Narrative, Memory, and New Technologies
Submitted by Colleen Kaman on October 25, 2008 - 5:27pm.
I spend a fair amount of time thinking about the documentary form and its relationship to narrative, history, time, and memory. This stems in part from working in documentary for a number of years and trying to balance the the desire to tell meaningful stories about political and social issues in ways that are visual and inventive.
I’ll have more to say about the truth and narrative moving forward but really want to share a few links that have gotten me thinking in the last few weeks.
PostSecret is an ongoing art project in which people mail on things (anything - postcards, Starbucks cups, dollar bills, helium balloons…) revealing a secret. I’ve loved this project since I learned about it a few years ago but I just learned that users are starting to put postcards of their secrets into the PostSecret books for sale at the bookstores for others to find. I love the idea that new technologies are allowing people to connect with complete strangers in such amazing ways.
Also PostSecret has inspired one fan to start a related site called Ifoundyourcamera that reunites lost photos with their owners. As a longtime collector of lost photos, I’ve always wondered what happened to their owners… soon I might find out.
The WhaleHunt Wander around. It’s fun.
Lincoln Schatz mixes and overlaps recorded visual images with real time video onscreen. His work relies on viewers to supply the narrative. Documentary looks at people/issues/subjects at a fixed moment in time; I like that this piece challenges this notion.
Gregory Chantonsky's work L’attente/The Waiting, a project that is part of a series called “Flußgeist”, the “spirit of the flow” that combines twitter posts with Flickr photos whose tags match keywords in the tweets, as well as an ambient soundtrack from Odeo and video footage. I learned about this work from Jean Burgess's blog so I’ll pull a few lines from her: "The overall effect is quiet and beautiful, of course, and it’s a nice comment on the ambient intimacy we are learning to associate with twitter. I think it is also doing something in the way of reflecting on the very different ways of being together-but-apart that the experience of sharing space in cities brings with it - the intimacy of strangers, maybe; it invites us to consider the slight frisson associated with observing the ‘private’ moments of others in a ‘public’ place."
Reactions? Thoughts?
Ambient intimacy
Colleen, your posting is provocative and well worth pursuing. I am intrigued most of all by the last work you are discussing, including the notion of "ambient intimacy" from twitter. Are we creating connections and a "community" when we have people following each other in twitter, or is it some sort of strange false sense of connection that is a delusional substitute for real relationships? I am haunted here by the difference between voyeur/bystander and the person who is civically or personally engaged. Would a twitter follower save you if you reported you were in trouble? Send you money? How does this work when the stranger becomes a friendly participant in your comings and goings? How far can you lean on that follower?
Great work, keep it up
Great work, keep it up Colleen. I love returning back to this site and reading the quality content you always have on offer.
narrative, memory, and history
In my opinion, the thing that new technologies has most-neglected--and especially regarding narrative and memory--is history. Think of all that is lost in house fires, floods, and collapsing city archive buildings. It is in these archives, and in libraries and various other first-world archives, that the collective human narrative remains at risk of being destroyed and lost forever. Perhaps it may be beneficial to look backward a bit as we look forward at the future of Civic Media. Maybe history has a place in one of these projects, or in a project of its own.
PostSecret - Greate project!
Could not stop myself from reacting! Thnx Colleen.
Really interesting projects especially PostSecret.
PostSecret is quite
PostSecret is quite interesting.
Post new comment