An interview with MadV

It was great to get a comment from the elusive MadV after my recent post about his new video – “We’re All in This Together”. I asked if he’d do an interview and he has. He talks about the inspiration behind “The Message”, what motivates his collaborative work, and why he re-staged his 2006 YouTube hit in HD. Here it  is.

The Jean Rouch Project

On Wednesday I was lucky to be at a Paris screening of the seminal documentary – “Chronique d’un Ete” (“Chronicle of a Summer”) which was being shown, almost fifty years after it was made in 1960, to a gathering including the co-producer Edgar Morin and two of the original participants – Marceline Loridan-Ivens and Nadine Ballot.

I was in Paris for a conference, Le Projet Jean Rouch? (The Jean Rouch Project?) which looked at the legacy of the pioneering French anthropological film maker Jean Rouch, who died in 2004. (The conference papers I refer to later in this piece are available as pdfs on the conference website).  Rouch is a figure I’ve been interested in since the ’80s when I was alerted to his work by Michael Eaton who wrote the first English language Rouch study . I interviewed Rouch in ‘91 for a BBC Late Show special about documentary, and his ideas have influenced the way I’ve thought about work I’ve produced since – in particular BBC 2’s Video Nation.

Rouch started making anthropological films in West Africa in the 1940s, having gone there as an engineer, and embarked on a body of work which, while it drew on the past – Rouch sited film makers Vertov and Flaherty in particular as influences – was highly innovative and still feels fresh today. Imagine a film in which two young men from rural Niger enact their own story of trying to survive in the unfamiliar modern urban surroundings of Abidjan, Ivory Coast, narrated by one of them – in the persona of Edward G Robinson. That’s “Moi un Noir” – 1958. Or picture an African on the streets of Paris conducting an anthropological study –  persuading passers-by to let him measure their heads and inspect their mouths. Not “Meet the Natives” – 2007, but Rouch’s “Petit a Petit” – 1969, featuring Rouch’s long-time friend and collaborator Damoure Zika.

Rouch is interesting for a number of reasons. In terms of content, he took anthropology into the African city, pointed to the contemporary content of ritual, and to the growing influence of American culture in everyday life and fantasy in post-war West Africa. But he saw filming not as some kind of documentation but as a form of engagement in which the camera is a catalyst, a player. He wanted to get right inside the world he was filming – “to get rid of one’s own systems of thought, to better understand other peoples’ thoughts” – and this is expressed in his films through first person, subjective narration. Film-making for Rouch was a collaborative process in which film-maker and participants jointly create meaning, a project he called ‘shared anthropology’. I was in Paris because I’m interested in how this idea of shared anthropology might be deployed in the development of collaborative documentary practice today. I was also there because I’m taking Jean Rouch’s 1960 film “Chronicle of a Summer” as the starting point for a collaborative piece I’m going to be producing half a century later in 2010.

At the screening on Wednesday, Edgar Morin described how “Chronicle of a Summer” came about after a conversation in which he proposed that Rouch turn his anthropological eye on the people of Paris. (Morin’s account brought to mind the genesis of the British Mass Observation project which similarly arose out of a dialogue about ‘bringing anthropology home’ – in that case between anthropologist Tom Harrisson, filmmaker Humphrey Jennings and journalist Charles Madge. This parallel was explored in a conference presentation by Elena von Kassel Siambani the morning after the screening.)

The film that emerged from Rouch and Morin’s discussion involved one of the first uses of 16mm handheld camera and sync sound. This technology was by no means off-the-shelf. The filming was very experimental technically and it took a development process across the shooting period to achieve reliable sync, as Vincent Bouchard and Severine Graff explained in their conference papers. Rouch’s ’50s films were shot silent with narration added afterwards. What he was striving for was a handheld set-up flexible enough to film spontaneous speech in real-life settings. As subject matter Rouch and Morin settled on the everyday life of “the tribe of people living in Paris”, their brief; “What is your life? Are you happy?” Their film unfolds as a disparate group of people consider those questions from different perspectives during the course of the summer of 1960. The film reveals French society in a process of change – divided over the repression of the independence movement in Algeria, living with the legacy of the Occupation, with class, race and identity in debate. At the same time the film is an investigation into this new spontaneous filming method, a reflection on the ethics and aesthetics of documentary still  relevant today.

I didn’t understand much of the Q & A at the Paris screening as my French is rudimentary, and there wasn’t any translation, but I did make out Edgar Morin relating that a young man who’d recently seen “Chronicle of a Summer” had summarised it as;“…a reality show, with a critical dimension.” It was an apt observation. The unfolding of events and feelings on camera, the “pro-filmic event” as Rouch called it, that was key to his film-making, is these days a crucial ingredient  in reality TV, with Big Brother acting as the catalyst to ensure that something does happen. You can see Rouch as the provocateur in this clip from “Chronicle of a Summer”. It’s not my favourite sequence – Rouch’s interventions seem heavy-handed out of context and without the “critical dimension” that is crucial to the film. But the sequence does give a flavour of “Chronicle of a Summer”, and it’s the only clip available on You Tube. So here it is.

In 2010, on the fiftieth anniversary of  ”Chronicle of a Summer”, I’m planning to revisit the questions that Rouch and Morin posed in their film, to try and start a conversation about contemporary life and values. I’ll use the web as the platform, and want to involve diverse participants from around the world, bringing together distributed responses – in video and stills, combined perhaps with some form of data visualisation. While Rouch and Morin’s 1960 film investigated the potential of the new handheld sync sound filming, “The Happiness Project” (working title) will investigate the potential for participatory online documentary. There are lots of challenges, and issues to work through regarding how to go about. At the heart of my investigation is the question of how to combine peoples’ recordings to tell a larger story – in a form that works on the web, and is editorially satisfying.

I’m not the first person to be experimenting with collaborative documentary by any means – there have been some really interesting creative responses already in this space – including work by Kutiman and MadV on You Tube, and Brett Gaylor’s “RiP! A Remix Manifesto” - an important, entertaining feature documentary that’s currently winning lots of prizes at Film Festivals (and will be the subject of my next post). In producing “The Happiness Project” as practice-based research, I get to build on what others have done, experiment, and share my findings. I’ll be posting here about the project as it develops, inviting people to get involved, and and reflecting on what works and what doesn’t.

Rouch didn’t see the explosion of non-professional video content that has happened on You Tube – he died just a few months before the service launched. But he did anticipate the age of participatory media. Back in 1973 he wrote; “Tomorrow will be the time of completely portable colour video, video editing, and instant replay… and of a camera that can so totally participate that it will automatically pass into the hands of those who, until now, have always been in front of the lens.” I hope that “The Happiness Project” might contribute a new dimension to shared anthropology, by developing ways for those who have “always been in front of the lens” to tell their collective stories.

Postscript ~ Rouch is a contested, at times contradictory figure and if you’re curious about him I’d urge you to read beyond this brief introduction. As a brief overview Michael Eaton’s terrific obituary piece is a must. The diverse perspectives of “Building Bridges” open up the complexity of Rouch’s work.  Rouch’s relationship to Africa has been subject to critique by, among others, Manthia Diawara in  “Rouch in Reverse” . Steven Feld’s  “Cine-Ethnography” which I’ve drawn on here, is a rich resource of Rouch’s own writing.  A new book - “The Adventure of the Real; Jean Rouch and the Craft of Ethnographic Cinema” by Paul Henley sounds promising.

We’re All in This Together

Nov 5th saw the  release of the latest video from MadV – the anonymous producer of the original “collab” hit.  Back in 2006 he was already a star on YouTube –  popular for illusions, which he performed in a Guy Fawkes mask. Then he posted a brief video – showing the words “One World”, written on his hand – and offered “an invitation, to make a stand, to make a statement, to make a difference. Join in. Be part of something. Post your response now.” He received over 2,000 replies – the highest number on YouTube to date. The piece he created from those responses is The Message – a four minute montage of webcam recordings of mostly teens and twenty-somethings, showing their own messages, written on their hands, accompanied by a track by Mugwai. “Respect, Compassion, Integrity, Honor, Altruism, Union…” the messages read. It’s an outpouring of yearning for positive values which culminates in ideas around human connectedness – “Together as one, United as One, We’re all in this Together… One World”.

“The Message” became a major YouTube hit – promoted on the homepage and nominated as “Most Creative Video of 2006″. It’s been much analysed and discussed. There are commentaries about the messages, and intense debates about whether there are contradictions between the statements. “The Message” has also been seen as a breakthrough work of participatory media. In “Wired” magazine Clive Thompson described it as a “curious mongrel form…a new language of video.” In his lucid “Anthropological Introduction to You Tube” Michael Wesch talks about MadV’s piece in the context of “cultural inversion”, a helpful framework for thinking about YouTube content. In everyday life, in our atomised, consumer society, we express individualism, independence, commercialism. We “crave connection, but see that connection as restraint”. YouTube, Wesch argues, offers the possibility of connection without restraint, and a space in which to express treasured alternative values of community, relationships, authenticity. Wesch’s commentary – which I wrote about back in the Summer – makes sense of “The Message”.

MadV’s latest video We’re all in this together returns to “The Message” – in high definition video. The call to action evokes the previous video, using the “One World” slogan again, adding, “This year, say it clearer”. The montage MadV has created is very close to the 2006 piece – though the high definition quality makes the young faces even more vivid, disarming. There’s an environmental theme, which though present before, is foregrounded this time.  The title, “We’re all in this together” – a quote from the 2006 contributions – underlines our inter-dependence. The video builds towards a final sequence that reads,” Hope, For our Future, You can change the world.” There’s a hand with a recycling symbol, a young man holding a globe, spinning slowly, close to the camera, and a last ambiguous message -” Wish You were Here.”

The piece is powerful, but something troubles me about this remake. The format begins to feel a bit like a party trick. MadV puts out a call, and his devoted community – there are 42,00 subscribers to his channel at this point – do as asked. They know what’s required now, and they’re playful with it – but still… MTV called “The Message” a ‘cultural shift in media’, but there’s a familiar dynamic at the heart of this – between star and fanbase. The content may be crowdsourced, but MadV calls the shots.

350 – collaborative creativity as political action

Last Saturday my daughter Shauna, my friend Vron and I joined a few hundred other people in the park by the London Eye on the South Bank, to stand in the form of a “5″ for a photo. The same day people in Sydney made a “3″ and people in Copenhagen an “O”, so that when the photos from each location were put together they made the number “350″. Those photos now form part of a moving, impressive slide show on the 350.org site, along with thousands of other images made by people around the world.

350’s mission is to build a global movement around climate change. (The 350 name refers to the parts of CO2 per million which it’s believed is a safe upper level in the atmosphere. We’re at 387 right now.) Saturday was a day of action to demonstrate public concern in the run up to the important Copenhagen talks in December. People were invited to stage an event “incorporating the number 350 at an iconic place in their community and then upload the photo to the 350 website”.

Over 19,000 pictures have been submitted so far – you can see them all on Flickr. Some are straightforward, some witty, some poignant. There are schoolchildren in the Phillipines and climbers in Vermont. There are men on horseback in Mongolia, and divers at the Great Barrier Reef. Some women in Australia display the 350 quilt they’ve sewn. There’s a crowd in Times Square, each with a placard. In Babylon, Iraq, one woman holds up a sign. According to the 350 website there were over 5,200 events in 181 countries.

I went along not knowing much about 350. The action was fun to be part of, but when I saw the slide show I felt something important, a sense of possibility. Together the pictures are powerful – offering hope that maybe we can make a difference on this huge, scary, complex, often divisive issue. This is by no means the first example of mass collaboration as political action – which has been written about by Clay Shirky, Charles Leadbeter and others – but this approach is particularly fitting for the issue of climate change – where the network can connect people across the globe, reveal each others very different circumstances in situ, and nurture a sense of joint purpose. Content is still arriving. Check out the 350 Blog for the latest developments.

Making Music – in B flat

Here’s another inspired musical collab piece. Producer Darren Solomon asked musicians on You Tube to offer him videos where they’re playing in Bb. He’s aggregated these onto one page along with some live action and spoken word recordings. He’s made selections so that the videos gel when played simultaneously in any order or combination. As he explains in his informative FAQ the idea came when he noticed that You Tube lets you play multiple videos at the same time.  It’s very cool that he’s effectively turned the You Tube audio controls into a mixing desk. (Though Solomon is a fan of  ThruYou he was already working on this when Kutiman’s celebrated mix piece came out.)

Solomon offers various versions of the piece and encourages others to play with his work too. Don’t miss the You Cube version – a mashup of You Tube content with an interactive 3D cube by (the overly modest) Aaron Meyers. It’s elegant, fun, and free.

One & Other

Photos of “Plinthers” taking part in One & Other by Garry Knight (Flckr)

“It is a spyhole on the nation’s secret mind, incidental fragments of humanity that weave together into a rich and  glowing mosaic…What puzzles me is why this great swathe of humanity – some weird, some dull, ordinary or  mundane, some with strange views, others kindly – all leave us with a feeling of warmth and empathy.” It wasn’t  written as a description of Antony Gormley’s mega collaborative public art project One & Other - which finished  yesterday, when the last of the 2,400 volunteers, Emma Burns, came down from the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square  after her Hillsborough Memorial piece – but it could have been.

The quote is in fact from a ten year old Radio Times review by Polly Toynbee of  Video Nation, which I was co-producing at  the time (having set the project up – with Chris Mohr – back in 1993.) It came back to me as I was pondering why One & Other and Video Nation (during its BBC 2 heyday) feel like they have something in common – despite their fundamental differences.

One & Other: Art, 2,000 participants, Random selection, Brief Participation, Public Space, Spectacle, Live, 24/7, Digital.

Video Nation: Documentary, 50 participants (at any time), Selection, Long-term participation, Domestic Space, Speech, Recorded, Broadcast schedule, Analogue.

One & Other has been much discussed – is it art? is it good art? etc etc. It’s certainly a stand-out piece that’s put art right at the heart of UK culture for the 100 days it’s been running – this blog offers a photographic record. I’ve been enthralled by the parade of inventive, thoughtful, stoical, earnest, subtle, funny, brave, poetic, and yes – sometimes dull, sometimes baffling – performances offered by the ‘plinthers’. ( And how interesting to see how pervasive ideas from performance and conceptual art have become. ) I’ve been entertained by it and moved by it, at least by the impression I’ve gained from seeing it when I went to Trafalgar Square in August, when I’ve visited the website, but mainly through watching the weekly Sky Arts show. The images of spectators in the square and the traffic to the website suggests that lots of people have felt the same.

In his farewell blog entry Gormley describes One & Other as a ‘portrait of now’.  The idea of creating a collective self-portrait was also behind Video Nation, and later behind the Capture Wales digital storytelling project that I was involved in. But more importantly what all these projects have in common is the fact that, within clearly defined parameters, the participants have been in control of how they represent themselves. The ‘plinthers’ were invited to use their hour on the plinth/stage as they wanted,  to create ‘an image of themselves’. We invited Video Nation contributors to show us their world – ‘through their own eyes and in their own words’. Polly Toynbee went on, “This is not about observing people as jokes or “characters”, turning them into figures of fun as docu-soaps do. It’s about letting the camera climb inside people’s skin to see the world through their eyes.” As the Video Nation project evolved I began to see the recordings less as documents and more as performances of certain truths that the participants wanted to share about their lives. Despite the audience gaze, they felt like the subjects, not the objects, of the exercise.

Reflecting on One & Other at the project’s end Gormley suggests that the plinth “provided an open space of possibility for many to test their sense of self and how to communicate this to a wider world.”  That works as a description of participatory media too – as the “open space of possibility” that is self-representation. It seems to me that for the spectator it can be affirming simply to bear witness to that testing, undertaken with commitment, with sincerity. (Anthropologist Michael Wesch is doing really interesting work on this. Check out his commentary on Gary Brolsma – the original You Tube star.)

“Chips with Everything” – more on Digital Revolution

Rushes sequences from interviews with web luminaries Howard Rheingold and Tim Berners Lee are among those now available for viewing and download on the Digital Revolution website.  It’s the latest development in what the BBC site describes as an “open and collaborative documentary looking at the way the web is changing our lives”.  The public are debating the issues, contributing ideas for storylines, and commenting on the emerging shape of the TV series that will be on BBC2 in the new year. The website has been buzzing with intense conversation ever since the project launched back in July.  It’s great to be able to see these rushes sequences at length rather than the inevitably short extracts that will end up in the cut programmes.  People can view, comment,  or edit the material under a one-off license.
Beyond the odd promotional clip, TV producers tend to be pretty nervous of letting material be previewed online. They can be worried the exposure will scupper interest in their linear output and awkward or rejecting of the idea of sharing what to date been very much an auteur project.  But opening up the process the way that Digital Revolution has is proving to be a grand exercise in community building in advance of the TV series. The internet is of course the perfect subject to approach in this way – as the BBC are trying to tell a story about the web platform and the demograph they need to engage with are available there. It wouldn’t work with every topic right now. Still, the approach is modelling a more open, dialogic form of TV making.
Digital Revolution is the working title of the series. The final name is of course being crowd sourced, and this has turned out to be an undertaking just made for twitter, a kind of 21st century parlour game, with tweets offering an array of more and less serious title ideas – “Chips with Everything”, “The Turing Stroud”, “Excess Babbage”…

Aerial Storytelling

Early this year aviation consultant Jeral Poskey took advantage of Google Earth 5’s new ‘tour’ capability to produce a re-enactment of the brief flight and emergency landing in the Hudson River of US Airway’s Flight 1549 that had happened a few weeks before. (Thanks to Marcus Gilroy Ware who showed me this.)

For the full interactive experience you have to access it via Google Earth, but the movie version is a powerful, dramatic watch. Your see the flight as viewed from the cockpit and you hear the unfolding conversation between the awesomely calm-sounding pilot – Solly – and the various flight controllers. Poskey put the re-enactment together from data plotting the flight path which he sourced online and eight separate audio recordings released by the Federal Aviation Administration. As a transportation expert Poskey wanted to contribute to an understanding of whether the crisis was well-handled. He explains how he went about it on his site.

The world is awash with data sets now – many of them publically accessible – and there’s great storytelling potential in all that information -as the BBC’s Britain from Above series showed.

A pioneer in turning data into kinds of stories is the American artist Aaron Koblin. He’s produced a number of works which use graphics to bring data sets to life, among them the gorgeous Flight Patterns – which visualises flight routes over the US.

A chilling news piece about the fate of a stowaway refugee gave the writer Kate Pullinger the seed of an idea for a novel. Rather than undertake the usual “solitary business” of writing it alone as a traditional linear piece Kate took note of the way that some non-fiction writers were opening up the development phase of books and decided to try something similar in fiction. Along with electronic artist and writer Chris Joseph, she created Flight paths, which they describe as a ‘networked novel’.

Their story puts a human face on one of today’s big global themes of political and economic migration. They are gradually publishing an episodic narrative told through words, audio and flash animation. Reader/collaborators contribute stills, text and video in response, resulting in a cross-media collage in which numerous flight paths – some real, some imagined – meet. I talked to Kate about this innovative project which she expects will continue to develop for years to come.

Birds on the Wires

Jalbas Agnelli from Sao Paolo has made a lovely video -  a co-creation between man and birds…

Making Music – in the edit

There are some interesting videos emerging which involve collaborations between musicians –   some of whom don’t even know of each others existence.  

 

This fresh treatment of Ben E King’s classic Stand by Me has proved popular on You Tube.  The video is an extract from Playing for Change: Peace through Music – a feature documentary which came out last year for which the producers Mark Johnson & Jonathan Wall travelled the world filming musicians in Tibet, South Africa, the US and elsewhere performing versions of Stand by Me, as well as Bob Marley’s One Love & Don’t Worry (Three Little Birds). While the musicians never meet they collaborate through playback, each contributing another layer to the mix.  The producers have brought them together in the edit by intercutting the geographically distributed performances.

The You Tuber known as Kutiman - Israeli musician and composer Ophir Kutiel – has taken this kind of idea to another level in the fabulous ThruYOU . He’s captured and worked with eclectic samples of You Tube music recordings - layering and interweaving the music in the individual movies to achieve great afro-beat, funk, and reggae mixes.  He’s created seven inspired tracks but also embodied his ‘open source’ approach in the form of the work – with the link / credit for each recording running as the clip plays.  It’s a whole new genre that couldn’t have existed without the internet. On Track 8 Kutiman talks about how he went about it and thanks the  musicians who ‘took part’ – this creative community he’s conjured out of search terms;  “I had a great time searching for you and working with you.”  I’m interested in looking at what’s possible if we start thinking about speech content the way Kutiman has thought about music. I’m going to be experimenting around that, and I expect many others will be inspired by his work too. 

One such example has just appeared.  Lewes New School in Sussex have released a video in which kids from the school perform David Bowie’s Changes.  It has to be inspired by ThruYOU, as the only grown-up playing is a bass player - Herbie Flowers - the grandfather of two boys at the school, who played on the orginal recording in 1972.