Re: [-empyre-] Week 2 of the April 2018 discussion: New Media Documentary Practice (Garrett Lynch)

[Dorit Naaman]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thank you, Dale, for the invitation to participate in this discussion. 
Invisible Geographies are often at the root of what enables political amnesia. 
My project “Jerusalem, We Are Here” 
www.jerusalemwearehere.com is an interactive 
doc that digitally re-inscribes Palestinians back into the neighborhoods from 
which they were dispossessed by the 1948 war.  Most Jerusalemites know that the 
best neighborhoods in Jerusalem were Arab neighborhoods, but hardly anyone 
thinks about the people who lived in those houses, the Palestinians who lost 
everything by that war.  Similarly, hardly ever do the Anishnabe and 
Haudenosaune people of Katarokwi, considered in what is now Kingston, Ontario, 
Canada, or my other home.  The political and historical conditions of erasure 
are different, of course, but the fact remains that the present dominates our 
sense of space, and it is not easy to see that which is not materially present 
in-front of us.

My impetus to make “Jerusalem, We Are Here” was born out of a sense of urgent 
need to make visible, that which has been erased and obfuscated. Digital media 
enabled a platform in which we can navigate the Israeli present tense visually 
(through google streetview and our own intervention), but are surrounded by a 
soundscape that is Palestinian and from the 1940s. As we meander virtually down 
the streets of Jerusalem, we meet participants who collaboratively made short 
films about their homes.

In a sense I try to de-territorialize (to use Garrett and Frederique’s 
suggestion) a space, in order to defamiliarize it for Israelis, and invite the 
Palestinians back, without a need for permits, checkpoints, and intense Israeli 
scrutiny and surveillance.  But I also hope to ignite a question mark about the 
spaces we inhabit more generally, a question about what is it that we don’t 
see, and why?

___
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Re: [-empyre-] Week 2 of the April 2018 discussion: New Media Documentary Practice

[Toby Tatum]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thanks for this Garrett. I'm watching this now, although I think a different 
kind of watching is going to be be required of me for this piece. I'm going to 
leave it rolling and drop in as and when. You're certainly at the outer limits 
in terms of digital duration with this one. It suggests to me something 
non-human, the relentless of some kind of robot or perhaps we're in the terrain 
of geological time, or the time of reptiles (actually the subject of non-human 
time-perception I find fascinating). I'm very drawn to the correlation between 
the experience of watching your film and the experience of being in those 
immense landscapes.

By way of introduction my name is Toby Tatum and I'm a film-maker from the UK. 
The piece I contributed to the FLEFF is called The Toby Tatum Guide to Grottoes 
& Groves. The piece resulted from a self-initiated vision quest into the 
twisted labyrinths of the forest, specifically the ancient woods near my 
Hastings home. The FLEFF curators have written an insightful piece of the 
project here should you wish to take a look: 
https://www.ithaca.edu/fleff/invisible_geographies/tobytatumguide/   
Regards,

Toby


 
Toby Tatum

http://www.tobytatum.com/  



Toby Tatum's films are distributed by Collectif Jeune Cinéma  



Recent interviews online here & here

 

On Monday, 9 April 2018, 19:49:07 GMT+1, Garrett Lynch 
 wrote:  
 
 Many thanks to Dale Hudson for inviting us to participate in the discussion.  
Frédérique and myself are looking forward to some interesting discussion on the 
subject of New Media Documentary Practice but also on the ideas and issues that 
emerge from our work as part of Invisible Geographies.
Our work Best of Luck with the Wall (variant) and an introductory text about it 
cane be found on the exhibition site here: 
https://www.ithaca.edu/fleff/invisible_geographies/bestofluckwiththewall/

When invited to contribute to -empyre- on the theme of new media documentary 
practice and in particular to "think about digital media and environmentalism 
across vectors that are visible and invisible, material and immaterial, audible 
and inaudible", our first thought was that documentary is not the principle 
purpose of Best of Luck with the Wall (variant).
It is the purpose of Begley's original film, Best of Luck with the Wall, to 
document the absurdity of building Trump's US/Mexican wall (its scale and so 
forth).  However, our 'variant' is foremost a critique of the form Begley's 
film as comment/criticism takes - a time/space compressed experience of 
travelling the wall.  Given the social problems building the wall will create, 
i.e. destroying US/Mexican relations when the US should be building better 
relations with its neighbours, we wanted the experience of the film to be the 
experience of travelling the length of the wall (34 hours by car), seeing all 
the landscape, all the communities that will be cut in two.  Nobody is going to 
watch the 34 hours of our 'variant' (the one extra minute is simply our 
credits) but if they do we want it to be a long arduous experience!
This is where we return to the idea of documentary, our 'variant' isn't any 
more documentative than Begley's film is, that is it doesn't address the 
subject of the wall to any greater degree, but it is more documentative of the 
time/space of the affected landscape while still remaining a mediated and 
immaterial experience of it.  What becomes invisible in Begley's film because 
of the speed of the edit accompanied by a pleasant soundtrack becomes visible 
in our 'variant' because it is time stretched transforming the soundtrack into 
a granular tortured soundtrack that makes the inaudible audible.
This is just one aspect of our thinking on this work.  Others that we would 
also welcome discussion from the list are:
- deterritorialisation;- political comment/criticism (in particular from an 
exterior position);- deconstruction and documentation of political fact;- ideas 
of appropriation (from Google, from Begley) and how they intersect with 
plagiarism;- expanded film formats (time, generative);- time stretching as a 
process in new media;
and the intersection of these subjects.

-- 
regards
Garrett Lynch & Frédérique Santune
_
garr...@asquare.org
http://www.asquare.org/
Current events and soon:
Real Virtuality The Networked Art of Garrett 
Lynch:http://realvirtuality.peripheralforms.com/
A network of people who attended an exhibition and contributed to the creation 
of this work
http://asquare.org/work/peoplenetwork/

Pick up a postcard and participate at any of the following galleries: Aksioma 
Institute for Contemporary Art (Ljubljana, Slovenia), Bannister Gallery (Rhode 
Island, USA), Centro ADM (Mexico City, Mexico), Centro de Cultura Digital 
(Mexico City, Mexico), Gallery XY (Olomouc, Czech Republic), Gedok (Stuttgart, 
Germany), Guest Room (North Carolina, USA), Human 

Re: [-empyre-] Week 2 of the April 2018 discussion: New Media Documentary Practice

[Garrett Lynch]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Many thanks to Dale Hudson for inviting us to participate in the
discussion.  Frédérique and myself are looking forward to some interesting
discussion on the subject of New Media Documentary Practice but also on the
ideas and issues that emerge from our work as part of Invisible Geographies.

Our work Best of Luck with the Wall (variant) and an introductory text
about it cane be found on the exhibition site here:
https://www.ithaca.edu/fleff/invisible_geographies/bestofluckwiththewall/


When invited to contribute to -empyre- on the theme of new media
documentary practice and in particular to "think about digital media and
environmentalism across vectors that are visible and invisible, material
and immaterial, audible and inaudible", our first thought was that
documentary is not the principle purpose of Best of Luck with the Wall
(variant).

It is the purpose of Begley's original film, Best of Luck with the Wall, to
document the absurdity of building Trump's US/Mexican wall (its scale and
so forth).  However, our 'variant' is foremost a critique of the form
Begley's film as comment/criticism takes - a time/space compressed
experience of travelling the wall.  Given the social problems building the
wall will create, i.e. destroying US/Mexican relations when the US should
be building better relations with its neighbours, we wanted the experience
of the film to be the experience of travelling the length of the wall (34
hours by car), seeing all the landscape, all the communities that will be
cut in two.  Nobody is going to watch the 34 hours of our 'variant' (the
one extra minute is simply our credits) but if they do we want it to be a
long arduous experience!

This is where we return to the idea of documentary, our 'variant' isn't any
more documentative than Begley's film is, that is it doesn't address the
subject of the wall to any greater degree, but it is more documentative of
the time/space of the affected landscape while still remaining a mediated
and immaterial experience of it.  What becomes invisible in Begley's film
because of the speed of the edit accompanied by a pleasant soundtrack
becomes visible in our 'variant' because it is time stretched transforming
the soundtrack into a granular tortured soundtrack that makes the inaudible
audible.

This is just one aspect of our thinking on this work.  Others that we would
also welcome discussion from the list are:

- deterritorialisation;
- political comment/criticism (in particular from an exterior position);
- deconstruction and documentation of political fact;
- ideas of appropriation (from Google, from Begley) and how they intersect
with plagiarism;
- expanded film formats (time, generative);
- time stretching as a process in new media;

and the intersection of these subjects.


-- 
regards
Garrett Lynch & Frédérique Santune
_
garr...@asquare.org
http://www.asquare.org/

Current events and soon:

Real Virtuality The Networked Art of Garrett Lynch:
http://realvirtuality.peripheralforms.com/ 

A network of people who attended an exhibition and contributed to the
creation of this work
http://asquare.org/work/peoplenetwork/

Pick up a postcard and participate at any of the following
galleries: Aksioma Institute for Contemporary Art (Ljubljana, Slovenia),
Bannister Gallery (Rhode Island, USA), Centro ADM (Mexico City, Mexico),
Centro de Cultura Digital (Mexico City, Mexico), Gallery XY (Olomouc, Czech
Republic), Gedok (Stuttgart, Germany), Guest Room (North Carolina, USA),
Human Ecosystems (Rome, Italy), Kunst Museum (Stuttgart, Germany),
Laboratorio Arte Alameda (Mexico City, Mexico), Le Wonder (Bagnolet,
France), MUTE (Lisbon, Portugal), NYU Art Gallery (Abu Dhabi, United Arab
Emirates), Open Signal (Portland, USA), Plymouth Arts Centre (Plymouth,
England), The Gallery at Plymouth College of Art (Plymouth, England),
Transfer Gallery (New York, USA), Upfor Gallery (Portland, USA), Watermans
(London, England), Wilhelmspalais (Stuttgart, Germany), WOWA (Riccione,
Italy), ZKM | Center for Art and Media (Karlsruhe, Germany)

Garrett Lynch: A network of people @ Galerie XY (Olomouc, Czech Republic) 9
- 13/04/2018
https://www.facebook.com/events/177492866199740/

Best of Luck with the Wall (variant) @ European Media Art Festival, Report
- notes from reality (Osnabrueck, Germany) 18/04 - 21/05/2018
https://www.emaf.de/en/index.html
___
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[-empyre-] Week 2 of the April 2018 discussion: New Media Documentary Practice

[Dale Hudson]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Thanks, Patty and Helen, for participating in last week’s discussion.

This week’s guests include Dorit Naaman (CA), Luke Munn, (AU/NZ), Garrett Lynch 
and Frédérique Santune (IE/FR), and Toby Tatum (UK).

All have participated in the “Invisible Geographies” exhibition for the 
twentieth edition of FLEFF. For this discussion, I would like to consider them 
for their intersections with and interventions to assumptions about documentary 
and digital media, as well as nearby categories, such as experimental. Each of 
these projects engages with representations and performances of spaces that are 
both physical and psychical, contoured by the sensory and rational.

Dorit Naaman’s project _Jerusalem, We Are Here_, an ongoing project to remap of 
the international city of Jerusalem (Al-Quds in Arabic). The project takes the 
form of a platform that allows users to move through neighborhoods, past and 
present. Users explore the geographies of a city whose many ethnicities, 
religions, and cultures have been partly erased and severely diminished — none 
more than the indigenous Palestinians.

Luke Munn’s _Null Island_ explores how movement through our world is 
increasingly dependent on environments that exist partly as computer code — and 
what happens when connections between virtual and physical worlds break down. 
The project focuses attention on invisible manifestations of power by rendering 
their effects visible in an absurdist yet disquieting manner by highlighting a 
tiny island that exists only in GPS systems.

Garrett Lynch and Frédérique Santune’s _Best of Luck with the Wall (variant)_ 
allows users to move along the geopolitical border between México and the 
United States at a speed equivalent to driving in an automobile, thus gaining a 
sense of the scale of the border and counterproductive enterprise of dedicating 
public monies to policing and militarizing it.

The result of “a year-long vision quest into the twisted labyrinths of the 
forest,” The Toby Tatum Guide to Grottoes and Groves presents psychological and 
emotional geographies in particular and peculiar environments near the coastal 
town of Hastings (United Kingdom). _Toby Tatum’s The Toby Tatum Guide to 
Grottoes and Groves_ looks at the wooded world in coastal towns in the United 
Kingdom.

I look forward to hearing more about these projects from their makers, as well 
as their conceptions of an arts practice that moves between conventional 
categories, including documentary.

Best,
Dale

Bios:

Dorit Naaman (CA) is a documentarist and film theorist, born and raised in 
Jerusalem, who teaches film and media at Queen’s University (Ontario). She 
developed a format of short personal documentaries, which she calls 
DiaDocuMEntaRy. She has published on Israeli and to a lesser extent Palestinian 
cinema, focusing on gender, nationalism and militarism. She initiated 
_Jerusalem, We Are Here_ as a collaborative platform that can map and tell the 
stories of a Jerusalem that is no longer visible. To learn more about her work, 
visit her website: http://www.diadocumentary.com/.

Luke Munn (AU/NZ) uses the body and code, objects and performances to activate 
relationships and responses. His projects have been featured in the Kunsten 
Museum of Modern Art (DK), the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona 
(ES), the Fold Gallery London (UK), Causey Contemporary Brooklyn (US), and the 
Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum (TR), with commissions from Aotearoa Digital 
Arts, and TERMINAL. He is a Studio Supervisor at Whitecliffe College of Art and 
Design and a current Ph.D. candidate at Western Sydney University (AU).

Garrett Lynch (IE) is an artist, lecturer, and theorist. His arts practice, 
teaching, and research addresses networks (in their most open sense) within an 
artistic context; that is, the spaces between artist, artworks and audience as 
a means, site, and context for artistic initiation, creation, and discourse. 
His project with Frédérique Santune, _Best of Luck with the Wall (variant)_, is 
featured in the European Media Arts Festival (EMAF)’s “Report – Notes from 
Reality” exhibition, which opens in Osnabrück  (DE) on 18 April 2018 
(https://www.emaf.de/en/index.html).
 
Frédérique Santune (IE/FR) is a versatile artist/designer with fifteen years of 
experience in cultural and educational fields. She is interested in both paper 
and screen-based media, so long as it involves user journeys through words. Her 
project with Garrett Lynch, _Best of Luck with the Wall (variant)_, is featured 
in the European Media Arts Festival (EMAF)’s “Report – Notes from Reality” 
exhibition, which opens in Osnabrück  (DE) on 18 April 2018 
(https://www.emaf.de/en/index.html).
 
Toby Tatum (UK) has exhibited at film festivals and arts events, including the 
Rotterdam International Film Festival (NL), the Berwick Upon Tweed Film and 
Media Arts Festival (UK), the Swedenborg Film Festival