Site-Specific Doc at Visible Evidence 22
Last weekend we had a great panel/workshop at the Visible Evidence 22 conference in Toronto: Site on Screen: Emerging Technology and Site-Specific Documentary Practice
Track: Expanded Documentary and Immersive Technologies.Type: Workshop Keywords: Mobile media, Locative media, Site-specific, Participatory, Collaborative, Psychogeography, Documentary, Experimental, Socially engaged, Interactive
In this workshop, documentary media artists Laura Chipley, Sarah Nelson Wright, Samara Smith, A.E. Souzis and Rachel Stevens will discuss site-specific documentary practice, highlighting their individual and collaborative location-based documentary projects and exploring how site-specific documentary practices have evolved with changing mobile and locative technology. All of the documentary projects to be discussed are site-specific explorations of physical spaces that augment or invite public participation in chronicling the physical world with mobile media. Technologies explored will include: audio, SMS messaging, augmented reality, sensors, go-pros, underwater cameras and aerial photography. Each presenter will open with a short overview of her body of site-specific documentary work focused on the central questions of the panel: How has your site-specific documentary practice evolved with new mobile technologies? How have new technologies influenced concept, form, collaboration, participation, interaction and audience experience? How do new technologies expand documentary audiences? Each artist will reflect on a body of experimental documentary work that demonstrates an evolution in engagement strategies blurring the lines between subject/audience and location/screen to expand the traditional documentary form and experience. After brief introductory presentations, the panel will engage in a discussion exploring questions central to the documentary work and evolving technologies: How do new and emerging technologies serve or complicate each project’s themes, motivations and goals? How does moving away from traditional narrative toward non-linear structures and “user-driven” mobile technology experiences impact documentary form and experience? How does it change or expand the documentary audience? What is unique about site-specific documentary practices? What is the relationship between screen/site and audience/subject/director? Projects discussed in brief opening presentations will include Oyster City, The Newtown Creek Armada, Architextour and COMMotion. Collectively, these projects draw on a variety of mobile technologies to increase interactivity and participation.
Fish Stories at the NYPL Mulberry St. Branch
We’ve been really busy soliciting recipes and stories for the Fish Stories Community Cookbook. In the past few weeks we’ve held workshops or shown up to talk with people at the Hamilton-Madison House Senior Center, the fishing clinic at the Lower East Side Ecology Center, the P.S. 184 Shuang Wen School Summer Carnival Fundraiser, the after school program 2 Bridges Kids! at Two Bridges Neighborhood Council, the Loisaida Festival, Family Day at the Vladeck Houses, Weinberg Center for Balanced Living at the Manny Cantor Center, a performance at Pier 42 by Arm of the Sea Theater and, most recently, held a seafood recipe exchange at the Mulberry Street Branch of the New York Public Library.
Wow, we’ve met a lot of great people and received many great recipes. Talking to people one on one is much more effective than directing people to the forms on our website for soliciting recipes, as you might imagine. At yesterday’s recipe exchange Judy Hiller-Schwartz gave me recipes for Gravlox with Mustard Dill Sauce, Gifilte Fish and ‘Jewish Style’ Halibut “Creole.” She also told me about her trials and tribulations starting up a business making knishs. A favorite place of hers to buy fish in the Lower East Side is Rainbow Fish in Essex Market and she suggested talking to Ira.
A very special thanks to Sherri Machlin, the librarian who helped to organize, promote and champion the event. She has a book of her own – American Food by the Decades.
Fluid Histories, Neighborhood Practices: Rehearsing a Changing Waterfront
We had a great time at this year’s iLAND symposium: Fluid Histories, Neighborhood Practices: Rehearsing a Changing Waterfront – a gathering around movement, science and the environment in New York City.
Our workshop, The Urban Backstage took people through a series of actions, spaces and prompts (or mini scores) to explore the boundary between performance and backstage, both within the urban landscape and infrastructure and in people’s everyday gestures and emotions. The final presentations of the movements generated from “rehearsing” the series of scores were fantastic.
In the photo of Eric Sanderson of The Welikia Project during his presentation at the panel he is gesturing at Collect Pond, one of our favorite topics.
