
Published in Rhizome Digest, Monday, March 22, 2004
Ethnography
in
Old
and New Media |
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Review
of:
"Cultures in Webs" (CD-ROM)
Roderick Coover (Eastgate Systems, Massachusetts, 2003)
By Pat Badani
The representation of cultures and the study of ethnographic documentary images,
finds interactive approaches in the recently published CD-ROM: "Cultures
in Webs" , in which author Roderick Coover discusses theory and practice
in "old" and "new" media. More significantly, Coover reflects
on the various ways in which the word "web" can be used as a metaphor,
not only to provoke thought about the co-habitation of documentary photography,
the moving image, and text in a hypermedia format, but also to argue in favour
of this format in order to reveal a network of concealed narratives in co-existing,
cross-cultural worlds. Composed of three essays that illustrate the use of
digital media as a mode of cultural analysis, the work uses a host of media
formats: HTML and Javascript, digitized video images shot in DVCAM and Hi8
Pal, digitized slides shot on 35 mm film using Nikon FG and Nikon N90, and
written material. Published by Eastgate Systems in 2003 with an introduction
by Lucien Taylor, the work demonstrates how interactive hypermedia can present
and disseminate ethnographic information that would be difficult to convey
in traditional form, thereby contributing an alternative model for the documentary
arts.
Theory: World-making / Sense-making
The use of film in psychiatry became common practice during WW2 and was adapted
to sociological research in the 1960's. Ethnographic filming was initiated by
Margaret Mead in the 1940's and classical examples can be found from Robert Flaherty
(1922) to Jean Rouch (1957). The works of Trinh T. Minh-ha and other filmmakers
serve as examples of the renewed efforts to use the documentary camera by prompting
the viewer to look and build a network of association. Coover references these
in order to discuss cross-cultural representation in film. He notes that these
filmmakers have used editing techniques to support multiple, and even contradictory,
associative and narrative fields, and that their experiments in breaking linear
form would seem to anticipate the multi-linear worldmaking available to digital
media documentary authors today.
One of the three essays presented, "Metaphors, Montage and Worldmaking",
discusses precisely these topics with theoretical texts, film samples and stills
from three filmmakers: Robert Gardner's " Forest of Bliss ", Vincent
Monnikendam " Mother Dao The Turtlelike ", specifically in reference
to strategies of montage; and Trinh T. Minh-ha's : " Naked Spaces : Living
is Round ", describing a physical as well as an intellectual process of
sense-making that the viewer undergoes in order to build pictured worlds. By
drawing parallels between the three filmmakers, who deny linearity and the authority
of a single voice-over narration, a case is made in favour of documentary producers
who abstain from reproducing the us/them power differential. To illustrate this, "Metaphors,
Montage and Worldmaking" contrasts the three films mentioned earlier to
Robert Flaherty's film : " Nanook of the North " in which the narrative
is placed within a prefigured Western and romanticised archetype of a man battling
nature. Coover supports the view that 'worldmaking is what one does in the act
of looking' and further describes a 'way of looking at the world by defining
relationships'. This way of looking guides decisions made while gathering images
as well as choices made while editing, a theory of production geared to structuring
the viewer's experience in the process of constructing reality. The essay shows
how "new" media practices amplify "old" media with design
elements that include the use of embedded digitized video clips, links and
pop-ups. Multi-sensory ethnographic material is thus organised and displayed
as interlaced fragments that can convey 'the culturally specific qualities
of places' for the viewer to experience and make sense of.
Practice : Interconnected Patterns
The idea of visual documentation supplementing a written ethnography is certainly
well supported in "The Harvest." In this second essay, Coover presents
his own practice as ethnographic documentarist and tackles questions about the
structuring of interconnected, layered information in view of audience reception.
The work explores photographic stills in digital media through a fifty-image
black & white photo essay about wine harvest in Burgundy, France, supplemented
by three layers of text. The texts unfold horizontally as one scrolls laterally
through the photographic diary. The occasional hyperlinked word will launch additional
image pop-ups, or videotaped interviews and sample analyses that offer insight
into the subject. Further, these hyperlinks inform the viewer on the author's
conceptual decisions and the use of techniques. The texts address three different
threads and narrative points of view. The first thread tells us about the harvest
as event and includes a luscious description of a work-day at the vineyard; the
tools, the methods, and the people who partake in the complicated task of growing
three different varieties of grapes. The second thread offers the author's subjective "felt" experience
of this event and about recovered memories that determine editing choices. The
third thread conveys the historical and contextual background of the harvest.
A story is told about winemaker Aubert de Villaine as someone who reflects cultural
ideals by practising a profession with a long history and tradition. Interconnected
patterns and relationships of meaning unfold as one moves back and forth and
into the hyperlinked environment. In "The Harvest," Coover convincingly
shows how grapes become 'substance for stories, histories, and images,' discovered
by the viewer in the construction of meaning. (http://home.uchicago.edu/~rcoover/CIWWeb/CIWWeb.html)
Performance: Concealing/Revealing
The relationship of culture, communication, and audiovisual perception in a
hypermedia context is once again explored in the third essay of the series: "Concealed
Narratives." By intertwining written information with photo and video, organised
in an interactive environment rich with hyperlinks and frames within frames,
Coover hopes to mirror the complex structure of the content presented. Composed
of field notes, video recordings, and photos taken in Ghana's Upper West and
Central Regions, "Concealed Narratives" is a study of how the history
of politics at the birth of the Fourth Republic emerged indirectly both through
traditional performances (festivals, funerals, enstoolments, and religious
ceremonies) and through painted words and images that decorate buses, boats,
walls, and statues. Specifically, Coover narrates his own learnt lessons about
the collision of politics and performance traditions, used actively to both
conceal and reveal conflicting positions. These scenarios often expose latent
struggles between several local, national and international bodies, and are
used to reclaim a space in sites scripted by colonial history, or to claim
a place within a new post-colonial order. The underlying stories that amplify
Coover's written narration reach us through a number of video-taped interviews.
These testimonies show multiple, and even contradictory viewpoints. By juxtaposing
contrasting ideas and images as they move through different experiences and
environments, the author encourages the viewer to compile the fragments into
a whole, becoming aware of concealed narratives through the process.
(http://home.uchicago.edu/~rcoover/CIWWeb/CIW-sampleElmina.jpg)
(http://home.uchicago.edu/~rcoover/CIWWeb/CIW-SampleNorth.jpg)
A new model
"Cultures in Webs" intertwines theory and practice, the 'imagistic
qualities of language and the paralinguistic aspects of visual media.' By suggesting
a new relationship between the visual documentarist, the subject, and the audience,
Coover combines the poetic, the didactic, and the interactive in what could
well be a new model for documentary representation in cross-cultural media. Concerned
with plurality, dialogism and reflexivity, the author fittingly withholds his
authority as narrator in his own practice and explores the social processes
of cultural self-representation as well as of spectatorship. Paralleling his
intentions to that of three ethnographic filmmakers, the author seeks to go beyond
conventional narration and exploits techniques of montage and metaphor in a new
hypermedia context. Most importantly, he invites the viewer to navigate through
and interact with a rich textual, visual, and aural landscape. In doing so, Coover
probes processes of documentary production, circulation, and reception in a digital
environment and aptly demonstrates how knowledge of the world may be acquired
through techniques that can in some measure enable spectators to discover webs
of signification for themselves.
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