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. 

The American Waitress: (Re)producing the Icon - A performative presentation by Heidi Hasbrouck

“Can I getcha some coffee with that?”

Placing myself as the central figure in my fieldwork, I set out to address the political economy of the iconography of the American Diner waitress and how it produces and reproduces her affective, precarious labour.  Through a combination of performance, lecture and documentary footage I will relate, play, recreate, critique and affect my audience/customers' understanding of the icon and our labour.  I aim to reveal the feedback loop that exists between the iconography and narrative associated with the affective labour of waitressing and how that then feeds back into waitress' identity formation. Through integrating performance and documentary filmmaking into my research I attempt to affect the narrative of the icon with new sticky ideas, reveal it's power and find ways of re-appropriating its power back into the hands of the workers from which it demands.

Heidi Hasbrouck - BIO

Along with currently being a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths Centre for Cultural Studies, Heidi Hasbrouck is a practicing filmmaker, performer and lecturer in London.  Heidi moved to London after years of precarious work in the restaurant industry in the US to pursue an MA in Screen Documentary at Goldsmiths and somehow never left.  Her research primarily pulls from a feminist Marxist tradition particularly American, British and Italian feminist critiques of work, feminine labour, precarious labour, and affective labour.  Her research interests also include her background in media including identity politics, media representations and nostalgia in American culture.

The next meeting is scheduled to the 11th January 2013 when Amanda McDowell will be presenting.    

http://soundcloud.com/audiovisualphd/tas008-0508

Practice Theory Schism? A group discussion

A discussion on the relationship of art and theory in our work. 

The discussion was led by Tom Tlalim who gave a short introduction of the texts, and screened his film 'Being a Border | 5.11.75'.
 
'Being a Border | 5.11.75' uses a scene from a film by Tlalim's father (Asher Tlalim) titled 'Jerusalem 22.4.75'. In the original work, his father and mother are filmed on set, just days before his birth, futilely trying to reach some form of communication, while his father is the director and his mother acting as a war widow. Tom Tlalim employs digital manipulations on the images and sound in order to undo some of the the signifying content of the family archive. He uses methods such as removing spoken voices and leaving only translation, erasing and cutting up the image, deleting the parents' silhouettes, as well as collapsing and juxtaposing materials from different points in the film, so that they tell the story about the conflict in their relationship, which becomes a model for negotiation of practice and theory.

Reading material were:
- 'Art and Philosophy' (1st chapter in Badiou's Handbook of Inaesthetics)
http://tinyurl.com/dxeehor
- 'A Whited Sepulchre: Autobiographical film/video as practise/research' by Tony Dowmunt
http://eprints.gold.ac.uk/2129/
- 'The 3rd Mind' by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin
http://tinyurl.com/bug2ntu

Guiding questions:
- What is the relationship between practice and theory in your own PhD work?
- Do you write about your art practice, or rather is your practice is driven or motivated by the writing?
- Or, do you separate the theoretical part from the practice component?
- Or how do you see the dialogue between the practise and theory in your PhD. "

* This is a recording of the discussion part only. unfortunately, the introduction file was corrupted.
** The texts can be obtained online, from the authors or from library resources, not attaching for copyright reasons.
*** This session took place on the 9th of November.
**** The next meeting will be on the 7th of December.