Introduction

This project is part of my dissertation work in Media Arts + Practice at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. The main component of the work is a feature length video piece designed for and intended to be experienced on an IMAX screen. This written work and media archive serves as a companion to the larger video work and contains the whole of that work in eight annotated sections. See this as a reference and a guide, but not a substitute for viewing the work in whole at IMAX scale.

In Camera is about the role of video in identity formation and contemporary practices of knowledge production. Video is not a single technology or approach but rather a concept of visual practice expansive enough to encompass and persist through epochal shifts. Sean Cubitt describes video this way in his 1993 work Videography, and describes his ‘utopian self’ as wanting to believe that video technologies represent a path by which the bifurcated conceptions of mind and body might reconnect (16). In Camera is an autoethnographic account of the role of video in my own life and the development of my understanding of my own personhood. Video has been a tool of my own contemplation, a meditation aid that helped me learn to be with and to see myself. Video leaves traces and accretes into an archive of memories. This piece is a tour through that archive crafted from a particular subjectivity but intended to be instructive as well. I chart my use of video across technological eras, from MiniDV tape to disk based multi chip HD to single sensor 4K to multicamera spherical rigs and beyond. The IMAX screen came into my toolkit amidst this flow of video learning and adaptation and revealed itself as the best yet canvas on which to try to invite a glimpse into the messy sprawl of personal archival perusal. This is the guiding idea of the experience I have tried to make in the linear, feature length backbone of In Camera, the experience of having 16+ years of your memories externalized on a hard drive in living color and sound, clickable, scannable, searchable. Dipping into clips from tapes, from cards, from clouds, seeing and hearing things you have forgotten, things you remembered differently, things that you will never forget.

The archive and the video memories grew along with me and I organize the work around key case studies representing experiences social and academic. As my video practice grew I also found my professional path, teaching and carrying out practice-based participatory research at USC.I saw the value of video as a tool for knowledge production, for collaboration, for a direct witness to contemporary forms of collaborative scholarship. So in this archive you see how I learned to teach graduate anthropologists and preschoolers alike how to connect with the camera, to see through and past the lens, to let their practice of visual creation extend their senses into a crystalline focus that records their worldly moment of truthful wonder and projects it into the potential future of infinite number.

In this archive you see my growing involvement in large scale collaborative research projects and networks. Video as my central tool and interface to contribute, translate, preserve and present the work. To learn through making and show through learning. The Media Activism and Participatory Politics (MAPP) project was all about the ways that contemporary participation in the politics of now has grown across and through the networks and tools that we use to tell the stories of our everyday selves. We shape and amplify these selves, join them together, infuse them with the flights of our imagination and shared fantastic joys, bending them towards the world we want to live in. And we make videos to show what we mean, to share and spread our voices. I make this video to share and spread the tools, approaches and ideas that have worked for me. To mark a moment in the ceaseless flow.

Guide

This online archive is designed for horizontal and vertical navigation, from which you can jump off and traverse along any number of exploratory principles. The horizontal path is the main way through, anchored by each section of the larger video work, progressing along a straight line. At each point along this path you can also dig down into more of the source material from which the main video work is edited and constructed. At the base you will find the raw hours of unexpurgated footage from which the rest has distilled. Mind, once more, that this online archive and the words within it are a companion. I consider the edited video piece in its entirety to be complete and to articulate directly everything I want to say about my practice, my research and myself. But the registers and affordances of this online archive are myriad in their value and contribution to the work. Here you can click and skip and explore much like I would touring through the work myself. You can play the long clips back at double speed. You can hover over the playbar and see thumbnail previews of what’s to come. And you can read this version of my accompanying interior monologue.

But sitting upright at a computer with a mouse in your hand and a keyboard listening for your thoughts, seeing the work on a screen that is close but is small, there are tradeoffs of attention and connection. We return our bodies to the big screen, to the theater, to the mind.

Section 1, “Opening the Archive,” situates the experiences in my chair at my desk on my computer opening the drive the folder the library where the archive lives and the video waits. A quick scan of a few clips at random introduces key themes connecting embodied senses with recorded memories, domestic landscapes and self reflections, looking for the world to reveal itself and become known.

Section 2, “Grid View,” is a passage about simultaneity and the ability of video to encompass more than our comprehension allows to be resolved into linear understanding. 12 clips in 4 slices play in a grid and introduce the case studies and content of the project. The first column is of the private spaces of the home where I learn new cameras and find myself. The second is where I journey with my friends as we make a documentary, One More Shot, about them trying to make a baby. Column three is of the Junior AV Club, a key research project aimed at developing appropriate media rich educational experiences for early learning. Column four is of the MAPP project and depicts work that took me across the country and back.

The clips across the top persist for as long as the source material can run without a cut. The persistence lets you see the carving work that editing performs. You don’t have to watch those clips but they’ll be there right through to Section 3, “Learning Cameras,” which contains parts 3 and 4 of the larger work. These pieces are memories and foundations. Some of the first times I picked up a video camera and looked at myself and the world. I still have the tapes I made where those images reside. They connect right up to today and my practices of looking continue, though the cameras I use have changed and the locations have shifted. The world hasn’t changed very much.

Section 4, “Cases of theory, practice and pedagogy,” weaves multiple temporalities and content worlds together. Behind it all is a little bit of the time it takes to read a book. You can see me moving around my house reading The Virtual Window. Four other windows are superimposed and open views into the classroom where I taught ethnographic filmmaking, the courtyard where we spent a day of the Junior AV Club making story games, and into the drama of various moments of the One More Shot documentary project. This piece represents the tying of it all together for myself. The end of a chapter of my youth and education, taking what I have learned for and of myself and using it to support others in their own quests to learn and make. It is the solidification of the foundation on which the remainder of the work is built.

Section 5 is a “Bridge” I have to cross to bring the Junior AV Club (JAVC) and MAPP projects into the flow of In Camera. Up to this point, In Camera has been crafted from video footage that has remained largely private and in my mind. But JAVC and MAPP have been written up and presented in various forms and for various audiences. The bridge is the space I had to cross to integrate those projects into the context of this work.

Sections 6 and 7, “JAVC in Camera” and “MAPP in Camera,” respectively, bring visual learning from those projects into the visual context of my subjectivity. At the time I was doing the work of those projects, I was aware that my approach and contributions were all the result of all of the work I had done before, all of the work that is documented in the earlier parts of this project. These two projects are where my video practice most shaped my research practice, the way I conceive of a question, plan and shape the progress and the circumstances in which the work of inquiry plays out, how I document to remember and to focus in the moment, how the video record becomes externalizable, shareable, knowable and how it complements the other ways we write and speak about the work amongst ourselves so that we know what we know and send the shouts out wider.