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

Fri Apr 13 07:19:36 AEST 2018

Hey everyone,

Long time listener, first time caller. ;-) Thanks to Dale for the
invitation to contribute.

I'd like to return, if I may, back to the concept of documentary, and what
a 'new media' form of documentary might exactly entail.

Documentary, as a word, stems from an idea of teaching using documents,
providing a factual record of something. And of course these documents, in
the filmic tradition, are necessarily visual, they entail surfaces and
images, which are read as one reads any surface or image.

But looking across the works listed here, it seems they are all struggling
to convey structure, not surface--something operational rather than
optical.

As Garrett and Frédérique have discussed, their work emerges precisely from
the frustrations with the six minute video, and how such a neatly packaged
duration in no way conveys the conditions of such a massive bordered space
(or indeed the 'life-times' of the subaltern as Tadiar would say, that
might go into building such a wall). The result is something that begins to
literally exceed the capabilities of traditional documentary structure, and
hence the time-code glitches with typical players and the need for a custom
player.

In a similar fashion, Dorit's work seems to be about the operations of
memory, in which the content is as much about the invisible as the
invisible--those things that our current technological condition has
rapidly erased through its hyperfocus on the now and its resulting
historical amnesia.

Toby's work is a 'vision quest', but one in which vision largely proves
inadequate. In these frames of running water and dark shadow, much is
hidden beneath the optical surface, and the power of such a work is
alluding to the forces, the energies, the latent capacities inherent in
these sites of significance.

For myself, looking at my "Null Island" as a piece of documentary
admittedly seemed very strange at first. This is, after all, a 3d
environment that one can explore, based on a fictional island at the GPS
coordinates of 0,0. And yet, "Null Island" does document a very 'real'
technological condition, a condition operating every minute of every day, a
condition made possible through an array of geospatial satellites, and a
condition that intersects with everyday life at the moment we take our
smartphone from our pockets.

GPS, like many of the 'documentary' subjects here, becomes political in
that it actively determines the possibilities available to subjects and
spaces. Such a politics, operating at the level of protocol, attains part
of its power precisely from its invisibility.

And this, then, might be the design brief for new media documentary, to
'document' the ubiquitous but often invisible logics that increasingly
infiltrate life-forces in our current neoliberal milieu. Such a brief would
include both content and form--locating significant conditions operating
unnoticed beneath our cultural and political landscapes as fitting subjects
for documentary, and at the same time, developing expanded forms of
'documentation' able to present these subjects: new intersections of sound,
media, code and presence that expands (or at least supplements) the
progressive display of still images at 24 frames per second.

best,
Luke Munn

On 12 April 2018 at 04:32, Garrett Lynch <garrett at asquare.org> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Yes gazing through technology is certainly an aspect of some of my works
> this probably creeps in from my reading around the New Aesthetic but the
> goals aren't the same.  There is a simpler level/theme (even 'site') that
> links the works however, networks.  Both Best of Luck with the Wall
> (variant) and Sculptures for Distant Places both use networks to see spaces
> in impossible ways.  The former work shifts me more firmly into film
> because it's a collaborative work and Frédérique's main medium is film.
>
> We've both (Frédérique and myself) being talking about
> deterritorialisation/reterritorialisation (sticking more closely with
> Deleuze's spelling with an s) since it's been mentioned a few times now -
> trying to unpack a little more how we feel Best of Luck with the Wall
> (variant) deterritorialises a space.  For us I guess this occurs on two
> levels; political, how politics is turing the US/Mexico border into a sort
> of no-mans land, and technological, how the use of technology/seeing
> through technology transforms the territory/space into something other than
> geography.  We are not sure what that 'other' is precisely but its scale
> (rapidly approaching actual scale) makes us think of Alfred Korzybski's
> map-territory relation and Borges short story On Exactitude in Science.
>
> There seem to be aspects of deterritorialisation/reterritorialisation in
> all the works by the artist's this week (to greater and lesser degrees) -
> would be useful if you could all unpack this for the list.
>
>
>
> On Tue, Apr 10, 2018 at 6:15 PM, Toby Tatum <tobyjamestatum at yahoo.co.uk>
> wrote:
>
>> Yes, of course! That is why your name was familiar. I can see now how *Best
>> of Luck with the Wall (variant)* ties in with your installation at
>> Stuttgarter Filmwinter. I can see now that the unrelenting gaze of the
>> surveillance camera or drone is something you're very interested in, as
>> well as the potential for subverting those machines.
>>
>> Best Wishes,
>>
>> 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>
>>
>
>
> --
> regards
> Garrett
> _________________
> 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 forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>
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