DETAILS

Installation: Reflective Space meets January 3–14, 2011, Monday–Friday, 9:30 A.M. to 4:30 P.M. in N-379, the class earns 3 credits and is offered through MassArt Professional and Continuing Education, visit their web site or call 617.879.7200 for more information or to register for the class. Download a flyer for the class as a PDF.

DESCRIPTION

Installation is a relatively recent art form that challenges traditional categories of art because of its impermanent nature and tendency to incorporate a multitude of influences. This course explores installation practice using diverse media, including but not limited to sculptural material, photography, drawing, video, and sound. Assignments encourage experimentation while reflecting on physical, psychical, and sociopolitical content in relation to the site, and include a shorter and more substantive project. Presentations, group discussions, and critiques enhance classes. Relating meaningful techniques and material to the space is emphasized over mastering shop skills. Students must have some experience with object making and the media they intend to incorporate in their projects.

INSTRUCTOR


Danielle Sauvé is a sculptor and installation artist. She received her BA from Laval University, Quebec, and her MFA from Concordia University, Montreal. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums throughout North America and internationally. She has created permanent public art installations, and has pieces in the permanent collections of several museums, including the Montreal Contemporary Art Museum and Joliett Art Museum in Quebec.

Photo: Danielle Sauvé’s Promises (Seeking Recognitions), 2010 (photo by Richard-Max Tremblay).

Among my favorite books is Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema, in spite of originally being published in 1970, it still offers a fresh perspective on the possibilities of new media art. Imagine a collection of essays that takes Youngblood’s book as a starting point. Well, here you have it! Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema, edited by Janine Marchessault and Susan Lord, is a collection of articles that takes Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema as a jumping off point and offers a variety of perspectives illuminating the shift from traditional “filmic” cinema to new “post-film” forms that include performative, interactive, and net-based media, which is part of a larger trend in which digital technology is transforming our visual culture. The articles present provocative questions of interest to both academics and practitioners: What’s new about new media? What’s different about digital aesthetics? How does the role of the viewer change? How does storytelling change? What are the political implications of these new forms? How does community production change the media? I read the essays with great interest, offering an opportunity to reflect critically on my own media making practice.

Today, writing with a camera has yet to achieve the expressiveness Astruc envisioned. Astruc would have loved MTV (at least back when they actually showed lots of music videos, I fondly remember watching MTV during its first three years, I thought I was witnessing the cinematic avant-garde going mainstream), anything that challenges mainstream film practice. Astruc writes the future of cinema will revolve around the director as auteur, which was an important idea behind the French New Wave. Fast forwarding to the present, personal documentaries–for example, Sink or Swim (Su Friedrich, 1990), Tarnation (Jonathan Caouette, 2003), and Sherman’s March (Ross McElwee, 1986)–demonstrate how cinema might very well have surpassed the novel as the dominant narrative form of a new generation.

Astruc’s idea of film as a language independent of literature provides a theoretical and historical tie-in to what is happening today, as cinema is becoming more personal, a form of visual writing, perhaps (dare I say) even eclipsing the novel, as our current generation seems to be returning to a new form of visual orality, and possibly, eventually, abandoning (perhaps too strong a word) the written word. I shudder as I write this, for I love to read and value the written word, there are reasons this blog post is in the form of words, not a visual essay, I strive for a balance between written/verbal and visual communication, for they represent two modes of knowing, each with unique strengths and weaknesses (is a topic best covered in a book or a movie?), however, I observe with anxiety the decline in reading, and I wonder if it is inevitable, as our modes of communication become more visual, perhaps it is evolution and not decline I’m not sure, but Astruc’s essay helps to assuage my anxiety. For better or worse, we are rapidly moving into an age of visuality.

Photo from The New Wave (Edited by Peter Graham, Doubleday & Company, 1968, p. 17).

provocative.objects: the extradition is co-curated by lou suSi and yours truly, working with the Bureau of cyberSurreal Investigation. Together we have selected for you a collection of works by a diverse array of artists, designers, and performers. Come experience an immersive sound installation, interactive sculptures, live performances, a video loop, and music, along with an assortment of tasty snacks and beverages. this one-evening exhibition/event will close with live music by local rockers stereo soul future, featuring christopher field.

Exhibiting artists include: Phillippe Lejeune, Ellen Godena, Alberto Negredo, Alison Kotin, Chris Basmajian, Christopher Field, Colin Owens, Courtney Brown, Courtney Lockemer, cyber sir eel kolectiv, Daniel Buckley, Daniel DeLuca, Dwayne Butcher, Elizabeth Mead, Ellen Lake, Joseph ‘Puppy’ Wight, Joshua Dolby, David Tames, Laugh Foundation, Laura Amador, Lauren McCarthy, Leigh Wells, Lewis Gesner, lou suS, Mary Rachel Fanning, Mauri Lehnoten, , Scott Murray, Stacy Scibelli, and X Y.

The event is presented under the aegis of the Dynamic Media Institute (DMI) at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. DMI offers a creative environment wherein graduate students from many disciplines explore the evolution of interactive art and communication design through new media. Through events like provocative.objects: the extradition, students, alumni, faculty, and friends of the program explore interactive storytelling, documentary, dynamic media design, video games, performance art, musical composition, and more.

I hope you will be able to join us for this special evening, for more information, point your browser to provocativeobjects.com (the site is evolving and will become the exhibition catalog by the end of November).

The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era

Mitchell suggests that after believing for over a hundred years in the notion of objective truth in photography (read film), its hegemony as a reliable witness has come to an end with digital imaging (read digital video). Since the ontology of documentary film (shot on film) is closely tied to that of photography, the effect of digital video on documentary is very similar to that of digital imaging on photography, except that maybe the house of cards has fallen in a different manner, since cinema is “truth at 24 frames per second” as Jean-Luc Godard once said, compared to a picture being worth a thousand words.

True to Marshall McLuhan’s maxim, the content of every new medium is the previous medium. Digital video, when compared to motion picture film, is no different. To suggest that digital imaging contains film is not to suggest that there aren’t several significant philosophical differences in their respective underpinnings. Cinematography is based on photography and digital cinema imaging is based on digital imaging. As Mitchell writes,

…digital imaging technology represents a new “configuration of intention [and] focuses a powerful (though frequently ambivalent and resisted) desire to dismantle the rigidities of photographic seeing and to extend visual discourse beyond the depictive conventions and presumed certitudes of the photographic record. (p. 59)

Without the reliable “indexical” reference of photography, it becomes difficult to claim “I was there” or “this really happened” or “this is evidence of an event,” and documentary, which was already on shaky ground in terms of truth claims, is now thrown into a full fledge ontological crisis. A large number of journalists, scientists, and documentary filmmakers find the malleability of the photographic image disturbing.

We are still in the process of developing a comprehensive theoretical framework to deal with the malleability of images. Mitchell ends Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era with,

…the emergence of digital imaging has irrevocably subverted [...] certainties [of recorded facts], forcing us to adopt a far more wary and more vigilant interpretive stance [...] and confronted us with the inherent instabilities and indeterminacies of [...] meaning. (p. 225)

and continues,

…as we enter the post-photographic era, we must face once again the ineradicable fragility of our ontological distinctions between the imaginary and the real, and the tragic elusiveness of the Cartesian dream. (p. 225)

and thus the possibility of documentary truth comes to an end. Or does it? Truth, whatever we make of it in documentary, is a notion that has never relied exclusively on the photographic image. Rumors of the death of the possibility of truth claims in documentary have been greatly exaggerated. How “truth” is constructed is a complex process that has always involved more than just a dependency on the photographic image, which was never such a reliable witness in the first place.

In his article “From Real to Reel: Entangled in Non-Fiction Film” in Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge University Press, 1996), Noël Carroll argues that,

In any given field of research or argument, there are patterns of reasoning, routines for assessing evidence, means of weighing the comparative significance of different types of evidence, and standards for observations, experimentation and for the use of primary and secondary sources that are shared by practitioners in that field. Abiding by these established practices is, at any given time, is believed to be the best method for getting at the truth.

Thus, since photographic evidence is only part of the system of evidence that filmmakers can provide in their documentary, order can be preserved and the ontological crisis is averted, at least for now.

Any given documentary should be analyzed in terms of standards essentially determined by non-photographic evidence, and that “film truth” based on a photographic record never had much substance or validity to start with. Even before digital trickery, documentary filmmakers have used clever editing or inappropriate B-Roll to lie with their images, Michael Moore’s Roger and Me providing a canonical example. It’s always been the rhetorical skill of the filmmaker that most effectively determines veracity of documentary in contrast to fiction. I think many (but certainly not all) documentary filmmakers would agree with Werner Herzog that it is the “ecstasy of truth” we’re after, not some Platonic truth, as if there were such a thing in the first place.

Bill Mitchell died this summer. He was a brilliant scholar and teacher. I never had a chance to take a class from him while I was at MIT, but I did have the pleasure one day of walking with him through the Stata Center as he spoke about the architectural program of the building. It was one of the most informative and delightful tours I’ve ever experienced. Wit, wisdom, and a love of architecture brought the ideas that drove the design of the building alive in my mind.

Perhaps now, with the ability of everyone to “broadcast themselves” we might see some of the future that Younglood envisioned forty years ago. A media form in which the demands of commerce and narrative give way to personal experience, personal perceptions taking precedence over the demands of traditional narratives. As Youngblood challenges his readers then and now, we need to create new narratives that are authentic, based on our personal experience, and thus truly unique. We have the means of making, collaborating, and distribution in today’s internet-based mediascape to bring Youngblood’s vision of synaesthetic cinema alive.

The personal computer allows us to merge the traditions of photography, typography, graphic design, audio and moving image production, interactivity, interaction through sensors, and more, into an expanded palette of infinite possibilities that Lev Manovich refers to as “hybrid, intricate, complex and rich visual language” in The Language of New Media (Leonardo Books, MIT Press, 2006, p. 11), which I like to call computational media. It encompasses every conceivable media form in a computational environment, which essentially makes it a hyper-medium.

I prefer terms like computational media and hypermedia over multi-media or digital media. The important transformation in photography and cinematography has not been digitization, but the embodiment of the medium in a computational environment. Computation is what is truly new in new media. Now, forty years later, we are living in an environment that makes expanded cinema not only possible, but necessary. Youngblood suggests that artists are ecologist crafting the environment and that expanded cinema will bring art and life closer together. We have a ways to go before we achieve that vision. As the internet becomes a new space for commercial conquest and net neutrality is threatened, we must fight to preserve this brave new medium so we may see the vision of Expanded Cinema come alive in our lifetimes.

Anyone who makes or consumes media should read this book. It’s an essential component of our intellectual diet for a sane planet.

1. culture of oral communication,

2. manuscript culture,

3. the Gutenberg galaxy, and

4. the electronic age.

The start of each phase is marked by the emergence of a new medium. Writing enabled manuscript culture, printing enabled what McLuhan called the Gutenberg galaxy, electronic media enabled the electronic age of broadcast communication. What has electronic media brought forth?

We have now entered the fifth era of history: the era of communication, simulation, and the end of reality. In previous ages we communicated in order to preserve and pass on memories. We lived in a world in which we believed there was a reality we wanted to share, so we communicated. But the signs we use are tricky and layered, they are deceptive, and the more we used signs the more we became removed from day-to-day, one-on-one interaction, we lost sight of the real.

The principle of reality ended in 1983 with the publication of Simulations, Baudrillard’s most influential work. At first only a small number of cultural and media critics were aware of the end, as the world continued to function under the illusion of reality. Sixteen years later the concept went mainstream with the release of the film The Matrix (Larry and Andy Wachowski, 1999). This blockbuster turned Baudrillard’s esoteric notion into a meme of apocalyptic proportions. Baudrillard wrote,

“Simulation is no longer that of a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory” (Baudrillard, 1983).

If the Matrix didn’t exist, Baudrillard would have invented it.

Simulations became a prescient handbook for the end of Renaissance ideals, fast-forwarding us through modernism, and throwing us straight into the eternal simulated present of post-modernism, post-capitalism, post-history, post-reality, post-memory, post-insert-your-favorite-concept-here. We no longer need to remember, we no longer can remember, for there is no reality, only information at out fingertips. And what we do remember is not even real in the sense of reality before 1983. Perhaps it never was. We are wired into the Matrix. Connected. In a wired eternal present without history, there can be no memory. Only desire fulfilled through consumption.

How did we get here? We learned how to write. Socrates tried to warn us of the dangers:

“If men learn [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom” (Plato, quoted in Kabitoglou (1990)).

Like Adam and Eve eating from the tree of knowledge, we chose to write, we chose to read, we chose “external marks,” and thus we chose to put our reality outside of ourselves, and thus, we created the Matrix, and with the Matrix, the principle of reality came to its untimely end. As Neo says in The Matrix, “All these memories I have, these places I went…. None of it ever happened. What does that mean?” Welcome to the simulacrum. We are happy to serve you.

References

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations, Trans. by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Phillip Beitchman, Foreign Agents Series, Semiotext(e), 1983.

McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, University of Toronto Press, 1962.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, The MIT Press, 1994 (originally published in 1964).

Kabitoglou, E. Douka. Plato and the English Romantics, Routledge, 1990.

Image Credits

1. Marshall McLuhan, © Canadian Postal Service

2. The Matrix, promotional materials, © Warner Bros.

3. “Jean Baudrillard (Simulated),” © Bifurcaciones

Note: This essay was originally written February 16, 2009 as part of an assignment for Design Seminar II
 at MassArt. Some minor editorial changes were made for the blog version.

Check out this link: www.berwickinstitute.org/bri/bumpkinisland for more details and information about the special Art Encampment boat shuttle that will deliver you directly from Boston to the island and back to the mainland! If you’re thinking of going, reserve a space on the boat now, as it will fill up and the alternatives are painful for they involve changing boats, the direct ferry is the best way to get there and back!

I’m involved this year as a project fellow documenting the Encampment. I will make the footage accessible to both participating artists and the public, working with interested collaborators to develop a participatory documentary on the project. If you visit this weekend, please consider making media (sketching and/or taking photos and/or recording audio and/or shooting video and/or writing) of your experience and sharing it with me. Contact me if you would like more details about my project.

Update, October 12, 2010

Here are some of the photos I took at the encampment this year:

Photo: Kate Dodd, “Ebb and Flow, ” 2009 Bumpkin Island Art Encampment, photo by Patrick Johnson.

There’s something for everyone: Get your feet wet with Documentary Video Boot Camp, hone your camera skills with The Documentary Camera, learn the ins and outs of producing with Producing the Documentary, study the art of editing with Editing the Documentary, make a complete short film from concept to fine cut (with a public screening in the Fall) in Documentary Project Studio, or take your editing skills to the next level in Advanced Editing with Final Cut Pro. Each of these classes provides a special opportunity to learn from practicing filmmakers who not only have a breadth and depth of professional experience, but are also passionate teachers who will challenge and inspire you to learn and grow in ways not easily done on your own.

MPFV230 The Documentary Camera
Instructor: Steve Maing
Meets: Jun 28 to Jul 2, M-Tr,9a-5:30p
1.5 cr. $614 Info/Register
Have you already taken Introduction to Video Production, Documentary Video Boot Camp, or the equivalent? Now take your camerawork to the next level with this class! Learn how you shape your film through the camera, and how that shapes the message. The week will include daily hands-on exercises, viewing and critique, and a segment on on-location sound.

MPFV232 Editing the Documentary
Instructor: Bill Anderson
Meets: Jul 6-Jul 9, Tu-F, 9a-5p
1.5 credits, $449 Info/Register
This workshop uses exercises to cover all stages of post production for both documentary and dramatic film editing: capturing media; logging; first cut; revised cuts; sound (production, effects, and music); visual effect; color correction. Familiarity with Final Cut Pro is helpful but not required.

MPFV208 Producing the Documentary
Instructor: Maria Agui Carter
Meets: Jun 21-Jun 25, M-F, 9a-3:30p
1.5 Credits, $449 Info/Register
From defining the parameters of a producer’s responsibilities to learning how to maximize production dollars, this is an invaluable crash course in how to take a film from idea and proposal to reality.

MPFV217 Documentary Projects Studio
Instructor: Yours truly
Meets: Jul 13-Aug 31, Tu, 6p-10p
3 Credits, $908 Info/Register
A studio course for students who want to produce their own short documentary and already have basic camera and editing skills. Through weekly milestone meetings you will be guided through the phases of research, planning, production, post-production, and distribution of a short documentary

MPFV218X Advanced Editing with Final Cut Pro
Instructor: Janet Gilmore
Meets: Jul 31-Aug 8, Sa & Su, 10a-4:30p
1.5 credits, $524 [Info/Register]
This course takes an in-depth look beyond the introductory level at the art of editing using Apple’s Final Cut Pro. Techniques will include motion effects, compositing, project management and finishing techniques.

MPFV225 Documentary Video Boot Camp
Instructor: Yours truly
Meets: Jun 14 to 18, M-F, 9a-4:30p, optional editing lab, Th, 4:30p 8:30p
1.5 credits, $614 [Course Full]
An immersive, hands-on experience for beginners who want to dive into learning the fundamentals of video documentary. Exercises, screenings, discussions, and critiques will expose you to a range of storytelling, aesthetic, and artistic issues. This class is currently full, however, it will be offered again during the January 2011 inter-session.

Check out additional Film/Video courses at MassArt this summer. What better way to spend one or more weeks this summer?

I encourage you to support your local independent bookstore or museum shop, however, if those are not easily accessible, you can order from amazon.com and help support this web site.

On Sunday, before returning to Boston, I went to MoMA to see “Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present,” a retrospective of four decades of her performance art presenting a fascinating mix of documentary films, objects on display, interviews with the artist running in a four-hour loop, live re-staged performances of some of her works including “Nude with Skeleton,” “Luminosity,” and “Imponderabilia,” and the centerpiece of the exhibition, “The Artist is Present.” In the vast MoMA atrium, we find Abramovic live and in person dressed in a minimalist flowing blue gown. Visitors can sit across from her at a table and lock gazes with her in silence, surrounded by museum goers, bathed in intense white light coming from four directions (provided by eight 1,200 Watt HMI lighting instruments blasting through four large silks placed in the corners of the space, the lighting geek in me could not help but notice how the performance was lit).

It’s quite a challenge to document and/or preserve performance art, which is such an ephemeral medium, and the live re-creations in a museum setting not only offers us a glimpse of her work, but also offers a meditation on the role of live performance in our completely media-saturated culture, elevating this exhibition way beyond what a documentary film or the run-of-the mill documentation-oriented show can accomplish. I think there is a real hunger for liveness in our culture, a response to the overly commercialized mass media experience, with so many of our interactions mediated, even when they are personal. One of the pieces is four hours of interviews with Abramovic and it was quite fascinating to take a break from the tumultuous exhibition, put in the headphones, and listen to her words for a while.

You can’t really document performance art, but in terms of degrees, “Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present” comes about as close as one can expect and is a show worth spending lots of time walking through, perhaps even a second time (as I did after listening to her interviews for a while). I’ve become interested in the challenge of documenting the ephemeral, and to see how her work was documented in a museum context both live and mediated was fascinating to me. If you live anywhere near New York, you should make the trek to this exhibition and allow yourself plenty of time to take it all in.

Related:

• Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present, MoMA exhibition page, show runs March 14th trough May 31, 2010
• “Performance Art Preserved, in the Flesh,” exhibition review by Holland Cotter, New York Times, March 11, 2010
• “Who’s Afraid of Marina?” by Randy Kennedy, New York Times, March 19, 2010
• “The Anxiety of Influence,” by Tatiana Berg, BOMB Blog, March 29, 2010
• “Fragments from The Conversation 2010 (March 27, New York),” previous blog post

You can view more photos and a rough cut of Alice Apley’s video “Traces” by visiting the project page at kino-eye.com/traces/

Shooting at the farm house on Bumpkin Island

Donath developed this installation with students Alex Dragulescu, Yannick Assogba, Aaron Zinman and other collaborators. They describe their piece as an installation about “living in a world overflowing with information and non-stop communication.” After spending some time walking through the piece, one thought that came to mind was Jean Baudrillard’s The Ecstasy of Communication meets the Ambivalence of Information. In The Ecstasy of Communication Baudrillard goes beyond his earlier discussions of “simulacrum” and takes on our state of pervasive digital technology, which he describes as an orgy of pure communication. He takes Marshall McLuhan’s mystical ideas to their logical conclusion: just as the medium is the message, communication is what is communicated. We are floating in a sea of information without grounding, and thus, we have constructed an environment that leads to an ambivalence of information.

When you first walk into the piece you are surrounded by a sea of rectangular shapes, perhaps a virtual city. On these objects are projected changing patterns of information, you can recognize words, names, numbers. The soundtrack is etherial, sounds could very well be from the same space at another point in time, mixed with computer generated voices reading what might be random pieces of information, even some personal data. From where does this data come from? As you wander through the space you come across three flat screen displays, each showing a different view of an information landscape. You are literally transported into an ether, a medium, along with its anesthetic effects. The sounds and visual imagery incorporate live and recorded data ranging from personal updates and private information, some of which apparently are from a search engine that invites you to type in your name or the name of someone you know. It comes back with all the characterizations of the person it can find on the net and then draws a spectrogram-like display showing various colored bands with labels like books, sports, management, family, committees, education, domestic, illegal, music, legal, social, religious, art, design, etc. A curious way to map an identity. Visitors who spend time immersed in the piece may eventually realize their data has become part of the exhibit, their images captured by surveillance cameras, their names entered into databases, their voices recorded and played back by in the echoing soundtrack.

Metropath(ologies) provides a perfect companion to the writings of McLuhan, Baudrillard, and their ilk, for it brings the ideas of a world overflowing with information and non-stop communication into the realm of experience right in front of you, and all around you. It places our post-modern information ecology right in front of your eyes, like helping a fish better understand water. We swim in media every day, we take it for granted, much like I imagine fish take water for granted. Can we imaging a world without constant news, mobile phones, information devices, our lives a constant broadcast and reception of text messages, tweets, emails, information. All of this we’ve begun to take for granted and Donath and her students present us with a new perspective from which we can reflect. The search piece in the installation allows you to type someone’s name and it comes back and shows how that person is characterized based on information available online. The data is easily misunderstood or misconstrued. When I typed in my own name it said I was all sorts of things that I might have been in the past, but I’m no longer those things today. It shows us as a sum total of net-accessible information, rather than the ephemeral pattern we, our friends, our family, imagine us to be. This search engine had no personal context, no input from the wetware, it only knows what data is out in the net, the matrix perhaps. Lots of old stale jobs were front and center. Nothing about my current life and work. Information about information without personal context, without filtering by rapidly becoming obsolete carbon based life units. Another visitor typed in his name. He was disappointed, having a common name, the search engine came back with a composite of people, but not him. He was lost in the sea of information. He had no way to specify his unique id/entity.

Among the abstracted city of information columns in the installations, I felt a constant information flow, without consciousness, without a life as I know it, but pulsing with another form of life, bringing to the forefront the challenge and impossibility of controlling the information about ourselves, as machines, agents, bots, databases, etc. take on a life of their own, making their own conclusions, or perhaps occlusions. Data patterns collected by software agents become a new form of truth. There is a fascinating ambiguity in the piece, the mapping of the data and the space is not clear, how is the information mediated? Is there such a thing as computational understanding? As the search engine is given names, it make sense of that “name” but not the “person,” later I learned that the name is sent to the soundtrack, part of music like, some from the news, computer generated voices read key words. The most fascinating component was the appearance of “data ghosts” in the central monitor in the space, which at first looks like an ordinary surveillance camera view, you see yourself and other visitors on this monitor, but then the screen is occupied by data ghosts, are these real people or data? What is floating in space? Metropath(ologies) is a garden of pure information, de-contextualized, re-contextualized, So what’s missing in our contemporary communication landscape that leads to ambivalence of information? What is the ecstasy of communication? Is it anything akin to Werner Herzog’s wonderful phrase, the ecstasy of truth? Perhaps it is the narratives that ground us in specific human experiences, a synthesis that resembles our lived experience. And that’s the story we seek to find. It may be that the way out of ambivalence lies in ecstasy, but one of human truths, not just communication.

Notes
1. This post was originally posted on the MassArt Design Seminar II Blog, Spring 2009. It is re-printed here with minor editorial changes.
2. Clicking on images will take you to the image photo page on Flickr

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.”

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 Islands, on Labor Day weekend, August 28-September 1, 2008.

Ten artists and artist collectives were each given one plot of prime, arable land on Bumpkin Island. As island "homesteaders" during the five days, they built temporary shelters on the land, lived on the land for four nights, and improved the land via site-specific project or performance. The various installations I managed to see (text borrowed from artist encampment project descriptions) while I were:

New England Expeditionary Alliance: Dedalus Wainwright, Bryan Long, Michael Andelman and Jeff Cleary – A scientific mission that mapped Bumpkin Island’s metaphorical, literal, and sensual parameters, Alliance members lead expeditions, generated hypotheses, established a classification system, created analysis, and gave lectures on their findings.

Astrodime Transit Authority: Bebe Beard, John Gayle, Ali Horeanopoulos, Mary Ann Kearns and Sam Smiley – C Celebrated the 150th year of the first attempt to lay the Transatlantic Cable by creating Bumpkin Island’s first "trans-gut" phone.

Spirits in the House: Then & Now: Sharon Haggins Dunn explored change and continuity of natural and human forces over time and the spirituality of place in an installation based mostly on materials from the ruins of the children’s hospital that was operated on the island.

The Camoufleurs: Hanna Rose Shell and Dan Hisel: Drawing on artisanal weaving techniques, military concealment strategies, and bird nesting practices, the camoufleurs transformed their land, and its particular human and natural ecology, into a camouflaged homestead environment.

Stone House, Urban City: Wenxiong Lin, Lynn Lee, Jens Stenger, Annie Wilker – Juxtaposing two themes of time (history and modernity; reality and romanticism), the artists created a model urban city in the stone farmhouse ruins, and framed windows of the naval mess hall ruins with brightly colored curtains.

Leave one for your ancestors, one for your children, and take one: Tiffany Dumont, Else Eaton, Raymond Garrett, Rory Jackson – Artists foraged island materials to create interactive, multimedia installations based on past, present and future. Artists encouraged visitors to add to the pieces, forage responsibly, and participate in performance.

Tactilist Theatre: Erik Conrad engaged in sensory deprivation for a week on the mainland, allowing him greater sensitivity as he identified island objects according to their tactile values. Arranged on the island in "theatre of touch," the artist, in the role of impressario, invited visitors to engage in a narrative performance based on a tactile values.

Survival Kit: Gabe Moylan & Rachel Roberts: Living off only the bare-bones survival kit provided by the Federal Emergency Management Association, the artists will use island-found objects to recreate family photos, common domestic objects and items of spiritual value often overlooked in disaster recovery.

Who should attend? Anyone who makes creative work: film, video, music, games, especially if you would describe yourself as an independent filmmaker. The day consists of both structured and free form activities to encourage open discussion and the opportunity to break into groups and get everyone talking to each other. Register now, the event is free but space is limited due to the size of the venue, designed to encourage an active and participatory discussion among participants.

This conference, inspired by the success of “unconferences” in other professions, is quite special because it’s being organized by filmmakers and supported by generous sponsors, hosts, and volunteers, rather than driven by vendors. It started last year when filmmaker Lance Weiler (Head Trauma, The Last Broadcast) reached out to Arin Crumley (Four Eyed Monsters) and Mike Belmont (We Are the Strange) with the idea to create a virtual conference and festival. After a series of discussions they decided that the virtual event would be a way to connect filmmakers directly with audiences and the event itself could become a model for open content distribution, one which allowed filmmakers to have a say in how their films were reaching audiences. It also enabled them to take concepts from the Workbook Project (an open source project for content creators) and to put them into practice. To make a long story short, the virtual event evolved into an online and real world event in two parts: (1) The From Here to Awesome festival which is playing out in theaters, living rooms, online and via mobile devices and (2) a series of live conferences with participatory discussion know as DIY DAYS.

The organizer’s goal is to create an open discussion and debate that will evolve as the conference travels around to several cities. At the end of the process, the organizers intend to share the results and then go back to the drawing board to plan for year two. I’m excited that this conference is coming to Boston, and being hosted in such a wonderful location. See you there!

Agenda and Announcement:
www.media.mit.edu/eventsreg/08gid-invite-fri.html

People interested in storytelling, entertainment, as well as new technologies will benefit in particular from this special event at MIT.

Space is limited, if you plan to attend please RSVP via email to: jk[at]media[dot]mit[dot]edu.

Steve Garfield announced that we’re going to have to change meeting venues, as Sweet Finnish in Jamaica Plain has closed. We also want to expand the scope of Boston Media Makers, nothing changes regarding these meetings, but starting in May, we’d like to host a technical and/or creative in-depth demo of a tool or technique one evening in the middle of each month. We’re in the process of crystallizing this idea, so make your suggestions known on the Boston Media Maker blog.

John Herman has been working on Gravityland a new websodic. The current episode (Episode 6: Joni’s Dream) was writtend by viewers who pitched their ideas on the Gravityland blog. He just did a 48 Hour Film Project film which debuts on Tuesday. I recorded an interview with John Herman after the meeting for the next episode of my audio podcast, Art Film Talk, so if all goes well, I’ll post the interview tomorrow.

Mike Mooney, FM Crew Productions, has finished What is Joppa and he’s now involved with Dr Dunbar’s Mystery Spot.

Curtis Henderson, General Manager of Boston Neighborhood Network (BNN), reported that they are now settled in their new headquarters at 3025 Washington Street in Egleston Square, formerly an MBTA power plant. They are right in the midst of the analog to digital conversion. BNN is having an Open House Ribbon Cutting next Saturday at 1:15pm w/ Mayor Menino and other local ploticos in attendance. BNN operates Boston’s two public access cable television channels: BNN’s News & Information Channel (9 Comcast/15 RCN) and BNN’s Community Access Channel (23 Comcast/83 RCN). Membership is open to Boston residents and non-profit organizations serving the Boston community. You can learn how to create your own TV program, have it broadcast on BNN cable, or produce projects for the web. Their facilities include two studios, digital cameras, non-linear edit systems, and a mobile production truck for doing multi-camera shoots on location.

Adam Green, CEO, Grazr, talked about his social networking application which allows you to create reading lists. Adam is currently looking to hire MySQL coders, Perl programmers, and CSS experts. The basic idea behind Grazr is that Everything is Miscellaneous. Grazr is a collection of tools to create and manage multiple reading lists, and share them with others. It makes it easy to keep up-to-date with the ever-increasing number of blog posts, web pages, and tweets of interest. The key insight is that they post-filter as needed, rather that requiring you to tag and sort in advance. Grazr can search each stream by keyword, date, or media type. Free accounts can merge and filter up to 50 feeds. Paid accounts can process up to 1,500 feeds in a single stream. And you can share your Grazr results on your web site using a widget they provide. Adam also blogs at Feedonomics. And speaking of tools to make sense of all the bits in your life, check out this video from Michael Wesch: Information R/evolution.

Jason Pramas, Editor/Publisher, reported that Open Media Boston is off and running. Their next meeting will be held tomorrow (Tuesday, April 8, 2008) from 6-8 p.m. at Encuentro 5, 33 Harrison Ave., 5th Flr. in Boston Chinatown (corner of Beach St. and Harrison Ave. close to the T Orange, Green and Red Lines). They will be talking about making the site really go now that’s it’s and running and start thinking about what direction to take the site design for full launch next month). Open Media Boston is a project of Media Working Group (a non-profit organization), Open Media Boston is a new audience-centered online media outlet dedicated to publishing fair and accurate news, views, arts, and entertainment content in text, image, audio and video formats from a progressive political perspective for the Boston area. They want to balance open participation with editorial control. They are soliciting submissions and commentary from the general public using the latest social media technology while maintaining professional journalistic standards at all times. Their site was built with Drupal, an open source content management framework that has become a popular choice for people building online media community sites.

Anna Pinkert, a media producer, talked about the Women, Action & The Media Conference that was recently held at MIT. In attendance were some really cool people, but she was surprised that the ratio is still heavy on print media. She’s getting into editing and asked the group, what are the differences between Final Cut Express and Final Cut Pro? Basically, Express only comes bundled with LiveType and the older 1.5 version of Soundtrack Pro. Final Cut Pro is part of a complete bundle that includes Soundtrack Pro 2 (much better than 1.5), Motion, Compressor, DVD Studio Pro, and Color. The interface is pretty much identical, especially now that the latest version of Express adds key-framing. Express does not support third party capture cards and the full range of video formats, however, it does support DV and HDV, so that covers it for most people. Express only has the secondary (two-way) color correction tool, it does not have the three-way color correction tool which once you start using it, you’ll really miss it. Also, Express limits undo to 32 levels. If you want to explore the differences in great detail, take a look at Final Cut Express Technical Specifications
and Final Cut Pro 6 Technical Specifications on the Apple web site.

Andrea Mercado, co-manager of PLA Blog, the official blog of the Public Library Association, recently aquired a Zoom H2 digital audio recorder and she’s very excited about it. I can see why, it’s a cool little recorder. One thing that makes the little H2 unique is that it has 4 built-in microphone capsules that simply put provides excellent stereo imaging.

John Carr has done short films and documentaries and is now venturing into audio. He’s getting involved in some podcasts and writing a radio drama. He’ll be doing a show at Improv Asylum on Saturday night (April 12, 2008). He’s been using Zhura, an online screenwriting application. Zhura is most easily described as Final Draft meets Google Docs. It provides a way to create formatted scripts with revision control online. Youc an create a private group and invite friends and colleagues to collaborate in a workspace. You can also use it in public mode to collaborate with others under a Creative Commons license, letting other people read and comment on your script, they can even help out with edits. Software is rapidly becoming a service and Zhura is making a play for the screewriting sector.

Jeff Cutler, who does Bowl of Cheese (self-described as “gentle, and not so gentle, ramblings about the inane and insane”) is taking some time to write.

Reiko Beach of TRB Design talked about Geek Girl Camp (which takes place on April 17, 2008 at the Heritage House in Hyannis). It’s a meetup and unconference for girls/women of all ages geared to empower, educate, evangelize, excite and improve the overall knowledge of the ever-evolving world of consumer products, computers, and the web.

Tom Beach of TRB Design recently aquired a Sony HVL-LBP LED camera light ($500, add $100 for NP-F970 battery, $100 for single charger $150 for dual charger). After the meeting we experimented with the light and I did some shooting with the light and a Sony HVR-V1 camcorder. The light is a little heavy mounted on-camera for handheld shooting, but it certainly works as a daylight balanced battery-powered LED light to add some fill or act as key when there’s not enough light to shoot sans light. It works with Sony L-series camcorder batteries, Tom discovered the smaller L-series batteries do not work with the light, it requires the higher capacity models.

In terms of price/performance I think the HVL-LBP fits somewhere between the more expensive Litepanels Mini ($740, add $164 for rechargeable battery) the less expensive Litepanels Micro ($300), a lightweight alternative to both lights that is well suited for handheld work with smaller cameras, but not as bright as the HVL-LBP and Mini. And on the high end of LED camera lights is the Zylight Z90 ($950 w/ mounting accessories, add $180 for rechargeable battery and cable) that lets you dial in any color. It has two built-in preset colors (5600K, 3200K) and two user preset you can program to display any color. This is where the Zylight differs most sharply from the Sony and Litepanels, no gels are needed, instead, you dial in the color you need. It also has a plus/minus green mode, or tungsten/daylight mode, allowing you to choose the color of “white” you need quickly. The number of LED lights is proliferating and expect to see continued price drops and innovation.

Alecia Orsini will be putting her film, Combustible Russ , on the net for sale. She’s interested in hearing from people the pros and cons of the various options available for filmmakers who want to sell their work online.

I suggest checking out a recent New England Film article by Rhonda Moskowitz, Distributing Your Short Film in the Global Marketplace. Also, in New England Film you will find two related pieces by yours truly which ran last year: Delivering Video on the Web, and Prepping and Posting your Video to the Web, most of what’s in there is still relevant, however, the field is in constant flux. Another suggestion is to take a look at Video on the Web: A Resource Guide, an evolving guide of compression tools, hosting services, and video players for delivering video on the web. It’s a work in progress, so let me know what else should go in there.

Steve Albanese, Tutorial Depot, provides tutorials for users of Logic, Pro Tools, Digital Performer, and more. He continues to do his very fun video show, Friday Brew, check it out.

Media scholar Heide Solbrig , a Professor at Bentley College, and her student Mai Huynh talked about Bentley’s program in Media and Culture. Mai is a graduating senior and the first graduating media major at Bentley. She had a Zine at 12, has been with new media for a long time. She’s doing a project mapping bloggers in the Boston area and hopes to talk to many of the people here at this meeting and beyond.

I’m fascinated by Bentley’s new program, and how forward looking it is, requiring students to balance their media major with a business minor and students do a media-related internship or project. Given the rapid change in the media industry, this fresh program strikes me as a savvy alternative to craft oriented programs that only teach tools and techniques on the one end, and traditional film schools on the other end, which definitely provide a good liberal arts education, but your major prepares you to enter an industry that will most likely not look anything like it does today ten years from now. It’s very fresh and timely that Bentley is providing students the opportunity to mix of business and media studies, along with a good solid liberal arts education, this strikes me as a very smart way to educate the new generation of media makers who grew up using editing tools and cameras in high school and don’t need to learn the craft so much as building their knowledge of history, trends, aesthetics, critical thinking, and business. You can’t go wrong with a good liberal arts education focused on the future yet still firmly planted in the fundamentals.

Joe Cascio continues to work on Social Logic and he’s also involved in starting up Providence Media Makers, their next meeting is on April 20th.

Mike Walsh is putting together another Barcamp on May 17th and a MacCamp on May 10th.

Phillipe Lejeune has been creating amazing video using Flash and lately he’s been using Seesmic which he really likes, he finds it “ten times more powerful that Twitter ,” especially as a visual artist. For him, Seesmic offers “something extra,” allowing you to see the “personality of the other person.” Phillipe also mentioned that for people who find using WordPress difficult, Phillipe suggested taking a look at Jimdo, which is very easy to use.

Brett Stilwell is involved with Pecha Kucha Boston. He talked about Pecha Kucha, an event format for presenting creative ideas. The name is onomatopoeia, the sound of conversation in Japanese. Fifteen or so speakers each present exactly twenty slides. Each slide automatically advances after twenty seconds. The next one in the Boston area will be focused on architecture, design and technology: Pecha Kucha Boston 4, hosted by Harvard GSD on Thursday, April 10, 2008 at 8pm in Gund Hall, 48 Quincy Street in Cambridge, MA. The event is free and open to the public. In June they will be doing another one with a more diverse speaker set. He had with him a copy of a beautiful book, Pecha Kucha Night: A Celebration, celebrating the phenomenon now running in over a hundred cities around the world. The book looks at how the event has grown, where it’s been held, how to run one, and why it has gone viral. Brett has put some videos on blip.tv

Adam Greene, Marksman Ship Pictures, does family history videos, he’s looking for people w/ web skills needs help with production and promotion. He’s also a certified Final Cut Pro trainer, so if you need help with Final Cut, give Adam a call.

This month I did show and tell about using an MS Stereo microphone (in my case an Audio-Technica BP4029) for hand-held documentary in-the-moment shooting. In the past I used two microphones to capture what’s in front and to the side of the camera, but it’s a drag to do a two handed technique. I’ll be posting a detailed article on this in the future covering both production and post-production details, so stay tuned.

Monte Ladner is a medical doctor who does Fitness Rocks, a health and fitness podcast. He suggests that there is something missing in the interaction between doctors and their patients around the dissemination of research on lifestyle and health. Health care costs are a big issue these days, and the shocking statistic is that 75% of the money is spent on chronic disease, over a trillion dollars a year is being spent in the United States on things that could be prevented if people were more active and ate healthy.

Brian Agusta has a show he started last summer, he’s an actor, performer, and singer, he helped form the professional vocal group, Almost Recess. Brian is looking for opportunities to do acting and performing, his first standup show is this Wednesday at Improv Boston.

Mike Ball talked about the wonderfully progressive Left in Lowell site, which is an excellent example of local progressive journalism. He has been running into some podcasting and Joomla problems, so if you know about both, he can use some help.

I’m sad we are no longer meeting at Sweet Finnish Cafe in Jamaica Plan, which closed its doors. We will miss the lovely cafe, it was a perfect environment for our meetings. Coffee, old-world pastries, new media, conversation, more coffee. We will miss Ulla’s hospitality, she hosted us for the past two years. This month we met in the back room of Doyle’s pub in Jamaica Plain and had what came close to record attendance.

I did not take notes about everything we spoke about, or everyone who spoke, so if I left someone out, sorry about that, nothing was meant by it. I think we might need to find some real-time wiki technique for taking notes at these meetings. It would be nice to explore how we could write notes of the meetings in a more collaborative manner. Any ideas? Until next month, keep making the future of media.