Documentary Across Platforms: Reverse Engineering Media, Place, and Politics

Description

In Documentary Across Platforms, noted scholar of film and experimental media Patricia R. Zimmermann offers a glimpse into the continually evolving constellation of practices known as documentary and the way in which they investigate, engage with, and interrogate the world. Collected here for the first time are her celebrated essays and speculations about documentary, experimental, and new media published outside of traditional scholarly venues. These essays envision documentary as a complex ecology comprised of different technologies, sets of practices, and specific relationships to communities, engagement, politics, and social struggles. Through the lens of reverse engineering―the concept that ideas just like objects can be disassembled to learn how they work and then rebuilt into something new and better―Zimmermann explores how numerous small-scale documentary works present strategies of intervention into existing power structures. Adaptive to their context, modular, and unfixed, the documentary practices she explores exploit both sophisticated high-end professional and consumer-grade amateur technologies, moving through different political terrains, different platforms, and different exhibition contexts. Together these essays demonstrate documentary’s role as a conceptual practice to think through how the world is organized and to imagine ways that it might be reorganized with actions, communities, and ideas. Dedication Contents Foreword • Gina Marchetti Introduction Part I: Platforms 1 Reverse Engineering: Taking Things Apart for the New Global Media Ecology 2 Ardent Spaces, Formidable Environments 3 Precious Places: Scribe Video Center, Philadelphia 4 The Hand That Holds Up All This Falling: The Works of Daniel Reeves 5 Cartographies of Impossible and Possible Worlds: The Photography of Michael Kienitz 6 Black Soil: Chernozem and Tusit in Ukraine Part II: Reversals 7 Matrices of War 8 Blasting War 9 Digital Deployments 10 Public Domains: Engaging Iraq through Experimental Digitalities 11 Cambodian Digital Imaginary Archive: Genocide, Lara Croft, and Crafts Part III: Histories 12 The Home Movie Archive Live 13 Throbs and Pulsations: Les LeVeque and the Digitizing of Desire 14 Just Say No: Negativland’s No Business 15 Remixed and Revisited Black Cinema: Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates Live Project 16 Live!: Reconnecting the Histories of Live Multimedia Performance 17 Toward a Theory of Participatory New Media Documentary Part IV: Speculative Engineering 18 Home Movie Axioms 19 Speculations on Environmental Sensualities and Eco-Documentaries 20 Speculations on Reverse Engineering: Algorithms for Recombinant Documentaries across Platforms Acknowledgements Index About the Author