Visual Methodologies (VM - E-Journal)
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Troubling the Humanist Teleology of Digital Storytelling
Get PDFAs a central strand of IVM4, Digital Storytelling was represented as a model of participatory research with significant potential for emancipatory impact. However, the ways in which digital storytelling is couched within Freire’s, Hegelian teleology generates a range of ethical problems. Freirean approaches rest on a humanist notion of the dialectic of recognition and when translated to the level of the collective, this ends in a problematic model of collective identity, which is ultimately exclusionary and particularistic. More recent thinking on the common by Italian theorists (Esposito, 2010; Hardt and Negri, 2011, Agamben, 1993) continues the struggle for liberation but sidesteps these problems through a rethinking on how the commons is formulated
FROM HERE TO: Drawing New Notations of Space
Get PDFFrom Here To is an art project that combines intuitive drawing strategies with interventionist performance practices: it collects hand-drawn directions from helpful passers-by in order to generate new visual scripts of space and memory. The project, which has been performed in three cities in North America and Europe, has produced a rich dataset of vernacular mappings and locative diagrams. The resulting 180 drawings, made with black ink on white paper, provide point to the possibility of research practices situated within a genealogy of art. These encounters follow a trajectory set by the situations of Guy Debord (1957), the cultural “tactics” of Michel de Certeau (1988), and the conceptual work of Fluxus artists, Stanley Brouwn (1961). In September 2015, Noone performed From Here To in Brighton, UK. Noone compiled and connected these spatial abstractions to make a foldout map, which she reprinted and distributed at the From Here To Information Installation throughout the International Visual Methods Conference.From Here To is a vernacular form of information visualization that explores the visual culture of navigation and articulation of spatial relations. The ‘real action’ - the almost-accidental and hurried nature of drawing a map for a stranger - becomes an act of translating an abstract sensibility to a notation of place-ness. In a time when the ubiquitous Google Map dominates cartographical thinking, what does it mean to elicit intuitive drawing as a way to capture the complexity and ambiguity of spatial interpretations
Manual Drawing in clinical communication: understanding the role of clinical mark-making
Get PDFThis provocation focuses on research into the widespread manual drawing practices used between health professionals and patients in secondary care. The drawings made are produced ‘live’ and in front of the patient or colleague, experienced sequentially (mark by mark) in the moment of their production and sometimes retained, as having documentary (medical records) or personal value. Can these drawing practices be illuminated by Barthes’ comic strip theories of ‘relay’, in terms of the sequential unfolding of images, and ‘anchorage’, in which texts (or textual annotations and speech) pinpoint meanings that would otherwise circulate more ambiguously? What other interpersonal triggers and cultural factors bear on this approach to clinical communication? Is this type of drawing, selective, schematic, in-the-moment and interwoven with text as it is, able to provide a quicker, or deeper, understanding for the patient or colleague?A first stage of this research is a study into health professionals’ experiences of drawing. Using a phenomenological approach, the researchers developed a method combining semi-structured interviews with prompts to make exemplar drawings accompanied by commentary. Reflecting on the intellectual, ethical and methodological rationales for this research design and participant group, this provocation will consider some emergent themes, illustrated by drawings. It considers the value of such drawing practices in conveying technical information, especially in the face of anxiety and distress, and the potential of this type of drawing to represent selected information in a way that can be both contextualised and personalised
Who creates the narrative? The case of RE/F/r:ACE, a participatory media artwork in city space
Get PDFThis paper discusses the roles of artist, author, participant and spectator within the context of participatory media art events, with reference to RE/F/r.ACE, a participatory video project developed by Andy Best-Dunkley, Merja Puustinen and Victor Khachtchanski. RE/F/r.ACE enables participants to easily contribute their own images as raw material to the ongoing flow of visual and audio narrative projected into the public city environment. Situating the project within an art historical context, the paper discusses the social and political coding of the architectonic urban environment, and the rules and norms relating to, and controlling, our everyday use of public space. When the notion of free “open to all” public space is under threat from ongoing commercialisation and gentrification of urban centres worldwide, RE/F/r.ACE is an example of one attempt to draw attention to this transformation in a creative, positive, and artistic manner
Where does the research knowledge lie in participatory visual processes?
Get PDFOver recent decades there has been a rapid expansion in the use of participatory visual methods to unearth neglected perspectives on complex issues. As example, participatory video can enable participants to show and tell, and connect marginalised communities with external audiences. However, there are important ethical questions raised, which echo wider debates in visual methods, such as the politics of public exposure and reception and the power dynamics between project actors. Furthermore, practical challenges are compounded by the tendency to view participatory video as a data production or research dissemination method, rather than the means to drive research dialogue or social change processes during action research.This provocation draws on participatory video experiences in India and Kenya to raise critical questions about the potentially valuable but tacit or under-utilised sources of research knowledge generated, and the implicit sharing assumptions in contemporary visual practice. I interrogate participatory representation as theoretical frame, because it often functions practically to restrict possibilities for participants by binding activities to the priorities of external agencies. Whilst acknowledging the tensions, I suggest participatory video is more productively conceptualised as the means to mediate communication processes towards both deeper understanding and improvement action. I conclude, that attention needs to shift to ensure the most pertinent knowledge is not overlooked
‘Compelling evidence’: mobilizing the Carlton Hill photographic archive
No full textOur project bridges the field of social work with the field of photography and archival scholarship and our interdisciplinary research team includes scholars from within social sciences and visual studies. We explore connected, transnational histories through a cultural framework and try to reconcile different viewpoints by working across historical spaces. In this paper, we focused on a single British case study, the Carlton Hill collection in Brighton that documented the area prior to it being demolished under the pretext of ‘slum’ clearance. We presented a small number of visual interventions and activities that were timed to coincide with the IVM conference in Brighton in September 2015. The collection continues to live on; the photographs, in their manifestations as physical objects or online images, continue to communicate through their itinerant languages. Our research shows that archival objects do not stay in place, the object and the auspices shift over time. New reworkings become possible, along with new sets of questions. Visual methods facilitate and heighten interventions and interferences, they dislodge familiar readings and holding spaces, and reopen those relations anew.
Cotton Hills Farm
No full textCotton Hills Farm is a observational film that captures the rural way of life that existed before the coming of cotton mills in the South and continues to exist after. To do this I worked with Jeb Wilson of Cotton Hills Farm in Chester, South Carolina whose family had been farming in the Lowry’s community since 1882.The film is positioned in the aftermath of the closing of the cotton conglomerate, Springs Global, an economic and economic and cultural presence in Chester since after the Civil War, which moved its cotton operations overseas beginning in 2007. In this context, the film shows the enduring culture and custom of the rural South against the backdrop of globalization.Additionally, the film portrays the South in ways not addressed in broader representations of the region in cinema. Cotton Hills Farm illustrates an alternative visual narrative of the rural and working class South which is usually represented through violent connotations in the American imaginary through in subgenres such as “hixploitation” and horror films. In turn, alternatives to such negative representations are sorely lacking in more popular cinematic depictions. Cotton Hills Farm offers this alternate view through its form and content, by allowing subjects a voice through its use of observational techniques that allow an alternative pathway of entry into the South for the viewer.------------------------------------ Chester County, South Carolina, in the Piedmont region was once central to the local mill conglomerate Springs Industries, which formed during the U.S. Reconstruction and was central to Chester’s economic and social culture. It closed its last operating plant, the Katherine, in 2007. While starting to visually document workers’ stories during the closing of the mill, I amassed footage quickly. The project morphed into a more comprehensive focus on class, culture, and history that considered Chester County in the context of a long-time reliance on the mills and the contemporary situation surrounding their closure. This wider palette was generated by my interactions with Chester’s citizens around the topic of the mills in informal conversations. I explored Chester’s importance to the South’s long history with mill culture and the ways in which rural- and working- class citizens associated with that culture were portrayed in a broader American imaginary.Part of this scope included Cotton Hills Farm, a farm in Chester that stood at the beginning of mill culture and now is enjoying one of its most successful periods. I decided to capture the rural way of life that existed before the rise of the mills and so contacted Jeb Wilson of Cotton Hills Farm whose family had been farming in the county since 1882. I explained my project to Jeb, and he allowed me full access to the work being done on the farm. What emerged was Cotton Hills Farm, an ethnographic film about the South in an observational style. The film includes scenes of work during the summer season and follows the daily activities on the Wilson’s farm. Part of the purpose of this film is to provide a counterpoint to what I saw as broader stereotypes found in films about the U.S. South.Central to looking at the region’s issues analytically can be a question of ethics for the researcher. I grew up in Chester. My grandfather was a doctor for Springs Industries, and my father followed in his footsteps at the turn of the millennium. I also had a vague notion of Springs’s involvement in constructing the Olympic size swimming pool in which I swam competitively during my youth, but had only the vaguest self-awareness of the mills and the work they performed. My family and hometown were obviously impacted by these events. To deny their personal effect on me would be both academically dishonest and ethically suspect. My voice is, of course, present in the film, but it is the obligation of the filmmaker to let the materials speak to readers for themselves, rather than shoehorn them into any type of preexisting theory.Cotton Hills Farm utilizes a methodical approach that explores the space around the subjects and the subjects’ relationship within that space and to each other, unfolding at an intentionally deliberate pace. To explain any more is to do the viewer’s job. One tenant of observational filmmaking is to allow the viewer to experience the rhythm, culture, and custom through visual nuance. Scenes included herein discover the way people across the racial spectrum work together on a farm. It is the eye of the viewer that must unravel the subtle distinctions of this film, engage moments of reading (or not) the underlying politics, culture, custom, and understand the ways in which Chester’s rural citizens exist. In the process, I hope to show a different side of the rural- and working-class South.Keywords: Southern mill culture; Cotton Hills Farm; observational cinema; Southern United States; Chester, South Carolina; Lowry’s, South Carolina; Southern farms; Southern Piedmont
Fronteras que revuelven: A Filmic Study of “La Línea” in Tijuana
Get PDFThis article rethinks the concept of border through a spatial and phenomenological ethnographic film study of “la Línea” (the Line) in the city of Tijuana. La Línea is a term used by residents to refer to the San Ysidro border checkpoint between Mexico and the United States, the most transited border in the world. This is a site composed of varied and contradictory lines and movements, with commuters waiting in line to cross the border and vendors walking around to sell their products to stationary cars. For crossers, the checkpoint represents a liminal space of waiting as they stand in long lines to enter the United States. For vendors, the site is a destination where many have worked for generations. While crossers are mobile in the sense of daily movement across borders, they remain relatively immobile in this site as they wait in line. Vendors do not generally cross the border and are perceived to be permanent fixtures yet are hyper mobile compared to crossers in the context of this space. By using the method of walking with a camera to follow vendors as they work along various paths or lines, we learn how people perceive and understand their place in the world along the border. I propose act of revolver (to mix, to stir) as an essential force that expands the concept of border, as well as reflexivity in ethnographic filmmaking.Video: https://vimeo.com/13919048
Participatory Research and Visual Methods
Get PDFThis special issue seeks to examine the role of participation in visual methodologies. It is a collection of essays from members of the Visual Scholarship Initiative at Emory University in which practitioners reflect upon their uses of photography, film, and video as a form of practice-based research. Though the use of visual methods and technologies are integral to all of the projects here, our focus is in the range of participation between photographer, filmmaker, or curator and subject or audience and how this impacts what we understand as scholarship. The photograph, film, or video, then, is a means by which we enter into the social and cultural negotiations of and reflections upon meaning making. In this introduction, we attempt to clarify what we mean by participatory research. Such practices often result in crossing disciplinary boundaries, as we discuss below. Further, morphing the use of visual media into a category of research method that generates scholarship with others means we are also exploring various connections and intersections between public scholarship and socially engaged art. Instead of resolving or precisely pinning down the concept of participatory research, we intend to explore the ways participation can be activated by artistic research and visual methods and the various types of relationships that emerge within this process
Pictures and Politics: Using Co-Creative Portraits to explore the social dynamics of the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo
Get PDFCo-creative portraits open space to explore the interaction of photographic subjects and photographers as they collaborate to create intentional images. This still photographic method explores how the space of photographic creation and the resulting photographs not only respond to, but also engage and reflect the immediate inter-subjective, and broader, regional politics. Particularly, I examine this method, and the photographs it produces, in the context of the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo - one of the densest spaces of humanitarian aid in the world. In North Kivu province, photography is produced daily for the purposes of fundraising, advocacy, and accountability. Aid agencies rely on the notion of photographs and their ability to ‘witness’ through portrayals of ‘documentary reality’. However, the visual imagescape of the eastern DRC is not bound by humanitarian imagery alone. In fact it is home to a thriving local photographic enterprise. Through co-creative portraits I examine the overlapping fields of ‘daily vernacular’ and ‘humanitarian photography,’ focusing on how individuals tack back and forth across these types of representation in front of the camera, particularly in response to dialectic social factors including space, time, and in their anticipations of their photographer. Therein, this article makes a two-pronged argument: 1) I argue that co-creative portraits contribute to the production of experiential, anthropological knowledge through photography. 2) With attention to the explanations, movements, and negotiations that produce the photographs, I argue that this method shows the constructed, subjective nature of photography, even in spaces of humanitarian aid.