What is Straight Out of Brisbane?

Straight Out of Brisbane is Queensland's largest festival of independent and emerging artists, thinkers and creative industries workers. It was last held in early December, 2004.

The festival was started in 2002 by a community of emerging artists who wanted to create new opportunities in Queensland's independent cultural sector. There have been three SOOBs since 2002, and the next SOOB is planned for August 2006.

The goal of the festival is to create a platform which can:

• develop audiences for , and
• create showcasing and professional development opportunities for independent and emerging artists , thinkers and creative workers and entrepreneurs
• support new and emerging artforms, especially contemporary and emerging art practices not funded or supported by the broader cultural sector
• work to build infrastructure for the independent sector

SOOB 2004 was Queensland's largest gathering of young and emerging artists and creative industries practitioners.

The 2004 SOOB Festival included 207 events and more than 2000 artists particpated. All told more than 30,000 people attended our workshops, performances, exhibitions, screenings and gigs, encountered our pulic art, shopped at the SOOB Shop, or visited this website.

The 2003 SOOB Festival featured more than 620 local and inter-state artists and creative practitioners across 152 events. An estimated 8,000 people attended. As in 2004, the 2003 SOOB Festival was the second-largest arts festival in Brisbane as measured by numbers of participating artists and numbers of events.

SOOB Philosophies

SOOB is an artist-run festival. All the people who manage, coordinate, curate and volunteer at SOOB are highly creative people themselves. We have no artistic director, do not recognise the traditional hierarchies of creativity and are committed to the philosophy of peer-review.

SOOB is a community festival for artists. We believe we belong to a community of artists and creative people themselves, especially those following their own path outside the well-travelled middle-road of commercial, employed and funded Australian art and culture.

SOOB does not recognise the high art/low art divide. We do not believe some artforms are more valuable or historically important than others. We do not believe some artforms deserve more funding simply because they are more unpopular or expensive to produce than others.

SOOB will work with you, not against you. Wherever possible, we will not censor your ideas, seek to limit your creativity or make you sign away your rights in an unfair contract. SOOB is philosophically opposed to exclusivity clauses and other restraints of trade that major festivals impose on independent artists.

SOOB believes artistic merit is not related to institutional or corporate support. Indeed, the most interesting artists are often those ignored by the establishment or banished from our nation's major festivals, galleries, record labels and performing arts companies. We want to support the often eccentric voices of artists who may only become significant a generation from now.

What does independent mean?

SOOB is dedicated to excavating the best in Australian independent cultural production.

By independent we mean art and culture that is not (or not necessarily) produced for profit, is created outside of the framework of multinational corporate enterprise or large-scale government-funded arts organisations, is promoting and fostering DIY aesthetics, or is excluded from mainstream public debate.

SOOB is also programmed independently. It is an artist-run and artist-programmed initiative. Unlike traditional arts festivals, we don't have an Artistic Director. Instead, we appoint a large number of content coordinators to review and curate the work of their peers. In this way, SOOB is able to encompass a far more diverse and representative program than traditional "capital A" Arts festivals.

Straight Out of Brisbane favours the DIY aesthetic and seeks to champion "bedroom art". We want to celebrate independent thinking, publications, music, performance, visual art, fashion, design, film-making, craft, dance and movement, public art, politically risky art and digital media of all kinds.

We're also exceptionally keen to include groups or collectives of independent artworkers, wherever we can find them.

Art collectives, artist-run spaces, discussion groups, online communities, small galleries, writers groups, independent record labels and publishers, and small businesses in the creative industries are all part of our ambit.

Straight Out of Brisbane also seeks to create a new critical culture that will inform and be informed by independent thinking and contemporary ideas and current events. Our aim is to improve the public climate for contemporary and independent arts and ideas, and to build policy platforms that speak from a non-Baby Boomer perspective.

Longer-term goals include building community infrastructure for the independent scene (for example, a community web server) that seeks to help independent artists and thinkers build careers on a sustainable basis.

A key immediate goal is the creation of a new artist-run venue in Brisbane's inner city that is cheap, accessible and supportive of independent and emerging arts.