On the road: Flaherty 1997 - Robert Flaherty Film Seminar

Last October, mediamakers, critics, academics, programmers and activists converg at Ithaca corporation for "Exploration in Memory and Modernity," a fresh kind of Robert Flaherty Seminar. Neither a film festival nor an academic conversation the Flaherty Seminar was, for 43 years, usually programmed as a week drawn out retreat in upstate New York. on the other hand this year the board of directors changed the make of the event. The rise is the Flaherty On the Road initiative, a series of five weekend seminars designed to unfold new audiences in various regions of the land providing professional networking opportunities within the national independent media field. "To do individual event per year doesn't give us the same amount of visibility and outreach to make the programs more accessible to a greater number of people" said Michelle Materre, Executive Director of International Film Seminars (the official sponsor of the Flaherty Seminars) and co-programmer of the Ithaca occurrence "When funders are looking at by what means many people you reach, it's important to tender your service in such a way that race partake of it, which consequently validates your ne to exist. The other part was to collaborate with other institutions around the geographical division We shared our resources and charges were kept low."

The first of these upon the Road seminars was "Gender Dichotomies and Social Spectacles," held at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio upon April 5. The program throw backed the Flaherty Seminar's historic support of and interest in regional film and video and was co-sponsored through the Ohio Valley Regional Media Action Coalition. upon August 6-7, "Animated Images: An Exploration in Multicultural Talent" was sponsored by dint of Sony's Corporate Affairs Department and neared at Sony Music in novel York City. The City corporation of New York, in conjunction with Aaron Davis Hall, entertainered "Documenting the Community" on October 17-18 "Passin' It On: The Documentary Across Generations" was designed in collaboration with the Department of Performing and Creative Arts at the guild of Staten Island. The circumstance held November 7-8, highlighted the "mentoring" of Alonzo Speight and Tami Gold well-known teachers of film and video.

A unique aspect of the Ithaca seminar was the 24-hour Digital Salon, an international cast curated by myself and 14 other artists, scholars and activists from all above the globe. It featured above 200 web sites and CD-ROM that explored memory, modernity and the reclamation of digitality as public space. Featured multimedia artist Pamela Jennings's CD-ROM throw out Solitaire: dream journal (1996) mixes the metaphor of the game board and the work Solitaire takes the user end a haunting journey on a search for peace with.one's self and with others. The CD-ROM uses a three-dimensional solitaire game as the engine to impel through this journey. Solitaire relies heavily on the narrative structures of non-Western tillage specifically the theories and processe of African oral literature, which provide the groundwork for Solitaire's narrative model

The solitaire board is a tetrahedral (a three-faced pyramid), its three faces corresponding to the thematic areas of melancholy, flight and balance. A impel made on one side of this pyramid will randomly unclose up a chapter of the corresponding "book": "the volume of melancholy," "the book of flight," or "the work of balance." The idea is to diocese how many pages you can access. The better your strategy, the more chapters you will be able to penetrate and explore.

First World Order throw out Development (1997), a CD-ROM and web site by means of Philip Mallory Jones, aims at exploring the agricultures of the African Diaspora and at communicating their public often encoded, knowledge in a way that chops across cultural barriers. The shoot forward illuminates a complex global diaspora, originating in Africa, on the other hand transcending race and ethnicity, which is defined in bounds of modes of expression, paradigms of perception and combination of parts to form a wholes of symbolic communication. Integral to Jones's work is the notion that communication happens vertically and horizontally. Horizontal communication shows linear, spoken language that we normally use; vertical communication is related to instinct and intuition - a way to knowledge and understanding that Jone perceive s is more powerful than intellect.

In conceptualizing the salon, Materre and Patricia Zimmermann, co-programmer and Professor of Film at Ithaca corporation were inspired by Umberto Eco's ideas about creating digital "osterias." "Eco said that computer ne to be in public spaces and that they ne to be easy and accessible and a part of conversation instead of the privatized prototype of singular computer ownership in the home" noted Zimmermann. The idea we had was to brownify and genderize the Web." Accordingly, the salon featured links to media arts organizations in Brazil, free-speech initiatives in Latin America, border politics in the West, feminist organizations across the globe, alternative media organizations, labor changes around the world, multimedia initiatives in Canada, personal websites by dint of women of color working in the U Native American arts throw outs and international lesbian and gay media. The salon was pleasantry and accessible and many of the CD were challenging. Seminar participants were given a list of websites and CD-ROM and a Digital Culture(s) Bibliography to further examine the art sampled in the salon.