12 Tweets from 2012 – expanded

1. “Bear 71 – haunting, terrific interactive doc”

The new year saw the launch of one of the best interactive documentaries I’ve experienced  - a bear’s memoir of life and death in Canada’s Banff National Park! If you haven’t seen Bear 71 give it twenty minutes of your time today. You’ll be rewarded with Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendes’ engrossing, sad, smart meditation on the tension that results “where the wild world ends and the wired world begins.”  It’s a perfect marriage of platform, theme, and realisation. (Review January.)

2. “ i-Docs – a stellar lineup, a five minutes cycle ride from home.”

The second i-Docs Symposium took place in March. Brett Gaylor, Martha Ladly, Brian Winston, Sharon Daniel, Max Whitby were just some of the names in a terrific programme convened by Judith Aston and Sandra Gaudenzi in my new home town of Bristol. I have to declare an interest, as the event is hosted by the Digital Cultures Research Centre where I’m a fellow, and I’m a contributing editor to the i-Docs website. But the Symposium was a major event in this field, and 2012 has seen i-Docs grow into a substantial international community and thriving website which I’m proud to be part of. For a balanced view, read Brian Winston’s review of the symposium here - it’s the account of a sceptic about interactivity. Follow i-Docs on Twitter or subscribe to the site for all the latest news and upcoming events.

3. “Watching this Mad (Wo)Men remix, again.”

This terrific piece builds a collective voice of defiance from private incidents of gender conflict in Mad Men. Enjoy!

4. “The power of dialogue – Question Bridge”

At Sheffield Doc Fest in June I saw the Question Bridge installation. Question Bridge is a transmedia work about black American life and identity comprised of questions suggested and answered by participating black men. The installation works by positioning the visitor among the participants’ talking heads. Addressed as if a member of the community, you are called on to imagine and hear from many varied perspectives how the world looks through African American mens’ eyes. It’s profound and affecting. I had heard about this project back in March when producer Chris Johnson presented it at the inaugural event of MIT’s Open Doc Lab. I was knocked out by the powerful simplicity of the idea, which you can see in the web version. Do catch the installation if it’s in your area.

5. “Sue Clayton’s remarkable Hamedullah – The Road Home”

In June Hamedullah – The Road Home screened at the very special Cube cinema in Bristol. Sue Clayton was there to introduce the film, which tells the story of Hamedullah Hassany, a young asylum seeker returned ‘home’ to Kabul by the British immigration system at 18, after growing up in the UK. It’s a remarkable piece of work made from video fragments which Hamedullah Hassany shot on a camera smuggled to him by Clayton when he was in detention prior to being deported.  The film starts with the statement that while the UK government deports young people it has never tracked what has happened to one of them on their return to supposedly safe environments. Through the bits and pieces of video that Hassany has managed to shoot and send back to Clayton the film tracks his return and the life that follows, and shows the physical and psychological hardship that he faces. It is understated but harrowing and constitutes an indictment of UK immigration law.

The project is also notable because of the impact it is making beyond simply raising awareness. A Facebook group has provided a hub for promoting the film and it has been shown widely this year. It is being used by barristers as defence evidence in deportation hearings. Building on the community that has grown around the film Clayton convened a meeting in September which initiated a collaborative research project to gather evidence towards a change in the law. Documentary has always had the potential to be a catalyst and organising platform. This side of documentary is finding fertile ground in the context of the affordances of networked culture.

6. “Have you tried CC’s new license chooser yet?”

The Creative Commons License Chooser launched in July makes it much easier to choose an open rights framework. Global Lives is an emergent documentary project which is showing what open rights can mean – as participants take advantage of content locally and the video recordings turn out to have unforeseen uses. Director of the Global Lives project David Evan Harris recently talked to Creative Commons about what CC means on that project. (There’s much more about Global Lives in this 2011 Collabdocs interview with Harris.)

7. “Summer reading – Artificial Hells “

This impressive book informed and inspired me over the Summer. Claire Bishop maps the aesthetically and politically divergent currents that have informed nearly a century of participatory art. She critiques the resulting work and the assumption that participation makes for “the ultimate political art”. Artificial Hells is a great read, a deep history, and challenges us to ask tough questions about collaborative and participatory work – the central one being; is it any good?

8. “RIP George Stoney”

July saw the death of the much loved and respected American documentarian and pioneer of access media, George Stoney, at the age of 96. (NY Times Obituary.) In 1968, while he was director of the National Film Board of Canada’s Challenge for Change programme his team handed cameras over to Native Americans who were protesting customs charges on a bridge across their land. The film that resulted, “You are on Indian Land” and the Challenge for Change output that followed inspired the development of access media in the US and beyond. Stoney went on to play a major role in a number of US access and alternative media projects as well as making films and teaching at NYU until the year before he died. While Stoney has gone it seems to me that his vision for documentary has found its historical moment. In the mid 2000′s the NFB set out to reinvent the Challenge for Change project in the digital age – an undertaking which led directly to the appointment of Kat Cizek as “Filmmaker in Residence” and to the multi award-winning Highrise project. Stoney was interested in documentary for community-building, a theme which is coming to the fore in a generation of purposeful participatory projects which are emerging now including Question Bridge (above) and Hollow – now in production, launching in Spring 2013. Stoney is much missed but his legacy is alive and kicking.

9. “New DG Tony Hall should follow Entwistles line on digital” 

George Entwistle may have resigned as BBC Director General after only 54 days, but his successor Tony Hall should heed his call for genuinely new forms of digital content . The fact that the BBC’s iplayer and the bbc.co.uk  service made it into the top ten brands of 2012, despite the damage that the BBC’s reputation had suffered this Autumn, underlines what the BBC has to gain by getting its digital offering right. Between 1996 and 2001 Tony Hall oversaw the development of the BBC news online proposition. Let’s hope he builds on that pioneering work now, giving BBC commissioners and producers a remit to make content that’s not just on digital platforms but native to them. (Open letter to the New DG – June)

10. “On the road to new forms of storytelling…we want to be in the driver’s seat. Ingrid Kopp – Looking under the Hood “ 

Ingrid Kopp, TFI New Media fund commissioner presented at Power to the Pixel Cross Media Forum in London in October. Kopp called for documentary makers to embrace the maker culture of the web. Her talk ranged across code, inter-disciplinary collaboration, participation, storytelling as software and hardware – urging documentarians “to open up their digital palette as creators” and access what Steven Johnson has called the “adjacent possible”.

11. “Looking forward to Sunday’s Interactive Documentary Conference at IDFA”

I attended and reviewed the IDFA conference in November. Seventeen projects were nominated for the 2012 IDFA DocLab Award and they are all worth checking out. I particularly like the oblique portrait of Chile being created by Christopher Murray, Antonio Luco and associates in MAFI – Filmic map of a Country – an ongoing collaborative project. No commentary. No interviews. No cuts. Carefully framed angles on the day-to-day life of a nation.

12. ” Zeega is so exciting.”

I’ve written about the terrific Mapping Main Street project and interviewed producers Kara Oehler and Jesse Shapins here (June 2010).  Unfortunately, Oehler ended up remortgaging her flat to pay for that project. The team felt that this was not a viable production model for interactive documentary. With creative technologist James Burns, Oehler and Shapins set about creating a tool that could enable anyone to make interactive work without investing their life savings. That ambition has led to Zeega, which launched this year. It’s an open source tool for web publishing and interactive storytelling which enables the simple, elegant inter-connection of stills, moving images, maps and more. Zeega takes its place among a gathering roster of interactive production tools that have emerged in the last two years. They include Klynt, Popcorn Maker, 3WDOC, Storyplanet and Galahad. ( 3WDoc, Klynt and Popcorn Maker were compared by Maria Yanez and Eva Dominguez. for the i-Docs Symposium back in the Spring. ) One thing that distinguishes Zeega is the sensibility of the team. Named after Soviet film artist Dziga Vertov, it is shaped by an experimental documentary aesthetic which is expressed in its the visual style as well as in the projects that have been made within Zeega to date. But the Zeega team see their mission as not just facilitating interactive making, but in re-making the web itself as a connected, rich media environment. Will Zeega become the Blogger of the teens? We’ll have to wait and see. Meanwhile check Zeega out. And there’s lots more about the development and mission of the project in “The Zeega Revolution” -  a Q & A between Jesse Shapins and Sandra Gaudenzi on i-Docs.

Open Video Conference – 2011

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.

An Evening at UnionDocs

It was good to revisit UnionDocs in Brooklyn, last Sunday, to take part in a panel on Global Perspectives in Digital Media . I was talking about Video Nation‘s work abroad during the 1990s, and the fruitful results which came from putting camcorders into the hands of participants, even briefly, or setting the camera up and inviting people to reflect on everyday life, as in this recording of a ferryman during the Bangladesh floods of 1998.

My co-panelists included producers Rahul V Chittella and Khairani Barokka (see Flickr stream below) from the remarkable collaborative documentary project, Global Lives (which I mentioned back in the Summer). Hearing them speak really brought home what a sign of the times that project is. Khairani explained how it all started in 2004 when David Evan Harris, now project director, was involved in making a film following a day in the life of a cable car driver in San Francisco. It gradually grew from there, until over six hundred volunteers – film-makers, photographers, translators, sub-titlers  - have now collectively produced 10 x 24 hour films following ten people – a representative sample of the global population – through one day. David Evan Harris talks through the project’s evolution in this TED video.

It would have been impossible to imagine creating and co-ordinating such a volunteer effort only a decade ago – without what Clay Shirky has called the “ridiculously easy group formation” made possible by social media and the expanding connectivity of the web. Global Lives is crowd-sourcing with a purpose, a community of volunteer producers with a common vision to redress a Western skew in representation, in particular a paucity of global coverage in the US.

There are extracts from Global Lives online, but the full work is an installation which needs a physical space. It’s been in shown in galleries, museums, schools and public spaces around the world. There’s an open archive too – with the footage available to anyone who wants to create their own show. According to Chittella and Khairani the ten films are just the beginning, and more will follow.

In the Q & A my friend Andrew Tyndall asked something that was on everyone’s mind about the twenty four hour idea; what happens when the subjects are sleeping? [surely that's not great content?] Khairani explained how rather than being boring this was in fact a very revealing section of the day. The sleeping quarters and arrangements – alone, with others, quiet or noisy, interrupted or private –  all contribute vivid detail to the picture of each person’s circumstances and culture. It made sense of their approach, and I could imagine how in an installation these quiet phases of the recordings would play well alongside the busy-ness of the other subject’s day-times.

In the face of what Global Lives is doing it felt rather like missing the point when someone in the Q & A asked whether it was ethical for people to be producing content without being paid. Don’t get me wrong –  documentary is fraught with ethical questions, and, whether in conventional documentary or in participatory work, transparency about the terms is vital when media professionals engage with the public. (Though in the case of Global Lives many of the film-makers are professionals anyway, though doing this project for personal rather than financial reasons.) I don’t think there’s one answer on the payment front, but whether payment is available or not needs to be made clear right at the start so that people can make an informed decision.

But production technology is out there now. It’s becoming ever more accessible and affordable. People are going to do stuff with it – sometimes paid, sometimes not, sometimes co-ordinated by professionals, more often on their own terms. We’re looking at the emergence of a literacy in video which is analogous to written literacy, and an arena that – when cameras, tape and editing were expensive and scarce –  was wholly a professional one is just not any more. This disrupts business models, raises questions about how creativity gets rewarded, and confronts us with a new problem of digital exclusion – what Henry Jenkins call the “participation gap”. But it allows for more and different perspectives, and (as “Global Lives” does) provides opportunities to counter representation by ‘Big Media’, which has to be good.

Before the evening panel I did a presentation for the UnionDocs Collaborative – a unique Masters-equivalent programme for early career media producers, theorists, and curators – now in its fourth year. As UnionDocs describe this independent educational initiative; ”It is both a rigorous platform for exploring contemporary approaches to the documentary arts and a process for developing an innovative group project.” Last year’s group made work inspired by Roland Barthes ground-breaking collection of essays,”Mythologies”. This year they’re focussing on the Williamsburg neighbourhood where UnionDocs is located, and have just completed a fast turnaround remake of an archive documentary about the area. I sat in on a seminar and was interested to see the programme in action. They were knocking around issues of authenticity and performance in the director’s position in first-person documentary, having watched Sherman’s March. My memories of my media studies MA are hazy, but I don’t think there was the kind of open, inquiring, critical discussion that I saw here, grounded in Kara Oehler‘s extensive experience as a media practitioner. If you’re interested in documentary and looking for a Masters programme in the US I’d recommend you check it out.

Mapping Main Street

“When politicians and the media mention Main Street, they evoke one people and one place. But there are over 10,466 streets named Main in the United States… Mapping Main Street is a collaborative documentary media project that creates a new map of the United States through stories, photos, and videos recorded on actual Main Streets.”

Back in April I wrote about visiting UnionDocs in Brooklyn and mentioned an independent project created by the Co-Directors of the UnionDocs Collaborative  - Mapping Main Street. I’m an admirer of this collaborative documentary project which has set out to reflect the diverse realities of Main Street America, unsettle assumptions, and foster dialogue in and about community life.

The four creators of MMS are a transdisciplinary group. Kara Oehler and Anne Heppermann are public radio producers, multimedia journalists and sound artists. Jesse Shapins is an urban media artist and theorist. James Burns is an economist, photographer, mathematician, who created the information architecture and data engine of the MMS website. Together they have significant experience and expertise in media production and public participation, informed by a conceptual framework that sees media as public domain and art as a tool for engaging “matters of common concern”. Jesse was one of the creators of the influential Yellow Arrow public art project, and Kara and he first worked together on the Yellow Arrow offshoot “Capitol of Punk”, a non-linear documentary mapping Washington’s music scene.

Mapping Main Street was created as a response to the way that politicians were invoking Main Street to stand for “ordinary America” during the 2009 election campaign. This is hardly a new story, as Jesse noted in an article for “Writing Cities”, since the publication of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street in 1920, “Main Street has been a highly contested shifting metaphor for what constitutes traditional American values and the “average” American experience.” MMS was designed as an intervention in this story through the co-creation and sharing of multiple representations of “these corridors of commerce and community” as seen from the streets themselves.

The project kicked off in May 2009 with a 12,000 mile journey across the country to visit Main Streets and gather material, followed by promotion to the team’s networks and, through a National Public Radio series, to the wider public. Audio stories with stills made by the team act as seed content to inspire and encourage contributions that are posted on Flickr and Vimeo, and drawn in to the MMS website using public APIs. The aspiration is to document all of the streets named Main in the USA, and to date there’s content from 591.

I’ve been keen to talk to the MMS team and recently hooked up with Jesse and Kara on skype for a phone interview which you can read here. The interview covers important fundamentals of collaborative participatory work – the role of the producer in “designing frameworks that have very specific constraints” (my italics – I think this is key), the relationship between professionally produced and citizen content, the challenge of how to structure a good user-experience from a “gigantic database”- a challenge met by the MMS team through what they call, ”algorithmic curation”.

An attitude to the database as a creative opportunity for reflecting a non-linear, multi-vocal aesthetic is an exciting aspect of the thinking behind MMS. “What the database enables in the context of public media arts is open-ended, indeterminacy. Instead of simply representing a singular thesis, the database allows for multiplicity… a framework that brings together multiple voices and multiple media formats. “ (From a presentation by Jesse & Kara to the Northeastern School of Architecture Feb’10). The team plans to share this approach through the development of Zeega, an open-source toolkit for the creation of API-driven interactive documentaries, which is high on the agenda of a new organisation they’ve set up, the non-profit Media And Place (MAP) Productions.

Something we didn’t touch on in the interview is the appeal of Main Street as subject matter. In a presentation by Kara, James and Jesse at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard (which is well worth watching), Kara says that when she records vox pops on the street usually only one in three people will be prepared to talk, but on this theme everyone wants to talk! This reminded me of how eager people were to talk about Voices, a project about accent and dialogue that I was involved in at the BBC, and it’s interesting to think about why some topics engage in that way.  On Voices it seemed that people had a confidence, a sense of ownership of the subject - we are all, after all, experts in our own linguistic usage. Many also wanted to weigh in about the issues of class and power that play out around language (at least in the UK). The subject was also emotionally resonant – it seemed to me because language is so linked to where we have come from – both geographically, but also in the oedipal sense. Main Street is similarly resonant, layered and contested thematic territory, and as such fertile ground for participation and debate.

Getting the subject matter right is clearly important to any media project but it’s critical for a participatory project which needs to matter and to be accessible for people to want to get involved. That’s happening on MMS, with educators in particular picking up the topic and facilitating local initiatives around it. Main Street is a great subject, and Mapping Main Street is doing important work with it – engaging a dialogue about the lived experience of this site of “common concern”.

UnionDocs

I was in NYC last week and on Friday had the pleasure of meeting with Christopher Allen and Steve Holmgren at UnionDocs in Brooklyn to see the place and hear about the UnionDocs venture. UnionDocs is a non-profit housed in a former shop on Union Avenue, a busy high road in Willamsburg. Christopher Allen, who founded UnionDocs along with Jesse Shapins, Johanna Linsley, Paul Kiel, and Kara Oehler, explained how it had gradually evolved over nearly a decade through a number of twists and turns into its current incarnation with a mission, as the website puts it, “to present a broad range of innovative and thought-provoking non-fiction projects to the general public, while also cultivating specialized opportunities for learning, critical discourse, and creative collaboration for emerging media-makers, theorists, and curators.” And this is what UnionDocs does, with what seems to be terrific energy, rigour and ambition.

The UnionDocs space has three functions with lots of cross-fertilisation going on between them. It’s a micro-cinema/discussion space which Holmgren programmes, for new, noteworthy and classic non-fiction work, often shown with the film-maker/s present. (I had to fly home Saturday but wished I’d been able to stay for that night’s show – a screening of Tarnation with director, Jonathan Caouette, joined by the ambiguous co-star of that piece – his mum, Renee LeBlanc. Allen was going to be filming the event for Caouette to use in a new work.) Secondly, it’s a base for projects being created by the UnionDocs team. Finally, it’s the home for what I think is a unique initiative – a practice based programme in collaborative documentary for early career professionals.

UnionDocs was recently the subject of a MoMA event and you can read a review of the evening just published in this Brooklyn Rail article. This offers a good overview of UnionDocs story, and what the collaborative programme is about. You’ll get a sense from the article of the interesting cultural space that the UnionDocs guys occupy – thinking about documentary and the representation of the real, engaged in questions of aesthetics with a clear sense that this stuff matters in society, and bringing to the project, among other things, aspects of performance and considerable web savvy. Allen, the Executive Director, studied theatre for a while at Trinity College in Dublin, and became interested there in the collaborative aspects of performance, and Johanna Linsley another of the founders, is now studying performance in the UK.

Allen was also one of the creators of the hugely successful and influential Yellow Arrow participatory global public art project – which began in New York’s Lower East Side in 2004. As the website description says, “Combining stickers, mobile phones and an international community, Yellow Arrow transforms the urban landscape into a “deep map” that expresses the personal histories and hidden secrets that live within our everyday spaces.” It was an early foray into the emerging ‘geospatial web’ that turned out to be perfectly pitched to engage visual arts communities in North America and European cities in particular.

UnionDocs combination of public engagement and formal experimentation reminded me of Four Corners in Bethnal Green, one of the UK Film Workshops established with funding from Channel 4, where I worked as a programmer for a while in the early 80s. The comparison might be interesting to explore further sometime, but UnionDocs see it as important to differentiate what they are doing from an easy association with 70s alternative media practice. In particular, as Allen discussed in a recent panel at the Chashama Film Festival, he is interested in collaboration as shared authority rather than as consensus based decision making. ( I think he was right when he said in the same session that the term collaboration is now ‘used so frequently that is emptied of specific meaning’. And this is one of the strands of our conversation Friday that I’d like to return to.)

One of the projects emerging from the team behind Union Docs – producers Jesse Shapins and Kara Oehler – is a production with National Public Radio which looks at the reality of the high street in America today. “When politicians mention Main Street, they evoke one people and one place. But there are over 10,466 streets named Main in the United States.” Mapping Main Street is a terrific ongoing participatory project in audio, video and stills that definitely warrants a post of its own, and I’ll return to it very soon.

I spent an hour and a half with Allen and Holmgren talking about their work and mine, and realise writing this that I have lots more questions I wished I’d had time to ask – not least to get a better understanding of just how they make all this work financially. Happily we agreed that I’d return in the Autumn to show some work. I also mentioned my hope to stage a conference about collaborative creativity, and UnionDocs would definitely be on the programme. (If you are interested in such an event, or have ideas for who might be in it, do leave a comment or get in touch.)