On the Road: Flaherty 1997
1998; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 25; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1543-3404
Autores Tópico(s)Digital Games and Media
ResumoLast October, mediamakers, critics, academics, programmers and activists converged at Ithaca College for in Memory and Modernity, a new kind of Robert Flaherty Seminar. Neither a film festival nor an academic conference, Flaherty Seminar was, for 43 years, usually programmed as a week long retreat in upstate New York. But this year board of directors changed structure of event. The result is Flaherty On Road initiative, a series of five weekend seminars designed to develop new audiences in various regions of country, providing professional networking opportunities within national independent media field. To do one event per year doesn't give us same amount of visibility and outreach to make programs more accessible to a greater number of people, said Michelle Materre, Executive Director of International Film Seminars (the official sponsor of Flaherty Seminars) and co-programmer of Ithaca event. When funders are looking at how many people you reach, it's important to offer your service in such a way that people partake of it, which consequently validates your need to exist. The other part was to collaborate with other institutions around country. We shared our resources and expenses were kept low. The first of these On Road seminars was Gender Dichotomies and Social Spectacles, held at Wexner Center for Arts in Columbus, Ohio on April 5. The program reflected Flaherty Seminar's historic support of and interest in regional film and video and was co-sponsored by Ohio Valley Regional Media Action Coalition. On August 6-7, Animated Images: An Exploration in Multicultural Talent was sponsored by Sony's Corporate Affairs Department and presented at Sony Music in New York City. The City College of New York, in conjunction with Aaron Davis Hall, hosted Documenting Community on October 17-18. Passin' It On: The Documentary Across Generations was designed in collaboration with Department of Performing and Creative Arts at College of Staten Island. The event, held November 7-8, highlighted mentoring of Alonzo Speight and Tami Gold, well-known teachers of film and video. A unique aspect of Ithaca seminar was 24-hour Digital Salon, an international project curated by myself and 14 other artists, scholars and activists from all over globe. It featured over 200 web sites and CD-ROMs that explored memory, modernity and reclamation of digitality as public space. Featured multimedia artist Pamela Jennings's CD-ROM project, Solitaire: dream journal (1996) mixes metaphor of game board and book. Solitaire takes user through a haunting journey on a quest for peace with.one's self and with others. The CD-ROM uses a three-dimensional solitaire game as engine to move through this journey. Solitaire relies heavily upon narrative structures of non-Western culture, specifically theories and processes of African oral literature, which provide groundwork for Solitaire's narrative model. The solitaire board is a tetrahedral (a three-faced pyramid), its three faces corresponding to thematic areas of flight and A move made on one side of this pyramid will randomly open up a chapter of corresponding book: the book of melancholy, the book of flight, or the book of balance. The idea is to see how many pages you can access. The better your strategy, more chapters you will be able to enter and explore. First World Order Project Development (1997), a CD-ROM and web site by Philip Mallory Jones, aims at exploring cultures of African Diaspora and at communicating their common, often encoded, knowledge in a way that cuts across cultural barriers. The project illuminates a complex global diaspora, originating in Africa, but transcending race and ethnicity, which is defined in terms of modes of expression, paradigms of perception and systems of symbolic communication. …
Referência(s)