sketch.sissel.september#1

Sketch#1 About video and the digital Image I have chosen to do some sketches about two "artworks" which uses both the opportunities of the digital camera and the internet, as a medium for disseminate a statement. #1 The documentary: Iraqi Short Films - by Mauro Andrizzi. Check out some of the movie here This movie uses original footage from the iraqi war, produced by both the militant groups (for recruiting on their web tv channels) and the allies' troops, and mixing these videoclips with a minimum of intervention or use of filmic manipulation/effects. In this way, the film shows us the unadulterated (more or less) picture of a war, which we watch and hear about every day. This is a critical comment towards how the media (especially the US) display the war, but also an exploration of what new media, such as the Internet and lightweight digital cameras/mobile phones can be used for in terms of telling the truth. In a media world where you have to question the authenticity and truthfulness of all political statements, the internet has become a source of circumventing censorship and governmental regulations of media messages... This is how the pictures of torture in the Abu Ghraib prison was displayed for the world, and this is how most of the footage in the film was achieved. #2 The second "artwork" is the online videochannel www.vbs.tv. They do a bunch of different shows, some better than others, but one in particular caught my interest: vbs - news, which tries to provide a different view on the world, through little documentaries on subjects that they find interesting/shitty/forgotten/crazy etc. These documentaries are in no way anonymous and objective (difficult word, but anyway), and they are not afraid of being in opposition to the discursive standards and opinions of the settled media. In this way they are fully exploiting the possibilities and advantages of the Internet as a source of information and a tool for being selective about media messages. They are customized for the format and easy accessible. 1+2=3 The two cases both tries to display some kind of truth and reality about the subject they are trying to deal with. They are both using the accessibility for finding this truth through new media. This brings me to the discussion of the photographic image as the representation of reality (in film theory first defined by André Bazin), and the semiotic discussion of the collapse of the iconographic status of the image, in the age of digitalization. With digital manipulation it is easy to manipulate what is seen, and thereby the direct connection to reality, as Bazin defined it, is gone. But another aspect of searching for the truth (which documentary filmmakers always have sought) has emerged in the practice of using the digitalization in an activist approach, to what would have been inaccessible without the digitalization of media images. I have made a couple of "children's book sketches" to illustrate this transition from the photographic image as a direct representation of the truth (Cinéma Vérité) and the way the truth gets out in the world of sharing images and information through new media: (sorry about the horrible quality, my camera is on vacation so photobooth had to do the work...)