–> About the Narrative Lab
The narrative lab is a creative and conceptual laboratory that has sprung from AVIT’s networking space which seeks to provide spaces and frameworks where research on narrative within VJ’ing can take place. We find that narrative is a way of mediating images and meaning and so wish to make use of its application to structure the wider issues of development. The primary aims of the lab are therefore to progress the conceptual development of the VJ artform, and to enable participating VJs to progress from a level of performance competency to producing work that can compete with existing media/entertainment forms.
Research is conducted through a variety of process and media, facilitated by the growth of collaborative clusters within the community. The narrative lab participants actively undertake their own research through the personal and collaborative efforts and seek to produce completed works which demonstrate the use of narrative within VJ’ing. Two dominant strands of thought can be traced through the Lab’s work. The first sets a critical agenda, encouraging the new medium of VJ’ing to enter theoretical discourses. VJ practitioners are invited to experience contemporary theoretical critiques of VJ practice; lectures which begin to explore and interpret VJ’ing as an act, as an art and as a new medium. A second strand of thinking meanders through and engages with the ‘process as practice’ debate. Intuitive approaches to production are common within the VJ community, as many practitioners do not have formalised training. Narrative Lab seeks to facilitate evolution in the understanding and management of the creative process.
Programme Structure.
–>Session 1 Tuesday 2 - 3pm
// Guest Speaker - Kate Southworth & Paul Mumford
The Narrative Lab in 2003 examined types of narrative structures that could be used in the context of VJ performance. It was clear from the outset that traditional linear narrative structures were incompatible with the random access and live construction elements of video performance. The notion of hypernarrative was prominent in discussions as an approach which links directly with the techniques and processes of the VJ.
Kate Southworth will be discussing her own work that is based on the representation of data, and the mapping of data in the emerging field of locative media. Kate is particularly interested in producing art that makes enquiry into the social and natural worlds, and which explores the ways in which new knowledge, and different ‘ways of knowing’ the world is produced through art.
Rather than engaging with one data type, she is trying to understand how different data types inform different ‘ways of knowing’ the world. Often, scientists and artists focus their attention on a particular way of understanding the world, to the exclusion of other ways. So, for example a statistician might know everything about the population flows in and out of a certain region, but know nothing about the emotional impact of migration on individuals and communities. An artist might visually record (as photographs or videos, for example) changes in the earth’s surface before and after an earthquake, but not make use of satellite images of the terrain, or subsurface sound recordings.
Paul Mumford will be discussing his recent project the story collector, a narrative loop about Blake whose story unfolds through a collection of observations, objects and photographs all woven together to create the secret life of objects and memories. They reveal a set of actions, a narrativity and a history outside of perception. The jigsaw pieces demand narrative interpretation, activate memory, search the mental database and compares structures to give rise to a periodically shifting map of shared cultural meaning. The act of collecting becomes an analogy for the act of VJing and the connecting process in understanding. The story writing process a way of organising the fragments of the world into sense making patterns. The work takes a look at procedural practice: using rule based stragegies and process methodologies.
–>Session 2 Tuesday 3 - 5pm
Collaborative Workshop Experiment [3 hours] Process Methodologies for Narrative Production.
This workshop seeks to follow up the guest lectures from Kate Southworth and Paul Mumford and to lead people on to a practice based research workshop. The premise for the experiment is the basis that narrative can be deconstructed into simple elements and builds upon the idea that narrative can thus be reconstructed from the same small elements. The workshop will seek to guide and develop VJ’s ideas throughout 3 stages in the workshop that will see them examine a unknown database of imagery, develop a narrative approach and then undertake a connecting process on NLE editing systems.
–>Session 3 Wednesday 2 - 5pm
//Lecture [1 hour] Meaning in Narrative Form
This is a short paper to ask us to relook at narrative. Both art and commercial work in public spaces borrow very different models of narrative to cinema (fiction, documentary etc) television or writing, though sometimes drawing on those structures. In some respects drawing on contemporary VJ practice and playing connect with narrative as causality (but using progressing and overlapping loops for example) can potentially produce new forms of hybrid narrative. Also using real time data to inflect or totally change imagery would borrow from existing VJ techniques and combine them with experimental forms of multiple narrative and the functions of memory, the look, being in the body rather than the head, and upsetting process of identification which dominate mainstream visual narrative in TV/cinema/video. Although D&G never explicitly wrote about narrative, but,,,, in ‘A Thousand Plateaus - capitalism and schizophrenia’ and Deleuze’s ‘Cinema 1 - The Movement Image’ and ‘Cinema 2 - The Time Image’, there are loads of ideas which relate to possible permutations of the ‘real time’ digital image and it’s surrounding world. The rhizome of the dance floor and the whole space of the club and the people in it is full of the possibilities of territorialisation and moment to moment deterritorialialisation like a territorial machine. So a form of causality/narrative which feeds back on the material events on the floor and takes data from the outside world could produce a narrative of the social unconscious, more like a dream than a TV show.
–>Session 4 Wednesday 2 - 5pm
//Collaborative Workshop Experiment [3 hours] Formal Narrative Composition
This experiment is a practical attempt to relocate some of Deleuze’s theories on cinema into the context of VJ technologies and practices. Deleuze, in his critique of film forms, deconstructs narrative convention; observing that narratives are typically created through the juxtaposition of a few simple shots. This VJ experiment seeks to recreate some of these ‘narrative formulas,’ using live material.
Accessible to the VJ are a large number of live feeds placed around the custard factory site, statically composed, in accordance with particular shot types. The VJ begins to compose narratives by cutting between the shot types in accordance with the ‘narrative forumlas’ Deleuze observed. This piece plays with notions of cinema and chance operations of the image; on the one hand obeying filmic convention, whilst on the other subverting it with the use of live, unsolicited material. It boldly challenges the preconceived notion of the ‘role’ of the VJ, and typical readings of the moving image, as the audience begin to ‘read’ a ’suggested’ story with unpredictable imagery. The ‘webcam story’ takes the formal qualities of mainstream cinema by finding similar shots in time to the time structures of mainstream narrative cinema and creates a data base of similarly framed shots on web cams, (e.g. establishing shot, very long shot, office block, day) and then streams those images for the same duration as that used in the reference movie. It then progresses to find shots such as shot/reverse shot (say 2 angles on different water coolers - which might originally have been a love scene). It exists formally as an analogue of the formal qualities of the original movie but contains no characters, existing in ‘any time whatever’ or ‘real time’ and ‘real space’.
–>Session 5 Thursday 2 - 4pm
//Workshop [1 hour] The Vj Story-Board Oli Sorrentino
This story-board workshop is aimed at breaking down the concept of ‘narrative’ into an understandable structure (sympathetic to VJ techniques and limitations), which can be used simply to create a plan for VJ content production and performance. The session will be based around the ideas introduced in the Digital Storytelling and Narrative for VJs lecture, and will be delivered by Olivier Sorrentino as a development of his story-board workshop from AVIT 2003.
–>Session 6 Thursday 2 - 4pm
Narrative Vjing - Falk Gaertner
Breaking free of the truly ab- stract nature of visuals is a goal not many VJs share. This speech will show some technics to get a visual narrative going. CTRL-V is one of the first test to have a fully self produce VJ narrative that extends over 45 minutes. fALk will explain his thoughts on the matter and give insights on the things learned from this experiment.
–>Session 7 Saturday 2 - 4pm
Narrative Work In Progress Session
With Guest S Rafael Hosted by Lara Houston
