The Medium Is the Room

The Cube Microplex makes its own cola.

This is not the most important thing about a volunteer-run cinema and arts venue, but it is an unusually efficient introduction. The Cube does not want to be a slightly smaller version of a normal multiplex. It would rather reconsider the screen, the bar, the workforce, the programme and apparently the soft drinks.

Its own history is gloriously unpolished. The building has been a girls’ school, deaf institute, second-run cinema, illegal gambling den, secret gig venue and glass recycling depot. The wooden staging, raked seats and panelled auditorium were handmade by an amateur dramatics group. Every job needed to run the current venue is carried out by volunteers through a not-for-profit workers’ cooperative.

There are films, but also music, cabaret, discussions, children’s events, amateur filmmakers’ nights and things the Cube declines to categorize. The categories feel secondary to keeping the room capable of surprise.

Plenty of cultural organisations talk about participation. Usually this means a workshop after the exhibition, an audience survey, a community panel, or the opportunity to submit something into a structure whose important decisions have already been made.

The Cube’s version reaches further into the machinery. Volunteers can work projection, front of house, programming, curation, technical support and the other unglamorous jobs that determine what the place actually becomes. The audience is not automatically separate from the people maintaining the medium.

Across Bristol, another version of the same idea has sawdust on it.

Bristol Hackspace is a member-run workshop containing woodworking, metalworking, electronics, textiles, 3D printers and laser cutters. The useful phrase on its homepage is not “access to equipment.” It is “100% led and maintained by our members.”

That distinction becomes concrete in the governance notes. A 2026 members’ meeting included votes on an upstairs expansion, plans for future infrastructure, volunteers for an open day and decisions about a larger metal workshop. Members were not merely choosing a class. They were discussing whether the new shop should include a spray booth, how hot-work areas should be arranged and what kinds of machines the space ought to acquire.

One place lets its participants help decide what appears on the stage. The other lets them decide what tools stand on the floor.

They are not utopias. Volunteer capacity runs out. Meetings become procedural. Tools break. Affordable space is still expensive. Open access and member responsibility pull in different directions. A cooperative can produce its own forms of inertia, gatekeeping and invisible labour.

Still, these rooms offer a sharper idea of participation than “we listened to the community.” They let ordinary people alter the conditions under which culture or making happens next.

The distinction is physical. Somebody learns projection because the film needs a projectionist. Somebody maintains the lathe because there should still be a working lathe next month. A child returns years later to the cinema where their parents once volunteered. A metal shop expansion becomes a collective argument about future capability rather than a purchase announced after the fact.

The programme matters. The workshop matters. Underneath both is the stranger achievement: a room that remains unfinished enough for its participants to change it.