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

Tue Apr 10 18:53:51 AEST 2018

Hi Toby

Yes we met recently at Filmwinter when you showed your work The Signal.  I
really liked the sonic composition that accompanied that and Grottoes and
Groves is just as impressive.

The length of our work (apart from the necessity of the 34 hours) came out
of our thinking about one interpretation of expanded cinema (in regards to
time literally expanded) but also watching both videos and music on
YouTube.  Videos that petform a technical feat of being 'the longest video
on YouTube. ..' and audio being time stretched to several hundred percent,
usually using Paul stretch.  Ironically our video surpassed most if not all
of those video's length but became unrecognisable by YouTube,  Vimeo and
even most html5 players (in the case of the latter they can't handle the
length of the time code - luckily I did find one that could).

With all this in mind folding our work back to the web makes a lot of sense
for us as most film festivals can't accommodate the length so exhibiting at
Invisible Geographies is ideal.  We've been luck enough as well to be
invited to exhibit at EMAF next week which is running for a month and they
will run our work continously so it should be at a different point at the
same time each day.

Not sure about geological or reptian time but certainly a
non-human/machinic vision of the space, perhaps similar to a drones, and
that fits well with what is occurring on the border (hi-tec surveillance
that's even outsourced to the public, which we found horrible).

regards
Garrett
_________________
Garrett at asquare.org
http://www.asquare.org/

Artist in residence at:
https://www.facebook.com/peripheralforms

On Mon, 9 Apr 2018, 9:32 p.m. Toby Tatum, <tobyjamestatum at yahoo.co.uk>
wrote:

> 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/ <http://www.tobytatum.com/>*
>
>
> Toby Tatum's films are distributed by Collectif Jeune Cinéma
> <http://www.cjcinema.org/pages/fiche_auteur.php?auteur=969>
>
>
> Recent interviews online here
> <http://theundergroundfilmstudio.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/FILM-PANIC-ISSUE-3.pdf>
> & here
> <http://www.swedenborg.org.uk/events/swedenborg_film_festival/programme_and_awards_24_march_2016/interview_with_2016_joint_winner_toby_tatum>
>
>
>
> 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/ <http://www.filmwinter.de/en>
>
> 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/20180410/00714608/attachment.html>