Watching life unfold on screen, even if recorded in the same place and only moments after, we become aware that what we are watching, while familiar, is in fact a very different space and time. In short, we perceive change, the fundamental truth of our existence. We happen upon this by way of a surface, a film that, although two- dimensional, makes part of the human brain momentarily believe it is there. In the cinema, recordings are manufactured with the intent of immersing audiences in the place, time and action of others. ‘Film-worlds’, in both fiction and documentary, are produced and directed in order to sculpt narrative and oversee the myriad processes that conspire to connect viscerally with an audience. However, there is a fundamental distinction between the two genres. While both aim to create or recreate worlds, fiction tends towards illusion, and documentary, unless it has ulterior agendas, tends towards truth. As Hitchcock once quipped, ‘In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God
is the director’ (IMDB, 2015). We might then ask where God resides in the aforementioned docudrama Life in a Day, which credits 29 co-directors and contributions from countless others around the world. As we enter into a global participatory environment, notions of authorship and the separating lines between documentary and fiction are being challenged as new narrative directions surface from the everyday recording of the world.
In approaching co-creative cinema from a standpoint of digital inclusivity, I deem it important to acknowledge the inherent performativity and ephemerality of mobile- cinematic production. The fragility of the line between documentary and fiction prompted me to seek ways of understanding mobilised film as an embodied practice in the world, and in doing so, engage with a mobilised cinema as a form of collective engagement. For this reason, I adopt a performative strategy which upholds the notion that speech and other communicative gestures are not simply made to communicate, but act in themselves and perform identity as an ongoing play between threads of engagement (Austin, 1975, Derrida, 1988, Butler, 1990; 1993; 1997). I have also drawn from a post-human performativity proposed by Karen Barad (2003, 2007) in order to consider human and non-human interactions as a condition of possibility, rather than as separate assemblages. This gestural and inscriptive perspective on digital film practice allows a consideration of Lifemirror as a machine that produces films as performances that can operate ‘not just in theatres but also in culture and ontology in developing new understandings of ‘reality’ itself’ (Nelson, 2009: 125). The work thus holds practice to be the principle research action and ‘sees the material outcomes of practice as all-important representations of research findings in their own right’ (Haseman, 2006). This allows myself as a researcher to freely navigate the interior and exterior relations of the artist-in-
world and simultaneously describe, through the creation of artworks, the digital and organic processes operating between them. In this way, the inquiry begins with a primarily intuitive, practice-led approach that loosely follows Robin Nelson’s PaR framework outlined in 2006. As an emergent methodology, my application of the framework develops and strengthens alongside the PaR initiative where it finds a more robust articulation in Nelson’s further refined model published in 2013.
Practice as Research stems from practice-based research which has been defined as ‘an original investigation undertaken in order to gain new knowledge partly by means of practice’ (Candy, 2006: 1). In contrast, PaR seeks to close the apparent gap between knowledge and practice by advocating ‘doing-knowing’, or what Donald Schön terms, ‘knowing-in-practice’ (1983: 8–9). The multi-modal strategy proposes praxis, or ’theory imbricated within practice’ (Nelson 2013: 32-33), as a means to perform research and express findings in rich, presentational forms (Haseman 2006: 5). In acknowledging the resistance against positivist enquiry in the social sciences and remaining sensitive to the often intimate nature of artistic practice, the model recognises the tacit understanding of the practitioner-researcher in the process of knowledge production. To mobilise a robust epistemological framework appropriate for academia, artist’s tacit knowledge, or ‘know- how’, is put into free dialogue with ‘know-what’ (knowledge drawn from critical reflection iteratively built into the process), and know-that (concurrent theoretical investigation). Resonances between the three aim to produce knowledge through creative praxis (Nelson 2013: 38).
My position is in accord with PaR’s paradigmatic shift towards ‘liquid knowing’ (2013: 52) which I suggest demonstrates a compatibility with the ephemeral and performative aspects of both film spectatorship and mobile video production on personal devices. In
addition to this, I argue that advances in mobile computing and cloud technologies intensify the need for new modes of thinking about and understanding emergent social perceptions and behaviours. As Graeme Sullivan contends, ‘Artistic practice undertaken in a digital environment is giving rise to research that is no longer challenged by questions about the human condition but is challenged by the need to revise what it is to be human’ (Sullivan, 2005: 156). With personal devices now mediating the (globally) shared data and processing resources that form the Cloud, digital utterances increasingly exist ‘instantly-together’ and ‘always-everywhere’. As such, the digital gesture now promises to take on new significance for both community and the shared environment.