Sam Addison. Ankenbauer
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States
Independent movie theaters (IMTs) are a part of the cultural infrastructure that offers shared spaces for patron communities to access, share, and engage with cultural artifacts. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, IMTs were mandated to shut down, resulting in unanticipated infrastructural breakdown. Drawing insights from a preliminary survey and interviews with staff members from 18 IMTs in the U.S., this paper attends to how this breakdown disrupted art and community engagement within patron communities. We investigate the sociotechnical practices of maintaining cultural infrastructure through 1) collaborating with community partners and external stakeholders, 2) screening films through online virtual cinema platforms, and 3) retaining community members through online platforms. Our work highlights the tensions and invisible human labor in this maintenance work. Together, this work intends to foreground cultural infrastructure and discuss how HCI can support and contribute to the design and oft-invisible maintenance of cultural infrastructure.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3501840
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2022.acm.org/)