Documentary Practice in a Participatory Culture

PUBLICATIONS:

Journal Article

'Camera Movies:
Awesome, I Fuckin' Shot Them'

Journal of Media Practice
Print ISSN: 1468-2753
Volume: 10 | Issue: 2&3
Cover date: June 2009
Page(s): 149-165

Creative Work

Hubbub in
Screenwork: Screen Media Practice Research Volume 2 - The AVPhD Issue 2009

Published by Intellect

DVD

About Hubbub:

In September 2004 Australian band Regurgitator locked themselves
away for three weeks inside a glass recording studio in the middle of
Federation Square, Melbourne, Australia for an event called Band In A Bubble.

Hubbub is a 26 minute collage of audience conversation and interaction where the band is relegated to the audio-visual background.It is the participation of the audience both in the event, and in the documentary, that serves as an important point of connection between participatory culture and documentary practice.

Mapping Metaculture is a PhD research project examining experimental documentary and the convergence of criticism and consumption as it emerged in an event called Band In A Bubble. The practice consists of a 30 min experimental documentary called Hubbub, and an interactive, split-screen DVD called One More Like That.

Planet Usher: An Interactive Home Movie was produced for the award of Master of Arts, RMIT University 2003 (AIM CENTRE). Planet Usher tells the story of, and through, the home video archive of my brother, Peter, a man who was born deaf, took 20 years of home videos, and has slowly gone blind due to the effects of Usher Syndrome.

Exploring the frailties of people and memory, and narrative in an interactive environment, Planet Usher explores the fantasy that new media might somehow revive the lost archive. In that vein, it is productivity, not simply loss, that is at work here, and the figure for this productivity is the 'remembered home movie'.

Planet Usher has been exhibited in Melbourne, New York and London.