Untitled Document

Holly Aylett (keynote), in conversation with Professor Christine Gledhill
Diversity of Expression in the Global World

In conversation with Professor Christine Gledhill, Holly Aylett – Managing Editor of Vertigo and Director of the Independent Film Parliament (www.filmparliament.org.uk/) – discusses the UNESCO Convention for the Protection and Promotion of Diversity of Expression and the role it can play in the future of our moving image culture worldwide. The Convention is an international instrument which came on to the statute books in March 2007 and had been already been adopted by UNESCO in November 2005. In this conversation, Holly Aylett outlines its origins, the difference it makes for our moving image practice and culture, the significance of the term ‘diversity of expression’, and the tension between the idea of national cultures and a global community in the digital era.

Steven Ball, Adam Lockhart and Peter Thomas
Working with Artists’ Film and Video e-Resources

This joint paper will present three e-resource projects that have been developed to address British artists’ film and video, particularly with a view to enabling the development of the history of the field and facilitating its research: British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection (set up in 2000), REWIND Artists’ Video in the 70s and 80s (set up 2004), and the Film and Video Distribution Database (set up in 2005 and due to launch 2008). Although the resources were conceived as separate projects, the presentation will highlight the potential that the combined resources present for the researcher. However, discovering the potential of the resources has been accompanied by a learning curve regarding the difficulties of developing digital resources, and the second half of the presentation will address some of the problems that can arise which relate to the nature of the project, the hosting institution and the material being handled.

Pat Brereton
The Influence of Database Logic on Film Structure: A Reading of Science Fiction as Smart Film – Spielberg’s AI and Minority Report

There is a continuing need for a creative and critical dialogue with new generations of students and audiences to reinvigorate the study of film. New media modalities of distribution and consumption like DVD add-ons help to focus attention on this dialogue. This paper will examine how new digital cinema successfully reflects and connect with new generational pleasures by framing a new database logic within their narrative structures. This new logic is signaled in Jeffrey Sconce’s seminal essay (Screen 2003) by calling attention to the term ‘smart’ cinema which has achieved popular currency in academic circles, alongside more recent studies including Nicholas Rombes volume on Punk cinema, together with various music video/games analyses of narrative structure – all have sought to question the continuing orthodoxy of traditional taxonomies embodied by the Classic Hollywood Narrative.
Minority Report for example is so smart and layered, while focusing on well trodden tropes around perception and uncovering crime. The twist of course being discovering such deviancy before it actually happens – which has been read by some critics as allegorical of the ethical crisis of legitimacy around the current ‘War on Terror’ and taking out an enemy before concrete evidence is available to validate such action. Like many new/smart films the complex storyline encourages re-viewing on DVD, alongside video games as well as TV series like The Sopranos or 24 etc, all such new media serving to appreciate and enjoy the layering of [smart] subtexts buried within the diegesis of the text.
While AI’s mode of perception on the other hand is very different, corresponding with Spielberg’s philosophical investigation of childhood innocence and what it means to be human with their accompanying memory banks. But as Carolyn Jess-Cooke in her Lacanian study in Screen (2006) affirms, ‘the fear of forgetting is so great that images of the past, images of the dead, create an uncanny sense of ever-present absence’. This preoccupation pervades much smart film where the ubiquity of human experience is sometimes marked as a faulty database of memories like in Momento. The ‘postmodern’ breakdown of knowledge and memory has promoted even more fears in our re-polarised World order. New digital media and their accompanying aesthetic sensibilities and modalities which have helped create a new ‘digital logic’ have at the same time become one of its main attractions and selling points. Both the industry and the academy need to understand and appreciate the potentiality of this database format and its future incarnation, as a method of distribution and consumption.

Maria Chatzichristodoulou and Adnan Hadzi
Deptford TV: You are Personally Invited to Rewrite this Paper

Web 2.0 is about sharing and networking. Software like wikis and social networking sites have made it possible for anyone privileged enough to enjoy access to new technologies to publish any type of content online and invite everyone else to access, share and process this.
This paper will attempt to explore the 'strategies' of sharing, using the project Deptford.TV (http://www.deptford.tv) as a case-study. Initiated in 2005 by Adnan Hadzi, Deptford.TV is an open and networked project that employs methods of commons-based peer production and uses open source software to build a video database for collective film-making. It also is a community project that attempts to collectively document the regeneration process in Deptford in South East London. Who are the Deptford.TV participants? Why do they want to share their work? What kind of work are they prepared to share? Which strategies do they employ in the process of sharing? How do they tackle the challenges such practices involve?

This paper examines changing practices in the documentation and analysis of artists’ cinema, with particular emphasis on the Irish context. Although Ireland does not have an established history of artists’ cinema or experimental practice, the advent of digital technology has contributed both to a proliferation of new contexts for production and distribution and to a renewed interest in moving image technologies and histories. Public art commissions and digital film funding schemes have created new contexts for production, while developments in distribution include the emergence of digital media festivals such as Darklight, screening networks and salons such as DATA, and a marked emphasis on the moving image within gallery and museum exhibitions.

Recent years have also witnessed the development of various digital archive and database initiatives, which are intended to expand or contest existing canons of Irish cinema. Practitioners, however, do not always support these initiatives and as a consequence archives and databases tend to offer a partial account of artists’ cinema and experimental practice. The paper will focus on some recent curatorial strategies within this area, including the establishment of a temporary reference collection that documents moving image works funded by the Irish Arts Council since the early 1970s. This collection was first assembled as part of a festival entitled 30 Years On: The Artist and the Filmmaker (2003) and subsequently re-presented at the Darklight 2007 Symposium, within the context of a thematic exploration of archival practices and strategies. The paper will compare these diverse contexts of reception and explore the various factors that continue to shape the formation of archives of artists’ cinema in Ireland.

In tandem with the upcoming AV Festival 2008 (taking place in Newcastle, Sunderland and Middlesbrough), Sarah Cook and Kathy Rae Huffman are co-curating an exhibition on the recent history of artist’s use of visual broadcast technologies – from television to the web (‘Broadcast Yourself’, Hatton Gallery, University of Newcastle, opening 28 February 2008). This paper reports on the research to date, considering histories of artist-television, the role of cable TV networks and the recent manifestation of streaming platforms on the web, such as YouTube. The role and implication of immediate online distribution/exhibition of works is addressed from the perspective of the curator/broadcaster. Artists discussed include Miranda July, Jillian McDonald, Marisa Olson, Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie, Rachel Jacobs/Active Ingredient.

Ross Rudesch Harley
Remixing the Archive in the Bit-torrent Age: An Antipodean Perspective

Artists have always been plugged into archives, whether it be for inspiration, research purposes, or as a source of raw material. The present digitisation of archives into web databases and peer-to-peer networks has further accelerated this relationship of storage and cultural exchange.
Australian media artists particularly have been engaged in using found-footage strategies – as evidenced by work made over the past three decades and included in recent retrospective exhibitions such as ‘SynCity’. Armed with techniques of cut and copy, these artists purposefully manipulate and hack found material for their own strategic purposes. In doing so, they dislocate archival material from its original techno-cultural location and re-animate global popular culture in their own personal/local style.
Tracing a conceptual bass-line that can be followed from the avant-garde filmmakers of the 1920s, Situationist detournement and Burrough’s cut-up techniques of the 1960s, 1980s Super8 strategies, contemporary VJ culture, creative commons, wikimedia, open source and P2P networks, this presentation will lay out some of the stakes involved in remixing the archive in the bit-torrent age.

In particular, this paper will analyse and present the work of Australian artists including Ian Andrews, the SodaJerk collective, Kate Richards, Sarah Waterson and others in terms of this lineage. It will also make reference to a number of new online video archive-and-research projects that are currently emerging in Australia (including those of dLux, the Monash University Australian Video Art Archive, the Sydney Video Art Research Project, and Griffith Artworks). In what ways do P2P networks and the read-write web challenge the existing practices of public institutions and content-producing artists, and what benefits might these networks offer artists and researchers in the future?

Tobias Hochscherf and James Leggott
Digital Realism: The Amber Film Collective, Digital Media and the Shooting Magpies Project

This paper examines the way in which digital video (DV) impacted on the work of the independent Newcastle-based Amber Film collective. Using their socio-political ‘docudrama’ Shooting Magpies (2005) and their internet website as examples, we will analyse how the use of digital technology in production and distribution both enhanced and restricted their ‘realist’ strategy of engaging with working-class communities in the North East of England. By prioritising digital distribution (online and as a DVD) over the more traditional 35mm theatrical exhibition, Amber have shown themselves willing to adapt to the increasingly perilous market position of independent filmmakers. Whilst the use of new technology could well be seen as an answer to the threat of escalating marginality (as it allowed new scope for post-production and distribution), the decision to use lightweight, inexpensive DV cameras has also had aesthetic implications. The use of smaller DV equipment resulted in greater mobility and improved access to their subjects, and digital technology also allowed the film to be constructed at the editing stage. However, DV technology also resulted in a degree of visual imperfection (saturation etc), and performances and mise-en-scene reminiscent of televisual formats. Our case study of Amber and Shooting Magpies will suggest how the incorporation of digital technology within traditional film culture has the potential to problematise the boundary between the regional and international, as well as to collapse the distinctions between filmic, televisual and web-based media.

Samantha Lay
The Institutionalisation of the Blogosphere: Commercialisation, Professionalism and the Case of Film Weblogs

Film fans engage with films, filmmakers and each other in a variety of ways on the internet. The weblog is one such popular platform of engagement and expression. In September 2000, Rebecca Blood suggested that weblogs might facilitate the transformation of ‘both readers and writers from audiences into publics and consumers into creators’. However, Blood was only too aware of the difficulty in achieving this in our ‘media-saturated’ times:
Our strength – that each of us speaks in an individual voice of an individual vision – is, in the high-stakes world of carefully orchestrated messages designed to distract and manipulate, a liability. We are, very simply, outnumbered. (Blood 2000)
By 2007, it could be argued that weblogs have become more commercial and more professional. The ‘individual voice of an individual vision’ is, according to the research presented here, something of a rarity. This paper suggests that professionalisation and commercialisation are two key components in the ongoing institutionalisation of the blogosphere. Through presentation of the results of an analysis of 12 dedicated film weblogs, the paper will argue that while film blogs expose blog audiences/film fans to commercial pressures both old and new, for some bloggers, the commercial rewards are important motivational factors. In addition, analysis of the film blogs found that many of their authors were professional, semi-professional or aspiring writers or connected with the film or media industries in some way.

This paper is an historical-analytical report about Cine Falcatrua (‘Cine Hoax’), an academic project of the Federal University of Espírito Santo that aims to rethink the cinematographic industry using digital technologies, questioning audiovisual distribution and exhibition inside a new media ecology.
The project works around a nomadic movie theatre, which uses domestic equipment –obsolete CPUs, datashows, audio amplifiers, a white screen and cables, many cables – to emulate a real projection room. Since the beginning of 2004, this movie theatre exhibits films downloaded from the internet in free weekly sessions, applying cultural guerrilla, tactical media, VJing and urban intervention techniques to the cinematographic circuitry.

During the presentation of his film The Last Bolshevik at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 1993, Chris Marker was spotted affectionately carrying a new compact video camera, ‘which he confessed to love and take with him everywhere, like a cherished pet’ (Almereyda). Correlating his new camera to the companionship of a cat, a smitten Marker admits his allure not only to cinema, but also his obsession in documenting, and a need to keep the means close by. His character Sandor Krasna in his seminal film Sans soleil writes, ‘I remember that month of January in Tokyo – or rather I remember the images I filmed in that month of January in Tokyo. They have substituted themselves for my memory – they are my memory. I wonder how people remember things who don’t film, don’t photograph, don’t tape. How has mankind managed to remember?’
Marker is a prolific filmmaker in terms of the ways in which he uses film to create a rhizomatic database of historical and personal images. His ruminations on the concepts of transnationalism and globalization in relation to image-based media began even before the terms were defined as such. Marker’s intrigue with various new forms of media reaches out from film to include CD-ROM, video, and computer based digital installations.

In this paper I will explore the notions of history, database, and memory in regards to Marker’s film Sans soleil (1982), the CD-ROM piece entitled Immemory (1997) and his most recent computer generated installation, The Hollow Men (2006). What draws Marker to these different mediums is the multi-layered architectures of them – as they bring us closer to electronically mimicking human experience. As Krasna states ‘electronic texture is the only one that can deal with sentiment, memory, and imagination’. Moreover, I will discuss Marker’s unique archival techniques, and demonstrate how the evolution of his process can be mapped through these three uncanny works.

Annamaria Motrescu
Images of Empire: Online Amateur Footage and the Re-interpretation of British Colonial Identities

In this paper I analyse British colonial amateur footage as being revived by the British Empire & Commonwealth Museum (BECM) via the ‘Images of Empire’ (IoE) online database. I discuss how film clip selection criteria influences the original interpretation of amateur footage. I also consider issues surrounding intellectual property in the context of commercial archiving, and I explore the influence of database-editing on amateur films’ intrinsic narrative.
BECM holds 400 hours of footage shot by British colonialists across most areas of the former British Empire, the largest collections being from Africa and India. Some of the footage has been restored and some has been made available online since December 2006. The IoE database presents short film clips selected from the most representative collections. The collections’ selection criteria is based on their coverage of certain geographical areas and socio-political events.
I discuss the criteria used in selecting the film clips and the issues raised by the conflict between an academic approach and commercial goals. I look at how amateur film collections are edited with a view to online commercialization. I also compare the IoE database with the one offered by the Centre of South East Asian Studies (CSAS) with its 80 hours of British amateur footage. This comparison highlights the different criteria for footage selection and presentation which respect or re-interpret the original material.

Heather Norris Nicholson
Virtuous or Virtual Histories?: Changing Ways of Working with Archival Film Footage

Digitalization has greatly improved access to archival film footage collections and widened opportunities for research. While the rapid recent growth of scholarly interest in using and working with archived film footage is widely to be welcomed, it seems timely to review how research methods and results may be affected as electronic-based approaches come to play an ever more visible part in shaping a growing body of scholarly work on archival film. How is research affected by online search engines, summary descriptions and pre-selected clips of data? Do archival dust, atmosphere and institutional eccentricities play a part in shaping historical narratives that use archived material? Is there greater reliance than in the past upon catalogue entries prepared by anonymous cataloguers? How might historical enquiry change if it is undertaken without extensive archive-based research? Do such questions even matter as archival film-related research attracts ever-broadening inter-disciplinary academic attention? Are practitioners from backgrounds in cultural, media and film studies less rooted in direct forms of encounter with their primary sources of evidence than researchers who have come from the humanities and social sciences?

This paper will explore some of the methodological and conceptual shifts that prompt such questions through reference to personal encounters with archive-based forms of research. Attention will focus primarily upon the visual interpretation and contextualization of amateur cine films, including family and holiday films. Discussion will consider use of regional and national film collections in Britain and Canada. Examples of silent amateur footage in colour and in black and white and transferred to DVD or VHS format will accompany the presentation.

Rick Prelinger (keynote)
It's Only a Moving Image: Archives, Authority and the Social Contract

Use justifies archives, but archives and their users have historically been frozen in an unfulfilling relationship. Despite their manifest popularity, historical and cultural significance, most moving images remain very difficult to access and reuse. Scarcity of resources, copyright concerns, and a culture that favors preservation over access have all contributed to the peculiar difficulties that face would-be users of archival moving images.

Until recently, archives had been unlikely places to look for prefigurations of future media forms and new relationships between cultural producers and consumers. This has changed. Archives are rapidly evolving into enablers of emerging mass authorship, and a growing constituency of nontraditional users are employing archival images as a means of historical intervention in the present. If moving image collections are able to leverage access, openness and new technologies to embrace new users, and if they can successfully resist enclosure and corporate control, archives will become key players in the dynamic between authorship and authority.

Michael J. Salvo
Architecture of Memory: Digital Representation of the Holocaust

Architecture of Memory articulates the rhetoric of representation in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Wexner Learning Center utilizing information architecture to articulate how digital multimedia effectively represents what was once thought to be unspeakable, a failure of language which left many holocaust witnesses and survivors unable or unwilling to testify to their experiences. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum created the Wexner Learning Center as a means to overcome this failure of language and to enable Holocaust Witnesses to speak and to preserve their testimony while making the testimony available to museum visitors. Architecture of Memory: Digital Representation of the Holocaust presents a new perspective that contributes to the Humanities' understanding of cultural representation of mass trauma and overcomes the silence of Lyotard's différend.
The différend is a limit, an end of language's ability to represent experience. Silence is often regarded as an unfortunate but natural response to experiencing and surviving the Holocaust: its immensity, violence, its threat to identity and representation, the emergence of survivor guilt, the failure of language to represent the Holocaust. The Wexner Learning Center's Database of Witness Narratives represents a model of overcoming the différend of the Holocaust. This research is unique because of its attention to a technological system and the tapestry of texts it creates: an immersive environment of Holocaust witness testimony.

In this paper I examine the Darfur action campaigns mounted through YouTube in order to explore the impact of the internet on the production, distribution, and exhibition of documentary testimony and human rights campaign. Drawing on Henry Jenkins’ notions of convergence culture and Patricia Zimmermann’s investigations into public spaces and the ‘new world image order’, I focus on the recently launched ‘Citizentube’ launched in April 2007 ‘to add fuel to the revolution that is YouTube politics’. Through a deeper study of the Darfur case, I address this concept of ‘YouTube politics’, at present loosely defined as the democracy of speech and ideas ostensibly enabled by the digital revolution. More precisely, these new media technologies have challenged institutional and corporate actors by ushering in citizen journalism and offering platforms for user-driven content, even as the virtual space is increasingly privatised. The use of documentary video for social action is nothing new; however, the internet broadens the reach of video testimonies, challenging traditional media gatekeepers and offering means of strategic narrowcasting that aid in the formation of political constituencies. Because viewers can share videos and upload their own video response, the internet has the capacity to transform audiences into distributors and producers. In the case of Citizentube, witnessing publics becomes witnessing publicists. Mapping the video dialogue around Darfur reveals iconic frames of suffering used to cultivate communities of concern as it also supplies another means of analysing internet influence on video aesthetics. By studying the mechanisms behind the image, it is possible to explore the ways the internet helps to align communities with and to work on behalf of NGOs – and it becomes possible to explore the production of a new public sphere.

Christo Wallers
Star and Shadow Cinema: Alternative Cultural Space in the Contemporary Age

Star and Shadow Cinema (www.starandshadow.org.uk) embodies certain politics and approaches that have all been seen before, but can perhaps be viewed today according to the FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) paradigm. We are a non-hierarchical, volunteer-run community interest company; nominally a cinema, but a current look at our programme reveals that cinema is but one cultural form amongst many presented at the Star and Shadow. Based in the Ouseburn area of Newcastle, we serve as a resource centre for a variety of media. This paper will detail the history of main activities of the Star and Shadow -- its start at the Side Cinema, its festivals, its collective programming groups, and other peripheral activities. It will examine the core principle that binds all activities, namely face to face human interaction. The approach to programming - the use of a wiki, open meetings, and consensus decision making - will be discussed in relation to the model of FLOSS. The Star and Shadow serves as an example of the future of cinema-going in the age of user-generated content.

This talk explores the epistemological, practical and imaginary connections between archives, historiography and digitalities. It examines emerging artistic practices that create temporal hybridities through layering the archival and the imaginary, the past and the future to imagine a new kind of historiographic interface. Case studies considered include locative media, live performance remix, ambient media, collaborative systems digital interfaces, and other emerging forms that engage contiguity, collaboration and polyphony. Contiguities suggests reconfiguration of both narrative and structure within a large set of coordinates that through their juxtapositions, contradictions and layerings create new meanings and interpretations, new futures. The archive is always open and recombinant, active rather than static, evolving not fixed. It opens to the future. It is never finished and always revised. Archival objects are not static. They should not be sacralized, monumentalized, or fossilized. Artifacts – rather than archival objects – are provisional and fluid rather than fixed. They are mobilized to create a collaborative performative spaces for the imagination of new histories and new futures.

The archival process is to name the unburied dead. This naming creates a liminal zone between that which is alive and that which is phantasmatic, ghostly, apparitional. Witnessing and testimonial, image and artifact: together, they move and work through repetition to create memory that is collective and always forming. The point of the digital archive is to fight the anaesthesia and amnesia of transnational capital which is ultimately authoritarian because there is no change or mutation. The digital archive fights back with synaesthesia and polyphony. It is necessary to ignite and mobilize the digital archive towards collective public memory through creating networked models of hybrid and multiple temporalities. In the digital age, we live in an archival surround: we are all archivists. We must enter into and reactivate the archive in recombinant ways that entail swarm tactics, cells, clusters, for provisional kidnappings of spaces for historiographic, semiotic and political guerrilla warfare. These recombinations exceed piracy, a limited political strategy. Instead, these recombinations open up public domains. An archive is not a place. It is, rather, a theater of operations that spans the analog and digital. It stages political interventions into the archival surround and engages provisional rewirings of historical imaginaries. The digital archive is an algorithm that is productive, changing, mobilizing. The digital archive is not a technology: it is an interface between histories and memories, artifacts and imaginaries, the real and the phantasmatic, history and the future.

Michael Zryd
Hollis Frampton’s Magellan as Virtual Future Metahistory of Film

Hollis Frampton left his utopian meta-historical film project, Magellan, incomplete upon his death in 1984. The 36 hours of film was to be exhibited as a calendrical cycle, with at least two short films screened each day of the year. Only 8 hours of film was completed, but he left behind many plans, production notes, and even some footage in a variety of scattered archives. Magellan was to be a meta-history of film, ‘a coherent wieldy set of discrete monuments, meant to inseminate resonant consistency into the growing body of his art’. This high modernist directive, however, was qualified by Frampton’s sense of film deriving not only from its ‘material limits’ but from an expansive sense of the ‘film machine’, that includes not only celluoid but the cameras, projectors, systems of distribution, and spectators who bring film to consciousness and the cultural, aesthetic, and economic historical traditions from which it derives. Frampton embraced new media like video and xerography, foresaw laserdisc distribution as an option for Magellan, and wrote several computer-imaging languages at SUNY Buffalo just before he died. In short, he was interested in how new technologies would shape the future histories of film production, distribution, and exhibition, all of which pertained to what he saw as the larger place of the moving image in culture, as an aesthetic investigation of dynamic human consciousness itself. Frampton’s meta-history, embodied in what he called ‘the Magellan metaphor’ of an explorer on an imperial mission to encompass all modes of human experience, was ultimately to serve as a grand epistemological metaphor for the history of art and the ways we understand the world.
Frampton’s meta-history was already a ‘future history’. The work of scholars who investigate the remnants of Magellan, and attempt conceptually to reconstruct it, makes Magellan, at least in part, a ‘virtual future history’. Such a history presents particular challenges and – given the development of digital and online textual, audio, and visual research resources – new opportunities to reconstruct the parameters of Frampton’s project, and by extension, its larger imaginative work on the moving image and consciousness. My proposed paper considers the possibilities and limitations that attend the conceptual reconstruction of such an unrealized utopian project. (Magellan lies in a tradition extending from Tatlin’s Memorial, and the rich tradition of conceptual architecture, to Benjamin’s Arcades project, and other hypertext literary forms, to incomplete film projects like Deren’s Haiti research to Eisenstein’s adaptation of Marx’s Capital.) As Lev Manovich and others have pointed out, many Frampton films (eg Zorns Lemma) use matrix structures akin to the database (and Frampton planned even more elaborate matrix structures for Magellan). New technologies facilitate the collection and synthesis of currently dispersed archival materials; the databasing of this material, secondary writings, and contextual material; and the potential for global and interactive re-presentation and analysis of this material and other films. At the MindFrames exhibition at ZKM on the legacy of the artists housed at SUNY Buffalo’s Center for Media Study, video artist Steina performed digital analyses of Frampton’s Artificial Light, Palindrome, Zorns Lemma, and (nostalgia) that exposed the films’ algorithmic base structures.

On the one hand, the layered, multi-dimensional nature of database structures, with the almost infinite capacity promised by the internet, allows the researcher to restage perhaps infinite recombinatory permutations of research material, which might even extend to the release of footage shot by Frampton for specific sub-projects of Magellan (his one minute Panopticons; the detailed grids drawn for the Clouds of Magellan). This allows the artist’s legacy to be alive, if transformed. On the other hand, how does one responsibly – insofar as the researcher is responsible to an artist’s thought, style, and sensibility – limit the recombinatory possibilities to something than might approximate a reconstruction of a Frampton film? These tensions in my research project illuminate some of the tensions that face artists and researchers confronting the larger future histories of the moving image.