ReadMe
Introduction
This project is submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy, University of Southern California, School of Cinematic Arts, Media Arts + Practice Division. 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 and delineate dry ground on which to stand. For all the positive potential within the practices and experiences documented and described herein, there are also the lurking anxieties of our digital selves swept up and swept away if allow the currents to rise against the values at the cores of who we want to be. Video can also be a symptom of and vehicle for commercial distractions shaped only by the values of an impersonal market, coaxing us to both reflect and internalize through practice the forms of greatest profit. I hope this work suggests some steps towards countering those otherwise prevailing trends.
Context
Before venturing further I would like to provide additional context about what this project is and what it is not and how I understand it as a contribution to my field. Media Arts + Practice is itself, from conception and by design, an interdisciplinary program and each of its graduates represents a hybrid approach to scholarship and art practice. Although interdisciplinary scholarship is growing in its impact, desirability and recognition throughout academe, it remains incumbent on each individual scholar to define the nature of their hybridity and to create a framework by which their work is intelligible. I see my own scholarly identity as a branching tree with video production and film studies as the core from which the other limbs extend; while my interests, collaborations and work have taken me deep into the field of Digital Media and Learning and into the social and political sciences through my work with the Media Activism and Participatory Politics Project, my core skills, mastery and theoretical foundations are of the cinematic arts and critical studies.
I was lucky that this intuition coincided with the explosion of consumer DV camera technology and desktop computer editing solutions, and even luckier that my professors supported my experiments and explorations within the context of their courses even though the school had no formal production classes or resources. I learned video production through experimentation, by living with the camera and using it as a tool for reflection and connection. I made several deliberate projects at the time that resulted in edited short works, but I also used the camera for more personal, open ended diaristic experiments that were more about the moment of recording than about a goal-oriented output.
Over time, I found that this approach, of simply using the camera as a tool for engaging in the moment, of focusing one’s senses as a tool for deep looking and listening was key to my own learning and growth. After Berkeley, I went to UCLA and pursued an MFA in Film Directing and Production. The education in film craft was rewarding and dizzying in its pace. Film production is expensive and cumbersome and the foremost goals of the program were to transmit and inscribe the best practices of the industry, teaching language and even body mechanics and posture to successive generations; clothespins aren’t called clothespins, they’re ‘C-47s,’ never sit on set, never make eye contact with a performer before or during a take. I loved the learning but missed the space for reflection and contemplation and felt a gnaw at my gut that at least some of what we perpetuated through our personal transformations into ‘filmmakers’ was inseparable from larger systems of commercial visual culture that contributed negatively to the health, equity and possibility of the world at large. Once again, many of my most valuable lessons during this time were at the periphery of my formal education, in the spaces I carved out for myself to learn the latest generation of high definition disc based camera systems that gave me much more freedom to experiment than the 16mm cameras we were being trained to use. HD cameras that I could use to look at the edges and hidden cracks in my own life, to consider how I really spent my time and who I was and who I wanted to be.
These phrases may seem vague and sweeping but they’re recorded in the images that make up my dissertation; they’re visible and livable and meaningful to me. That’s why I dove back into the archive of material I’ve amassed and tried to craft a representation of that archive and my personal experience of it that will be knowable and shareable. After UCLA I made my way to USC and began my entry into professional academic activities and found that my unique combination skills and sensibilities and my particular approach to video making was a valuable tool in surprising ways and places; in a collaborative action research project about a media rich approach to early learning, in courses I designed and taught for graduate students in Anthropology, in my own documentary production and in a project on youth and participatory politics.
In all of these applications there was a clear place for video practice and a clear desire for documentation. But video making comes with challenges - how do you integrate the technical aspects of the practice into activities and environments where life is happening without disrupting the world around you? How do you get to the point where the tool becomes an extension of self? What do you do with the footage? How do you make the tool your own while acknowledging and understanding the market and marketing forces pushing you to use it one way and not another?
My approach points towards answers while acknowledging that the answers generally reside in the ceaseless process and aren’t somewhere that we arrive all at once. I suggest that the camera can be a powerful tool for helping us to slow down and see more. My practice is interested in giving witness to the little personal details and routines of life, making them apparent to oneself through the ceremony of documentation, even if the footage itself only exists for itself and not for editing and exhibition. I suggest that this practice can be useful for anyone in the academy who feels a pull towards visual time based research but is not sure where to start and how to integrate the tools into their practice. That they start by living with the camera and using it to see themselves and their own life. That this leads to familiarity, expertise and calm that is then portable into other professional contexts. I suggest that the presence of the camera can then be both peripheral, ambient and yet mobilized towards the center when needed and when appropriate. There will be lots of footage to store and backup and some of it will never go anywhere. But the archive has its own life and vitality and is worth making and preserving and possibly deploying online. The options for such get better all the time, my own use of Scalar here provides a working example of such alongside the edited Giant Screen piece. And from the archive, key moments and memories will emerge and anchor the work.
It is a challenge to put words to all of this, that’s why I crafted a 98-minute IMAX movie from 15 years worth of video material: I think that the only way to really express what I mean is to show it that way, in time and space and light and sound. But there are other genres and disciplines and examples that share similarities and resonances with what I’m working towards that might help to consider. I see some resonance with emerging practices of dataism and lifelogging; practices that attempt to make a knowable, shareable, analyzable record of the otherwise hidden activities of daily life, from our footsteps and heartbeats to our caloric intakes and favored commuter routes. But I resist the tendency to reduce video to data, and video remains, for the moment, largely too complex to fit neatly into the analytical frameworks of machine vision and learning. Video is still an experience that we make and relive for ourselves and I am interested in unlocking the potential of those experiences without simply boiling them down to packaged snippets of digestible YouTube fragments. I gravitate towards fringe but growing movements that use new digital tools and distribution platforms to revive some of the experiential quality and pace of slow cinema for new experiences disentangled from narrative, like the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation’s work in slow TV.
But examples like that are still about finding an audience and ultimately participating in a commercial system. I see my practice as a way of interrogating the very tools that make it possible; the camera reflects on itself, on the resources and economic realities that brought it into being; and the camera helps us see ourselves as we are also enmeshed in the global flows of contemporary capitalism. My hope is that this project can function as a bridge between the kind of scholarship that inspires me (book length monographs from authors like Cubitt and Friedberg) and the kinds of autoethnographic essay films (like those by Chris Marker) that have challenged me to refine and define my work and its relationship to myself and the my place in the world. This project is not an instruction manual, though it may serve as a step towards such. It is for now, a meditation, a recitation, an exploration and an offering that invites you to take the time to step out of the pace and flow of your day and wander with me through memory and learning, and finally to look forward to the successive cycles of new technology and life phases we’ll encounter, that we take on each new challenge from places of growing strength and confidence in the directions in which we want to move, not only to be moved by forces we haven’t taken the time to question and resist.
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.
Finally, Section 8 hints at “Hypercinemas” and the places that video is heading next and how and why I hope that our work as scholars and practitioners will continue to push against the edges and bubbles and spheres of knowledge, to participate in the progress and to see the world as we imagine it can be.
Please see my Acknowledgements and Works Cited.
My committee:
Tara McPherson (chair)
Steve Anderson
Scott Fisher
Mimi Ito
Holly Willis