Thursday, April 17, 2014

Living Stories Development Log, 16. April 2014

"Can you imagine a world without electricity?"

Phil Albers' discussion topic at the end of his cultural movie night for Karuk TANF was particularly resonant for me. He was trying to make a point about how narratives existed for us on the Klamath River pre-contact, but for me the evening was one of looking at the usefulness of delicate technology.

Phil curated a selection of movies by Karuk videographers for movie night, including Living Stories (in which he appears as an interviewee). I went to the event planning on having a talk-back after Living Stories where I could suss out what was particularly engaging and where the video lost them to help me figure out the next stage in developing this project. The talk-back didn't happen, but what happened instead was probably just as informative.

The biggest problem with the current iteration of Living Stories is its visual stasis - it's all people talking to a point just off camera for an hour. As a theater artist, I've been brainstorming spatial ways to improve the viscerality of the experience. The video before Living Stories had the same visual stasis, so when the sound went out a few minutes into my movie and the audience perked up, I found a possible answer.

Video offers a lot of paradoxical possibilities as a medium. For example, as a recorded medium, it ought to have a stable longevity. Without constantly converting formats, however, that's not the case. It's also surprisingly brittle: the wrong combination of technologies can result in the video not playing, or not playing correctly. Third, and probably most alarmingly, video and film promote audience passivity. When we watch a movie, we sit back and consume the information, assuming that we're in good hands. It's only when something goes wrong, the instability and brittleness of the medium creeps in, do we sit up. This medium, that promotes passivity, has an equal potential to promote activity.

So what's next? First, I need to take a cue from the length of the other videos. I want to re-edit Living Stories into a series of discussions-by-juxtaposition on the central topics addressed in the interviews: books versus oral transmission, problems of translation, the role of traditional stories in mental health, etc. These smaller videos ought to play equally well separately as together. More importantly, I want to use the weaknesses of the medium to engage viewers as active participants in the issues under discussion. How can I present these problems using video in a way that the audience is not satisfied by the recorded material and needs to seek their own answers? And how can I structure that exploration? Ought I use curricula or game-play? Or a combination of the two?

And I need to figure out why the sound went out.

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