• Check out the Program Guide in HTML

• Download the program as a PDF (350K)

12th July - The venue of the Launch Gig is at the Public Office - 100 Adderley St West Melbourne. Start 7pm.

14th + 15th July - the rest of the Media Circus will happen at the Trades Hall, on the corner of Victoria and Lygon Streets, in Carlton.

• Presenter Bios

Keep up to date with Media Circus happenings by joining the MC-ANNOUCE list.

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If you want to express yourself and communicate with others about issues relating to the state of the media circus - join the media circus DISCUSS list:

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Media Circus is a gathering of people who create, consume, critique and distribute media content that challenges, questions, expresses and celebrates our culture, our society and the way we live.

The media is everywhere. Deals, ideas, ideology, websites, porn, breaking news, films, positions vacant, knowledge, technologies. It's all around us. Just as we tend not to think about where milk comes from, we can forget to interrogate the processes through which media is made. Homogenised and pasteurised or non-genetically-modified? It's all mediated.

There is little doubt that the large media corporations with their diverse interests exert an overwhelming amount of influence and control over the way our world works. This is reflected upon and critiqued by academics and others in privileged ghettos, but this detail is often contained inside their sanctioned structures.

We know from our direct experience that the media manipulates and distorts reality, that it misrepresents and influences priorities and that it disempowers and attempts to confuse us with choices we do not ask for. And we know that the media should belong to us, the public, and not to a handful of transnational corporations.

The Media Circus will include a broad group of people to develop networks and share and exchange information, knowledge, skills and tactics. We need to reclaim the media space and continue fostering a bottom-up media culture which will break us free from the illusions which attack and prototype us every day.

We need to tell our own stories and what better place to empower ourselves than at the Circus. For the event to be a success, it is essential that the audience-presenter boundaries are broken. Everyone is a participant.

The Media Circus was first held in Melbourne in September 1999. See the webbed archive.

Media Circus 2001 will be happening in Melbourne on the 12th, 14th and 15th July. 2001, and will be comprised of screenings, discussions, forums and exchanges. The days will be packed, but there will be spaces for autonomous gatherings and networking.

It is hoped that this event will help create an origin from where more Media Circus events can be held to continue the development of a media culture in Melbourne and other networked locations.