
to all media, and cable has been the only place we’ve been able to make
inroads.” KOOP and KAZI have since added a broadcast element to community
media.
WATER was hatched in 1993, when Hill and Vaughan discovered that a house next to the foundation’s
headquarters was about to go on the market. “We had talked about the issue of
women not being visible, of women being able to tell their own stories, of
women overcoming societally induced technophobia,” Hill says. “It would be a
combined guest house and a place where women could come not only from Austin,
but all over the world, and be in a comfortable environment to learn the skills
useful in carrying out whatever social change issues they were working on.”
Early participants included a group of Native American women working to
preserve the stories of their tribal elders, and a group of women from Central
and South America, some of whom have gone on to establish sister media centers
in Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil.
Aside from WATER, the Foundation for a Compassionate Society, founded in 1987,
has also sponsored projects including Stonehaven Ranch, a women’s retreat, and
the Austin Peace House. This past May, the Foundation sponsored the Feminist
Family Values conference, which brought to town such luminaries as Angela Davis
and Gloria Steinem (who received a tour of WATER House). Two months before in
March, WATER was a main component of a 24-hour media celebration of
International Women’s Day. KOOP and KAZI devoted their entire broadcast days to
women’s issues, while ACTV simulcast various segments of the radio programming,
adding visual text to women’s issues and activities. Some of the broadcasting,
such as a party that capped the celebration, was conducted by remote from WATER
House itself. Noting that the city, various media outlets, and the Foundation
all worked together on this event, Hill says, “It just goes to show that if you
have something of community concern, the community will come together on a
higher ground to improve communications on an issue such as this.”
The future flows for the feminist media forum with ongoing projects both inside and outside the
facility. One is to install ISDN lines, which would digitally compress material
created at the facility, for possible rebroadcast to radio distributors such as
The Pacifica Network. The facility is also looking to add to its Web site
RealAudio, which digitally transmits audio to ordinary computers. These
electronics will also allow WATER to add a multimedia dimension to next year’s
International Women’s Day festival via a live Net broadcast; Johnston notes
that anyone is welcome at the initial early planning meeting September 30.
Another goal is to encourage the city’s cable service provider to add a cable
radio channel to its public access services. “My sense is that people are open
to the idea of cable radio,” says Johnston, “but things haven’t been put in
writing, so we’re still actively lobbying and encouraging people to voice their
opinion about that.” She feels that WATER would most likely work as part of a
consortium of community media groups interested in specialized radio
programming.
Hill envisions something beyond WATER House itself: a constellation of
neighborhood media centers. “One of the things the city is looking at is that
instead of one big access center everyone comes to, is to have community
centers. So if you want more and different kinds of people in access, you have
to put access where the people are,” she says. Noting that Sue Beckwith of the
local Net provider Free-Net is looking to put computers in housing projects,
Hill adds, “I would love to see those be multimedia computers, and that we have
things like WATER for geographical communities, as well as communities of
special need.” n
This article appears in September 20 • 1996 and September 20 • 1996 (Cover).