Patients as Authors [working title]

Christine Douglass, Friday 15th November

I am applying the theories of shared visual anthropology and the methodology of shared visual ethnography to produce collaborative films with 9 individuals who have had a breast cancer diagnosis. My practice seeks to position patients as active producers of knowledge by facilitating a framework for them to “structure their view of the world - their reality - through film” (Sol Worth 1997: 7). It addresses the constraints of knowledge produced by a singular authorial view through the presentation of the individual perspectives and aims to capture the experience of having had a breast cancer diagnosis in a language that is not sanctioned. Equally though I don't want to promote a trope of victimology. My practice challenges the hegemonic epistemes used in clinical research to explore illness experiences. Cameras were 'handed over' to patients for 6+ months, the resultant footage has been collaboratively edited and will form a gallery installation in December 2014.

Worth, S., Adair, J. (1997). Through Navajo Eyes. An Exploration in Film Communication and Anthropology. Revised edition. Albuquerque. University of New Mexico Press.

Still: TB 2012

 The next presentation is with Tom Tlalim, 10.30am, Friday 13th December 2013 in MRB Screen 3.

Documentary - Intimacy - Migration

Marianne Hougen-Moraga,  Friday 11th October

My research takes its point of departure in my own film-project, which focuses on migration and long distance relationships (including all kinds of relationships from couples to parent-child relationships) and how the feeling of longing for someone and eventually somewhere creates another kind of long-distance intimacy than when being together.

By looking on my own moving image practice, I explore how I can achieve an audiovisual intimate aesthetic through different kinds of approaches as e.g. a confessional approach, close-ups and recorded conversations done on video calls by the characters themselves.

I am recording with four characters and aim at recording with at least five more. The recordings are planned to end up as a one hour non-fiction film.

Film as an Archive for Still Images: strategies for activating colonial memory

Miranda Pennell, Friday 31st May

My research explores the possibilities of film as an archive for assembling and animating colonial still images.  I hope to show how the merging of still and moving images bears on the perception of time and of history, collapsing the disconnections and separations that enable the colonial past to be kept at a safe distance. My research proposes a formal means for inviting the colonial past to be felt in the postcolonial present. 

For this session I shall look at some of the ways the archive has been theorised.  My current practice re-organizes the visual archive of the Anglo Iranian Oil Company (BP). One of my immediate aims is to unravel the colonial construction of ‘Iran’, and of the British subject,  and to engage alternative readings of the company’s historical narrative. What are the techniques of seeing and knowing the world produced by the archive?  By which methods can these be grasped? And what kinds of knowledge or experience might a moving counter-archive hope to produce?

I will present a number of sequences from my film-in-progress, each sequence constructed either from an album of official company images or from the personal album of an employee. Each sequence seems to elaborate a way of seeing and of knowing the world. My film will act as an accumulation of different orders of such image-series, which I rework and reframe with other elements, including sound and voice-over.

*** Next meeting will be Friday 12th July 

AVPhD Group member's participation in Sheffield Fringe 14-15 June

Sheffield Fringe programme announced including "Urban Observations: In and Around Istanbul" curated by November Paynter with films by Köken Ergun, Didem Pekün, Annika Eriksson, Halil Altındere, Esra Ersen.
Saturday, June 15 at 12.00

http://goo.gl/yGe4W

Also showing Amanda Mc Dowell & Jennifer Fearnley's  programme in tribute to Michael Grigsby. Living on the Edge (1987) reveals the impact of the Thatcher era on three families, counterbalancing the exuberant Sheffield Media Unit archive (1984-89).


Saturday, June 15 at 4.30 pm

FLAMIN artist Charlotte Ginsborg’s Over the Bones launches Sheffield Fringe 2013, as the opening salvo of a curatorial mix tape that positions artists’ film as musical, selected by Minou Norouzi.
Friday, June 14 at 6.00 pm

Full programme details: sheffieldfringe.com
Image: Didem Pekün, "Of Dice & Men," 2013

OBJECT DOCUMENTARY: EVERYTHING

Project Title: Object Documentary

Minou Norouzi, April 2013

Through literary adaptation of Everything, a short story by Ingeborg Bachmann, using only personal archive and through themed curatorial presentations at Sheffield Fringe, this PhD by Practice research project titled Object Documentary surveys the relationship of contemporary artists working with documentary material today. The project questions what the ethical implications are of using actuality as object. It tries to keep an open, critical perspective on the positioning of documentary as material in art production - rather than simply as a genre as in film practice.

It investigates how far the ‘creative use’ of actuality can be taken in this context.

Looking at specific contemporary examples, including my own objectifying practice, the project also examines the relationship between audience and maker, placing audience interests and drives against the drive of artists.

The project occupies an intentionally oppositional space. Looking at deliberately questionable ethical practices, the project asks when and how it might be useful to objectify. 

minounorouzi.com

sheffieldfringe.com

Minou Norouzi, 'Everything', 2013. video still 

Of dice and men; production of subjectivity as reflected on essay film

Of dice and men; production of subjectivity as reflected on essay film

Presentation by Didem Pekun, 8 March 2013

On this session I will be presenting the introductory chapter of my practice-based PhD, which embarks from previous works and outlines the reasons for my positionality. 
The current project focuses on essay film and how it functions, if at all, as a platform for production of subjectivity. 

Text circulated:

Guattari, Felix "Subjectivities; for Better or Worse" in 'The Guattari Reader' ed. Gary Genosko, London: Blackwell Publishing, 1996: 193-204 

* The next meeting will take place on the 10th of May and Minou Norouzi will be presenting her work. 

Cross institutional presentation at "Poetics and Politics of Documentary Film" in Finland

The AVPhD Group will be participating and presenting a cross-institutional panel to the Research Symposium: Poetics and Politics of Documentary Film - Building Bridges between the Theory and Practice of Documentary Film  

April 22 - 24, 2013 Aalto University, ARTS, ELO Helsinki Film School, Finland

The Aalto University ELO Helsinki Film School (Department of Film, Television and Scenography, School of Arts, Design and Architecture) will host a symposium on the relationship between theory and practice in documentary film. The objective of the symposium is to build bridges between the practice and theory of documentary film.  The symposium seeks to find ways to “theorize within” film instead of “theorizing about” it. Theory can be understood as an active tool in catalyzing the new politics and poetics in the practice of documentary filmmaking.

http://sensate.tumblr.com/post/36586627091/research-symposium-poetics-and-politics-of-documentary

Theorising Practice, Practicing Theory

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CALL FOR PAPERS

Theorising Practice, Practicing Theory

A postgraduate training workshop

Tuesday April 23rd, 2013

Hosted by the Centre for Research in Film and Audiovisual Cultures and the Media, Culture & Language Forum at the University of Roehampton in London.

This postgraduate-led training event will explore practice-as-research and contemporary conceptions of the relationship between practice and theory in screen media studies (and related disciplines). Bringing together scholars and postgraduate students who are conducting, supervising and examining practice-as-research projects, this workshop will also serve to build and strengthen a network of scholar-practitioners.

Drawing on the experience of some of the leaders in the field, we will explore how the practice-as-research landscape is developing. Eight years after the launch of the AHRC-funded AVPhD (audiovisual PhD) initiative, what have we learned?

What are some of the common issues faced and approaches being taken? How do artistic and academic aims clash or converge; how are creative and critical concerns balanced? What other disciplines are we drawing from and what theoretical and methodological frameworks are we using? How do we understand audiovisual practice in a research context as distinct from other kinds of audiovisual practice?

We invite 20-minute paper proposals from postgraduates and researchers at all levels who are engaged in audiovisual practice-as-research. Please submit 300 word abstracts and a short biographical note to Holly Giesman at holly.giesman@roehampton.ac.uk by March 18th, 2013. 

Performing Documents Conference at Bristol University

Four members of the AVPhD Group (Heidi Hasbrouck, Amanda McDowell, Marianne Hougen Moraga and Didem Pekun) will be participating in the Performing Documents conference which will be held in Bristol University, 12-14 April 2013. The participation takes the form of a panel titled 'Performing the Self' and will be chaired by Dr. Tony Dowmunt. 

Performing Documents is a major collaborative research project which asks how we are dealing with the remains of Live Art today. Drawing on creative, curatorial and research strategies, this project stages a wide-reaching investigation into the problems and potential of performance and its documents. It will comprise a series of public events in 2012, culminating in a large-scale conference and exhibitionat Arnolfini in 2013.

http://www.bristol.ac.uk/arts/research/performing-documents/

Picturing live war: frame, language, and technology by Sabine El Chamaa

The 8th of February 2013 meeting was a presentation by Sabine El Chamaa.

Abstract:

This practice-based PhD analyses 24/7 live war media coverage from the perspective of a citizen residing inside a city being bombed, by means of a film-based installation and a theoretical text. The argument of the text is that, intrinsic to the experience of contemporary wars waged by the US and its allies in the Middle East, there exists a space of co-liveness that remains absent from the scholarship that is critical of the rise of live war as ‘spectacle’. I have defined co-liveness, as the space inhabited by a citizen who is not involved in war in the function of a fighter, living the bombing of the city as both an embodied experience, as well as a mediatized live image. The research reveals the manner in which this embodied space, which is potentially political and ethical is made invisible by analyzing the rise of liveness (Telstar, 1961), and the politics of its framing where notions of peace and democracy are introduced as inextricably linked to the advancement of satellite technologies that enable the visibility of history in the ‘now’. Subsequent live war coverage (The first Gulf war in 1991 and the Iraq war in 2003 on CNN) equally formulate the confines of what can be considered “live” and “democratic” and thus “human” within a technological framework which consistently affirms the power of those who can bomb and film due to access to an aerial point of view/ of control. The practice component of the research is an installation where audio-visual, pictorial, and textual elements represent various “types” of frames that question the inherent limitations of any representation of war. In a playful and interactive space that refuses the notion of the “untouchable and museumized war images” no trajectory or map is provided. The public is asked to share their impressions in a round table discussion where co-presence lends to a renewed reading of the elements on display.

Mini Bio:

Sabine El Chamaa is a Lebanese Writer/Director, currently in her last year as an Audio-Visual Phd candidate. 

* The following meeting will take place on the 8th of March and Didem Pekun will be presenting her work. 

Women's madness, transgenerational haunting and performative practice

Amanda McDowell, Friday 11th January 2013: 


“When an unspeakable or uncertain history, both personal and collective, takes the form of a ghost it searches for bodies through which to speak” (Grace Cho, 2008: 25)

My work explores the relationship between transgenerational haunting and women's experience of the psychiatric institution, taking inspiration from Grace Cho's book 'Haunting the Korean Diaspora'.

My presentation starts with a clip from a documentary made with my mum in 2009 about her experiences of psychiatric treatment. This is followed by a few short clips of material shot in places which have significance in my own 'mad' narratives. Using Cho as a methodological guide, I am moving away from linear narrative and bringing personal and institutional archive together, searching for ways to express the affective relations between generations of women treated within the institution of Psychiatry.

Suggested reading:

Cho, G. & Hosu, K (2005) Dreaming in Tongues Qualitative Inquiry, Vol. 11 No. 3 pp. 445-457

** The next meeting will be on the 8th of February and Sabine El Chamaa will be presenting her work.