Seth Keen

‘Interactive Documentary’ course taken by Ruth Sergel at Interactive Telecommunications Program ITP part of TISCH School of Arts and NYU.

Interactive documentaries provide radical new possibilities for both community creation and active audience engagement. This class explore the history of the documentary form through photography, oral history, film/video, performance and current hybrid projects. Interactive Documentary is a production class. Weekly experiments in creating documentaries are supported by lectures, viewing of non-traditional works and learning the necessary audio/video & projection tools. Assignments focus on developing works whose creation mirrors the themes we are seeking to explore. In the past documentaries were created with an expectation of the audience operating as passive consumers. Interactive documentaries enable us to dream new possibilities with audiences actively participating in the work.

Also, this course has crossover as well ‘Interactive Screens and Cinematic Objects’ by Marina Zurkow, including a focus on multilinear narrative.

What does it mean to create cinematic works? What are the limits of the term “cinema,” and what are its possibilities? Will it be story-based, formalist, or symbolic? How does interactivity impact narrative perception, rhythm and arc? Is an interface user-driven or machine-driven? Multi-linear or singular? Screen or object based? Do we want to work for our stories? Is it possible to make profound or emotional narrative work in a multi-linear or interactive environment? The creation and evaluation of work in this class pivots on the notion of narrative perception: a viewer’s desire to actively make story out of represented moments, from Chaplin’s silent movies to US Army recruitment ads to Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. The emphasis of this class is on art practices, focusing on sculptural and screen-based installation forms rather than commercial applications. More conceptual than technical, more narrative than formal, students work on the creation of time-based projects through short and medium-length assignments. Students work in a range of media, from paper maps to multiple screens. In addition, students are expected to engage in critical dialogue through individual research and presentation of precedents, from new media art projects, readings, and experimental or mainstream film.

I made a connection with Jon Kolko’s ideas on ‘reframing’ taken from Schon’s ideas on framing. Used in Abductive Thinking and Sensemaking: The Drivers of Design Synthesis: Overview: Making Sense of Chaos’ in relation to design, I linked reframing with a practitioner making a shift in their practice. Framing a problem as part of moving that practice into new territory. Following Kolko’s discussion on the design process, he refers to Schon’s idea of framing in relation to scoping a design problem. Framing a problem he argues is set up pragmatically and intuitvely from what is known. Reframing in contrast alters the frame by introducing a different or unusual point-of-view:

Thus, reframing is a method of shifting semantic perspective in order to see things in a new way. The new frame “re-embeds” a product, system, or service in a new (and not necessarily logical) context, allowing the designer to explore associations and hidden links to and from the center of focus.

The Stony Rises Project exhibition opened on 22nd July and I finally finished off the video work ‘Purrumbete Verandah’, I made specifically for this travelling exhibition. The exhibition was reviewed in ‘The Age’ – Rock art, but not as we know it. Robert Nelson the reviewer referred to the video work ‘Purrumbete Verandah’.

Pondering the aesthetic history of the region, Seth Keen revisits the location of a painting by Eugene von Guerard. His video yields an unsettling tranquillity, where the peace can never be knitted with the glazed lights and hollows of the European tradition.

The supporting Stony Rises project website has been finalised as part of documenting the exhibition and broader research project, where you can read more about the video work ‘Purrumbete Verandah’ and the Locative Painting research project. Also, I there is an artists statement published in the accompanying book ‘Designing Place’ published in parallel with the opening exhibition.