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The 2010 DeCordova BiennialWritten by David Tames on February 15, 2010
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Not to be out of step with the Biennial trend sweeping through the museum world, the long-running DeCordova Annual has been transformed this year into the new DeCordova Biennial providing a more extensive survey of New England’s contemporary art scene, which will be occurring, as the... Continue Reading...
What happen(ed) when artists annex(ed) an island?Written by David Tames on October 16, 2009
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This summer Alice Apley and I were “embedded documentarians” collaborating with mixed-media artist Sharon Haggins Dunn on her installation, Dragonflies and Angel Wings as part of the 2009 Bumpkin Island Art Encampment. An exhibition opens this weekend (part of the Fort Point Open... Continue Reading...
What happens when artists annex an island?Written by David Tames on July 28, 2009
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The Bumpkin Island Art Encampment, a weekend-long interactive art exhibition, will be open to the public on Saturday and Sunday (August 1-2, 2009). Sharon Haggins Dunn, Alice Apley, and yours truly are among the artists participating in the event this year. If you live in the Boston area, consider... Continue Reading...
Metropath(ologies): ecstasy of communication or ambivalence of information?Written by David Tames on May 23, 2009
Filed Under Art, Featured, New Media, Reviews
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Judith Donath recently spoke at MassArt. In anticipation of her talk I went to see the Connections exhibition of works by Donath and her Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab. I was particularly taken by Metropath(ologies), an immersive installation that is at once beguiling and enchanting.... Continue Reading...
A postmodern remake of a futurist classic: Perry Bard’s Man With a Movie Camera: The Global RemakeWritten by David Tames on March 29, 2009
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Video artist Perry Bard’s Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake is a participatory project made with contributions from people around the world who upload video clips interpreting Dziga Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera (1929), a film that is still fresh today in surprising... Continue Reading...
Bard’s work is the kind of machine-assisted participatory filmmaking that brings Vertov’s vision into the new millennium and enabled by computers and the net. I’m sure Vertov would have loved it. Man With A Movie Camera was Vertov’s mechanical vision of a new socialist society with Vertov as auteur, Mikhail Kaufman as the cameraman, and Yelizaveta Svilova as editor, and with Soviet society and the machinery of the industrial age as the protagonists. Bard’s project presents a global social reality in the new millennium. Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake, or as I like to think of it, “People with Video Cameras” brings the machine and ordinary people into the process of movie production and delivery, providing a collective vision consistent with Vertov’s futurist masterpiece of the modern era but remade in a postmodern setting with the media and tools of our generation: participation, camcorders, the internet, and computation. The perspectives of multiple contributors is consistent with Vertov’s philosophy, Joseph Schaub wrote in his essay, “Presenting the Cyborg’s Futurist Past: An Analysis of Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Eye“, “Kino-eye, then, is a cyborg construction that contains multiple positions for the production of film meaning.” OK, I’m stretching a little, but ideas are fun to play with, I see them as guides to possible worlds.
Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake provides a crisp example of the first, second, and fourth characteristics that Janet Murray suggests in her book, Hamlet on the Holodeck, make new media a powerful vehicle for literary creation: 1. Procedural, 2. Participatory, 3. Spatial, and 4. Encyclopedic. The site does not make use of the spatial dimension (except for some aspects of the interface, which traditional cinema lacks completely), however, It’s pretty easy to see how the project could become more spatial in an interesting manner by adding geographical information related to the video when it is uploaded to the site, underscoring the truly global nature of the effort. Regardless of being light in the spatial dimension, Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake is one of the most interesting participatory video projects I’ve had the pleasure to experience and points the way to the future of cinema. While theater owners worry over sagging ticket sales and studio moguls fear the audience’s move to net, as creators and participants we can move beyond the industrial practices of the past and look forward to a re-invented, participatory, global, postmodern, Kino-Eye.
This post is based in part on a post written for my Design Seminar II class at MassArt in response to Scott Kirsner’s Media Tech Tonic presentation, “Inventing the Movies.”
--> David Leitner is blogging from Sundance againWritten by David Tames on January 21, 2009
Filed Under Art, Film Festivals, Filmmaking
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David Leitner is blogging from Sundance again (this marks his fourth year) once a day, Sunday to Saturday. Leitner is known for his informed, sometimes irreverent perspective on the art, technology, and business of independent film, so check out his posts, which he describes as “more... Continue Reading...
Artist Encampment PhotosWritten by David Tames on October 21, 2008
Filed Under Art, Events & Screenings, Photography
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These are the photos from the recent artist encampment on Bumpkin Island (a Flickr slide show). The Berwick Research Institute joined with the Island Alliance and Studio Soto to present the 2nd Annual Artist Encampment, a "homesteading" experience on Bumpkin Island, Boston Harbor... Continue Reading...
DIY DAYS coming to Boston October 4, 2008Written by David Tames on September 13, 2008
Filed Under Art, Business, Distribution, Events & Screenings, Filmmaking, New Media, Web
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The DIY DAYS conference will be held in Boston on Saturday, October 4th at MassArt, along with screening of From Here to Awesome films the night before, also at MassArt. This traveling conference, recently held in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York, explores how independent filmmakers... Continue Reading...
Media Fabrics for Media Makers Symposium at MIT Friday, June 20, 2008Written by David Tames on June 13, 2008
Filed Under Art, Documentary, Events & Screenings, Filmmakers, New Media
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A celebration of Glorianna Davenport’s three decade effort at MIT focused on documentary storytelling and technology, “Media Fabrics for Media Makers: Realizing an Expressive Landscape for Digital Dialogues” is a day-long symposium to be held on Friday, June 20, 2008 at the... Continue Reading...
Facing Realities: Backyard and Operation FilmmakerWritten by David Tames on June 11, 2008
Filed Under Art, Events & Screenings, Filmmakers, Filmmaking, Films
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On Thursday, June 12, 2008 at 6:30 p.m. at the ICA in Boston the Facing Realities: Dialogues in Boston Documentary Film series continues with Ross McElwee’s “Backyard” (1984, 16mm, 40 min) and Nina Davenport’s “Operation Filmmaker” (2007, HDCAM, 95 min)... Continue Reading...
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