VEAEA — the Victorian Endowment for the Advancement of the Electronic Arts — is a registered Australian charity. We exist because the electronic arts community in Victoria has done extraordinary work for decades on infrastructure that was never designed for it.
Most electronic art and underground music here lives or dies on a few shaky pillars: bar takings on a Saturday night, unpaid labour from organisers, and venue owners who carry the financial risk. When any one of those wobbles, scenes disappear. People burn out. Programs that took ten years to build vanish in a season.
We think there's a better way to do this, and we're building it slowly, one piece at a time.
What we fund
We direct money toward three things, in roughly this order:
Artists, paid properly. Performance fees, commissioning, residencies. We won't run a program that pays artists in exposure.
Infrastructure that doesn't depend on alcohol. Daytime events, all-ages programs, listening rooms, recording and rehearsal access. Not because bars are bad — many of our favourite venues are bars — but because a scene that can only happen after midnight in licensed premises excludes most of its potential audience and exhausts the people who run it.
Harm reduction and community care. Concretely, this funded our first project: SafeGuide. It also funds the unglamorous things — first-aid kits, water stations, training for door staff — that keep audiences safe at events run by our partners.
How we operate
We're a small organisation with active business hours Wednesday to Friday. The board meets monthly. Decisions are minuted. Annual reporting goes to the ACNC like any other registered charity. None of this is glamorous, and that's the point — the boring infrastructure is what lets the interesting work happen.
If you want to support what we're doing, the donate page is the most direct way. If you want to participate, the contact page is where membership and volunteering begin.
Thanks for reading. We'll keep these updates honest and short.