Assembling Observations: aesthetic noticing & multilinear documentary

Hannah Brasier non/fictionLab, RMIT University

My talk today, is called, as you can see here - Assembling Observations: aesthetic noticing & multilinear documentary. What this talk will be about is how my method of aesthetic noticing, translates through a practice of multilinear documentary. I will be discussing this translation in light of a project I have recently made called Sunny, Rainy, Foggy.

aesthetic noticing

Here is a photo of me filming with my phone a shadow of myself against the reflections of windows inside the Tate Museum of Modern Art, in London. Aesthetic noticing is a term I have coined to describe the way in which I film through noticing, my phone, the Vine video app, and the reflections, shadows, movements, and other stuff that make up the world.

aesthetic noticing

Sunny, Rainy, Foggy, as the third creative output of my project-based PhD began when I arrived at Leeds University, on a particularly cold, and unusually snowing day for the beginning of March, or so I was told. Snow fell on me as I walked up to the Communications building. This was the first time I had ever seen snow. In Leeds, far away from Melbourne, I wanted to get myself into a rhythm of filming consistently during my 3 month stay. I set myself the task to film at certain times everyday. I would film when I woke up, and at 12pm, 4pm, and 8pm, using the Vine video capturing application on my phone. The Vine app limits your filming to 6 second video clips in a square aspect ratio. I chose Vine, because I could easily capture on the move, and was confined to brevityto film a moment, rather than narrate a sequence of events. The brief and momentary qualities of Vine videos maintains the list-like qualities of previous projects I have made. My collection of Vine videos accumulated to a sort of list-like diary that catalogued my time in Leeds into mornings, middays, evenings, and nights.

aesthetic noticing

noticing distinguishes some thing from its surroundings (Mason)

lists as provocations, as litanies of surprisingly contrasted curiosities (Bogost)

So, as I was wandering in the unfamiliarity of England I was noticing, through capturing 6 second videos that distinguished some thing from its surroundings. These distinguished things included rain, as puddles, glimmering off roads, or reflecting off windows, to the lush British countryside blurring past outside a train, bus or car window, to a pink sunlit sky, flowers dancing in front of gravestones, blue skies, movements of people and cars, landscapes, animals, and light reflections. On my computer, I scrolled through the collection of Vine clips, I had captured so far. Not quite remembering where exactly those flags fluttering in the wind were captured, or what day that formation of raindrops fell on my skylight. Rather, these moments became singular things. The video files on my computer became a litany of surprisingly contrasted curiosities.

aesthetic noticing

What is perceived here with the most delicate sensibility, is not what rain really is, but the way in which it appears when, silent and continuous, it drips from leaf to leaf, when the mirror of the pool has goose-pimples, when the solitary drop hesitantly seeks its pathway on the window-pane, when the life of the city is reflected on the wet asphalt (Epstein qtd. in Deleuze)

This collection of moments of noticing I was accumulating in Leeds, London, Bristol, Brussels, Berlin, Barcelona, and Paris, started resonating with documentary filmmakers that capture bits and pieces of the world, to, in Renovs terms, serve an aesthetic function. Ivenss 1929 film, Rain, exemplifies this aesthetic function of documentary. In its 14 minute length, the film shows rain in all of its different forms, as; it drips from leaf to leaf, when the mirror of the pool has goose-pimples, when the solitary drop hesitantly seeks its pathway on the window-pane, when the life of the city is reflected on the wet asphalt. Rain provides in Renovs terms a sensory experience through the cascading explosion of rain elements that we see when we watch the documentary.

aesthetic noticing

RainSunny, Rainy, Foggy

Between Ivenss Rain playing on the left here, and my own filming for Sunny, Rainy, Foggy, shown on the right, aesthetic noticing as a practice emerged as an atmosphere, an environment, or an experience created through the accumulation of visual resonances. As Ivenss documentary is a linear film that builds on the properties of rain through the act of a storm, the relationship I was interested in is what type of environment would multilinearity make out of these aesthetic moments of noticing.

multilinear documentary

What, then, is the relationship between aesthetic noticing, as a method to draw attention to the visual resonances between things, and multilinearity as a framework for documentary?

multilinear documentary

Here is a list of what some of my Vine clips noticetowns blurring past, plane windows, condensation, bridges, shadows, and rain glimmering off surfaces. As items on a list maintain the individuality of each moment, multilinear documentaries maintain the modularity of each piece of footage.

multilinear documentary

created by independent objects linked to each other where each file is accessible and independent from the others (Gaudenzi)

Korsakow allows, and is premised upon, the creation of multiple, simultaneous links, that is relations, between the individual video clips that make up a K-film (Miles)

To use Gaudenzis description, as this first quote here, multilinearity is when independent objects can be connected to numerous other things. So, a multilinear documentary is made up of independent bits of footage, from the world, that can then possibly connect to numerous other bits of footage through user interaction.

I use Korsakow to make multilinear documentaries known as K-Films. K-Films are multilinear because they follow the rules that Gaudenzi outlines. K-Films allow one particular clip to connect to multiple others through an interface of a playing video and a set of thumbnails.

K-Films are unpredictable because the computer generates what thumbnails can possibly connect to the current clip playing. K-Films then constantly change because of this unpredictability. Between computer generation and user interaction, each interaction with a K-Film generates a different version of the work.

multilinear documentary

if not languid, exactly, then contemplative, interpretive and explorative (Soar)

Sunny, Rainy, Foggy, as a multilinear K-Film documentary, takes list-like moments of aesthetic noticingthe rain, the sky, a flower flickering in the wind, and a train moving slowly from a platform, into Korsakow to produce a multilinear documentary that maintains the momentary, fleeting, and restless relationships between things in the world. So, unlike Ivens, who spent 4 months collecting footage of rain from various storms to edit into the intensity of a singular storm, Sunny, Rainy, Foggy shows moments of rain, weather, landscape, and movement that maintain the independence of each different impression. Sunny, Rainy, Foggy then does not achieve the rhythmic intensity that Ivenss Rain does through the accumulation of shots and editing pace. Rather, this lack of intensity, aligns with Soars descriptions of K-Films as if not languid, exactly, then contemplative, interpretive and explorative (160).

multilinear documentary

Sunny, Rainy, Foggy

While K-Films are better understood through the act of actually interacting with them on a web browser, here is a screenshot, anyway of someone interacting with the film in a web browser. The first window, here, is the playing video, and these other 3 are thumbnails. As the user clicks a thumbnail it then opens in this first playing video window. I will just allow some time here for you to watch this interaction.

What you might be able to see here is that Sunny, Rainy, Foggy draws attention to moments of movement, stillness, reflections, and water, and then allows multiple relations to form between these moments through user interaction. So, when we bring multilinear documentary and aesthetic noticing together we watch, stop and expand the details and description of moments that exceed an individual contemplation of the world. The patterns, computer generated thumbnails, and user decisions combine to make multiple unstable realities of the work in each interaction. Sunny, Rainy, Foggy, then, through a multilinear framework, aesthetically notices the individual moments of the world, in their varying and fleeting arrangements. What, then, Sunny, Rainy, Foggy acknowledges is the stuff that makes up the world, to then allow the users, or interactors of the project, to engage with this stuff through their own trajectories of aesthetic noticing.

projects.hannahbrasier.com/sunnyrainyfoggyhannahbrasier.com/creative

To get a real feel for the project you can interact with it online at projects.hannahbrasier.com/sunnyrainyfoggy, and find links to my other K-Films at hannahbrasier.com/creative

works cited

Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology. Or What Its Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Print.Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema One: The Movement Image. London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 1986. Print.Gaudenzi, Sandra. The Living Documentary: From Representing Reality to Co-Creating Reality in Digital Interactive Documentary. University of London, 2013. Print.Mason, John. Researching Your Own Practice: The Discipline of Noticing. London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2002. Print.Miles, Adrian. Materialism and Interactive Documentary: Sketch Notes. Studies in Documentary Film 8.3 (2014): 205220. Print.Renov, Michael. The Subject of Documentary. Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2004. Print.Soar, Matt. Making (with) the Korsakow System: Database Documentaries as Articulation and Assembly. New Documentary Ecologies. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 154173. Print.