Documentary As an Open Space

6.1 Documentary as an Open Space

HELEN DE MICHIEL AND PATRICIA R. ZIMMERMANN

By the first decade of the twenty-first century documentary, it migrated into documentary.3 The emergence of new media can be argued, was undergoing a profound change in its direc- and new platforms, such as Web 2.0, social media, Wikis, tion of travel. The rhetoric surrounding the use of moving images remix technologies and amateurisation of media tools as a tool of social action was acquiring a fresh lease of life. The have contributed partially and incrementally to these notion of the socially engaged documentary was not, of itself, changes and recalibrations of the documentary project.4 new, but now, in the post-Griersonian era, the very idea of the But technology can account for only part of these quite ‘documentarist’ as a species of professional communicator was significant shifts – and does not sustain sufficient explana- being called into question more comprehensively than ever tory models. In the current era, a perfect storm of social, before. cultural, aesthetic and economic recalibrations has also mobilised the emergence of new forms of open space NEXT documentary. Resources to support long-form documen- The coordinates and practices of documentary have shifted taries across the globe have either been expunged or dramatically in the last decade – and now require our criti- diminished.5 Interrogations into documentary ethics in cal attention to rethink how we consider and reframe the relation to the active agency of subjects have accelerated in documentary project for the twenty-first century. the context of social media virality in Iran and Eqypt, China This chapter provides some initial theorisations and and Indonesia.6 Documentary forms that foreclose space case studies mapping an approach to emergent documen- for community engagement and collaboration have been tary forms across the analogue, the digital and the embod- critiqued as remnants of one-way communication and ied we call ‘open space’ documentary. To open more control not only by international activist organisations and dialogue and debate, this chapter threads through specula- non-governmental social media organisations, but also by tions on open space documentary, invoking and continuing communications scholars seeking to remap the connection the legacy of Dziga Vertov, an early theorist and practi- between technologies, representation and politics.7 tioner who also probed the nexus of new technologies, new Transnational political restructurings insist on the import- political configurations and new ways of considering the ance and urgency of the micro-local and its multiple map- audience and spectatorship.1 In homage to Vertov, our pings.8 All have functioned as key drivers – beyond new exploration and argument for open space documentary is technologies – of this shift to a more open and fluid form organised in sections, mixing theory, case studies and that holds the possibilities of opening space for convenings speculations. and dialogue. From the static, fixed objects of analogue film and These emerging documentary forms are developing video, documentary is now redefining itself as a fluid, col- beyond the status quo of long-form feature-length docu- laborative, shape-shifting, responsive environment for mentary – with their characters, narrative arcs and resol- encounters we call open space documentary.2 The spaces utions – designed for festivals and public television. These invoked in these works are open to many iterations, com- open space documentary projects move in more mobile, munities and engagements, rather than closed deductive flexible, public spaces characterised by indeterminancy, arguments. These significant changes in the documentary community and risk. New possibilities for combinatory ecology require a reconsideration of documentary theory story-telling are proliferating in spaces now enabled by dis- and practice, a shift from a text-centred criticality towards ruptive broadband, new media and mobile technologies.9 a nexus of technology, form, histories, community, politics, Community needs to map specific histories and stories convenings, collaborations, mobilities, movements and into spaces colonised by the state; corporate interests or strategies that have developed in performance art and environmental destruction also propel these new forms of community arts practices of the last decade and have documentary.

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The range of works this chapter groups as open space binaries through polyphonies and which creates mosaics documentaries include analogue short form, digital inter- of multiple lenses on issues.12 Open space documentary is faces for mosaic projects, user-generated projects, web where technologies meet places meet people. archives and locative media. Open space documentaries Documentary now assumes many forms and occupies deploy combinatory story-telling strategies embracing the many locations in the transnational media landscape. It local through community engagement, participatory moves across many platforms. It engages and builds media and user-produced histories across multiple plat- publics in myriad ways. It operates in fixed analogue forms forms that intermingle the digital and analogue with lived as well as in open, fluid, endlessly transforming digital social relations and places.10 Open space conceptions and forms and social-media iterations. If the documentary tri- mobilisations of community, collaboration, place and angle of subject, film-maker and audience formed a central migration across digital interfaces undergird the projects image for documentary studies, open space documentary described in the case studies below. These works – whether conceptualisations shift towards the documentary circle, video projects, websites, performances, or social media – where vectors are no longer straight lines of contact but open up with participation by people, places, ideas, endless circular engagements that change and open up change.11 The social is as important as the technological – discourse and spaces for action.13 a key distinction of open space documentaries that sepa- Although many open space projects work within the rates these works from the euphoria encircling many participatory promises of Web 2.0 interfaces, the works discussions of the relationships between the social/ discussed in this chapter reject the idea that these differ- political and new technologies. ent platforms are simply ways to trap the user/spectator Open space documentaries move among analogue and within a story-world conceived by the director or a cor- digital platforms, constantly adapting to engagement with porate media entity. Web 2.0 social media and networked participants and locales while migrating across transme- technologies such as Wikis, blogs, user-generated con- dia formations – from videos, to websites, to media events, tent, gaming, viral media, Facebook, Twitter, Second Life to dialogues, to archives, to performance. These open space have, of course, been effectively deployed for increasing documentaries extend documentary’s legacy of collabora- awareness of social justice issues, advocacy campaigns tive models into the present and the future. Although and critique.14 much of documentary history and theory heroicises indi- In these virtual worlds of utopian democratic fan- vidual authorship, an equally long tradition of collabora- tasies, images and ideas are easily captured, easily con- tive work exists, starting from Flaherty’s Nanook of the North sumed, easily circulated, easily erased in endless loops of (1922) and moving through the Workers Film and Photo record, process, delete. As Douglas Rushkoff has argued in Leagues of the 1930s, to George Stoney’s All My Babies (1953) Life Inc, social-media production is the new camouflaged and his Canadian Film Board work on You Are On Indian face of consumption, with this quasi-participatory mode Land (1969), to community media operations that started in part of the corporate chain creating marketing webs to the 70s and early 80s like Appalshop, Kartemquin, Third advance global capital.15 However, all of these more corpo- World Newsreel, Paper Tiger Television and the entire cable ratised, commodity-chain modalities function within a access movement in the USA since the late 70s. similar structural model of pushing out an idea and con- Open space documentary forms extend these legacies trolling its usage and circulation through the institution of and then explore these newly emerging spaces where tech- hierarchies of control, either in the form of argumentation, nologies are meeting places and people in new and unpre- positionality, or campaigns with predetermined actions dictable ways. Not simply one form or mode, open space and outcomes.16 Story-worlds, then, function as a form of documentaries chart a new, highly diverse, ecologically enclosure and linearity that is highly problematic politi- complex documentary space and landscape. Open space cally: they propel consumption and colonisation. documentary practice is reciprocal, human-scaled and We propose another form of documentary practice localised, reflective and multi-voiced: it is structured not as that we argue is equally significant, salient and powerful. a deductive, expository argument but as a shifting mosaic We have identified this form as the open space model of of ways to consider a concept or a place. documentary, where ideas of collaboration, micro- The coordinates of documentary have shifted from a territories, contingency, horizontality, bottom up, multiple quest for meaning, construing the text as a mysterious agency, decentralisation, migration across media platforms puzzle to be deciphered, into a more mobile and flexible and through different communities, permeability and environment of many technologies and vectors that open mutability are key. These different registers layer on each up to indeterminancy, community and risk. Documentary other, forming what we identify as a strategy of conceptual is not so reductively, in this open space model, about compost that creates new ways of thinking about docu- changing lives or establishing deductive rhetorical argu- mentary and engaging the social, the political and the ments, but about opening up complex dialogues that reject community.

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FROM KINO-PILOT TO KINO- he explains, produce multiple, complex, knowledges in a COLLABORATOR generative way that establish a ‘collective identity through a shared experience’.17 From director to convener and designer French theorist and art curator Nicolas Bourriaud, in From confrontation to collaboration his important book Relational Aesthetics, has also charted From characters to communities these new forms of participatory art based on encounters, From one to many contingency and collaboration that produce micro- From argument to exploration communities. He contends that each art work in this genre From story to stories is ‘a proposal to live in a shared world … giving rise to other From incantation to invitation relations’.18 Intersubjectivity and conviviality join together From fixed to permeable to form the machine provoking new encounters that create From closure to open micro-utopias. Proximity rather than distance is operative From pushing out to pulling in in this move from the visual to the tactile and the interac- From expository argument to mosaic constructions tive. Bourriaud contends that works produced in this way From the documentary triangle to the documentary produce a space of openness, a social interstice for possi- circle bilities. ‘Art … is no longer seeking to represent utopias; rather it is attempting to construct concrete spaces,’ claims RELATIONAL AESTHETICS Bourriaud.19 A relational aesthetics introduces the net- Our theoretical model of open space documentary invokes works of plurality into a work that extend beyond families, collaboration, multiple iterations, decentralisation and institutions and technologies; the emphasis here is on new migration across media platforms and through distinct arrangements of agency, ideas and space. A relational aes- communities. This theoretical framework – a way to under- thetics restores polyphony and ‘binds heterogeneous stand and locate how open space documentaries differ arenas together’.20 from traditional fixed analogue forms and present some These ideas of relational convenings, performative new possibilities for rethinking documentary theory – encounters, polyphony and engagement have also emerged engages relational aesthetics, collaborative public art in the World Social Forum and its debates about open space theory and landscape design theory. politics and praxis. Indian architect Jai Sen has forcefully Open space documentary presents a different routing argued that open space can be defined through its horizon- through representation of the real and trauma than more tality, uncertainty, transparency, networking, autonomy and traditional, analogue forms of documentary practice. In emergence. As Sen explains in his essay ‘On Open Space’, place of the politics of representation, it offers the politics open space is non-centralised, open-ended, indeterminate, of convenings. In place of artistic vision and hierarchies, it and adaptive, where simple convenings across difference offers collaboration and horizontality. In place of argu- lead to complexity.21 Interaction, exchange and reflexive ment, it offers dialogical conversation and contingencies. practice reconfigure existing networks through encounters In place of positions, it offers encounters. In place of the with multiple subjects with diverse interests. global and the national, it offers provisional micro- Open space serves as central organising concept in territories. In place of separations between analogue and urban planning, landscape design and architecture. Sen digital, it offers a wide palette of technologies, platforms, shows how international feminist movements, radical performances. In place of a fixed image as object, it offers India politics in the 1970s, Latin American liberation theol- fluidity, permeability, intersubjective exchanges, processes. ogy, Latin American magical realism, improvisational jazz Open space documentary has a long lineage in and 90s direct action have fused into open space practices. twentieth-century experimental arts, from Dada and In open space, uncertainty, indeterminacy, agency and futurist performances, to Fluxus happenings, conceptual chaos challenge enclosure. For Sen, open space does not art, minimalism, feminist art, art practices that required exist a priori, but must be constructed by people in face-to- the audience to activate the work. In his book Conversation face interactions in real spaces. Open space is always a Pieces, Grant Kester argues that a new form of practice has ‘struggle against enclosure’ and, thus, open space ‘moves emerged that refutes the individual artistry, shock-value, from being a noun to being a verb’.22 In this sense, open abstractions, ambiguities, privileged subject, specularity space is always about possibility and change in specific of modernism and postmodernism with an emphasis on places, and will look and feel different in different the everyday, accessibility and conviviality. Kester identi- locations, whether in the global north or the global south. fies these newly emerging, performative practices as a In the open space documentary project, we conceptu- ‘collaborative and dialogical model’, that catalyses the alise open space as that juncture where complexity and viewer into creative encounters and conversations where ambiguity meet participatory media through dialogue and the outcome is not predictable. These creative encounters, community in a provisional node. Media, then, are not

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objects or arguments, but instead are places for people to As a unique kind of Philadelphia neighbourhood advo- wander around in, a landscape of ideas, actions, networks, cacy project, Precious Places has developed an open space histories. It is a place where producers and subjects and documentary model where everyone on the creative team is audiences work together through dialogue in grounded generating content from a very special point of view that production, deploying a wide variety of tools and moving only emerges when something – like your home place – is at across many versions and iterations of a work that are end- stake and where retrieval of public memory is urgent. This lessly adapting. slow, local and democratic creative investigation offers an example of how to reroot new technologies in history, ethics, OPEN SPACE DOCUMENTARY: ordinary people and communities at risk of violence, pov- A JUSTIFICATION erty and social isolation from the mainstream. Precious Places reconfigures the documentary triangle 1. It restores human-scaled, localised, social agency in between film-maker, subject and audience as an open space new and unimagined ways. It invites new conversations circle of mutual concern and collaboration. To Badlands and and connects people. Back Again (2005), a short community video produced by the 2. It is a practice that drives people to convene in and pay Fair Hill Cemetery activist group as part this project, shows attention to real places, and to understand together how how a working partnership between Philadelphia Quakers to reclaim the pervasive social-media environment and concerned local African American and Latino residents from global corporatism. transformed an historic cemetery from a dumping ground 3. By reaching out to contributors across disciplines and for garbage into a safe green space for the community. generations, a media project, in multiple versions, can In this short video, sustainability and environmental live and evolve through expansive networks, com- issues are not white, middle-class greenwashing, but multi- munities and clusters beyond traditional distribution cultural, engaged political activism that produces visible channels. and usable changes in real places where people live and 4. It is a practice whereby media practitioners and work. Although important early feminist and anti-slavery exhibitors become context providers rather than content activists are buried there, this knowledge was lost; Fair Hill providers, creating scenarios that facilitate dialogue, par- had disintegrated into a haven for drug pushers and an eye- ticipation, collaboration, shared experience and inter- sore in the community. The Quakers and community groups connections across boundaries. worked together to clean up the cemetery, disposing of the 5. It is a practice grounded in micro-territories. refuse as well as the drugs and drug-dealers. In the project, 6. It is a practice of continual engagement between con- community members explain the landscape and drug- vener and participant. Practices of collaboration, contin- dealing clean-up process, and how they reclaimed the latent gency, horizontality, multiple agency, adaptability, histories of the cemetery. decentralisation, migration across media platforms and Precious Places shorts are produced by a wide, diverse through different communities, permeability and muta- range of organisations such as the African Cultural Art bility are central. Forum, the Community Leadership Institute, Mt Moriah Preservation Society, Germantown Historical Society, CASE STUDY: PRECIOUS PLACES Odunde and West Girard Community Council. The pieces Scribe Video Center’s community media and oral history focus on specific places that have significant historical, cul- project, Precious Places, an ongoing collaborative video anthol- tural, religious or political meaning for the residents who ogy of short documentaries inaugurated in 2005 to explore live there. Although aided by professional historians from the historical memories imbedded in public spaces, build- Philadelphia colleges and universities and with experienced ings, parks, street corners, churches and monuments, consti- video-makers as consultants, Precious Places was conceived tutes an imaginative and empowering example of open to document a particular place – a micro-territory – through space documentary. Scribe Video Center, started in 1982 and oral histories of residents as a response to a wide range of based in Philadelphia, is a non-profit media arts centre pro- development initiatives that can potentially destroy com- viding instruction in film, video, audio and digital media to munities and their histories. residents of Philadelphia, Camden and Chester. The short The Precious Places project, a mosaic of community inter- pieces produced in Precious Places over the years employ a action and places, moves documentary towards networked, realist documentary style of interviews and cutaways to collaborative interactions between neighbourhoods, places, places, with editing structures advancing storytelling as a film-makers and scholars who create new histories in an collective and active historical enterprise. Taken as a whole, open space design. As a result, Precious Places embodies the project sizzles with polyvocal vitality that counters polyvocalities and micro-histories as a way to reclaim and touristic propaganda promoting cities as places for high-end revitalise ideas about the archive, history and memory, a hotels, symphonies, theater and expensive restaurants. creation of open space at the micro-level.

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Precious Places is not conceived along the lines of a more traditional long-form documentary project, where a director researches an idea and then searches for archival material, informants and images to advance an argument, position or point of view. Rather than this top-down model of single authorial vision, Precious Places advances a collaborative eth- nographic and historical open space model, where community participants become the authors and not simply the subjects of community history. In Precious Places, development and sustainability are rethought from the perspective of communities, eminent domain, reclaiming parks and restoring lost histories to particular buildings or blocks. It provides a micro-history that zeroes in on public places, individuals as part of the fabric of a community who remake and rejuvenate these places Lunch Love Community (2010) started as a story of how the and spaces. For example, in Putting the ‘Nice’ Back in ‘the Town’ Berkeley, California community pioneered school lunch (2005), the Neighborhood Advisory Committee works to transformation restore the area. Precious Places extends the important legacies of collaborative community media by retelling the history of Lunch Love Community demonstrates how an open space Philadelphia from very specific locations, such as churches documentary model can create dialogue across divisions, that were part of the Underground Railroad, the Friends bring communities together and help build citizen action. It Housing Cooperative, a community garden call Las Parcelas, elaborates the traditions of well-crafted analogue documen- Mt Zion Baptist Church, or the Uptown Theatre. tary, yet also innovates with new digital and software appli- Precious Places materialises a powerful, eye-opening and cations. Lunch Love Community constitutes a mosaic of films collaborative open space response to diverse neighbour- about schools and food explicitly designed to be shown and hoods and the press of development that completely alters discussed in a variety of venues. The project depends on a how one might think about cities, their inhabitants and the continuous process of paying attention to, and engaging links between sustainable development and history. with, all the different communities coalescing around the subject of food reform. This endlessly fluid and responsive CASE STUDY: LUNCH LOVE COMMUNITY approach connects and engages an ever-expanding sphere In 1999, the Berkeley Unified School District created its of participants involved with schools and food. ground-breaking and influential food policy mandating a Lunch Love Community is mounted on a simple, user- goal to ‘provide nutritious, fresh, tasty, locally grown food friendly, inviting website. It features luscious and bold that reflects Berkeley’s cultural diversity … and ensure that imagery, clear descriptors and a minimum of visual clutter. the food served [in the schools] be organic to the maximum The story-telling approach invites viewers to open up to the extent possible’. It took ten years for the School Lunch subject, engage with it and form their own conclusions. The Initiative in Berkeley, California, to realise that dream. And short films can be watched both on the Lunch Love now, this Bay Area city is leading the national movement to Community website and on a designated YouTube channel eliminate childhood obesity and change the way children for download and embedding. The short films on school gar- eat. dens, cooking and parent advocacy for healthy food were Helen de Michiel23 produced documentary project, Lunch designed to be viewed on phones, tablets, laptops and in Love Community.24 It is designed as an open space documen- larger, more public exhibition venues. tary continual work-in-progress. It presents a multi-layered In the Lunch Love Community project, the films are not the story of how this determined community of cooks, educa- singular attraction. Instead, the films inhabit a context tors, parents, health advocates, politicians and food purvey- beyond their own textuality – the social web that is fluid, ors created a programme that offers fresh, homemade, impermanent and unstable but marked by connectivity and organic breakfast and lunch to all children in the public engagement with online visitors, users and live audiences. schools. Lunch Love Community weaves together media social events Lunch Love Community started as a story of how the and online activities to reach new users and engage larger Berkeley, California, community pioneered school lunch issues. By committing to flexibility, adaptability and atten- transformation. The short, five- to seven-minute-long films tion to viewers/users responses and requests, the project in the project deal with issues of food reform, health, com- operates within a process-orientation that moves outward munity sustainability and citizen-based democracy. from traditional documentary approaches. To balance the

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ephemeral and virtual nature of social media, Lunch Love Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act. For example, school Community designs public programmes called ‘media garden advocates have used The Whole World in a Small Seed socials’. These events connect the town hall to interactive (2010). Flamin’ Hot (2010) has been posted and discussed performance. While eating and taking away table literature, across the country and internationally. The Parent Factor and audiences become involved in the conversations and con- Feeding the Body Politic (both 2010) are used with Parent nections about food policy and schools that the films open Teacher Association groups motivated to go to Board of up. Education meetings and ask the tough questions about In this project, media socials emerge from relationships school food. built with individuals and organisations involved with food, The school lunch reform movement has expanded into nutrition and health. Lunch Love Community designers con- multiple directions – from the relationship to local agricul- tact community organisations, universities, parent groups ture and procurement infrastructure, to the youth-driven and arts exhibitors to collaborate with them on presenting a food justice movement, to changing community food sys- ninety-minute public event. The format is customised in tems in a climate-changing world. The Lunch Love Community collaboration with these local groups to activate public transmedia project demonstrates how open space docu- gatherings around food, nutrition and health issues. Local mentary models link issues with communities through stra- experts frame a ten- to fifteen-minute discussion following tegic use of dynamic transmedia platforms. one of the short films. Discussions have dealt with the process, politics, educational impact or systemic issues of CASE STUDY: SAVING THE SIERRA: VOICES school lunch reform. Speakers and audience participation OF CONSERVATION IN ACTION adds depth to and extends the film stories. Audiences com- Saving the Sierra is an ambitious three-year multi-media ment, question, argue and offer solutions, while the hosting project created and developed by public radio producer organisations hand out printed resource materials from Catherine Stifter and community organiser jesikah maria groups such as the Center for EcoLiteracy or other local ross.25 Its purpose has been to co-create, along with people nutrition-related organisations. living in the communities of the Sierra Mountain Range in The Lunch Love Community films, online distribution California, a set of communication platforms where resi- process and live public events integrate work as open space dents could talk to each other about the issues that affect documentary. In this transmedia model, the film-maker is a them. It was also designed to reach out to urban people convener, creating stimulating encounters among people outside the region to deepen understanding of what is hap- and places, ideas and new technologies. For food system pening across this extraordinary biosphere – from water reform advocates, parent groups, health educators, school issues to rural poverty, land pressures and development, administrators and community food policy councils, the conservation and agriculture, history and cultural Lunch Love Community films are ‘media tools’ to be spread memory. around the internet and screened in public settings. The Sierra mountain range area is 400 miles long and A key open space strategy, Lunch Love Community has eighty miles wide with only 2 million residents. How could established connections with potential partners to host and this team pull together a project that would represent this hold community-based media socials, training individuals immense place and give voice to its inhabitants that would how to use the films in a variety of educational environ- be authentic to their experiences and influence policy out- ments, educating them around the innovative use of media side the region? It started with conversations, story-telling to support their objectives, and how to host convenings and building relationships first, before any media products where participants leave inspired for future actions. The were developed or created. media social events not only serve to locate food issues Stifter and ross started their own collaboration by within communities, but also refresh and boost the social- understanding what their different skills could contribute media components of Lunch Love Community. to the project. Then, during this first year, came the process Since Lunch Love Community inhabits a dynamic, always of social networking, both through old-fashioned face-to- moving online stream, these short films work with different face community organising and through internet-based constituencies. While one film might connect with those outreach. They found and invited local non-profit conser- working on food policy issues, another might be reposted on vation organisations to become partners in the project. a nutrition website. Some of the shorts have been posted on They held meetings with people across the region to under- Twitter feeds and Facebook pages advocating for children’s stand what the issues were and what the stories were that health and diet issues, food justice and the economy, or people had to tell. When they secured initial funding, they local citizen calls-to-action. The Lunch Love Community created mobile audio ‘story-booth’ vehicles, manned by vol- monthly e-newsletter connects readers to current events in unteers, that travelled the length of the Sierras and col- the news cycle like health and education news, and updates lected the personal stories of people across the mountains, on or op-eds about legislation like the Farm Bill and the starting off by inviting people to talk about the Sierra places

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they love. With more than a hundred stories recorded, they This open archive conceives history as a network of created this website that collected and organised the audio associations, rather than a linear story. It is built as a stories into a database-driven mapping interface. It was horizontal internet-based open space that invites citizen designed to include user-generated content, from news of historians to contribute images of ephemera, mementoes, the area to ways for community members to get involved photographs, film clips or writings directly or tangentially and participate in this and other Sierra-related environ- related to the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in lower mental projects. The team built the interface so all the Manhattan in New York City. It widens the pathways material could be shared and repurposed by visitors and between the past and the present. users. All of this groundwork and public engagement took A photograph or a news clip can trigger a question that place before they began producing their centrepiece expands into a narrative travelling across decades. From a national radio documentary. group photo: why does Triangle Fire survivor and anarchist It was a challenging project for the producers. They were Mary Domsky live in exile in Mexico in the 1930s? From a committed to trusting an open space technique of docu- staged portrait and family commentary: how do the living mentary engagement. It started with a wide-ranging partic- descendants of teenage factory seamstress and Triangle Fire ipatory process before any media was produced. People’s victim Rosie Weiner keep her memory alive as a real girl stories were freely posted online as contributions to a multi- with hopes and dreams? From multiple video clips, art facetted dialogue, spurring and opening up conservation in works and news items: what can this 1911 labour tragedy the Sierras. The producers’ intention was to bridge people signify a hundred years later in the global struggle to protect and the dynamic new media forms, while co-existing in this worker and immigrant rights – especially those of the most newly emerging public media sphere. By opening up the vulnerable in the workplace – women? media-making process to citizens in the Sierra communi- The project developed from a collaboration between the ties, Catherine and jesikah were able to build identity and Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition and Buscada for the engagement around the project, draw in more participants hundredth year memorial of the fire. The Triangle Fire Open and, most importantly, develop the capacity of organisations Archive is simple and straightforward – a visitor can easily and individuals to integrate this media for their own pur- click through an expanding collection of digital entries that poses: on their own websites, in meetings, in newsletters, at project creators call ‘objects’, and explore new patterns and events and share the media through their own social net- entry points towards understanding history through ances- working platforms. tral, political, cultural and emotional associations. Gabrielle When they were ready to produce the national radio Bendiner-Viani and Kaushik Panchal formed their interdisci- documentary, in the second year of the project, they knew plinary creative practice, Buscada, to bring together ‘place their subject would be the hyper-local, rural responses to and dialogue’ across communities and disciplines, through the urban development pressures being placed on the a variety of place-based and online public projects. They call mountain range. How were local people working to conserve the Triangle Fire Open Archive a ‘people’s archive’ because it their environment at the dirt level? By the time the docu- encourages anyone who might want to contribute – a text, mentary was created, Stifter and ross had established a an image, media or physical pieces – to copy it digitally and mosaic of voices giving a rich and detailed portrait of the upload it, along with a comment or personal note about its issues. They created a living archive for activists and significance. researchers to return to and reuse. And they awakened indi- This archive is not locked up: it is always open for access viduals and organisations throughout California about the and activity by participants, peers and users. By generating possibilities to reclaim social media as a way to open up new a mosaic-like history through artefacts, anyone can share in forms of social dialogue and engagement around the issues deepening the impact of the Triangle Fire event across the among people who might never otherwise find ways to talk generations. History is a living entity in this open space to and interact with one another. interface, where the story begins on a Saturday in 1911 in the Brown-Asch building in New York City, and continues CASE STUDY: TRIANGLE FIRE OPEN ARCHIVE today across the global labour map. The Triangle Fire Open Archive expands in multiple directions When individuals and communities (families, neighbour- and reaches across decades as a living documentary collab- hoods, labour organisers, artists, students and professional oration: it offers participants a contemplative encounter historians) make a contribution to the Triangle Fire Open with this seminal event in American labour history.26 The Archive, they can choose from four thematic areas: people, website’s design invites the visitor to engage, reflect and politics and activism, cultural response and memorial. The speculate, a prismatic story rediscovered and revivified pieces are also cross-tagged for ease of navigation, with a list through contributed artefacts. This project exemplifies an of thirty sub-categories where the visitor can move deeper and open space strategy of designing an archive that engages more specifically around topics. Even in the choosing of sub- and amplifies a specific history through user engagement. categories, the donor decides how to interpret the meaning of

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their object contribution – from fatality to Italian, from protest CASE STUDY: PREEMPTIVE MEDIA to legislation and occupational safety. The contributor COLLECTIVE AND LOCATIVE MEDIA becomes enmeshed in a dialogue with the past, with the Locative media represents another form of open space official records of history and with an actual tragedy that documentary interested in the convergence between digital called people to act and make change. From the extreme domains and geographic spaces. It anchors the digital, often close-up (a piece of jewellery saved by a descendant) to a viewed as ambling around in a place-less realm, in geo- landscape view (a recorded lecture by a feminist labour his- graphic space. Artists marshall portable, networked com- torian), participants are anchored in the specifics of a real puting devices like GPS, mobile phones and radio frequency event. identification devices (RFID), as well as wearable tech- A visitor can comment on the objects that are being nologies, to map space and intervene into data streams. shared, and is invited to submit contributions. The archive’s Locative media is horizontal and user-led, and conjures up visual simplicity and friendliness invites user participation, convenings. The Preemptive Media Collective (PM) re- while promising a transparent interactive environment that engineers thinking about mobile digital technologies imbed- invites returning to contemplate and review new connec- ded in everyday environments.29 In live performances and tions among the materials. An archive object can take the real-time actions, the PM art, technology and activist collec- user back to the era. Contributor Edward Mullen writes tive disturbs, dislodges and redesigns new media tech- about his photo of a chalking on the sidewalk outside a nologies that we often ignore, like the bar codes on drivers’ building in Hoboken, New Jersey, for fire victim Vincenza licences or radio frequency information devices used for EZ Bilota, age sixteen: pass on highways. PM empowers participants to feel like they can actually understand wireless and RFIDs. I couldn’t help but think how we’re only separated by Preemptive Media repositions highly specialised tech- time. Vincenza, who I don’t know, am not related to, nologies within the democratic discourse of low-tech ama- walked down that same street 100 years ago on the way teurism. The emerging locative media movement has to work. My brother-in-law, who lives a couple blocks from gathered steam and attention since 9/11 and the 2001 here, is 16. He’s skateboarded by that spot many times, Patriot Act, which authorises unprecedented data mining, I’m sure. But also, that 100 years can make the fire seem invasions of privacy, wiretapping and internet surveillance. artificially far away.27 In SWIPE (2001), Preemptive Media investigated how bar codes on the backs of drivers’ licences activate data collec- These entries suggest a history that is necessarily incom- tion most people are oblivious to. Bars and convenience plete, always changing, and presentinging multiple stories stores use licence scanners to determine age – and to build simultaneously and across time. free-of-charge but enormously valuable databases on their The Triangle Fire Open Archive interface functions like a clients. Last autumn in Irvine, California, PM set up a bar at deck of cards that stimulates associations – a model for docu- an arts event and swiped the drivers’ licences of every mentary quite distinct and different from a film or live exhi- drinker. A monitor over the bar visualised the scanned infor- bition. The archive tethers the user and participant to events, mation with computer-matching to census data, demo- geography and people in a deeply immersive way, facilitating graphics and voter information. Customers received a data an historical narrative enlivened through the user’s associ- receipt detailing their buying preferences, philanthropy, ations. Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani explains the process: income, profession, housing. SWIPE foregrounds issues of privacy in data streams, We created the Open Archive as an ongoing participatory demonstrating the invisible and discreet nature of auto- online archive to understand the Triangle Fire not only mated identification data collection (AIDC). AIDC not only through historical narrative but also through lacks prior notification and consent, but is also largely contemporary human connection, inspired by the variety unregulated. Although the mainstream press highlights of perspectives represented by the Coalition. To tell the individual criminals who pirate cyber-identities, SWIPE sug- story, we sought out ‘objects’ (rather than oral histories or gests that the real issue of data mining resides in the images alone) for their power both to ground us in the increasing interdependence between corporations and the present and to form links across lifetimes.28 government. Data-mining companies are now more effi- cient than the FBI. Preemptive Media reverses and makes The Triangle Fire Open Archive models a documentary story- visible how data mining and surveillance technologies telling practice that is neither fixed nor permanent. It create a new ecology of consumer social control – not refrains from a top-down hierarchical intrepretation of his- simply privacy invasions. Their tactics resonate with the war tory in favour of one that is constantly assembled and rein- on terror where cyber-warfare, information gathering, track- terpreted through encounters in the intervals of daily life ing and networked technologies have been mobilised by the across eras, places and people. Patriot Act, the military and retail outlets. Comprised of

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artists Brooke Singer, Beatriz da Costa and Jamie Schulte, Context Preemptive Media rethinks a wide range of mobile tech- Circular nologies. It veers away from a fascination with the aestheti- Cost cally constructed image to a collaborative interrogation of Composting methods, ideas, practices into something the mobile interface. The collective’s skill set includes an new alchemy of programming, graphic design, robotics, photog- raphy, electronics, video, carpentry, data visualisation and NOTES data mining. 1. Yuri Tsivian (ed.), Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties, trans. Julian Graffy (Gemona: Udine [Le Giornate WORKING PRINCIPLES OF OPEN SPACE del Cinema Muto], 2004); Jeremy Hicks, Dziga Vertov: DOCUMENTARY Defining Documentary Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Dziga Vertov, Kino Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, 1. Open space documentary is intentional creative trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley: University of California enquiry into how we create dialogues. Press, 1985). 2. Open space documentary is multiple voices in dia- 2. For additional writing from this chapter’s authors on the logue. concept of open space documentary, see Patricia R. 3. New interfaces open up new ways to frame community Zimmermann’s blog, Open Spaces, at http://www.ithaca. activities as creative practice rather than avenues for edu/fleff/blogs/open_spaces/ and Helen De Michiel’s consumption. website, http://www.thirtyleaves.org. For an expanded 4. Open space documentary organises projects around version of De Michiel’s thinking on open space concepts, contradictions and communities. These proj- documentary, see her essay, ‘Open Space Documentary’, ects open to a horizontal process with inputs from a http://animatingdemocracy.org/sites/default/files/ variety of different participants. documents/reading_room/HDeMichiel_TrendPaper.pdf 5. Open space documentary can help build and 3. For an excellent review of recent socially engaged arts strengthen local infrastructures. It can capture signifi- practices that engage audiences in public performance cant public memories and histories not controlled by and convenings to sustain new, aleatory publics in the consumer/corporate agendas. face of globalisation, see Nato Thompson (ed.), Living as 6. Open space documentary engages a strategy of ampli- Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991–2011 (Cambridge, MA: tude: to see a given topic from every possible perspec- MIT Press, 2012); and Shannon Jackson, Social Works: tive, to provoke curiosity about and compassion for the Performing Art, Supporting Publics (New York: Routledge, thinking of other people, to encourage reciprocal and 2011). open-ended collaborations and interactions. 4. For a good overview of the heterogeneous dimensions of 7. Open space documentary advances and makes space new media practices emerging across many different for co-creation among people. platforms in the late 1990s and early 2000s, see Martin 8. Open space = networks, redefined away from corpo- Reiser and Andrea Zapp (eds), New Screen Media: ratist story-worlds. Networks are digital systems, but Cinema/Art/Narrative (London: BFI, 2002). For an excellent also social systems of people, places and technologies. introductory overview of the multiplicity of new media 9. Open space documentary can offer environments for forms emerging and their geneaologies in older ongoing dialogue that lead participants to connect, technologies and media forms, see Martin Lister, Jon communicate and collaborate on human-scaled, local Dovey, Seth Giddings and Ian Grant, New Media: A Critical actions. Introduction (London: Routledge, 2009). For an 10. Open space documentary practice reclaims tech- international analysis of the rise of mobile media, see nologies from their hyper-utopianism and rethreads Maunel Castells, Mireial Fernandez-Ardevol, Jack them within social and political relationships. Linchuan Qui and Araba Sey Sey, Mobile Communciation and Society: A Global Perspective (Cambridge, MA: MIT THE TEN Cs OF OPEN SPACE Press, 2007). For a thorough and systematic analyses of DOCUMENTARY AS THE NEW KINO-EYES how networks are reorganising political structures, legal systems and technologies, see Yochai Benkler, The Wealth Complexity of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Connections Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). For a Community review of the affordance of miniaturised and amateur Collaboration new technologies, see: Byron Hawk, David Rieder and Continuum Ollie Oviedo (eds), Small Tech: The Culture of Digital Tools Conversation (Minneapolis,: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

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5. For example, see the recent concerns of the 11. For an exploration of the historical legacies of entertainment industry about arts defunding limiting the participatory modes in modernist as well as nurturance of new talent, in Ted Johnson, ‘Arts Orgs Seek contemporary arts practices, see Clair Bishop (ed.), GOP Champions’, Daily Variety, 29 August 2012, p. 5; Ted Participation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). Johnson, ‘Election Year Fuels Clash over Art Coin’, Daily 12. The question of polyphonic historiographies has been Variety, 27 March 2012, p. 1; see also Americans for the productively explored in Dipesh Chakrabarty, Arts, a national arts advocacy organisation that engages Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical in significant lobbying and public education on the issues Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). of the arts and economic sustainability, that posts A key book arguing for a polyvocal and dialogic position papers, http://www.artsusa.org documentary ethics is David MacDougal, Transcultural 6. For a critique of the techno-euphoria surrounding social Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). media and the Arab Spring, see Ulises Mejias, ‘Liberation 13. This concept of documentary practice moving from the Technology and the Arab Spring: From Utopia to Atopia documentary triangle to the documentary circle was first and Beyond’, Fibreculture (n.d.), http://twenty.fibreculture formulated at the workshop Open Space Documentary, journal.org/2012/06/20/fcj-147-liberation-technology-and- at the 2012 National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture the-arab-spring-from-utopia-to-atopia-and-beyond/. Conference in Minneapolis. The workshop featured Accessed 1 November 2012. For a discussion of internet theorist Patricia R. Zimmermann and new media issues in China, see Guobin Yang, The Power of the Internet artists/conveners Helen De Michiel, Laura Kissel and in China: Citizen Activism Online (New York: Columbia jesikah maria ross. University Press, 2011). For user-generated videos and 14. A primer on using social media in advocacy campaigns is discussions of the importance of new technologies in Jessica Clark and Tracy Van Slyke, Beyond the Echo post-Reformasi Indonesia, see KUNCI Cultural Studies Chamber: Reshaping Politics through Networked Progressive Center and EngageMedia, Videochronic: Video Activism and Media (New York: Free Press, 2010). For a scholarly Video Distribution in Indonesia (Collingwood, Australia: assessment of social media and participatory practices in EngageMedia, 2009). a variety of social and political milieus and formations, 7. For an example of the movements emerging around see Aaron Delwich and Jennifer Jacobs Henderson (eds), participatory media practices and reconsiderations of The Participatory Cultures Handbook (New York: Routledge, nexus of documentary, technology, politics and social 2013). change, see Meg McLagan and Yates McKee (eds), Sensible 15. Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc: How the World Became a Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism Corporation and How to Take it Back (New York: Random (Brooklyn: Zone, 2012). House, 2009), pp. 84–158. 8. Tim Cresswel, Place: A Short Introduction (Malden, MA: 16. For examples of the entertainment industry’s interest Blackwell, 2004); Merlin Coverley, Psychogeography in the development of story-worlds as expanding (London: Pocket Essentials, 2006); Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of control over consumers, see David Cohen, ‘Delux gets Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market (New York: into Clipping’, Variety 23 February 2010, p. 5. For a New Press, 1998); Janet Abrams and Peter Hall (eds), discussion how the independent sector is mimicking Else/Where: Mapping New Cartographies of Networks and this strategy by promoting independent films engaging Territories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, a transmedia component, see David McNary, ‘Sundance 2006). sets Screenwriters Lab’, Variety, 14 December 2009, p. 3. 9. For a vibrant discussion of the dialectics of control and The 2011 The Future of Entertainment Conference at possibility in the intersection of mobile technologies, MIT in November 2011 assembled industry place and social relations, see Adriana de Sousa e Silva representatives to discuss how to extend story-worlds and Jordan Frith, Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces: on properties to increase brand recognition and Locational Privacy, Control, and Urban Sociability (London: engagement. Routledge, 2010). For an explanation of the concept of 17. Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and combinatory story-telling forms, see Maria Popova, Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of ‘Networked Knowledge and Combinatorial Creativity’ California Press, 2004), pp. 51–119. (n.d.), http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2011/ 18. Nicholas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Paris: Les presses 08/01/networked-knowledge-combinatorial-creativity/. du reel, 2002), p. 22. Accessed 1 November 2012. 19. Ibid., p. 46. 10. For an analysis of this shift from producer-centric forms 20. Ibid., p. 294. to user-generated practices, see Axel Bruns, Blogs, 21. Jai Sen, ‘On Open Space: Explorations Towards a Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: Form Production to Vocabulary of a More Open Politics’, Antipode vol. 42 no. 4, Produsage (New York: Peter Lange, 2008). September 2010, pp. 1000–6.

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22. Ibid., p. 1016. 26. The Triangle Fire Open Archive, http://urbanomnibus.net/ 23. Full disclosure: Helen is also the co-author of this 2012/09/making-meaning-together-the-triangle-fire- chapter. open-archive-and-open-museum/ 24. The Lunch Love Community Project, http://www.lunchlove 27. Ibid. community.org 28. Ibid. 25. Saving the Sierra http://www.savingthesierra.org 29. Preemptive Media Collective,http://www.preemptivemedia.nt