Mobile narratives by Carey Scheer

With a keynote by Craig Hight, an associate professor at the Screen and Media Studies Department of the University of Waikato (NZ) and an expert in the fields of documentary theory and practice, documentary hybrids and digital cultures, the organizers could not have chosen a better scholar to open the event. With his talk on “Video-making, photographic evidence and software culture.”  Hight provided a comprehensive theoretical framework for MINA 2015.

One of the key questions that ran like a common thread through his presentation focused on what mobile video-making might mean in the digital era. By drawing our attention to the role of software and its all-permeating status within our digital culture, he highlighted the translation of practice into code. As new ways to create unique media experiences for users, the processes of automation, simulation, augmentation, and transformation offer a wide spectrum of choices for today’s media makers. However, Hight also pointed out that these embedded logics of coding, though enabling the users to perform, gradually take away their agency, most of the time without them noticing. With applications fostering specific default practices, templates offering a given hierarchy and the automatic collection of metadata, the nature of video becomes that of an information stream and our practices are increasingly informed by normative sets of values built in to the code.

Software and automation are not neutral: photo applications tell us what a “good” picture should look like, our data is used for mining and surveillance. In this post-photographic era, thus, software literacy becomes one of the most crucial assets for our media practices. To conclude his talk, Hight drew on the example of WITNESS – a New York-based human rights organisation (https://witness.org/) – to highlight the importance of software proficiency: If you want to use your camera to capture evidence you need to know about the politics and ethics of data practices, be strategic about what you do with your data and develop a critical capacity towards understanding which practices are enabled or disabled by the code. Only then, media users will be able to make an informed choice about which application to use.

After some mingling around tea and biscuits during the morning break, the first two sections on textuality and media production featured speakers as Tasmanian based sociologist Ashlin Lee who shared his findings about his Ph.D research project on “Negotiating Informatic Surveillance Risks in Everyday Life.” Following the keynote’s line of argument of privacy, surveillance, and data implications, Ashlin highlighted media illiteracy and an alarming state of unconcern amongst his participants when interviewed about their mobile phone and social network practices. Mobile filmmaking pioneer and professor for Media and Communications at Universidad Santiago de Cali in Colombia, Felipe Cardona, then, went on to offer a more positive outlook on mobile technology when he shared his experience on working with social media in a collaborative audiovisual workflow. His examples pointed towards the emerging range of possibilities for filmmakers to collaborate globally on low-budget scales to create meaningful “cultural audiovisuals”.

© Sabine Gabriela Fritsch.

In the afternoon, one of MINA’s co-founders Max Schleser joined us via Hangouts to report back on the history of MINA and how the network had been growing. While the background of the symposium has come out of academia, there has been a focused effort to be open and connected to innovative artists and industry; the organisation finds value in getting diverse people into a room to learn from each other.

“In New Zealand we talk about ‘whānau,’ Schleser says, inspired by the Maori language in New Zealand. With MINA he feels a sense of whānau, of a multi-layered and dynamic sense of collective family, of a spiritual dimension layered upon a family tree or community.

During the session on education, Melbourne-based documentary designer and producer Seth Keen talked about his experience teaching a mobile videography studio at RMIT University. Focusing on the design method of video-sketching, the studio’s aim was to explore ways of practices that are not superimposed on the web environment but rather reflect its specific characteristics. Following this experimental approach, the students were able to openly engage with notions of repetition, seriality and the void to embrace a more speculative design process in which they would discover unforeseen potentials and possibilities which sometimes turned out to be more alive and unique than a polished completed work.

The program went on with a section on Hybrid Art featuring Patrick Kelly’s talk on “Instamoji and Everyday Remix Art Practices” in which he reflected on the practice of blending emoji characters with photographs to customize images and generate new meanings and contexts for cultural artifacts in the process. Then, New Zealand illustrator, concept designer, and writer Thaw Naing presented his “metamuseum,” a transmedia storytelling project which uses the website-based fictional Noble and Paige Museum (TNAPmuseum.org) as well as a mobile-device-driven ARG treasure hunt to promote a reading culture and encourage the audience to playfully engage with classic literature.

At the screening we began to see specific mobile aesthetics emerging. In sensory ethnography in anthropology, as well as in creative practice, there’s a context and presupposition within the relationships between the segments inside the research paradigm. “With creative practice, like with the films in the screening, there’s an emphasis on expressions of research as a methodology,” says Berry. Various films showcased this.

Some films explored the uses of cultural visual aesthetic normatives. Certain shots and edits that used to be avant-garde in mobile filmmaking, have now become norms due to technology and forming of a cultural visual aesthetic. For example, when relaying humour for a specific scene, many filmmakers will speed up characters in both the video and in the higher-pitched audio. We also saw perspective used as a new way to tell a story, such as in the film The Life & Death of an iPhone.