New Media://Visible Evidence show opens

The New Media://Visible Evidence exhibition showcases several examples of mainly Los Angeles-based documentary practice that employ disparate new media forms. The exhibition will include examples from the Web-based portraits of LA and its inhabitants produced by Juan Devis for the KCET series titled Web Stories; media artist Natalie Bookchin’s Mass Ornament, composed entirely of clips from YouTube videos; and several interactive DVD-ROM documentaries created by USC’s Labyrinth Project under the leadership of Marsha Kinder. The show also includes Erik Loyer and Sharon Daniel’s interactive documentary Blood Sugar; The Iraqi Doctors Project: Research and Remix, which envisions remix as a scholarly practice and was produced by Virginia Kuhn, DJ Johnson and students in IML 340; Mobile Voices, a project created by and for day laborers using the MMS feature on cell phones; as well as several examples of database documentaries made using the Korsakow System, including Matt Soar’s Almost Architecture and Florian Thalhofer’s Forgotten Flags.

In addition to showcasing the projects in the School of Cinematic Arts Gallery, the exhibition will also include three lunch-time presentations during the conference, with Bookchin appearing on Friday to talk about Mass Ornament, Marsha Kinder and Scott Mahoy on Saturday to talk about the Labyrinth Project, and Katie Mills on Sunday to talk about Web Stories. We invite you to experience some of the innovative work produced in Los Angeles – the gallery showcasing the projects is located on the first floor of the Lucas Building in the School of Cinematic Arts; the lunch-time talks will take place between 1:15 and 1:45 in the gallery.

The exhibition was curated by Holly Willis and is presented by USC’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy in conjunction with the Visible Evidence conference.

Documentary Assassination

Documentary Assassination is a database documentary created in honor of the 40th anniversary of the JFK assassination. It was created using The Korsakow System and is based on archival footage from the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C. The Korsakow System was developed by Florian Thalhofer, Willem Velthoven and Heinz Emigholz at the University of the Arts, Berlin [Universität der Künste, Berlin]. Documentary Assassination premiered at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) in November 2003. This work represents one of my earliest experiments with the idea of computational historiography and is designed to allow users to remix and recombine materials from a government documentary created to articulate a single, unambiguous narrative of the events surrounding the JFK assassination. Documentary Assassinationis not copyrighted and no rights are reserved. Both the project files and archival materials may be freely copied, remixed and redistributed with or without attribution.