UnionDocs Collaborative

Applications are now open for the UnionDocs Collaborative programme – a unique documentary study scheme at the wonderful UnionDocs in Brooklyn, NYC. I’ve curated a couple of events there and held workshops for the CoLAB. If you can apply, or know anyone who might be interested, I so recommend this opportunity.

“The UnionDocs Collaborative Studio (CoLAB) is a one-year program for a select group of 12 emerging media artists from the US and abroad. Based in one of NYC’s most exciting neighborhoods, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, UnionDocs offers a platform for exploring contemporary approaches to the documentary arts and a process for developing a collaborative project. The program consists of weekly production meetings, seminars, screenings and other public programs, along with regular masterclasses and critiques with visiting artists. Key benefits include dynamic interaction among a network of talented peers, direct exchange with visiting artists and industry experts, a structured environment for research and experimentation, mentoring on the production of original work and regular group critique, exhibition opportunities for the year’s collaborative project.

The CoLAB represents a new and alternative fellowship model, offering residency and visa support for six participants coming from abroad and an equal number of spots for local, non-resident participants. It is designed to be affordable and, although participants are asked to make the UDC their primary creative focus, the schedule does accommodate full-time or freelance work. Rather than applying with a project proposal or rough cut, all participants are selected on the basis of previous work and enter the program at square one, open to discovery and fresh connections. The CoLAB has presenting original work at premiere venues such as MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight, the Harvard Film Archive, the Visible Evidence Conference, Camden International Film Festival, Hot Docs, and Direktorenhaus, Berlin, among other venues. We expect a very competitive group of applicants, representing some of the most exciting emerging talents in documentary.”

Apply here. Deadline June 30th.

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.)