In Camera: a Video Practice of Living, Learning and Connecting

Grid View

Section 2: Grid View

In her novel The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin’s main character works to develop a new understanding of relativistic simultaneity, the success of which lays the foundations for the invention of a superluminal communications device called the ansible. The story is told along two timelines playing out on two worlds. One world is embroiled in a fight between capitalism and communism, the other world struggles with its own single system of anarcho-syndicalism and the staling forces of permanent revolution.

We cross distance and time together and each act of memory projects us into the possibility of a future where we may remember again. Le Guin’s layered approach to literary structure creates an experiential model of mind and weaves stories that ask us to question the fundamental basis of our own realities and the profound influence of the political and economic systems in which we live on the emergence of that self and the directive pressures that push, pull and mold us with relentless patience.
Before I knew the Frankfurt School, I felt the imperative need to find my own hard way of looking at the world. Video cameras helped me do that; to slow down and look for myself, see for myself, learn for myself. The more I learned of cameras and myself, the more I learned that like any tool, the camera will already always create a subject position for you to inhabit if you are not active in creating it for yourself. Each generation of devices comes with its own affordances yet we trend towards a universalizing grammar of visual result that yearns for the cut, the linear progression of ideas built one upon the next. Yet video can play at once more memory than I can conjure and relive simultaneously on my own, even if the mind’s potential memory experiences reside inside me somewhere. And though the video itself is a surface vision, flat except along the axes of sound and time, the depth of memory it triggers extends into the realms of body, sense and human feeling.
The grid view in this section is my ansible, my time machine, my anarchic push against a single point perspective. The video camera will hide itself if you let it, fit snugly into the glamorous inevitability of progress meted out by engineers, supply chains, marketing divisions and the demand for viral videos of blockbuster cats to flow through distribution channels from our pockets to our temples. Or you can turn the camera on itself and catch the glory of your own time passing by. Make it see your hours and then find those hours for yourself so many years beyond their passage that they are no longer real except in ones and zeroes that might just be immortal.  
 

Transcription of the Voice Over in This Section

The work of my PhD has been carried out across three key case studies; One More Shot - a feature documentary about infertility; The Junior AV Club - a participatory action research project about the use of digital media practice in early childhood learning; and the Media Activism and Participatory Politics project - a research project examining the digital practices of youth focused participatory politics. Each of these projects has been connected by my practice of video making. Video making as a means of documenting the projects, creating a tool for reflection, understanding and communication; a key component of the research. But that video practice grows out of a very personal art practice concerned very much with the relationship between image making, the body, memory and expanded perception.

The goal of the dissertation project is to share the experience of this video archive I’ve amassed throughout the time of my PhD work. No one can really experience the whole archive; it represents many hundreds of hours of material. In many cases, the originating act of documentation fulfilled its own purpose by providing a kind of focused participation in the events being witnessed. Video documentation created a framework for collaboration, participation, discussion, focus, creativity and fun; while creating a record of itself and the people involved.

These are the kinds of things I want to show and reflect upon here. How a mindful practice of video making can be a productive tool in all kinds of art practice and research. I want to share something of what it’s like for me personally to mine this archive, to fly through my hard drives, timelines, events sequences and projects. To play forward and backwards, to remember, to experience surprise and nostalgia and insight; to find forgotten details that go beyond a verbal memory, a written account, that are contained in voices and body language, that can be seen in the video but that also trigger a personal sense memory that can be connected to the digital trace but never fully contained within it.

The question of how to shape and share this experience has been an important question and a challenge. Where to put the video, how to share it? I access it on a very fast, very heavy hard drive with built in data protection and redundancies. All ingested and sorted in a Final Cut Pro X library. An imperfect database that can be messy in places but in which I can always find what I’m looking for, and always discover something new. That facilitates high speed scrubbing with sound. Something you don’t get if I put the clips on YouTube or Vimeo or Critical Commons or Archive.org.

Each of those hosts has its own advantages, its own views into the metadata, the ability to tag and comment. YouTube lets you playback in high speed, to scrub through with thumbnails. Archive creates nice thumbnail galleries of still images. Critical Commons privileges the text. Vimeo lets me password protect my work but puts huge limits on how much I can upload and share. As a platform, Scalar lets me put it all together in a navigable dynamic interface, gives a strong sense of the conceptual framework, the progression through the projects in time. But any of these computer based experiences suffers from a potential for attention; how much video can you really watch on your computer? You can click through clips, but it can be hard to really watch them. And to some extent I embrace this; you can see and navigate the archive and project an assessment of the potential of each video; noting its duration, accepting the context in which it is presented, you can understand something about what it is, what it means, what you might learn from it.

But here, on this screen, in this presentation, I hope to create a different kind of attention. Through scale, through simultaneity, I hope to share something about the experience of time. The move to disk based high definition video acquisition formats allowed for very long very high quality takes. Representation often erases the real time of experience, the real time of learning, the real time of life. When I decided to record myself setting up the video camera you see here, pulling out the tripod, putting the pieces together, the lens, the support rods, the follow focus, I gave myself the extra attention it took to really understand that time; not just as a liminal requirement to achieving a goal, but as an actual time of learning, reflection, of value. Not knowing how or when the footage would be useful or shareable, but feeling that it was somehow important to do. When I decided to film myself reading on the couch, I just wanted to see what reading looked like; this private act of learning, of discovery, this intimate connection to the mind of the author and any other readers, a record of learning that mattered to me and how I approached my work. Here it is. This time, this moment of my life. But I would never ask anyone just to watch it. But the screen of this room is big enough that it becomes a space in itself that you can navigate from your seat, possibly scanning with your eyes, but even moving with your head, big enough to register the time and effort it takes to scan from one corner to another, and to have a center large and vivid enough to carry through.

And there are these other moments, private, harder to explain the impetus to record but deeply connected to the most basic foundations of my practice. I think that in making video and in the work of scholarship there is a need to personally explore yourself and where you’re coming from; Ernest Morrell drove this home for me in the introductory passages of Critical Literacy and Urban Youth. A kind of post structuralist self ethnography. Not apologizing for the individual biases and imperfections of a human perspective as a source of scholarly thought and writing, nor an attempt to explain and contain it, simply an acknowledgement and expression of that self and an avowal of the importance of the work to real human lives; to the love learning and sharing and collaborating as human beings. And this self is body.

The body is hard to describe, hard to write and talk about. But the body moves, the body can be seen. Learning to stretch and move changed my life, it made me think and see differently. Placing my body in the space of the camera was somehow a kind of learning. Claiming the importance and beauty of the time it actually takes to live; time that’s so often erased or degraded in the way we think and talk about life; as though life is an inconvenience; eating, cleaning, sleeping, reading, thinking; these things are so often invisible except to ourselves.  About the slowness of observation. The texture of memory and of moment. And it means something to me when I see it now. Marking a moment in my life. It tells me that at the start, it's worth it to take your time, to create a stable base, and to listen to that part of yourself that want to see, to record, to remember. To let that guide the work, to trust that it will take you somewhere, no matter what the result, no matter the footage. Listen, look, move with purpose. Advice to the camera operator and the scholar.

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