Alternative media presence kinté space (kintespace.com) inches past the dot-com crash and should never have to worry about court injunctions based on alleged copyright violations. This online collection of poetry, “digitized art”, music, prose and documentary makes its media the “old fashioned way”: from original material directly from the creator. “We have no business model that exists separately from the artists’ model,” Bryan Wilhite admits, “we try to keep the creativity as pure as possible.”
Artist and computer programmer, Bryan Wilhite lived through the dot-com crash first hand and takes tongue-in-cheek pride in never even thinking of kintespace.com as a target for “eager” tech-sector investors. “The winter of 2001 almost killed me,” he says smiling, “I learned a lot. I was afraid that the Internet was turning into a giant Home Shopping Club. After the ‘correction’ in the market, I am only concerned if the public sees the Internet solely in utilitarian terms—I still maintain that great art can be featured online. I depend on the good people of the Internet to see that as well.”
The kinté space is sticking to fundamentals by focusing on gathering the best content from the worlds of literature, motion pictures and visual arts. New projects for this latest turn of the century include writings by Mumia Abu-Jamal, a documentary film on Romona Africa (Romona Africa: 1992, produced by R/Kain Blaze of FreeStyleMega.com) and an interactive museum featuring selected works from award-winning visual artist Michael Massenburg (Massenburg Faces Five—which is also slated for distribution on CD-ROM). “We can’t forget about the poetry,” Bryan chimes in, “we still need the poetry! And we will still continue to support it faithfully.”
Both published and unpublished poets are featured in the kinté space. They include Israeli-born Moshe Benarroch, Cuban-born Silvia A. Brandon Perez, Sandra E. Morris from Barbados and many others both worldwide and local to the Los Angeles area. “Right about now, the kinté space is based in Los Angeles—a serious media wholesale outlet—so even though we want artists from all over the world, you will still find me prowling around film festivals and poetry readings in Southern California hoping the lights don’t go out before I get to introduce myself to the next great creative force streaming through the kinté space. There’s nothing like person-to-person contact. The Internet can’t beat that. I do plan to get some plane tickets one of these days and see all these great artists I have met online—and definitely new artists—in person.”