[-empyre-] Week 2 of the April 2018 discussion: New Media Documentary Practice

Tue Apr 10 05:32:01 AEST 2018

Thanks for this Garrett. I'm watching this now, although I think a different kind of watching is going to be be required of me for this piece. I'm going to leave it rolling and drop in as and when. You're certainly at the outer limits in terms of digital duration with this one. It suggests to me something non-human, the relentless of some kind of robot or perhaps we're in the terrain of geological time, or the time of reptiles (actually the subject of non-human time-perception I find fascinating). I'm very drawn to the correlation between the experience of watching your film and the experience of being in those immense landscapes.

By way of introduction my name is Toby Tatum and I'm a film-maker from the UK. The piece I contributed to the FLEFF is called The Toby Tatum Guide to Grottoes & Groves. The piece resulted from a self-initiated vision quest into the twisted labyrinths of the forest, specifically the ancient woods near my Hastings home. The FLEFF curators have written an insightful piece of the project here should you wish to take a look: https://www.ithaca.edu/fleff/invisible_geographies/tobytatumguide/   
Regards,

Toby

Toby Tatum

http://www.tobytatum.com/  

Toby Tatum's films are distributed by Collectif Jeune Cinéma  

Recent interviews online here & here

    On Monday, 9 April 2018, 19:49:07 GMT+1, Garrett Lynch <garrett at asquare.org> wrote:  

 Many thanks to Dale Hudson for inviting us to participate in the discussion.  Frédérique and myself are looking forward to some interesting discussion on the subject of New Media Documentary Practice but also on the ideas and issues that emerge from our work as part of Invisible Geographies.
Our work Best of Luck with the Wall (variant) and an introductory text about it cane be found on the exhibition site here: https://www.ithaca.edu/fleff/invisible_geographies/bestofluckwiththewall/

When invited to contribute to -empyre- on the theme of new media documentary practice and in particular to "think about digital media and environmentalism across vectors that are visible and invisible, material and immaterial, audible and inaudible", our first thought was that documentary is not the principle purpose of Best of Luck with the Wall (variant).
It is the purpose of Begley's original film, Best of Luck with the Wall, to document the absurdity of building Trump's US/Mexican wall (its scale and so forth).  However, our 'variant' is foremost a critique of the form Begley's film as comment/criticism takes - a time/space compressed experience of travelling the wall.  Given the social problems building the wall will create, i.e. destroying US/Mexican relations when the US should be building better relations with its neighbours, we wanted the experience of the film to be the experience of travelling the length of the wall (34 hours by car), seeing all the landscape, all the communities that will be cut in two.  Nobody is going to watch the 34 hours of our 'variant' (the one extra minute is simply our credits) but if they do we want it to be a long arduous experience!
This is where we return to the idea of documentary, our 'variant' isn't any more documentative than Begley's film is, that is it doesn't address the subject of the wall to any greater degree, but it is more documentative of the time/space of the affected landscape while still remaining a mediated and immaterial experience of it.  What becomes invisible in Begley's film because of the speed of the edit accompanied by a pleasant soundtrack becomes visible in our 'variant' because it is time stretched transforming the soundtrack into a granular tortured soundtrack that makes the inaudible audible.
This is just one aspect of our thinking on this work.  Others that we would also welcome discussion from the list are:
- deterritorialisation;- political comment/criticism (in particular from an exterior position);- deconstruction and documentation of political fact;- ideas of appropriation (from Google, from Begley) and how they intersect with plagiarism;- expanded film formats (time, generative);- time stretching as a process in new media;
and the intersection of these subjects.

-- 
regards
Garrett Lynch & Frédérique Santune
_________________
Garrett at asquare.org
http://www.asquare.org/
Current events and soon:
Real Virtuality The Networked Art of Garrett Lynch:http://realvirtuality.peripheralforms.com/
A network of people who attended an exhibition and contributed to the creation of this work
http://asquare.org/work/peoplenetwork/

Pick up a postcard and participate at any of the following galleries: Aksioma Institute for Contemporary Art (Ljubljana, Slovenia), Bannister Gallery (Rhode Island, USA), Centro ADM (Mexico City, Mexico), Centro de Cultura Digital (Mexico City, Mexico), Gallery XY (Olomouc, Czech Republic), Gedok (Stuttgart, Germany), Guest Room (North Carolina, USA), Human Ecosystems (Rome, Italy), Kunst Museum (Stuttgart, Germany), Laboratorio Arte Alameda (Mexico City, Mexico), Le Wonder (Bagnolet, France), MUTE (Lisbon, Portugal), NYU Art Gallery (Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates), Open Signal (Portland, USA), Plymouth Arts Centre (Plymouth, England), The Gallery at Plymouth College of Art (Plymouth, England), Transfer Gallery (New York, USA), Upfor Gallery (Portland, USA), Watermans (London, England), Wilhelmspalais (Stuttgart, Germany), WOWA (Riccione, Italy), ZKM | Center for Art and Media (Karlsruhe, Germany)
Garrett Lynch: A network of people @ Galerie XY (Olomouc, Czech Republic) 9 - 13/04/2018
https://www.facebook.com/events/177492866199740/
Best of Luck with the Wall (variant) @ European Media Art Festival, Report - notes from reality (Osnabrueck, Germany) 18/04 - 21/05/2018
https://www.emaf.de/en/index.html
----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------_______________________________________________
empyre forum
empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20180409/ae3d99a1/attachment.html>