[-empyre-] Viewfinders

[Max Schleser]

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As the Viewfinders online platform/gallery is almost finalized,  www.viewfinders.gallery<http://www.viewfinders.gallery/>, we are now working on the AR feature. A prototype was recently premiered in public at i-Docs in Bristol (https://idocs2018.dcrc.org.uk/). Copy and paste the following link into any Android device when you are on the move: https://script.google.com/macros/s/AKfycbyPPQp8r4OZsyWwBGuPLVvCYlsuQ7zsPbW33yUdLw7NcuW_6I7D/exec or via QR code: https://twitter.com/VGalleryMobile/status/976755603568844800
The idea of the AR experience is to explore the state of travelling, being out and about and/or being on the move as a process of making new connections. The word documentary itself derives from the French, who used the term documentaire to describe travelogues (Grierson in MacCann 1966, p.207). Viewfinders allows participants to upload short video shots captured on smartphones into an expanded documentary that both situates moving-images into the world and creates a world around them. Theoretically Viewfinders can be examined through the Open Space Documentary (Zimmerman and De Michiel 2017) “Open Space documentary shift away from a narrow focus on the highly crafted finished product toward responsive and iterative processes deployed across platforms and places.” Viewfinders “configures networks not solely as digital interfaces, but as the nexus of people, places, and technologies”. While Viewfinders is playful and engaging through its qualities of (utopian) travel experiences, the project also aims to provoke and reclaim “technologies for people”.
As a creative practice research project we wanted to explore the imaginary futures / blue sky concept of taking the cinema experience out of the cinema into the world and realise ideas that I have been considering since 2010 (see appendix of my PhD project Mobile Mentary – Mobile Documentaries in the Mediascape). With Google Cloud Vision API, 4G mobile networks and smartphones some of these ideas are now materialising (even with micro budgets). At the same time, one should note that the conceptual embedding of APIs into any project must considered with care. The YouTube video editor that we used to remix submitted videos such as https://youtu.be/AZrtSKxcaic no longer exists. We envision to translate the creative inspiration now for social innovation and support community groups and/or NGOs to show how the form of “smartphone filmmaking 3.0” can be utilised. In the recent published edited collection Mobile Story Making in an Age of Smartphones I point at some examples in this realm and demonstrate how mobile devices and smartphones can make a difference in peoples’ lives and catalyse creativity in order to tackle current socio-cultural issues.
> Viewfinders is a collaborative project with Gerda Cammaer, Phillip Rubery and numerous international participants (see www.viewfinders.gallery)<http://www.viewfinders.gallery)>
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