MULTIPERSPECTIVE
EXPERIMENT TWO – DIGITAL MEMORY AND STORYTELLING
Nowdays we have devices of «digital memory» (Clipnarrative, Mecam…etc) that offer us the possibility of storage our daily live for an affordable price and little effort.
I´m really interesting in all the questions that this fact open about a possible future where we can rewind our memory everytime we need and the consequences of this permanent digital memory. We know that the act of remembering is as important as the act of forgetting (We need both in order to have a healthy mind). But beyond this questions I want to use this devices in order to experiment with multiperspective narrative, memory narrative and digital visualization of forgetting.
I´ve been thinking about create the following exercise (this is an idea in development).
1. Four people are asked to use for one day this tiny camera.
2. These four people have to be a group (friends, family etc) who are going to be part or attend to the same event that day.
3. The event should be a meaningful event for that group. Of course the most interesting the event and the group of people are the more interesting will be the exercise. So this is a very important point, but I need time to think and research about it.
4. Days after the event they will be asked about what they remember about that day (They will be asked to try to remember everything hour per hour).Their memories will be recorded.
5. The memories of each person will be check with the image they recorded.
6. The image will be distort through a process called «Databending» creating an effect called «Wordpad Effect». This software disrupt, intentionally, the information contained within a file. The level of distorsion in the image will be directly proportional to the level of forgetting in their memories. So if certain moment is remebered by the person very well the image will be very clear without «Wordpad effect». In the case a moment is forgotten the image will be highly distorsionated by this effect.
7. I will try to recreate that day an their experience mixing togueter all their memories within an Spatial Montage, where we can see and hear different interpretations of the same day and verify their memories. I think I can create an interesting exercise with all these elements but I have to think more about it. So…
To be continued…
LEV MANOVICH’S SPATIAL MONTAGE, DEANN BORSHAY LIEM, GEOPOLITICS AND CULTURAL IDENTITY
What resonated most for me within Manovich’s chapter “The New Language of Cinema”, and which relates to our ‘space-time’ theme, is his discussion of the spatial montage. He cites cultural geographer Edward Soja in prefacing the renewed interest in spatial montage, stating that “…it is only in the last decades of the twentieth century that this mode has made a powerful comeback, as exemplified by the growing importance of such concepts as “geopolitics” and “globalization” as well as by the key role that analysis of space plays in the theories of postmodernism” (323). I’d like to briefly explore filmmaker Deann Borshay Liem as emblematic of this particular claim, specifically drawing on her film In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee (2009). Deann becomes a integral player in this kind of wave of spatial montage (or experimentation with such within the documentary filmic form) in a service to a geopolitical analysis of her identity as a Asian transnational adoptee. The film serves as a sequel to her first autobiographical documentary First Person Plural(1999), and takes us on her journey back to South Korea to find the girl Cha Jung Hee who she replaced years ago at the orphanage and whose identity she has assumed throughout her adolescence. Deann’s personal exploration and journey becomes a story about a collective, historically-infused experience of transnational exchange that stems from neocolonial economics and politics from the 1940s onward between South Korea and the United States. She takes up the use of spatial montage within her documentary in order to provide a visibility as well as spatiotemporal simultaneity to the different identities that she has simultaneously assumed her entire life.