10.12 Domenico Distilo: Coding Storytelling; Aily Nash: Image Employment

Domenico Distilo: Coding storytelling / World Wide Stories 10-13h
Coding storytelling – is the analysis of the documentary project I’m currently developing within the frame of the DAAD exchange program at Udk. The film project is called World-Wide-Stories, WWS, and it’s a documentary that uses new media technologies and television to fulfil the narration. When I started to work on WWS I had little idea of the lengths and how many examples and innovations are currently running in the field of storytelling. It’s maybe the right time to face them trying to work within, with proportion and acknowledgement. -Coding storytelling- will analyse some examples of transmedia and crossmedia narratives, with a focus on documentaries to depict the elements and some trends of storytelling through new technologies. The use of the second-screen and the non-linear storytelling : examples of softwares and products for interactions. These new experiences of storytelling , will be analysed through the different categories that constitute the act of narration. An attempt to build a systematic overview, a possible catalogue to the new narrative technics.
-Coding storytelling, will present excerpts from two previews documentary films: Urban Extremes – Jerusalem (HD, 30 min. 2011) Trailer: http://vimeo.com/23585666 Between cyberspace and daily life, “Jerusalem – Urban Extremes” is an insight into the conflictual use of space in the Holy City. In Jerusalem, groups of both Israeli and Palestinian urban planners have joined together to defend human rights: the right to possess land, because in Israel the biggest conflict is that of space. Architecture and urbanism are cause in the conflict, and the documentary follows the emotional maps of the city, through the eyes of those who live and work in the city defining the development and the confines of Jerusalem: a capital city for two populations. The regulatory plan, building licenses, evictions and illegal building are the tools used to define the territory’s nature: the war is fought through housing, no longer using tanks. The planning of the houses has become a filter, revealing the intimate mechanism of a thousand year long conflict. Imaginary Roma (HD, 45min. 2012) Trailer: http://vimeo.com/26704624
For the first time, in 2007, the Venice Biennale hosted an exhibition of Romany Art. A historical exhibition, which questioned the traditional ‘identity’ frontiers of contemporary art. The curator of the exhibition, Timea Junghaus (Hungarian Sinta, art historian and academic) takes us through the works of art and the lives of the artists who have given birth to this new movement in the international artistic panorama: Roma Contemporary Art. The Romany artists, whose cultural capital is Budapest, use art as a medium to overthrow and discuss the main cultural images which the European media have created around the Romany minority. Roma Contemporary Art in Hungary therefore becomes a political tool used to fight against the strong racist society, littered with threatening paramilitary xenophobic groups, linked to the far right parties. The story is told by the artists themselves, together in Budapest for an exhibition of new media, and this documentary follows the challenge created between politics and aesthetics.
 
Aily Nash: Image Employment 14-16h
Image Employment presents recent moving image works that investigate various modes of contemporary production. The selected works illustrate differing approaches to the subject, from observational films that avoid participation in capitalistic image creation, to videos that engage corporate omnipotence by employing its processes, as well as works that complicate these two tendencies. Many of the films in the exhibition take an oppositional approach to commercial image making. In Kevin Jerome Everson’s Quality Control African-American workers from an Alabama dry-cleaning factory are shown relentlessly carrying out their jobs in real time. Everson explores the duration and physicality of labor through a series of lengthy shots that draw attention to particular tasks such as working the pant press or ironing shirts. Alternately, many video works in this exhibition employ corporate processes and communication by reiterating corporate imagery and intervening into sites of emergent industries and globalized consumption. DIS’ Watermarked I Kenzo Fall 2012, for example, arose out of a paid commission for Kenzo’s seasonal menswear collection. The work reflexively dramatizes the commercial advertisement form through the absurd excesses of the actors’ expressions, the politically correct racial composition, and a stock media infused aesthetic. Invoking the growing convergence between labor, consumption, and that which propels them, Image Employment examines different ways artists use moving image work to engage and confront contemporary modes of production.