Tuesday, 18 August 2015
Tuesday, 11 August 2015
The Innov8 Invercargill team would
like to invite you to the next Innov8 Invercargill Pecha Kucha being held on
Monday 17 August at Level 6, Kelvin Hotel, from 5.30pm for a 5.45pm start.
Presenters
this month are:
Stephen
Davies
- the manager/curator of Anderson Park Art
Gallery who will speak on the history and significance of the gallery’s
collection.
Kathryn
McCully –presents
on Soft
City: The Animation of Cultural Scenes and asks the question If
Invercargill could be contextualised as a “soft city” providing the stage for
the development of social scenes which intensify urban performativity, what
could these scenes be and what role could they play in the revitalisation of
the life of the city?
Mick
Hesselin -
architect with an extensive knowledge about Invercargill's heritage buildings
who will talk about some of the buildings we have in the CBD.
For more information about Innov8
Invercargill Pecha Kucha visit our Facebook page
Sunday, 2 August 2015
A Southland Museum
https://vimeo.com/135204716
a southland
museum
Directed and Produced by Kathryn
McCully
The definition of a museum in New
Zealand is broad, recognising a diversity of non-profit entities that research
interpret, preserve and manage collections on behalf of communities[1].
The Museums Aotearoa description of a museum’s purpose is indicative of the
belief that collections are preserved for the purpose of interpreting
histories, exploring ideas and creating dialogue that contributes value to
communities. The majority of museums in New Zealand were relatively recently
established[2]
and are classified as small – employing between 0 and 5 full-time staff[3].
The most recent sector survey indicates 62% of museums identified funding,
collection care, buildings, visitation/engagement and staffing as challenges in
the 2013 year[4]. Performing the DIY Museum aims to
establish a new paradigm by exploring the applicability of creative
practice-based research methodologies alongside
“critical reflection” and “reflexive action” following a progression from the
“unknown to the known” to the
purpose of and challenges facing a majority of New Zealand’s public museums.
The development of ideas as many artists will
attest is not a process that can be controlled or structured “but one that
starts connecting diverging elements” that explore the potentiality of new
relationships. It is via the practices of the archivist that Crang suggests a
process of working “through materials”[5]
for example. Walter Benjamin’s affinity with collecting or the archive as a
means of revealing “hidden dynamics” serves to support Crang’s argument for a
non-linear practice that “reconfigures” and “recontextualises” existing
relationships in order to encounter new insights.
Method of this project: literary montage. I
needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no
ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse – these I will not inventory
but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of
them.[6]
Benjamin’s method of collecting, juxtaposing
and reinterpreting his material would he hoped “make new truths erupt…from the
conjunctures and disjunctures between elements.”[7]
This archival practice of gathering “fragments and moments” he believed more
accurately reflected the nature of experience, of one’s day-to-day engagement
in the world. Benjamin’s thinking was in the 1920s aligned with developing
surrealist and collage based practices however his intention was an attempt at
more than just the clashing or and layering of disparate elements, he sought to
perform the evolution of the city by allowing ideas to “emerge from and through
the materials”. Benjamin’s method exemplifies the desire for a “mode of
representation” that favours neither the experiential nor theoretical but
allows experience in the world to be performed thereby signifying the “multiple
interrelationships of material”.
The work has been influenced by a diversity
of practices including the Life in a Day
project. Seeking to celebrate its fifth anniversary YouTube approached Ridley
Scott’s production company Scott Free UK and consequently began a collaborative
project that would see the creation of the first crowd-sourced feature film.
Inspired by the Mass Observation movement established in 1937 to study and
record the everyday lives of people in Britain, director Kevin Macdonald said
the feature documentary titled Life in a
Day “was a wonderful
opportunity to hear the voices of ordinary people describing the world as they
see it, telling us their fears and loves. I always knew this would say
something fascinating about who [we] are as a species and what we value—but I
never realized how emotionally affecting the result would be."[8] Life in
a Day was composited from over 80,000 video clips posted directly onto
YouTube by people sharing their experience of one day - Saturday July 24th
2010.
The receipt of 4,500 hours of footage
necessitated a team of people to view and catalogue each submission according
to production quality and content to enable the process of narrative
structuring that followed. Confining the
projects scope to one day facilitated some fortuitous synergies, for example
there happened to be a full moon so the documentary starts with numerous shots
of the full moon before moving into scenes associated with typical and perhaps
not so typical waking and breakfast rituals. Evidently the documentary does not
attempt to be seamless or pretend to be anything other than what it is. Scenes
are filmed by professionals and amateurs alike and the final narrative decided
via a process of identifying and compositing patterns and juxtapositions.
“One could always rely
upon millions of coincidences and rhymes in this material,” says Walker. “Just
because of the sheer volume and range of it. So when we had to move big chunks
of the film into a different order, and had to lose connections we'd begun to
rely upon, we knew that other connections would swiftly take their place. Some
of those only dawned on us later, such as how two very different contributors
utter the words ‘because I'm a man,’ or how many clips feature a space where a
mother should be.”[1]
Further discussion and
research around the development of this project can be sourced via http://diypublicmuseumnz.blogspot.co.nz/
Thanks to:
Martin McCully
Rachel Mann
Sandi Couchman
John Wishart
Sam Mitchell
SIT
And all the fabulous
people of Southland for being so inspirational!
[2] Museums Aotearoa Sector Survey Report,
Prepared by Lisa McCauley for Museums Aotearoa, March 2013.
www.museumsaotearoa.org.nz.
[5] Crang,
Mike. “Telling materials” In Using Social
Theory; Thinking Through Research. Michael Pryke, Gillian Rose & Sarah
Whatmore (Eds), Sage, London,2003.P136.
[6] Benjamin,
Walter. As cited by Crang, Mike. “Telling materials” In Using Social Theory; Thinking Through Research. Michael Pryke,
Gillian Rose & Sarah Whatmore (Eds), Sage, London,2003.P136.
[7]Crang, Mike.
“Telling materials” In Using Social
Theory; Thinking Through Research. Michael Pryke, Gillian Rose & Sarah
Whatmore (Eds), Sage, London,2003.P136.
http://movies.nationalgeographic.com/movies/life-in-a-day/about-the-production/
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