Paper short abstract:

Foregrounding ideas of temporal and relational forms of the image and image-practices, this paper seeks to formulate a post-future essayism through examples of time-based analytical acts, that uses video live editing.

Paper long abstract:

This paper investigates a dimension of communality, pertaining to the temporal basis for difference in society, through time-based analytical acts. While steeped in insights, knowledges, and affinities with the intellectual history of essay filmmaking, the paper seeks to formulate a post-future essayism (la Cour 2022), when understood as a precarious filmic methodology and epistemological strategy of the moving image. Post-future essayism sidesteps the optimism of current discourses on the cinematic and the essay film, because its viable trait is the training of care, attention and sensibility: Examined through the practice of video live editing – a fragmentary and momentary compositional effect – and drawing from feminist and decolonial ideas of relationality, that challenge the modernist concept of the self-determined subject (Da Silva (2007), post-future essayism looks towards more circular aesthetics (Schneider 2021).

The paper seeks to contribute to new, much needed, conceptualizations of filmmaking not as an act of intention but as an act of relation; filmmaking not as an act of narrating a place or a community, but as an act of engaging situated conditions upon shifting grounds. To foreground ideas of temporal communality, then, is to critically circumvent the historical and colonial legacy of a historiographic concept of futurity, that continue to characterize more site-bounded desires of achieving communality – in filmmaking practices but also in a wider sense.

The paper provides concrete examples of experimentation with collaborative video live editing, as a basis for discussing post-future essayism and temporal communality in relation to media ecological infrastructures.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I look at approaches to VR that work with cultural traditions and grassroots social formations to project collaborative futures. Ana María Millán's works ground their production in real-world interactions, embodied movement, and storytelling before moving into the virtual world.

Paper long abstract:

The development of new platforms and technologies for virtual reality has often been paired with both utopian and dystopian visions of the future. Theorists from McLuhan onwards have speculated on the ability of new media to shape the ways people communicate about and co-create societies of the future. The emphasis of these discussions, however, often follows a top-down approach to social formations. New modes of interaction are regarded as emerging from the frame of possibilities within a technological platform, with each progressive technological development offering better options to the imagination. In this paper, I propose to look at artistic approaches to VR that work with cultural traditions and grassroots social formation to project collaborative futures. Recent video works by Ana María Millán, such as Este viento amor (2019) and Wanderlust (2015-17) are based on extensive collaborations with different youth and cultural groups. They reflect on the limits of stereotypical video game characters, while co-creating new characters and landscapes linked to surviving environments. I argue that by beginning this process with real-world interactions, embodied movement, and storytelling workshops before moving into a virtual world, Millán reverses the individualized hierarchy of typical VR engagement. Her works provides spaces that address the complex ties between technology and consumption, time to consider and discuss the abilities needed to maintain future-oriented spaces, and opportunities to recognize the non-human agencies that play a part in these processes. They also allow for different levels of opacity and transparency to inform the videos. I posit that Millán’s videos provide an example of a methodology for co-creation that resists the erasure of extractive histories, prevents the appropriation of participants’ accounts, and contributes to ecological imaginations of the future.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how a performance-based, multimodal approach to ethnographic process and representation can mobilize alternative ways of engaging with memory and absence. These ways of imagining can, in turn, problematize our existing approaches to studying absence as worldmaking praxis.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, we explore what we call “ethnobricolage” – a performance-based, multimodal approach to ethnographic process and representation—by analyzing the project the morning I died I flew over the tobacco fields. Developed in collaboration with a Toronto-based Romanichal multimedia artist, the project combined physical theatre performance, audiovisual ethnography, and written and oral storytelling to reflect on family, memory, and absence. Ethnobricolage can, we argue, constitute a novel technique of ethnographic worldmaking that blurs the lines between the senses, between fiction and reality, and between memory and confabulation. Constructing ethnographic knowledge in this twilight zone that lies somewhere between the existing and the emergent allows us to let go of our notions of temporality and mobilize alternative worldmaking practices. In our research, audiovisual ethnography allowed us to tap into these sensory spaces of absence, uncertainty and emergence, and imagine alternative worlds and possibilities. In particular, we explore how employing physical theatre, ethnographic film methods, video screenings and facilitated audience discussions might offer novel modes of sensory and reflexive engagement. By showing film clips from our storytelling sessions, theatre rehearsals, and public screenings, we hope to open a conversation on how ethnobricolage might problematize our ethnographic study of memory, absence and worldmaking.