Complex Art for Complex issues
Focusing on the issue of private logging on Cortes – David Dodson
Focusing on the issue of private logging on Cortes – David Dodson
After a presentation, Hello World, by Kate Armstrong (http://www.katearmstrong.com/bio) , we held a Samoan Circle, a fishbowl conversation where people move in and out.
Bill Weaver: One day I was running in the rain. With laptop. Having just completed a real estate transaction with transvestite clothing designer on Second Life. Wondering, what am I doing? How can technology enhance relationship with nature?
Patricia: Nature is the ultimate media. Started out as nature filmmaker. Took me to different lifestyle. I connect with nature without technology. A long photo lens will bring me into intimate world of wildlife.
Locative media. Radio telemetry has been used with animals. Apply to story: story of those animals. Meditation might bring you into specifics. Never comes up to here and now moments.
David: How do you share experience of nature with the many who don’t have that access?
Kate: Photo of a butterfly is media. Is media best way to talk about natural cycles?
Tuti: Want to draw back to ancient and primary kind of medium. Oral histories. All about place. Chants. Learn them so we know where we are. Geneology. Place is always a main character.
Patricia: Inuit use inukshuks – bulletin boards / stories. The rocks as markers.
Kate: Who wants to experience nature through a mobile phone?
Berkley: How is information stored in a project like Murmur?
Kate: Mysterious signs. Information is fragile.
David Black: Conventional media induce hypnotic state. Trade on psychological suggestibility. Locative media could be cure for the disconnect. They are embodying. You have to activate. Encourage balance between senses. Non linear. Heterogeneous unlike conventional media. Ads speak to desire, envy, awareness of lack in your life. Sublimely aware of physical surroundings, inner life. We media makers are part of the problem
Patricia: Geocaching: find secret stash.
Kate: Remix is interesting.
Michael T: Is there a danger we’re romanticizing notion of nature? Seems dangerous to think that if we spend time in the woods, things will be OK.
If media is extension of your senses / existence. I have relationship through Facebook.
David B: Nature is antidote to that.
M T: Is city part of nature?
DB: No. We’re reorganized nature.
Deepak: Media does have opportunity of providing ideas. You don’t have to become overwhelmed. You can show nature and experience place. What’s special through eyes of people who are there?
Sue: Nature/ media. Global/local. How do I connect to “Being Caribou”?
Mike Tippett: Laptops are banned, books are allowed?
Sue Biely: How can we teach more accountability? Each of us have opportunity to be plugged in or out.
Deepak: we are rewuiting our relationship to nature. It may rewrite us.
David D : Movement around indigenous storytelling. Let’s connect with them. How are we connected to nature . . . swarm of information. Trees are doing that for years. Space and time.
Deepak: Up to us to rewrite our role in larger story. Nature will go on. How do we relate?
J: It’s about relationship to nature. Guy who died because he didn’t know how to function outside of human controlled environments. Nothing left that’s wild.
You will become compost.
BW: Since I bought a new screen, I’m more in jeopardy of becoming a couch potato.. CBC’s ‘natural’ takes me to Rwanda. HD takes me there; I grok what they are going through. It comes down to media literacy.
Tom Adair: Seeing process as living. What do people watch? People have to choose. What is already linear? Airplanes now have screens up. What if stories came up?
Patricia; Maybe we need ask ourselves, what is media? What is nature? Nature is media in most perfect form. When I think about going into nature, do I know how to survive? By simplifying my relationship to it, I’ve learned and grown.
Chris Cheadle: Complexity – diversity of nature in every ecosystem. Self-sustaining. Create awareness of treasure box. Medicine. Monoculture of our media no good. Learn from nature. Man’s stuff has been perverted by goals of business.
Steve Anderson: Technology/nature/media is false dichotomy. Looking at the larger picture: how’s it structured? Who’s directing our participation in media? Need to look between messages and methodology.
Convener: Andrew Frank, Forest Ethics
What makes a media campaign less like medicine and more like manna? How does it get sticky and viral? Does it take seasoned media magicians to capture attention and action -- or is it just authenticity, enthusiasm, and luck?
Andrew Frank, communications director for Forest Ethics, will give us an overview of his organization's successful Victoria's Dirty Secret media campaign, as well as other initiatives such as Greenpeace's Mr. Splashy Pants, that have also grabbed lots of eyeballs -- sometimes in very unexpected ways.
We'll then morph into a group strategy session on raising public awareness and political action around the Alberta Tar Sands -- North America's biggest single environmental tragedy. It will be a great chance to pool our collective wisdom toward shifting the sands of a growing threat to the earth and its atmosphere.
Conveners -- Sarah van Gelder, Stephen Silha
How many stories in media are all about conflict? Black and white? Good and bad? Polarities run amok?
How many stories tell about the disintegration of people's lives, about people as passive victims of forces beyond their control?
How many times do you find stories of people as agents of change--and stories about creativity at all levels of society that address our world's deepest challenges?
What if we added a 6th W to the Who What Where When Why of journalism: What’s Possible Now?
How can questions and stories be infused with possibilities that inspire changes in readers in viewers?
Sarah van Gelder, editor of Yes! Magazine, and Stephen Silha, former reporter for The Christian Science Monitor and principal of Good News/Good Deeds: Citizen Effectiveness in the Age of Electronic Democracy, will discuss specifics on how to explore any story from a possibility perspective—and keep it dramatic.
Join us for a private showing of Up the Yangtze, hosted by Tracey Friesen. Up the Yangtze is produced by Eyesteel Film in association with The National Film Board of Canada.
SYNOPSIS:
In China, the mighty Yangtze is known simply as “The River.” It is about to be transformed by the biggest hydroelectric dam in history, the Three Gorges Project. At the river’s edge, a girl named Yu Shui says goodbye to her family as the floodwaters rise towards their small homestead. She is leaving to work on a cruise line that takes tourists on a "Farewell to the Three Gorges Tour", where visitors get to wave goodbye to 5000 years of civilization. It's "The Love Boat" meets "Apocalypse Now". The Three Gorges Dam — contested symbol of the Chinese economic miracle — provides the epic backdrop for Up the Yangtze, a dramatic feature documentary on life inside modern China.
Click here for more information.
"IMMENSE AND UNFORGETTABLE"
-Peter Howell, Tornoto Star
"OUTSTANDING... GORGEOUSLY SHOT AND AS GRIPPING AS AN EPIC NOVEL"
-Liam Lacey, The Globe and Mail
“A GLORIOUSLY CINEMATIC DOC”
-John Anderson, Variety
Convener - Kate Armstrong
How can we as writers and producers approach the situated space of the physical environment as an active narrative element in our projects, and how does engaging the real world in our stories affect what we create and present?
In this session, internationally exhibited artist, writer, and curator Kate Armstrong will present an overview of this emergent transdisciplinary approach to narrative in which the work becomes located in geography, time and physical space as part of its structure or meaning. Such projects invite activity on the part of the reader or participant and engage attributes from a variety of technological and disciplinary traditions, including theatre, mobile technology, film, video, activism, drawing, documentary, walking, and GPS art.
In the session we will look at examples of this work and consider the role of the actual world in the production and experience of narrative forms.
Convener: Tracey Friesen, National Film Board of Canada
There’s lots of talk about the cinematic documentary, but how is that defined? What fundamentally is the difference between a television doc and project intended for feature release? What elements (besides penguins) do these films have in common? Cinematic aesthetics are unique and should be apparent right from development. Cinema allows us to be ethereal, providing the time and space to ponder, dream and escape into our imagination.
Join Tracey Friesen, executive producer of NFB’s Pacific & Yukon Centre, in a forum around high-impact documentaries. We’ll brainstorm together in an attempt to determine what goes into creating successful theatrical films - narrative, content, timeliness, art...
Convener -- Sue Biely
In this session, we'll watch a variety of short-form videos known for igniting interest and action, and get an overview of what's happening this dynamic and varied genre. We'll graze through short films, new trends, viral videos, and citizen reporting via cell phones. Join the discussion as we explore how bite-sized content is mirroring our world and its issues.
Prior to co-founding Nimble Company, Sue Biely was acquisitions editor for the late-night Emmy-nominated CBC TV series ZeD. For three seasons, she led the team that screened and licensed more than 700 short films from around the world for multiple platforms. She has attended more than 30 film festivals, as a buyer, international juror, panelist and facilitator in various countries, including the U.K., the U.S., Spain, France, Ireland, Denmark, Australia and Canada.
Convener - Michael TIppett, NowPublic
In a global world, it’s tough to be local. Small and mid-sized journalism outlets keep communities alive and informed, adding depth and variety to local and regional culture and aboriginal identity. But choosing to be local means working with smaller revenue models, and in many instances, in markets dominated by multiple media ownership.
At the same time, news from everywhere else is more instantly and democratically available than most local news; and as local immigrant communities become more firmly established, the line between local and global continues to blur. Are there ways both forms of independent media can work together to overcome these challenges? Does citizen journalism hold a key to the their collective future ?
Conveners - Bill Weaver, Patricia Sims
Our
affluent and influential culture is becoming increasingly infused with
flickering screens, keyboards, consoles, and touchpads.
Our almost seamless relationship with these devices has given us
windows into planetary knowledge and toolkits for grassroots action. On
the other hand, a growing body of research indicates they are also
playing a major part in removing us – and especially our children —
from the nourishing, tactile contact of family, community, and nature.
The result: less emotional intelligence and a dearth of future
environmental leadership.
From bumper stickers to banners, from VR to PVRs, how can we reconcile
this dissonance? What are the most engaging ways that media and
technology can enhance, rather than detract, from our wonder and
stewardship of the natural world?
During the session, we'll have a chance to apply some of these ideas to media strategies evolving for the Robert Bateman Gallery and Environmental Education Centre, which is scheduled to open in 2010.
