Supporting Creative Networks: From Underground Music to Museum Leadership

COLLECTORS WHO GET IT

Collector: Seb Chan

Metalabel Collection Size: 11 and counting

Latest Collect: LORE by Future Commerce

THE STORY

From running underground electronic music events in Sydney to leading major cultural institutions like ACMI and the Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt, Seb Chan has dedicated his career to supporting creative networks and fostering cultural innovation. His journey spans decades of bridging institutional and underground culture, from weekly club nights and radio shows to pioneering museum digitization efforts. Now as Director & CEO of ACMI, he continues to create conditions for creative risk-taking and bringing new ideas to audiences.

KEY INSIGHTS

• Supporting creative work is about validating risk-taking and maintaining the cultural infrastructure that makes innovation possible

• Physical vs digital format decisions are increasingly shaped by practical considerations like international shipping costs, while still recognizing the unique value of tangible media

• Cultural support should focus on nurturing entire creative ecosystems rather than just individual transactions

• The perpetual reinvention of musical genres like jungle demonstrates how creative communities can sustain and evolve over decades

IN SEB’S WORDS

"Supporting creative work for me is about two things - ensuring that creators are aware of how important their efforts to do something new (and risky) is, and supporting the conditions which made that creative risk-taking possible."

READ THE FULL INTERVIEW BELOW

Supporting Creative Networks: From Underground Music to Museum Leadership

METALABEL: What's your relationship to creative work?

SEB CHAN: My day job is as the Director & CEO of ACMI, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, in Melbourne Australia so I am directly connected to supporting the production, exhibition and catalyzing of new creative screen based works - film, games, time-based art, media art - as well the critical understanding of how screen culture shapes our world. ACMI, beyond being a major State-owned public museum - curating and preserving works, building exhibits and running education programs, operating cinemas - also operates a cultural incubator ACMIX which houses 90 creative workers making films, games and other work for commercial release. Before ACMI I've worked for the Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt Design Museum in New York, and the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney alongside being a museum consultant for nearly 20 years helping institutions around the world come to terms with what we used to call 'digital'. Before becoming a museum director, I worked in museum technology and was known for helping institutions digitize and open up their collections online.

But that's not the whole story.

From the early 1990s to late 2000s, I was part of a crew that ran electronic and underground music things in Sydney - a decade long weekly club night called Frigid, toured lots of bands and musicians, nearly 20 years of a weekly public radio show, and a free national music magazine Cyclic Defrost (print and online) - as well as a long running decks'n'fx music duo who performed at hundreds of clubs, raves and festivals. This was a deeply subcultural time and straddled the pre-Napster, post-Napster era of music - and I was always motivated by an ethos of bringing new sounds and new ideas to people. I also co-founded Sound Summit, an annual gathering of independent labels and musicians which shared new ways of making and disseminating music in the early 2000s.

Creative work - and creating the conditions for people to have a curiosity in new and unfamiliar things - are at the heart of what I have always done.

METALABEL: What feels meaningful about supporting it?

SEB CHAN: Supporting creative work for me is about two things - ensuring that the creators are aware of how important their efforts to do something new (and risky) is, and sometimes this isn't about money, but just about knowing someone on the other side of the world listened to, read, watched or played what you made. Second, it's about supporting the conditions which made that creative risk taking possible. When Brian Eno first wrote about 'scenius' it struck a chord with me - in policy thinking I might say this is about creative networks or the creative ecology (vs economy). I go to gigs and performances, buy music, buy books and zines, to encourage and support the networks that make great things possible - not just to pay creators. This cultural infrastructure beyond the marketplace and the transactional really matters.

METALABEL: Would you call yourself a collector?

SEB CHAN: Not really. I don't buy or support work to collect or hoard it. I buy and support work to have them seen, read, heard by as many people as possible. I don't buy creative work to later sell them - I don't 'invest' in that sense.

When I relocated from Sydney to New York for the Smithsonian job in 2011, I had to sell a large part of my decades old music collection and many books too - and I still wake up with regrets about different records, books or even CDs that I foolishly (but out of spatial necessity) sold.

METALABEL: Tell me about one work (object, book, essay, album, etc) you own that blew your mind.

SEB CHAN: Kodwo Eshun's More Brilliant Than The Sun (1998). This is not an obscure pick but it's far too hard to get hold of these days. Kodwo's book is still ridiculously out of print and was such a fantastic read that opens up countless wormholes for niche genres of music, describing their sound and impact in poetic ways that make you want to go and hunt them down - which at that time, pre-streaming was not so easy. It also connected music, its specific sounds and textures, to socio-political momentum and imagination. It was a book that captured a period at the very end of the last century that felt exciting and full of possibilities. Kodwo came over to Sydney a few times in the years after its release and did a reading and screening at my club night, and another year did a DJ set at one of our summer outdoor ambient events on an island in Sydney Harbour. On one of these occasions, we took Kodwo up to the Blue Mountains a couple of hours out of Sydney for some hiking - and crate digging in small second hand record shops. We were up in the mountains, looking out over the endless valleys and Kodwo, with his specific way with words, looks out, astonished by the scale of the Australian landscape, and says to us, "this isn't a forest. It's a forest of forests."

METALABEL: Do you look for specific energies in the things you collect?

SEB CHAN: I look for new ideas and new approaches to old ideas, and I look for that 'cultural ecology'. By supporting something am I also indirectly contributing to support a scene, a label or publisher, a network of others. I like to support things that can grow and help others develop and experiment too.

Depending on how much the diabolical "shipping to Australia" costs, I think about whether a physical form matters - is a digital version of the book or music enough or does the physical form matter? These days I'd usually buy a t-shirt and the digital version to support an independent electronic label or musician than have them ship the vinyl. But for a book I find I am better at reading and absorbing the ideas if it is tangible vs a PDF and I love good innovative book design.

METALABEL: What's the first thing you added to your collection?

SEB CHAN: I don't really think about 'firsts'. I am mostly interested in what comes next! That said, I do still love discovering things that others have yet to come across.

METALABEL: What's on rotation for you right now?

SEB CHAN: The Australian summer is hot and slow, people are on vacation. Uptempo it's been the nostalgic jungle and drum'n'bass of the Portal Tech EP on Stereo 45s with young-ish producers Tim Reaper, DJ Sofa, and Dwaarde. The continuous reinvention of breakbeat science over 30 years of jungle - a sound that switched my own crew out of acid techno all those decades ago - continues to amaze and delight my ears (and feet). It also speaks - like the perpetual youth subcultures of metal and goth (and their permutations) - to a wide and now international community of people, very specific places, and sounds.

Locally, literally from my suburb, is the new LP from local funk crew The Pro-Teens doing MF Doom instrumental homages on their new MF Teen: Your Concurrence In The Above Is Assumed which just dropped and is super fun. Live musicians playing versions of MF Doom's tunes originally built with samples of recordings of live musicians!

For the introspective moments it's been the new album Heavy Vibes from Roger Robinson, a London dub poet who now has a trilogy of fantastic releases on Jahtari in Leipzig. Robinson's social commentary cuts through at a time when we need it the most.

Reading-wise, it's been the recent book deliveries from Akisoma via MetaLabel, and Andrew DeWaard's Derivative Culture book which looks at the aesthetic and cultural impact of speculative finance in the culture industries.

When I get around to writing things, I tend to cover my newest discoveries - books, art, music, theory - in my semi-private newsletter Fresh & New.