[-empyre-] Welcome to the April 2018 discussion: New Media Documentary Practice

Fri Apr 6 00:49:01 AEST 2018

Our concept of Open Space New Media Documentary explores the productive interstices between documentary and the digital turn.
            New technologies, realigned social relations, and emerging contestatory political challenges call for a reexamination of documentary’s forms, functions, and roles.
            No longer a fixed object, documentary is taking on iterative, shape-shifting contours and migrating across multiple interfaces. Collaborative models of production, distribution, and exhibition reject enclosure and hierarchies. Open space new media documentary projects gesture towards a nexus of collaborations, community, convenings, histories, and technologies.

Documentary studies has focused on analog forms.

            However, new media documentary presents a more place-based practice of co-creation, collaboration, and community. Avoiding vertical hierarchies of production, the participatory documentary uses a horizontal system. No longer auteurs, documentary directors transform into community designers who convene people around contradictory, suppressed, and unresolved issues. In open space documentary, technologies meet places and people.

             The documentary triangle of subject, filmmaker, and audience is a central metaphor informing documentary studies. In contrast, the open space documentary paradigm is circular, with media makers becoming place-based designers and audiences becoming engaged participants in collaborative encounters. These collaborative documentary practices move across the analog, digital, and embodied.
Open space new media practices emerge from long histories of collaborative, collective, and participatory media movements which critiqued auteurism and focused on communities and broader unresolved social and political issues. In the early 20th century, Dziga Vertov and the Kinoks (USSR) and the Workers Film and Photo League (US) refuted auteurism for collective work. In the 1960s, Challenge for Change (Canada) and the Newsreel Collective (US) addressed political issues from the perspectives of communities. In the 1970s and 1980s, Appalshop (US), Paper Tiger Television (US), and the Black Audio Collective (UK) advocated for collaborative processes to probe marginalized ideas and communities. In the 21st century, digital storytelling movements and global indigenous media production processes proliferate.
            These aggregated storytelling micro-documentaries build mosaics that are localized, multi-voiced, and reciprocal. They experiment with how to design dialogic approaches to political crises and traumas. Rather than producing images or artifacts, they generate open-ended ideas, questions, solutions, and actions across many platforms in many voices, recombining many tactics and tools.
             Open space new media documentary creates permeable space for dialogue. It engages fluidity, intersubjectivity, and permeability to animate provisional networks and temporary alliances. This mode is human-scaled, localized, multi-voiced, reciprocal, and reflective. This paper elaborates four features of these practices—small places, designing encounters, polyphonic collaborations, and inviting spaces.

--Patricia R. Zimmermann, Professor of Screen Studies, Ithaca College and coauthor of OPEN SPACE NEW MEDIA DOCUMENTARY: A TOOLKIT FOR THEORY AND PRACTICE (Routledge, 2017)

Patricia R. Zimmermann, Ph.D.
Professor of Screen Studies
Roy H. Park School of Communication
Codirector, Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival

Ithaca College
953 Danby Road
Ithaca, New York 14850 USA

http://faculty.ithaca.edu:83/patty/
http://www.ithaca.edu/fleff

________________________________
From: empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au> on behalf of Dale Hudson <dmh2018 at nyu.edu>
Sent: Thursday, April 5, 2018 2:28:55 AM
To: empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Welcome to the April 2018 discussion: New Media Documentary Practice

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Post from one of this week’s guests: Helen De Michael

>
> From: Thirtyleaves <helen de michiel>
> Date: April 5, 2018 at 03:42:57 GMT+4
> To: Dale Hudson <dmh2018 at nyu.edu>
>
>
> I have seen many new medias arrive and depart on platforms that were like mirages, and platforms that had grown solid, almost real, as if I could touch them again in the years to come. But because that will probably not happen, it has been liberating for us as creators and scholars to connect new media documentary projects to the open space framework: brave explorations that are realized in the peripheral nodes beyond the theater or television screen.
>
> This is documentary untethered and participatory. It plays within spaces not typically connected to the genre. It is about shape-shifting the form, breaking it open to let the work meet people, places and technologies in new combinations and patterns. At its richest and most surprising, an open space documentary evokes dialogue where there was silence. It gives form and meaning to the times and sensibilities we live with now by fearlessly embracing rapidly evolving techniques and critical approaches, not knowing where they could lead.
>
> What if I want to experiment with making an open space documentary project? How can I plan a structure and form without getting swept away and overwhelmed?
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> In my experience, the secret is in taking small steps and considering your intentions and constraints as you proceed. To facilitate this process, my co-author, Patricia Zimmermann and I conceived of a toolkit to anchor both the practice and an accompanying conceptual framework. As a toolkit, it can ground the creative process when planning this kind of project. The toolkit approach can also function as a theoretical scaffold when thinking about and explaining the diversity of new media documentary.  We call these the ten “C”s to consider when a project is both taking shape, and when discussing its outcome and ripple effect:
>
>
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> Community (what we’re building)
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> Complexity (that’s a given always)
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> Conversation (what kinds we are inspiring)
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> Collaboration (absolutely necessary)
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> Connection (empathy for the visitor and their time)
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> Cost (estimate and review constantly)
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> Context (always changing)
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> Continuum (where are we on the curve now?)
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> Circular (responsive and interdependent on the web))
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> Compost (the project will end, die, and where will it go?)
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>
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> The ten “C” take advantage of the fact that new media is in a swirl of constant change, response and adaptation. How do you feel these elements can impact your work in and thinking about new documentary media forms?
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>
>
>> On Apr 2, 2018, at 20:42, Dale Hudson <dmh2018 at nyu.edu> wrote:
>>
>> Welcome to the April 2018 discussion: new media documentary practice, moderated by Dale Hudson (AE/US).
>>
>> I hope that the discussion opens expectations about documentary to modes that use digital technologies to help us reengage the complexities our world. Some recover repressed or overlooked histories; others speculate on possible futures. Some analyze the everyday mediated images of the world that shape our perceptions of global connections; others locate themselves in particular locations to reveal subtle and often subjective details that might otherwise escape notice.
>>
>> The last three weeks will focus on artists, scholars, and others participating in the “Invisible Geographies” exhibition for the twentieth edition of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, which reimagines how we think about documentary across vectors that are visible and invisible, material and immaterial, audible and inaudible.
>>
>> Confirmed guests include: Philip Cartelli (US/FR), Dawn Dawson-House (US), Helen De Michiel (US), Adam Fish (UK), Garrett Lynch and Frédérique Santune (IE/FR), Erin McElroy (US), Liz Miller (US/CA), Max Schleser (AU), Naz Shahrokh (IR/AE), Sarah Shamash (BR/CA), Toby Tatum (UK), Steve WetzeL (USA), and Patricia R. Zimmermann (US).
>>
>> For the first week, the discussion will focus on Patricia R. Zimmermann and Helen De Michiel’s new book _Open Space New Media Documentary: A Toolkit for Theory and Practice_ (Routledge, 2017), which reimagines how we think about and teach documentary practice.
>>
>> They highlight community-based practices that are sustainable, scalable, and relatively inexpensive. They also select and analyze documentary projects made between 2000 and 2017 by artists and scholars in Argentina, Canada, China, Ghana, Indonesia, Peru, Syria, Ukraine, United States, and elsewhere, including the in-between spaces of diaspora and exile.
>>
>> Their book also bridges what is often conceived as a divide between theory and practice by offering a “toolkit” for putting theory into practice, but also one for opening theory to considering a range of practices that have emerged with new technologies and even been ignored or marginalized by past generations.
>>
>> With this message, I invite the –empyre subscriber list to discuss these issues in our soft-skinned space with our distinguished group of weekly guests.
>>
>> Best,
>> Dale
>>
>> Guest bios:
>>
>> Patricia R. Zimmermann (US) is professor of screen studies at Ithaca College in the United States. Her books include _The Flaherty: Decades in the Cause of Independent Cinema_ (2017); _Open Space: Openings, Closings, and Thresholds of Independent Public Media_ (2016); _Thinking Through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places_ (2015), and many others.
>>
>> Helen De Michiel (US) is a filmmaker, writer, and community designer based in Berkeley in the United States. Her documentary projects include the work-in-progress _Knocking on Doors_, _Lunch Love Community_ (2015), _The Gender Chip Project_ (2004), _Turn Here Sweet Corn_ (1990), the dramatic feature _Tarantella_ (1994), and many other shorts and media installations.
>>
>>
>> Moderator bio:
>>
>> Dale Hudson (AE/US) teaches in the Film and New Media Program at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) in the United Arab Emirates. He is a digital curator for the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF) and coordinator of Films from the Gulf at the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) FilmFest. He is author of _Vampires, Race, and Transnational Hollywoods_ (2017) and co-author of _Thinking through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places_ (2015).
>>
>> __
>>
>>
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