There are a couple of opportunities in England this month for some hands-on experimentation and learning with new tools for interactive and ‘”connected” documentary.
Following the i_Docs Symposium here in Bristol there will be two parallel day-long workshops on Saturday 24th with industry professionals from 3WDOC and HonkyLab. “The workshops will explore each company’s cutting-edge authoring software…you will get the opportunity to work closely with the creators of these new tools. HonkyLab and 3WDOC teams will spend the morning teaching participants how to use the tools and the rest of the day leading the development of collaborative projects using the tools. So participants get the most out of these workshops, the group sizes are going to be small so tickets are limited, Book now to ensure your place!”
For more info and tickets see the i-Docs site where you can also still buy tickets for the Symposium on March 22nd and 23rd. Come along. There’s a terrific lineup.
The following day in London there’s a Popcorn Learning Lab courtesy of Mozilla. “We’re looking for Javascript developers and adventuresome filmmakers interested in exploring media on the web. Drinks, code, and good ideas are in the mix at this one-day event led by the Mozilla Popcorn team. You will get your hands dirty by sharing hacks and peer-reviewing projects. Demos from the Popcorn community provide inspiration and running code to build from.” Book now. (It’s free.)
These are precious opportunities if you’re interested in new directions for documentary.
I’ve just been in Barcelona, at the ECREA (European Communication Research & Education Association) Digital Culture Workshop which looked at innovative practices and critical theories. It was a terrific gathering – small enough to get to know people, focussed enough to be productive – a great mix of conviviality and critical dialogue. (Thanks to the convenors, Caroline Basset and Elisenda Ardevol.)
I presented in the Creative Practices strand which was concerned with, “concepts of participation, co-creativity, co-design or co-innovation in creative processes involving audiences and independent creators in a wide spectrum of activities including art, photography, video, and videogames.” My paper offered a draft categorisation of the projects I write about here, according to the type of contribution made by the participants. I’ll give a brief summary of the four categories.
In “The Creative Crowd” model which covers work including Mad V’s The Message, and perry bard’s Man with a Movie Camera; the Global Remix, multiple participants contribute fragments to a highly templated whole, analogous to the separate panels within a quilt. The units of content may not make much sense on their own but value and meaning accrue as they come together producing a distinctive aesthetic that’s about energy and repetition. (Though not a documentary, The Johnny Cash Project is a prime example of this mode.)
In the second model, “The Participant Observers” are distributed filmmakers who each contribute to a work that’s concerned with contrasting experiences of place. The participants decide when and what they shoot and what story they want to tell, but their role in the final contextualisation of that content can vary dramatically. Participants may contribute rushes towards a linear whole that someone else edits, as in Life in a Day, or produce a stand-alone film, a considered narrative, for an interactive framework as in Mapping Main Street. Though filmed observation is as old as documentary I see the prevalence of these situated observers now as significant. What they bring is the potential for documentary “knowledge” that is grounded in experience – situated, embodied, affective. This mode is all about multiplicity, and when content is organised in a database the output can also be open-ended, produced through the interactive experience of the viewer / user.
The third mode I call “The Community of Purpose”. Here, a group of participants take part in a production with a shared objective around social change. They may be involved in making content but may have another role in the process, as the resident experts do in the Highrise project. These projects tend to be iterative rather than having a fixed trajectory. Global Lives and One Day on Earth are examples here. What’s fascinating in this category is that collaborative process – the dialogue and experiences involved in production - begin to be as important as product. There is a definite turn in this direction right now, though this way of working is not new in itself. Kat Cizek’s work at the National Film Board, in particular, is a deliberate re-working of Challenge for Change – the 1960s project which initiated Community Media. ( See earlier post on Cizek as Filmmaker in Residence.) For more on this group do take a look at my interviews with David Evan Harris (Global Lives) and Kat Cizek (Highrise). An open rights framework such as Global Lives has can then add another dimension of emergence as uses for the content can grow in a unrestricted way, driven by collaborators.
After I submitted the abstract for Barcelona I added a fourth category, which I call, The Traces of the Multitude. (Thanks to Jon Dovey for introducing me to Negri’s concept, here used somewhat ambiguously.) This category relates to “Semantic Documentary” - work that’s just emerging like the Highrise spin-off, One Millionth Tower, and 18DaysinEgypt. These projects introduce a new aspect to collaboration by drawing on social media content – linking to a multitude of, potentially anonymous, contributors. Here we can start to see documentary that is continually live and updating, with static video linked to live web data. (I’ve been working on an article with Jon Dovey about this work and the wider implications of the “Sea of Data” for documentary, in which I ponder my own experiments on the The Are you Happy? Project. I’ll write more about that here soon.)
It was lovely at ECREA to meet and hear from a number of scholars doing theoretical work on areas close to mine. I presented alongside Isis Hjorth, from the Oxford Internet Institute, whose PhD examines peer-production in the Wreckamovie community. Isis is asking whether accounts of peer-production have been over optimistic, and if these modes aren’t in fact closer to the managerial and bureaucratic modes of conventional production than has been suggested. The other panelist, Antoni Roig, is, with co-researchers Talia Leibovitz and Jordi Sanchez Navarro of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, examining the concepts and practices of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. Again, their interest is in getting behind assumptions about democratisation to understand the complexities of these practices.
The discussion after the panel circled around what is going on in the dynamics of participation. As Trish Morgan asked in a Tweet, “Who has final editorial say in a collaborative, crowdsourced, peer-produced work?” The answer varies, and the discussion made me realise that I need to tease this out and make some of my working assumptions more explicit. When I speak about collaboration I assume that the types of contributions people make, and the control they have, will be uneven; that not everyone will have the same stake or involvement, though the terms certainly need to be clear at the start. I think of collaboration as a relationship that can be productive even if it’s asymmetrical. This perspective comes from experiences in production going back to Video Nation, where the BBC provided production expertise, cameras, training, editing, and the BBC platform, and the participants brought their everyday life experiences, community contexts, their time, thought and their recordings. The co-creative relationship that existed in the first stage of the VN project (94-2000) – which was founded on participants right of veto over what was broadcast – produced documentary insights that were valuable to the audience – based on reviews and audience feedback – and, by various accounts, to the participants – see Nancy Thumim‘s research at the time. Though it is worth saying that Nancy produced a more critical commentary on institutional mediation in her later research which looked at Digital Storytelling including the Capture Wales project I was part of at that time, which will be reflected in her forthcoming book, Self-Representation and Digital Culture. (I do apologise for referring to the VN example so often, but it’s so relevant here. For another take on VN, and a substantial overview of this field, see Nico Carpentier’s Media & Participation, published earlier this year.)
Video Nation, and many of the projects I describe on this blog, are initiated and structured by professional producers. This is not to say that participants don’t make substantial contributions to meaning. But that’s another discussion… The producers are “context providers” but only sometimes “content providers”. They can be seen as “benevolent dictators” as Eric Raymond has described it, referring to the dominant mode of organisation in Open-Source Software development. Even the exceptional Global Lives, which as David Evan Harris describes in his recent interview is now run as a collective, is still substantially influenced by Harris’ orginal vision.
Isis Hjorth mentioned the idea that there is often a charismatic individual behind crowd-sourced projects. It’s an interesting suggestion and isn’t at odds with the producer model I’m describing. You need to be motivated to take part as a volunteer in a collaborative project, and Cizek and Harris, for example, are certainly inspirational figures. The idea makes sense in a particular way in the projects described in the Creative Crowd model above. Those examples come close to Fandom. They are not necessarily led by, but they each involve an iconic figure – Mad V, Johnny Cash – or an iconic work – Man with a Movie Camera. [If anyone isn't sure of the iconic status of Mad V- pictured above - I can assure you that the interview with him on this blog has consistently been the most viewed page - years after he bowed out of You Tube.] These are works of homage. Thinking of them in this way underlines how the dynamics of participation inter-relate with structures of feeling that are not new, and not necessarily egalitarian. (For a nice catalogue of organisational models see the slide below – from a session I recently attended at the Mozilla Festival – where structures for open working were under discussion.)
So the Barcelona workshop raised some important and engaging questions for me. Being there made me realise that I need to unpack some of my starting points, and consider my assumptions. Those four categories may prove productive in that thinking, and they may not. I suspect now that they try and capture too much, conflating production, participation and aspects of form which need disentangling. Another outcome from the workshop for me was that I want to think more about how value is distributed in these projects – about money and surplus value, yes, but also reputational value, the value of taking part, audience value, public value. Some ethnographic work on particular projects is really needed right now. So the ECREA workshop was productive, as well as fun. And there was lots of interesting work under discussion that I haven’t mentioned here. Do take a look at the abstracts, which are all available on the website.
Since 2004, getting on for a thousand filmmaker volunteers have between them recorded, translated and assembled footage following one day in the life of ten world citizens, chosen to reflect key global demographic realities. Decisions in the project are made by a collective. All the content is licensed under Creative Commons and is going to become an open archive. The ten twenty-four hour films made so far have been combined to produce an immersive installation in which gallery visitors wander among big screens on which these everyday lives play out in real time. An open source package is in the pipeline so that anyone can mount their own exhibition. And that’s just part of the story so far…
I’ve mentioned Global Lives here before ( Nov 10, Jan 11) and have been keen to understand more about how the whole thing works, so was thrilled when GL’s Founder and Executive Director, David Evan Harris, found the time to talk to me via Skype.
Harris came up with the idea in 2002, inspired by the open source ethos of the web and by his experiences of collective and open organisational structures in a co-operative student house, in the Global Justice Movement and at the World Social Forum. The aim, as described on the website, “to collaboratively build a video library of human life experience that reshapes how we as both producers and viewers conceive of cultures, nations and people outside of our own communities.” The idea of Global Lives is to bring the audience up close with other lives as they unfold in detail, through an ordinary day. There is “no narrative other than that which is found in the composition of everyday life…we invite audiences to confer close attention onto other worlds, and simultaneously reflect upon their own.”
Harris had studied abroad as a Berkeley undergraduate within a unique programme which involved staying with families in their homes in diverse settings – in Tanzania, India, the Philippines, Mexico and the UK. When he got back to the USA, he “wanted to communicate not just the political and social justice issues and deep inequality that I had seen, but also the emotional side of this experience of travel and life outside of my tiny bubble in the US, which is something that I was feeling unable to do as a student of the social sciences. “
Harris had almost no formal training in video but had the idea of applying the collaborative, open ethic he saw emerging in web projects to video production. As Harris says, “The film and video industry is extremely hierarchical and very top down, a somewhat rigidly structured industry. And, you know, these models like Wikipedia and Linux and Free and Open Source software, all those things haven’t really reached the world of video, and they definitely hadn’t in 2002…We did the first shoot before YouTube even existed…”
In 2004 Harris and a video producer friend together produced the first Global Lives film, a record of twenty four hours in the life of San Francisco tram driver, James Bullock. Then followed two shoots produced by Harris’s network of friends and contacts. When one of them wanted to produce a film in Japan, Harris cast the net wider. He put posts on a number of social networks and sent a mail out to everyone he knew that read; “Do you know a filmmaker in Japan interested in social change?”” They got more responses than they could accept. Those who have got involved have included lots of amateur and professional video makers, artists, academics, and students.
One of the very interesting things about Global Lives is the way it’s evolving. It’s an emergent project, with unforeseen outcomes and benefits that are coming about, partly because the footage is licensed under Creative Commons, partly because the global community of collaborators are acting as advocates for the project in their own regions and contexts. For instance -
The Wikipedia community plans to use Global Lives footage to illustrate articles.
The Producer of the Indonesian footage presented the project to the National Teachers Union resulting in plans to use Global Lives video as part of the curriculum in schools across Indonesia.
Nearly five hundred volunteer translators have painstakingly transcribed and translated about 80% of the 240 hours of footage. In some languages, this has resulted in an unprecedented asset. Harris has been told that the translation of the Chichewa, the language spoken on the Malawi shoot, is the longest in the history of that language, especially valuable as it is not a translation of a book but corresponds to sound and to video. As Harris says, “This could be the beginning of building a corpus for the language – a set of words and word usages used to develop things we take for granted in English like spell checkers and grammar checkers that really work, or even voice recognition.”
Patricia Zimmerman has described the way that certain emerging documentary practices work as “a politics of convenings”. It’s a resonant term for these projects where the meanings and impacts don’t reside in a single documentary ‘text’ but are made within encounters – between collaborators, in interactive and gallery settings, across a variety of platforms. Global Lives is all about convenings, it seems to me, of conversations about everyday life experience and advantage/disadvantage prompted by the footage, and of communities and networks among the collaborators.
There’s lots more detail about Global Lives in the interview which you can read in full here. Thanks to David Evan Harris for sharing so much,(and apologies for the delay in getting this published.) I look forward to seeing what happens next on this inspiring project.
I mentioned to David that it would be good to make a Global Lives film with a Welsh speaker. I’m interested in hearing from anyone who is interested in collaborating in making one.
It’s this year’s Open Video Conference (OVC) in NYC this weekend. “Open video is the movement to promote free expression and innovation in online video.” I was there last year and it was a great event, very relevant to my work, and this year’s lineup is no less strong.
There are two projects on the programme which I’m particularly interested in. There’s a workshop on Popcorn.js – an open HTML5 platform, created by Mozilla’s Web Made Movies team, which allows producers to relate video to other web data – which I’m going to be working with this Autumn. The Popcorn project has really moved on since the Beta version I mentioned here last year. They’ve built Butter now, an authoring tool to make Popcorn accessible, and producers have created a number of demos that explore its potential. Rebellious Pixels make perfect use of Popcorn as an annotation engine, to reveal the sources of the content in this brilliant Donald Duck remix. In Happy World, it’s used to provide additional context and information to a documentary about the Burmese Junta. In a rougher state, but tantalising for its documentary potential, is a proof of concept for 18DaysinEgypt, the crowd-sourced documentary that’s being made from the media that people produced during the revolution in Egypt back in January / February of this year. The 18Days team have used Popcorn to create overlays offering details within a shot, which they have tested on footage of a demonstration, and it looks like a very powerful way of depicting the dynamics of those unfolding events. And there’s more Popcorn in the pipeline. Kat Cizek described to me in her recent interview how the Highrise team are using it to offer footnotes and semantic references within a 3D animated environment on their latest sub-project The Millionth Tower.
Over the last few months I’ve been gathering video contributions from collaborators for The Are you happy? project and there are quite a collection now – from Serbia, Scotland, Maharastra, Tasmania and elsewhere. Do take a look at the project gallery and the Vimeo group. The sequences are fascinating, and feel like micro-portraits of the places they come from. Taken together they raise lots of questions about happiness, and point up the interview as a social construct, with the interviewer’s style, and the context - Ugandan market, Bristol fashion school, Mongolian capital city square - clearly playing a big part in the kind of things that get said.
This Autumn I’ll be looking at how I can use Popcorn to inform and add other layers of meaning to this content. I want to see how contextual data combines with the video, and try creating some annotations. What really interests me is how web data can be used in a poetic way, creating a montage effect which with live data will be dynamic. Right now I’m wondering what kinds of data and annotation might work in this way – happiness indices? news feeds? weather info? poetry? psychology? One reason I’m sorry to miss the Open Video Conference is that it would be an opportunity to knock these questions around with others who’ve been thinking about how Popcorn can work. If that’s you, or if these questions particularly interest you do please get in touch.
Another ambitious project that will be showcased at the OVC is Zeega – “an open-source HTML5 platform for creating interactive documentaries and inventing new forms of storytelling. Zeega will make it easy to collaboratively produce, curate and publish participatory multimedia projects online, on mobile devices and in physical spaces.” Zeega first got a mention here last year when it was very early days for the project. It’s being developed by Kara Oelher, Jesse Shapins and James Burns, the team behind Mapping Main Street, and they’ve recently won a prestigious award which will support them in the next stages of the development. There’s an interview on the Open Video Conference site about how Zeega is progressing, and an invitation to sign up if you’re interested in creating a Zeega pilot project.
“Will video be woven into the fabric of the open web? Or will online video become a glorified TV-on-demand service? Open Video is a movement to promote free expression and innovation in online video through open standards, open source, and sharing.” These are the questions and the mission behind the OVC and the Conference is about building the policy, rights framework, technology and creative ideas that will support accessible and open web video. Tools like Zeega and Popcorn are really significant in that undertaking, allowing producers without coding skills to produce video projects for and of the web, so that we can begin to see what’s possible when the immersive world of video meets the network landscape of the web.
