I heard about the One Day on Earth project on the radio while staying at the apartment of new friends in Seattle: the idea is that people around the world would film on October 10, 2010 and submit their footage to the initiative’s website. The footage can be seen on the site via individual users profiles and will also be edited into a film (submit at least 1 min of video and you will get online access to the film). I am interested to see what that will be.

What will the archive of footage look like? Who will have submitted? Will this in itself be a portrait of the world? Who has access to video technology & the internet and what do they care about?

I spent most of 10/10/10 on an airplane.

I found the perfect detail to film while waiting for my bags to arrive on the baggage carousel: a 24-hour vending machine for fresh flowers. What an odd and lonely commentary on nature and culture! Unfortunately I couldn’t get my camera settings set correctly and had to give up to catch the train into the city.

Amelia

Picture 1

Chris Milk’s interactive online film The Wilderness Downtown mixes music video + documentary + personal history + Google satellite images + browser art. Try it out! The project is a collaboration with the band Arcade Fire, and is labeled “an experiment”.

Earlier Chris Milk worked on The Johnny Cash Project, a crowd-sourced video set to Cash’s “Ain’t No Grave.”

Amelia

The Wilderness Downtown

Johhny Cash Project

Here is a smart mockumentary from Heal the Bay about the life cycle and habitat of a plastic bag.

Amelia

UBUWEB is a wonderful site for viewing often hard-to-find films of 100+ artists, poets and researchers, including:

Jean Rouch
Trinh T. Minh-ha
Dziga Vertov
Ed Emshwiller
Brian Eno
Chris Marker
etc.

The site has a clear curatorial eye and presents full-length works, Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Shoot for the Contents (1991, 101 min) for example. It was created on a voluntary basis by “an alliance of interests” including media archives and bandwidth providers. The site presents not only films but concrete poetry in visual / text / sound forms.

Amelia

See a beautiful short document of a Tokyo restaurant by Dennis Wheatley and Stefan McClean here. The camera is set on a conveyor belt which takes plates of sushi by customers sitting around the small bar. It gazes both at the patrons and the filmmakers. More than any news report it gives a sense of what it is like to linger in a Japanese restaurant after work – of everyday life in Japan.

Amelia

I had a conversation last night that has got me thinking about the incredible ubiquity of images: with digital cameras and the Internet the photographic image has proliferated to a point were it has little novelty. At this point of image-saturation, can we begin to use images in new ways? Perhaps, less as documents and more as tools for reflection?

Here is one way of using the image, both “written images” and “video images” as tools of observation:

In 2005 and 2006 I spent time in Beijing. While in China I both kept both a written and a video journal.  There, I observed “everyday” things, including peoples’ homes, the textures of the sidewalks, hand movements used in cooking, the ways people cross the street.  Through writing and filming I began to become aware of the things that I was noticing.   While, in an overall sense, both journals are about “what I did” in Beijing – where I went, who I met, the two are more characterized by the details of objects, experiences, and social interactions.   In particular, observations about things that seemed similar to and different from home, for example, the oddness of seeing plain white tea pots and cups in nearly every restaurant, and the familiarity of Starbucks Coffee shops (ubiquitous in Beijing).   The journals are documents of the process of getting to know a place, not simply through its language, but through its social and aesthetic patterns. They are a record of what I thought was beautiful, but also what seemed ugly and surprising, of how I arranged my apartment, and of the foods that I gradually began to like.

(An image):

In Beijing, I ask my friend Yan Li if she would show me what her kitchen looks like.  I’ve been in China twice before, but I tell her that I’ve never really been inside a Chinese kitchen. She laughs, and replies, “I don’t think it’s that different from a Western one.”  But, humoring me, Yan Li walks in. Her kitchen is a small one, a little bit tricky for two people to stand inside and move around together.  There are vegetable peels on a paper on one side of the sink and steamer with warm water in it on the stove from the meal we’ve just finished.   It’s true that the familiar parts of a kitchen are there: a white refrigerator with a few magnets on the door, a gas stove, cupboards above, below, and opposite from the sink, a silverware drawer, a microwave, and places and containers to store dry foods.

But, also, looking deeper, the objects that are there, the details, ways things are organized, are different from my kitchen.  Above the stove there is a sort of ventilation hood, essential for cooking with hot oil, but, below, there is no oven.  Next to the sink, a typical stainless steel model, there are no sponges for washing dishes, and behind it there is a set of blue and white painted tiles showing a scene from a traditional Chinese painting.  In the cupboard below the kitchen’s far window are old large soda bottles filled with rice and also red beans – the bottles keep bugs out in the summer.  Next to them, there is a collection of containers of a dark liquid (soy sauces?), and two large plastic jugs of a golden-colored cooking oil.  Another set of low cabinets is crammed with cooking devices that can be plugged into the wall.  The only one I recognize is a rice cooker, the others, Yan Li, explains are for things like making a flat bread, or eating hot pot, something similar to fondue.

What is the purpose of this kind of “everyday” documentation? Can it change the way we see things?

Amelia

I’ve recently published a paper with cartographer Sebastien Caquard in the Art & Cartography special issue of The Cartographic Journal. Here’s a description:

Mapping Globalization: A Conversation between a Filmmaker and a Cartographer
This paper is an edited version of a written dialogue that took place between the fall of 2008 and the summer of 2009 between a filmmaker (Amelia Bryne) and a cartographer (Sebastien Caquard) around the issue of representing globalization. In these conversations, we define some of the key means for representing globalization in both mapmaking and filmmaking discussing local/global, strategic/tactical, data/narrative and unique/multiple perspectives. We conclude by emphasizing the potential impact of new media in ushering in hybrid digital products that merge means of representation traditional to filmmaking and cartography.

It begins …

SC. Why would a filmmaker like you involved in exploring globalization through film be interested in maps and cartography?

AB. In my view cartography and cinema have a similar problem at heart: how can we represent the world in a meaningful and engaging way? These representations can be made with many kinds of information – fragments of the world – including information in the form of scientific data, or about spatial and temporal relationships, cultural practices, and even individual perceptions or emotions. These two disciplines seemingly address the challenge of constructing representations of the world from different angles, and I am interested in exploring them. More specifically, I am interested in exploring how the combination of these two practices could be complementary in terms of understanding and representing globalization, which is a significant focus of the work of many contemporary filmmakers, including myself.

SC. So, you are interested in cartography as a domain that could help you to better represent globalization in your films. Could you elaborate a bit?

AB. My desire to represent globalization is perhaps my way of saying that I want to find ways of making sense of what is happening in the world today, and I think that cartography might be able to help me do that. Globalization is a name for a collection of phenomena that characterize and influence contemporary politics, business and everyday life. Globalization operates at multiple scales, from the personal to the global, and impacts both humans and our environment. It spans issues ranging from the influence of transnational organisations, to global labour and global capital movements, to deregulation and privatisation, oil, scarce resources, intellectual property rights, China, containerized shipping, export processing zones, and anti-globalization movements (Zaniello, 2007, p. 2). Globalization and its associated flows of capital, people, and objects is challenging to make sense of. It challenges traditional forms of representation and resistance (Jameson, 1991).

Film theorist Holly Willis suggests an explicit connection between films and maps in the context of globalization. She frames films as a type of ‘map’ that may be able to capture the increasing complexity of the world in a different way than more literal cartographic representations. This desire for alternative or hybrid forms of mapping stems from a dilemma of representation: ‘How do you ‘‘map’’ a global economy, a vast military industrial complex, or the convergence of gigantic corporations? How do you chart multinational banking and stock exchanges, or the increasingly powerful web of bureaucratic control?’ (Willis, 2005, pp. 74–75). Those are the questions I hope cartography could help me to address. Maybe, as Willis suggests, filmmaking and cartography could be helpful to each other.

Etc …

Amelia

My first contact with documentary-as-a-tool-for-change was at a Washington, DC anti-globalization protest in the spring of 2000, where I hung out with an Indymedia crew (and, as a documentary student admired their camera).  The event was not much covered by mainstream TV – except by a few rather frightened looking local newscasters in suits – but there were lots of cameras operated by small video crews and various photographers.

I think that a lot of documentary media makers make media that we hope will change things – to bring a problem to light, to help people see an issue in a different way, etc.  It’s always been tricky for me to reconcile what the relationship actually is between media and social change – have I ever seen a film that has truly changed the way I look at things?  I think that much more than watching films themselves, it is the process of making media – talking to storage unit owners, wrangling through an idea, visiting abandoned factories – that has changed me.

I have been thinking lately that some methods of media making put process first, while others prioritize product, and that this is a very important distinction.  For example, participatory video (see this book), power mapping, and issue mapping put process first – the point of these activities is to participate in the process itself. These methods can be used as co-inquiry tools, and may help to surface people’s ideas of what the issues at hand are and how to solve them.  They also may surface people’s assumptions and theories of change. The final product of such exercises in raw form (post-it notes on a wall, DIY videos, etc.) may not be particularly meaningful to those outside the group that produced them, though they could be translated into documents designed for an outside audience.

Alternatively, documentary films and research-based articles typically put product first. The audience is expected to learn by consuming the product instead of learning by participating in its creation (the creation process is left to the “expert”).  Recently, a number of documentary films have attempted to bridge this gap by providing study or discussion guides to accompany the film. For example, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Though this may help audiences to engage more deeply with the issues presented, this strategy is probably not a substitution for participation in the making-process itself.

Amelia

I attended an online video industry event recently, organized by NY Video.  There were 400+ people at the event from all kinds of companies, freelancers, etc.. The attendees mingled in a below-ground theater space, with sticker name tags and holding their winter coats.  All in all I was really impressed by the amount of stuff happening in this field.

Presenters included:

1. AttracTV – This company creates video widgets that fit over online video streams. For example, you could have a vidget over a basketball game that would allow you to access info about specific plays, chat with other viewers, order a pizza, etc.

2. The Feedroom – Feedroom spoke about their recent project for the GSA, a U.S. government agency, where they tackled the challenge of making online video accessible following the section 508 guidelines r.e. disability and the internet.

3. Miro 2.0 – This non-profit company provides a platform that acts as an aggregator of online video content, allowing you to pull video from various sources or specific topics together via RSS feeds. It adheres to open standards, and is affiliated with Kaltura and the Open Video Conference.

4. PortalVideo – Gives filmmakers a way to edit interviews much more quickly and collaboratively. Your footage is transcribed and stored online. As you edit the text transcripts, the program edits the corresponding video. After you have made a basic edit of the dialogue you then import a file with the edit data into your video editing program.

5. thePlatform – A video and audio content management system that also allows for various ways to syndicate and monetize content. The Associated Press, for example, uses this to manage its content from various contributors and send it out via local and national streams.

These companies give a sense of the breadth of online video – exciting stuff! Another type of emerging company are video stock agencies such as Pond 5 or Thought Equity Motion. All of these are pretty revolutionary in terms of filmmaking. For a couple of years we’ve been seeing companies that challenge traditional distribution mechanisms (Youtube, etc.). But, these new initiatives hit the whole range – how you get your footage, how you edit it, how you manage footage, how you make money, how advertising fits in with media content, the basic infrastructure of the video internet, etc.

Some of the same themes – monetization, the rise of aggregators, TV + internet, HD quality online, various infrastructure/platforms for distributing video online, widgets that allow users to chat about what they are watching, etc. – were echoed at the DCIA P2P Market Conference on March 17.

Amelia

Recently I spoke with the creators of two very different projects, Daytum and Abecedarium:NYC. Daytum, a sleek but friendly data visualization platform, helps users to track and communicate daily routines, say the number of espressos you drink, or the percentage of weekdays you wear yellow versus black. Abecedarium:NYC, an online interface that holds 26 films of New York City each based on a letter of the alphabet, is hosted by the New York Public Library and includes the work of a number of well-known filmmakers.

What is striking about Daytum and Abecedarium:NYC is that despite their differences they both make use of open source and social media technologies created by others – to the extent that neither project would have been possible without them.  Daytum was built with the open source tools Ruby on Rails and Open Street Map and interfaces with Twitter.  The Abecedarium:NYC creators used Google Docs and iChat to collaborate remotely, and WordPress, delicious, Google Maps, Facebook, Youtube, etc. in the project itself.

Recently, I have been amazed by what I would call “middle platforms”.  These applications – many of which Daytum and Abecedarium:NYC make use of – boost online content presentation by providing users, usually for free (or with the option of a paid higher tier of service), with the basic elements to build blogs (WordPress, posterous), websites (indexhibit), and content management systems (Drupal); to aggregate links, video, or news feeds (Miro 2.0); to present photos (Vuvox), videos (Vimeo), and even magazine layouts (issuu).

What is so revolutionary about these platforms-in-the-middle is that they help detach content creation from its presentation. With them we need not be both media content creators & web geniuses to share our work and thoughts.  It is as if we come online to pre-built musuem and gallery spaces, customizable to our liking.  Maybe success in presenting creative work well online is increasingly less about knowing how to build things from scratch, and more about knowing how to stitch together applications built by others?

Amelia