Campus Reboot

 

Presenter: Susan Cardillo

Registration Number: 001
Institution: University of Hartford, Connecticut, USA

Abstract: Campus Reboot is a crowd-sourced, interactive and collaborative web-based documentary project and course. The project will be a living document of the historical times of college during the Covid19 pandemic and its aftermath. Working with 15 colleges around the world, students created videos, based on prompts, to share their feelings about college during Covid. Campus Reboot allows students to not only create works that speak to the voice of their generation, in the midst of a historical pandemic, but it also allows students to work with the footage from other schools, around the world, to create a broader story of our times. According to Nichols (2001), documentary projects are about telling stories concerning our shared world and how we want it to be. This generation grew in participatory art, video and community to begin the discovery that documentary could be about making purposeful stories with people rather than just about them (Rose, n.d.). This project uses crowd-sourced documentary to tell important stories and create a rich learning environment. Collaborative, crowd-sourced and interactive sites are all examples of Participatory Media. Participatory sites such as Youtube have changed the landscape of digital video storytelling. It can also be argued that social media sites are the new breeding ground for both collaborative and crowd-sourced video work. Campus Reboot uses Youtube as a cloud-based participatory site for video uploads and currently Wix as its cloud-based website placeholder and Klynt interactive software to create the home base. Collaborative documentary allows the scope of the documentary to expand with the addition of user-generated content. User-generated content can be remixed, reworked, and built upon to enrich the story (Bhimani, 2012). According to the MIT Open Documentary Lab, collaborative or co-created documentaries interpret the world, and seek to change it, through a lens of equity and justice (Clark & Cizek, 2019). Enabling students to learn and create in this international environment affords them new ways to interpret, understand and engage in the world through the experiences and insights of their peers. With interactive documentary the viewer is invited to become a creative partner in the story. It also enables a global access at any time through many entrances, including social networks (Uricchio, 2019). All of these documentary styles come together in unison to help both students and instructors work in new and collaborative ways to tell important stories in Campus Reboot.

Bio: Dr. Susan Cardillo has a Doctorate of Computer Science in Emerging Media concentrating on Interactive Documentary (digital storytelling) for Social Change. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Journalism at the University of Hartford. Dr. Cardillo was recently awarded the Innovations in Teaching award, as well as the Women’s Initiative Fellowship at the University of Hartford. Her area of research is Interactive and Micro-Documentary for Social Awareness and Change. Campus Reboot is her latest work, in progress.

EXPOSED: Documenting COVID-19 in the Criminal Punishment System.

Presenter: Sharon Daniel
Registration Number: 037
Institution: University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
Abstract: In the 15th century, Venetians invented the Quarantine as a protection against the plague. In the Mid-20th century, Americans invented a criminal punishment system based on the model of quarantine in which the disproportionately poor, black or brown "offender” is treated like a pathogen to be isolated and contained. In the 21st century, COVID-19, an actual pathogen, has both exposed and intensified the brutality of that system—prisoners have been stranded in quarantine without adequate food or medication, abandoned and unseen. In the US, over 2 million people are confined in overcrowded, unsanitary, and unsafe environments. Prisoners cannot practice social distancing or use hand sanitizer and are regularly subjected to medical malpractice and neglect. California suspended prison visits on March 11. The Federal Bureau of Prisons and state prison systems across the country rapidly followed suit. The first confirmed case of COVID-19 infection among prisoners in the US was reported on March 21. As coronavirus lockdowns ended visits by lawyers and family members, it became increasingly difficult to know what is going on inside. In late April 2020, a prisoner at Marion Correctional Institution in Ohio—which, at that time, was the largest coronavirus hotspot in the US—wrote the following:
The social category of prisoner qualifies one as undeserving of a decent civilized life. Herein lies the cause of the profound spread of the virus throughout the institution: the collective sense of the undeservingness of prisoners. A vaccination would be nice. Proper P.P.E. would help. But the real cure for our woes is an affirmation of the inalienable entitlement to life for people in prisons and jails.
This hybrid paper/artist presentation will focus on the interactive documentary EXPOSED [https://unjustlyexposed.com], conceived in a state of "emergency," to provide a cumulative public record and evolving history of the coronavirus pandemic’s impact on incarcerated people. EXPOSED, documents the spread of COVID-19, over time, inside prisons, jails, and detention centers across the US, from the perspective of prisoners and their families. Original interviews, combined with quotes, audio clips and statistics collected from a comprehensive array of online publications and broadcasts, are assembled into an interactive timeline that, on each day, offers abundant testimony to the risk and trauma prisoners experience under coronavirus quarantine. EXPOSED launched on October 30, 2020 and will continue to be updated on a weekly basis until the pandemic crisis in carceral spaces across the US is resolved. The scale of the project is intended to reflect the scale of the crisis. For July 8th alone, the timeline includes over 100 statements made by prisoners afflicted with the virus or enduring anxiety, distress, and neglect. The monochrome, image-less, headline-styled interface, which allows viewers to step through thousands of prisoners’ statements, is designed to visualize their collective suffering, signal that the injustices they endure are structural, and demonstrate that the criminal punishment system in the US, itself, constitutes a public health crisis.

Bio: Sharon Daniel is a media artist who creates interactive and participatory documentary artworks addressing issues of social, racial and environmental injustice, focusing principally on mass incarceration and the criminal legal system. Daniel develops innovative online interfaces and multi-media installations that visualize and materialize the testimonies of incarcerated people and marginalized communities. Her work has been exhibited in museums and festivals internationally—most recently: at CPH:DOX, Copenhagen (April-May 2021), in Electronic Literature Organization’s COVID E-Lit exhibition, Bergen, Norway (April 2021), in Barring Freedom, San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA (Oct – May 2021), in the Museum of Capitalism, Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Parsons School of Design, NYC, NY (Oct – Dec 2019) in a solo exhibition Secret Injustices, at the Schmidt Center (US, FL, 2017), as an official selection in the Alternate Realities exhibition at Sheffield Doc|Fest (UK, 2016), and in a solo exhibition titled Convictions at STUK Kunstencentrum, (Belgium, 2013). Daniel’s works have also been shown in museums and festivals such as WRO media art biennial 2011 (Poland), Artefact 2010 (Belgium), Transmediale 08 (Germany), the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival DEAF03 (Netherlands), Ars Electronica (Austria), the Lincoln Center Festival (NY/USA), the Corcoran Biennial (Washington DC) and the University of Paris I (France). Her essays have been published in books, including Female Authorship and the Documentary Image (Oxford University Press, in press), Context Providers (Intellect Press 2011), Database Aesthetics (Minnesota University Press 2007) and the Sarai Reader05, as well as in professional journals such as Cinema Journal, Leonardo, Studies in Documentary Film and Springerin. Her writings and projects have also been published in online journals such as Stretch, Thresholds, and Vectors. Daniel was honored by the Webby Awards in 2008 and the Rockefeller/Tribeca Film Festival New Media Fellowship in 2009. In 2015-16, she was named in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts “YBCA 100”—a list of “the creative minds, makers, and pioneers that are asking the questions and making the provocations that will shape the future of American culture.” She was a 2017 Fulbright Scholar at Ulster University in Art, Design and the Built Environment. Documentation of exhibitions and links to projects can be found at http://sharondaniel.net.

Escaping Confinement: Electronic-Device Footage in Fictions about the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Presenter: Yago Paris
Registration Number: 052
Institution: Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem, Budapest, Hungary
Abstract: This study delves into a very recent tendency in film, which is the use of electronic-device footage (mostly, but not reduced to, phone footage). This tendency is paramount to understanding one of the many mutations of mainstream cinema. Specifically, I will study the new use that has appeared since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. To develop this study, I will establish a comparative analysis between the most representative commercial films of the pandemic, and I will extract the conclusion that the use of electronic-device footage has acquired a new meaning, and that the use of phone footage has different implications than the other types of electronic-device footage. One of the most representative aspects of the fictions about the COVID-19 pandemic is the insistent appearance of electronic devices to allow virtual communication. Here it is important to realize that the use of this footage is diegetic; that is, not only it is filmed by the cameras of these devices—phones, tablets, and laptops, mostly—but they are also integrated in the narrative itself. The appearance of electronic-device footage in film, as a source for the development of new narratives, was born many years before the start of the pandemic, usually used either as an immersive experience—it creates the impression of subjectivity and impersonation—or to create a sense of immediacy and documentary-like style. Nevertheless, I claim that, in the films that address the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of these devices and the images they produce is different from those that appeared in pre-pandemic cinema, and, as such, conveys different meanings to the filmed images. The first main difference is the change from the character filming the environment, to them filming themselves —which is represented by the switching from the use of the lens on the back of the device to the so-called “selfie-camera.” The second difference relates to the meaning each device conveys. Whereas in many fictions—such as Locked Down (2021)—conversations take place through laptops and tablets, which transmit the idea of isolation and stillness inside the house, in others—especially Songbird (2020)—the use of the phone is attached to an idea of more freedom and movement, not only inside the house, but also around the area where the film takes place. By analyzing the most relevant films that have been produced so far, I intend to prove that in these fictions phone footage—as opposed to other electronic-device footage—addresses the desire to find some freedom in a scenario of confinement.

Bio: Yago Paris (Tenerife, 1989) graduated from the master’s in film studies (Film Theory) at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), in Budapest. He wrote his thesis on the aesthetics of Michael Bay’s transformers and its influence over the representation of CGI robots in American big-budget commercial cinema. He has published an article, about the use of the documentary format to heal trauma, in Studies in Eastern European Cinema, and has presented a paper on cultural trauma and political taboo in the 4th Trauma and Nightmare Conference. He is preparing his access to the PhD program, while also developing a monographic book on the oeuvre of American animator Bill Plympton.

Leering in Lockdown: COVID-19 and its impact on White America’s Social Media Responses to the Death of George Floyd.

Presenter: Allison Wiltshire

Registration Number: 039
Institution: University of Missouri-Columbia, USA

Abstract: In the late spring and early summer of 2020, only one news story could pry America’s attention away from the growing rampancy and anguish of the COVID-19 pandemic. When footage of the murder of George Floyd surfaced and spread across social media platforms, Americans were offered a rare view of the gleam of death through a focus on a single individual rather than an ever-growing ailing group. In this paper, I analyze the intersection of the pandemic and Floyd’s death, drawing an antithetical yet causal connection between the social distancing of the pandemic and white America’s social media-fueled attraction to the George Floyd case. I argue that during the rise of COVID-19, white American social media users became particularly attached to footage of George Floyd’s death because of their pandemic-driven expulsion from physical public spaces. Through a theoretical framing that encompasses Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of the gaze and Frank Wilderson’s theory of Afropessimism, as well as a variety of theoretical and scientific studies related to social isolation, I demonstrate how white voyeurism at George Floyd’s dying body is ultimately an unconscious attempt to soothe anxiety associated with social distancing—a feeling of outcasting to which white Americans have rarely been subject. Additionally, I draw historical connections between the white gaze at Floyd’s body and white voyeurism at the bodies of Sarah Baartman and lynched black men during the Jim Crow era. In the case of George Floyd, social media has served as an antidote for white anxiety, allowing white Americans the chance to both subdue their feelings of social segregation by repeatedly consuming intimate images of Floyd’s dying body and feel a sense of personal pride and social gratification in publicly denouncing the overt racism of Derek Chauvin and his supporters. In my final analysis, I contend that within virtual public spaces, white responses to racial injustice must transcend the typical perception of white silence as a perpetuation of white violence, and I assert that social distancing, even in the form of virtual distancing through social media, is a crucial step for white Americans who are sincerely committed to social justice and civil rights activism. 

Bio: Allison Wiltshire is a G. Ellsworth Huggins Fellow, PhD student, and graduate instructor of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Wiltshire focuses her scholarship on literature of the African diaspora. Predominantly, she examines themes of race, Afropolitanism, duality, and twinning in contemporary African and African American texts. Wiltshire received her MA and BA from Mississippi State University and began her doctoral studies at the University of Missouri-Columbia in 2019.