What We Do...
Artists’ Television Access is a San Francisco-based, artist-run non-profit dedicated to underground media and community access. Since its founding in 1984, ATA has been dedicated to screening awesome work that you won’t see elsewhere. Filmmaker Craig Baldwin has been with ATA since the beginning, and you can catch his pioneering series Other Cinema most Saturday nights. Other recurring series include Periwinkle, Mission Eye & Ear, GAZE, and Sistah Sinema and we’ve been home to countless other rising stars and fantastic freaks. From music, to performance, video, 16mm, 8mm, and mixed projection… ATA does it all.
This September, ATA celebrates its 30th birthday. To keep current in the changing landscape of San Francisco and best support our artists, we need a new projector, some refurbishing and space upgrades, and a surge of community support.
If you love ATA, we encourage you to become a member, buy an advance ticket or pledge to attend our 30th anniversary events. The first $4750 we raise will be matched by a challenge grant from San Francisco Grants for the Arts, to help us get to our new projector even faster. Resolve to watch experimental cinema in higher resolution… and lend your support to ATA!
Support Our Future - How You Can Help
We’re celebrating Year 30 with an upgrade of our projection system at ATA. To this end we were awarded a coveted challenge grant from the San Francisco’s Voluntary Arts Contribution Fund (VACF) to help us cover the costs (thank you, Citizens of San Francisco!). There’s a hurdle: we have to raise matching funds first in order to get the VACF funds.The good part: right now the VACF is matching your Indiegogo donation dollar for dollar, doubling your impact and ensuring the each year ATA can offer over 200 independent, experimental filmmakers and media artists a way of showing their work from high-end digital to 16mm to beloved Super 8 and 8mm formats. Pick the Pure Light perk and we’ll make sure that for every dollar you give an artist gets a minute of projection time at ATA.
Along with a new projector, we also need to fund a few much-needed institutional improvements to ensure ATA's sustainability and functionality. Here’s what else we're hoping to upgrade with your help:
An updated speaker system so every soundtrack and music performance sounds amazing
A new screen so every projection looks pristine
Load Up With Terabtyes. ATA is preserving hundreds of hours of original VHS and Beta format video from its long-running experimental cable television program ATV as part of a large-scale digitization project. Good hardware and storage space will help us accelerate the project and make this work accessible to the community.
Refinish the floor before we give someone the world’s nastiest splinter
Replace our office computer with a slightly less-old one that will support a browser other than Internet Explorer (if you’ve got one to donate - let us know!)
As you may have noticed, it’s hard to be an arts organization in the city these days, especially on a fast-changing street like Valencia. Once we pay our rent each month we don’t have much left for organizational and space improvements. Our birthday wish is modest: a slight spruce up... followed by another healthy, vibrant 30 years. Your support means a lot to us!
More (non-monetary) ways to support ATA
We appreciate your monetary contributions so much, but there are many other ways to help out, like:
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Spread the word about our crowdfunding campaign and 30th Anniversary events online and to your friends
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Come to our shows! We love to meet our friends, neighbors, and fellow film fanatics - you're the reason we do this
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Volunteer! We're always on the lookout for new volunteers to work shows, curate, promote, coordinate, and generally help out. Get in touch.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. Can't wait to see you at ATA.
