Ghosts of the Horseshoe to Ward One

Ghosts of the Horseshoe and Ward One are critical interactive applications that offer two distinct yet complementary examples for how questions such as the ones just posed might be addressed on-site and in real-time. In what follows, we offer an account of each application and its context. Subsequently, we provide a theoretically informed discussion of how these projects elicit “empathic awareness” and, by extension, inspire a sense of responsibility for a past that remains unacknowledged – one that has ensured the existence and expansion of the physical campus of the University of South Carolina– Columbia.

I-Docs and New Narratives

Digital media make it possible to move from a conventional storytelling medium to other avenues that allow open stories to be told, maintaining the traditional basis of narratives while also adding other elements that enrich and deepen storytelling innovation. Therefore, it is important to analyze how the characteristics of digital storytelling work together in order to create meaning through new narratives. Recent documentary projects show how new ways of telling stories involve new ways of relating meaning and form, multiple platforms, and strong interaction and engagement from the side of the viewer. Interactivity and participation change the way in which a story is told and received, thus changing its nature as a narrative. To delve deeper into this field, I will analyze Highrise. The Towers in the World. World in the Towers, (http://highrise.nfb.ca) by Katerina Cizek. This is a complex project produced by the National Film Board of Canada, a multiyear, many-media collaborative documentary experiment that has generated many projects, including mixed media, interactive documentaries, mobile productions, live presentations, installations and films. I will develop a textual analysis on part of the project, the interactive documentary Out My Window, by focusing on its ways of meaning-making and the specific narrative implications of the relationship between meaning and form. The project is ambitious: Cizek's vision is "to see how the documentary process can drive and participate in social innovation rather than just to document it, and to help reinvent what it means to be an urban species in the 21st".

Crowdsourcing Documentary Making

The creative commons documentary Preempting Dissent (2014) builds upon the book of the same name written by Greg Elmer and Andy Opel. The film is a culmination of a collaborative process of soliciting, collecting and editing video, still images, and creative commons music files from people around the world. Preempting Dissent interrogates the expansion of the so-called “Miami-Model” of protest policing, a set of strategies developed in the wake of 9/11 to preempt forms of mass protest at major events in the US and worldwide. The film tracks the development of the Miami model after the WTO protests in Seattle 1999, through the post-9/11 years, FTAA & G8/20 summits, and most recently the Occupy Wall St movements. The film exposes the political, social, and economic roots of preemptive forms of protest policing and their manifestations in spatial tactics, the deployment of so-called ‘less-lethal’ weapons, and surveillance regimes. The film notes however that new social movements have themselves begun to adopt preemptive tactics so as not to fall into the trap set for them by police agencies worldwide.

Off the Wall with Shchedryk

This paper examines how music and juxtapositions can ground a story in a longer history where the potential of images and cutting points become a dialectics of point, counter-point, and fusion in a revisitation of archetypal images and as a co-authorship of reception. A visual dialogue evolves in the film Shchedryk (2014) through a remediation of scenes from Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), Alexander Dovzhenko‘s Earth (1930) and Norman McLaren’s experimental film Synchromy (1971). People who do not have recourse to the dominant culture are through recipient-co-authorship able to replay things in more sophisticated ways. Judith Butler’s idea of the performative and of subjects re-performing an injury (Butler 1993) can be introduced to the multi-screen experience. Foregrounding the wounding aspect as visual images is about ‘bad pleasure’ (O’Brien & Julien 2005). If realness is a standard by which we judge any performance, what makes it effective is its ability to compel beliefs and embody and reiterate norms (Butler, 387). Image Credit: Frame from Shechedryk, directed by Kalli Paakspuu

Telling the Stories of Left-behind Children in China

The issue of “left-behind children” in China has been widely recognized as a significant social problem, as more than 61 million children are living in villages away from their parents, who have migrated to large cities to seek employment opportunities. There is a very limited number of media products depicting left-behind children in rural China as central characters with individual personalities. As Stuart Hall states, representation is the process or channel or medium through which meanings are both created and reified. This paper analyzes how stories and voices of this underprivileged group are presented in recent years to the public in different non-fictional media forms, particularly documentary films. Through content analysis of selected samples, the paper examines how narratives are weaved about the lives and emotions of these children, and how the stories make sense of their family experiences. The paper discusses the power of digital narratives and visual-based expressions. It also examines how the products of representation are mediated by different types of storytellers, who are often motivated by a sense of social engagement to raise awareness about the plight of these children to appeal for support but addresses the issue from their specific perspectives. Image Credit: Still of Children at a Village School by Nengjie Jiang

Emerging Forms of Citizen Video Activism

Gilles Deleuze's early reflections on assemblage identify the idea of the diagram or possibility space as a framework to suggest the ways in which the assembling of technology and human practices merge to create distinctive and innovative new assemblages. Yet routinely it is the technological advances of the 21st century that receive the most revered credit for shifts within citizen-based video activism. Essential to the new and often undefined waves of digital documentary birthed in scattered alcoves of social activism and human rights movements are the relationships between the components of these assemblages. Particularly influential are the facilitating agents spearheading the means to digital video literacy that allow these narratives to be shared. Conducted over three years, my Ph.D. research has examined very specific emerging video practices rooted in social activism in a number of global settings. My fieldwork has sought out citizen media makers in order to discuss how these practitioners have approached their nascent video activism with the goal of identifying properties that might allow these surfacing video practices to become sustainable over time. This paper examines and critiques specific elements that these particular forms of video activism confront in their own unique global possibility spaces. Moreover, as traditional methods of video distribution and video recording continue to change even further through online platforms and mobile technology, how might we begin to identify emerging forms of citizen-based video activism and documentary media?

Alpenprojekt

Alpenprojekt videos register the action of cutting the skyline in the alpine mountains. The footage was taken at different sites in the Alps. The cutouts evoke the European tradition from the 18th century to depict portraits with scissors and paper. A deliberate intent to apprehend the landscape within a unique line in a reduced dimension is the main issue in Alpenprojekt I and II. To react in the face of this specific landscape as an effort to embrace what is not controllable became a fundamental issue in the Alpenprojekt series of works. Alpenprojekt began with artistic research related to the southern German region closely connected with its physical landscape. Its representation was then perceived as a memory heritage of historical facts, either forgotten or intentionally lost. The entire project is called Trilogy of the Mountains, and it is related to memory and history. Trilogy of the Mountains comprises three phases: Alpenprojekt, based on the alpine landscape; the second one approaches Beckton Alps, an artificial mountain in east London; and the third part is related to artificial mountains made with war debris in Germany. Each piece of the Trilogy comprises a series of works. The project was initially developed based on landscapes where the notion of Romanticism is still present. Then the project was set toward the post-industrialization period—and finally related to reshaping the topography in Germany after WWII. In Trilogy of Mountains, the tension between natural and artificial is a central issue, being rather complementary than the opposite.

Inês de Castro on Youtube

Since the fourteenth century, when Inês de Castro was laid to rest in her magnificent tomb in the Monastery of Alcobaça, artists have told the tragic story of the Galician noblewoman who was assassinated for political reasons and became Queen of Portugal after her death. Inês embodies beauty, love, innocence, and saudade, and figures prominently in the lusophone cultural imaginary. Plays, novels, poetry and feature films offer representations of the Dead Queen that range from tragic and defiant to sentimental and trite. In new media, the moving im- ages that currently vie with iconic figurations of the legendary colo de garça are YouTube videos about the love of Inês and Pedro. Responding to homework assignments in Portuguese history or literature courses, primary and secondary school students engage with the love story and create new narratives – plays, animation, and videos – that attract thousands of viewers. In this paper, I consider a selection of YouTube videos made by Portuguese and Brazilian students that tell the familiar love story in a unique way, taking varying degrees of poetic license with their sources, the medieval period and the medieval woman. Some are original and irreverent while others simply glorify dead poets. Through a feminist lens, I analyze the mediated embodiment of Inês de Castro and interrogate the inflexible and hierarchical binary dualisms of man/woman, masculine/feminine, and public/private to posit a fluid conception of historical adaptation and the gendered representation of iconic figures. Image Credit: Still of Encenação D. Pedro e D. Inês

Old Plays, New Narratives

When a theatrical performance is digitally broadcast live to cinemas, the limitations of temporal and spatial specificity are removed and the theatrical experience is simultaneously opened up to a wider audience and inherently altered. One such production, Coriolanus (Donmar Warehouse, 2013-14), starring an actor with a particularly enthusiastic online fan community, was broadcast to cinemas by National Theatre Live, where fans recorded it on digital devices, extracted clips and produced animated gifs, which they captioned to reinterpret the play, sharing them online, removed from their original context. The transformation of theatre texts to cinemas to social media platforms raises exciting questions related to how fans interact with culture both as consumers and as producers of new media texts. How do the different transformations (technical and actively fan-produced) affect both the narrative and the cultural experience? How do new texts function as surrogates for, and extensions of, the ‘official' narrative, as well as new interactive narratives in their own right? This paper addresses these questions in the context of a specific theatrical event as it crossed the boundary from a live, co-located experience first into cinema, and then into interactive hypertexts and memes. Drawing on theories of fandom and participatory culture, as well as post-Web 2.0 analyses of Internet behaviours, the paper examines fan production of new media texts and how they both transmit and transform the source narrative via interpretation, re-interpretation, and misinterpretation. Image Credit: Still of fromhiddleswithlove (2014)

Editorial

Film and media practitioners and educators have been expanding the use of digital through new experiences with unusual and innovative technical and artistic “approaches.” Likewise, researchers and academics are questioning and analyzing these new practices that increasingly dominate global society, as seen in the past months with the advent of the worldwide pandemic. In 2013, we created the IFM-Interactive Film and Media Conference to provide an inclusive educational space within the digital theory and interactive studies where researchers and practitioners could discuss and present their research and work in film and media. With this purpose, the IFM has partnered with universities worldwide and established a space for a global integration between academia and the audiovisual production community that aims to forge a valuable exchange between researchers, faculty, students, practitioners, and the community. The goal is to generate a broad debate, emphasizing the need to evaluate the increasing use of digital screens in contemporary society and how people respond artistically, socially, and politically to the challenges of the digital cultural space. The work of professors, researchers, and practitioners (artists, filmmakers, and videomakers) from various areas and several countries, including Italy, Brazil, England, Spain, Canada, New Zealand, Portugal, Scotland, Germany, and the United States, constitutes this special issue with selected articles and audiovisuals from the #IFM2014. The aim is to launch IFM Journal first issues while archiving our preliminary works.