With dynamic, short, exploratory essays, Open Spaces: Speculations on Openings, Closings, and Thresholds in International Public Media posits a provisional theoretical concept of opening in independent documentary and experimental work. It examines archives, conferences, convenings, festivals, fi lm, installation, media cultures, new media, performance, symposia, and video art in China, Guinea, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Singapore, USA. A heterogeneous mosaic of people, places, practices, technologies, and ideas, this book asks: Where are the open spaces where technology, people, politics, and dialogue meet? Where are these provisional zones for independent public media? Where do people, places, and technologies converge? This volume of essays demonstrates with great originality the importance of new modes of engagement in a time of evolving digital scholarship and production. Professor Zimmermann s pioneering work is crucial reading that rewards the reader and advances the field. --B. Ruby Rich, Editor, Film Quarterly In this illuminating compendium of media analysis, transnational curatorial journeying, and piercing explorations of multiple spaces where film, art, community, and politics intersect (and sometimes collide), Professor Zimmermann solidifies her position as one of the most vital, versatile, and potent thinkers of media history, production, and circulation in the United States. A critical book for those searching beyond the binaries of independent versus corporate media and of industry versus art. --Rodrigo Brandão, Vice President of Marketing and PR, Kino Lorber Patricia R. Zimmermann is Professor of Screen Studies at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York, USA and co-director of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival. She is author of Reel Families: A SocialHistory of Amateur Film; States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies; and Thinking Through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places (with Dale Hudson). She is also co-editor (with Karen Ishizuka) of Mining the Home Movies: Excavations in Histories and Memories.