Phuturepunk [Video Screening] Symposium

This project is a ‘post-modern’ video experiment which examines documentary ‘modes’ as recurring themes as a central strategy to motivate the narrative of the documentary practice. By recording the act of painting as a ‘political’ critique of the war in the Middle East, the form of the work continually seeks to undermine the authenticity of the structured narrative through edited repetition, displaced positioning and use of audio as a means to ‘subvert’ the truth telling capacity of documentary work.
This project is an extension of my PhD research expanding the activity of documentary practice and engaging in the ‘performance’ through technical tropes and participatory interventions which traditionally remain detached while documenting other people, cultures and events is part of the documentary cinema history. As a ‘future cinematic’ ambition, I now feel that ‘participatory digital culture’ Wiggins and Bowers (2014:1891) has radically transformed the documentary relationship between producer, subject and audience since the start of my own PhD journey.
Contemporary documentary activities can be characterized by easy access to technologies, which were generally unaffordable to disenfranchised groups and in recognition of the ‘new’ participatory nature, which helps construct ‘realities’ in documentary work through selective participatory social networks, my video seeks to make explicit my attempts to re-shape and re-structure interventions to form a new narrative, which ‘selects’ key aspects of my journey, my experiences and give them a ‘cinematic voice’ to be received by a selected audience.
In this work my voice is deliberately repetitive and structurally seeks to challenge notions of the documentary grand narrative as dominant in contemporary practice.
The method I intend to use is based of the Punk interpretation of poetic ‘bricolage’ by gathering elements of my journey and re-presenting connections in a structured way to give new meaning. I intend to use audio/visual materials, which I have originated, gathered as part of the research or previously recorded as vocalist for an anarcho-punk band.