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#DocShop event invitation: Notes from El Saniyya

Dear Friends,
Harvard’s DocShop and MIT OpenDocLab Fellow Lara Baladi are happy to invite you to Notes from El Saniyya on Thursday December 11th from 3-9 pm, with the main event and artist’s talk from 6:30-8:00, at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Based on a growing archive that artist Lara Baladi has been gathering since the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, Notes from El Saniyya is an invitation to participate in the making of a ‘transmedia painting’ and is part of the interactive history-telling project Baladi is developing at OpenDocLab, called Vox Populi, Archiving a Revolution in the Digital Age.

Tahrir Square was the most digitally documented and disseminated event in modern history. It is the archetype of a global phenomenon that marks the beginning of the 21st century. Baladi’s Vox Populi will act as a tribute to this symbolic event and represent its impact on and resonance with the uprisings and socio-political movements that followed, and continue to do so worldwide.

Notes from El Saniyya is the first in a series that DocShop and artist Lara Baladi will present during the 2014-15 academic year. Experimental and conversational, the event will offer participants the chance to interact with archival media, give feedback, and contribute ideas which will help inform later events in the series. This open lab experience mixing art, history, and digital media will encourage participants to immerse themselves in the creative process of making socially-engaged art.

Notes from El Saniyya will take place on Thursday December 11th, from 3-9 pm in Gund 522 (The HILT room) at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, 48 Quincy St, Cambridge, MA 02138.

Space for this event is limited, please RSVP here: http://goo.gl/forms/IzopK1UwWL
Email Joe Steele jsteele@gsd.harvard.edu with any questions.

Warmly,

DocShop and Lara Baladi

DocShop is an interactive documentary workshop that seeks to engage filmmakers, artists, and storytellers with new audiences. Dedicated to exploring the possibilities of embodied media in ever-expanding contexts of participation, DocShop is part of the Digital Problem Solving Initiative (DPSI) at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and metaLAB at Harvard.

Lara Baladi is an internationally recognized multi-disciplinary Egyptian artist. Baladi applies archives, investigations of myths, and personal narratives to a range of mediums including architectural and video installations. Baladi publishes and exhibits worldwide. Here is a link to her CreativeTime Reports articles. Her works are part of a number of institutional and private collections. She has been a board member of the Arab Image Foundation since its creation in 1997 and in 2014, began to serve on the advisory board of R-Shief, a historical online archive and media system.

During the 2011 Egyptian uprising, Baladi co-founded two media initiatives, Radio Tahrir and Tahrir Cinema, which served as public platforms to build and share an archive on and for the revolution. Today, much of Baladi’s work revolves around and stems from this archive.

#DocShop Meeting 08

What we worked on

We had two meetings this week. During the first DPSI meeting, we responded to last week’s visit to Lawrence to see Dan’s locative media piece ‘Fall of the Pemberton Mill’. We then shifted into project management mode to make a schedule and scope out our first event.

In the second meeting, we met in the HILT Room in Gund 522, where Lara Baladi (Egyptian-Lebanese artist and fellow at the MIT Media Lab) presented her work and posed various problematiques of working with an archive, troubling the idea of the public domain, and how to combine media with data visualization and record narratives from the audience. Lara, along with the group, came up with an idea for a prototype for the first ‘happening’ for #DocShop, which will be in the first week or two of December. More information to come next week.

What went well

It was great to start really digging into the material, with the artist present. We also got to discuss our positioning to the modes of interactivity in documentary arts and storytelling, and what it means to spatialize time-based media.

What was challenging

Planning this event in such a short time and scoping out what we will be able to do by early December. The team is working beautifully, but the challenge comes with working with media in space and planning the event, and the moving parts that go along with it, along with being respectful to the artist’s material.

What’s up next

Booking a space, meeting with Lara at our #DocShop meeting on Friday, and beginning the planning of the installation and event.

#DocShop Meeting 07

What We Did

This week we took a field trip out to Lawrence, MA to experience an interactive documentary in situ: The Path: The Fall of Pemberton Mill, produced by #DocShop member Dan Koff.

This multi-modal presentation of 7 videos, played on personal smart phones over the course of a walking tour of the Lawrence mills, featured the narrative of a present-day teenager intertwined with the historical perspective of 2 sisters who had worked in Pemberton Mill disaster, interviews with present-day historians and a relative of the two sisters. Additional media assets included place markers around Lawrence, artifacts such as maps, indentures, and arrest records, as well as the historic mill buildings themselves.

What Went Well

The Path videos augmented reality to create a novel experience of place that was connected to historic events by proximity. The maps and instructions provided in the video series led us gently along while allowing enough room for ad hoc exploration of the spaces and artifacts. There was a consensus in our group that the piece would have worked just as well if we had not had Dan to guide our way, and that the overall experience benefitted from the social context of group discussion.

What Was Challenging

While the overall experience was quite positive and thought-provoking, some unanswered questions remain. The piece itself was participatory, but we were not sure if it fits the definition of interactive. The spectrum of interactivity continues to be a concept that we hone and refine. We also discussed the possibility of creating a networked learning experience with the incorporation of audience participation; we brainstormed ways that participants might add content in the form of reflections on present-day industrial accidents and generating their own media that connects the present to the past. This could take many different forms and we weren’t sure which would be most effective for the participant, and most interesting for the larger network of the piece’s audience.

What’s Up Next

For the next meeting, we’ll continue to unpack our experience with The Path in a discussion of location-based storytelling and the limits of interactivity, as not all of the #DocShop members were able to join us in Lawrence.

We also plan to recap and reflect on some of the group members’ experience of Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors and the recent Illuminus Festival.

Ultimately, we’ll work on a roadmap for collaborating with Lara Baladi and the final #DocShop deliverable for DPSI.