APPROACH
Learning to watch, write, board, shoot, edit and re-edit audiovisual narratives, the lectures and seminars presented here cultivate a form of deconstructive attention seeking to better observe, understand and regenerate the tropes and imaginaries we create and consume in the very context in which they permeate our realities.
Thinking about image-making while making images, we seek to develop a critical distance through creative narrative engagement … We’re learning to cultivate a reflective awareness of the very attention-giving processes usually nested in our biases and blind spots… We’re questioning our attention dramaturgy as it unfolds on and off the screen… ; we’re learning to observe what we´re doing with images and what images are doing with us; … we’re cultivating creative forms of creative/critical immersion in the very media environments we ventured to distract ourselves with…
Approaching movie-thinking, making & watching with a dynamic mix of intentional and attentional distance, ruling tropes can be investigated and re-negotiated to generate alternative representations, identities and imaginaries. Working “on-site” we seek to reconsider perceptual habits and creative practices with the very tools formatting them, striving to dissociate our minds from compulsive “bingeing” without actually dropping out.
We’re asking ourselves : what if “film-making” was a form of digital detox, - an unlikely biohack ?
Teaching formats
The teaching projects outlined here are divided into two apparently distinct categories : “seminars” and “lectures”, - two formats approached as discovery processes doing and undoing the expectations associated with the academic traditions they are departing (and distanciating themselves) from. Despite their different settings and educational function, both formats play with the sustained attempt to untangle reception/production processes by sending the participants on creative excursions recombining both.
• The Lectures are twisting the traditional frontal “set-up” by proposing participatory excursions in contemporary media worlds and their construction processes.
• The Seminars are more explicitly action-oriented and invite participants to deal with contemporary themes, hypes and framings through various types of creative/critical engagement.
Both formats seek to unsettle at first, and to motivate reflective explorations leading to open-ended results and/or formats development processes introducing basic conception methods used in professional environments to both use them and reflect them.
Research Workshops
Building on the experience gathered with the above mentioned seminars, the structured practice of collaborative storytelling reveals to be a promising avenue to explore difficult themes from multiple points of view. Scenario co-creation workshops can enrich stakeholder consultation or citizen engagement formats with immersive and experiential features.
Conceived to approach clearly defined topics and issues with playful riddles, co-creation workshops invite groups of participants to imagine storylines together, - prompting them to explore each other´s interests, expectations, fears, norms and values as they conflict or align with explicit goals, while meeting differentiated challenges or co-benefits from multiple perspectives.
Workshops designed to explore the future of clean mobility or the circular economy have demonstrated to be of substantial help to highlight multiple points of view and formulate problems more effectively.
Workshops are structured as a sequence of activities alternating creation, reflection and deliberation. They can also be the occasion to discover new informations to be learnt by means of speculative engagement. These workshops are carefully prepared and moderated to facilitate co-creative situations potentially generating useful insights, sometimes even transformative outcomes as participants come to generate productive new frames taking each other´s perspectives into consideration as participants seek consensus. over several rounds of iterations.
Working with paper and pencil at first, then with text, voice, body and motion, arranging spaces and timelines, multiplying p.o.vs on specific plot points, workshop participants are driven to discover multiple alternatives to a given situation. Latent conflicts come to the fore, issues are negotiated, new framings are drafted, tried out, discarded or re-iterated. These formats are particularly promising to identify gaps and conflicts in the perceptions of sensitive issues.
Co-creative storytelling workshops help register differing perceptions about present and future realities and therefore present a great potential for practical exercises.
Implications & Potential
Human beings arguably think and act narratively. Following this narrativist premise, “we” register lived experiences as stories and/or (re)construct them as such, - reading, writing and speaking them as novels, jokes or epic sagas. Improvised biographies stitch genres and aesthetics together, as they frame and re-frame personal recollections with ambient tropes ranging from drama to romcom, thriller, slapstick or even porn. Lived experience can be, in this perspective, regarded as a story-in-the-telling process framing and reframing life with or without conscious intent. Staged audiovisually, these stories organise the chaos of experience as apparently structured continuums. How do they operate? How can this reflective process help us gain new insights?
Resembling subjective experiences, audiovisuals involve viewers and listeners in screen-based immersive experiences. Working against the apparent comforts of passive spectatorship, we seek to challenge them to overcome their “spell”, give us a chance to analyse how they operate, envisage alternatives and invest our insights in our creative practices. This is the critical creativity we suggest to practice through narrative prototyping projects.
Exploring themes together, we’re looking at moviemaking as an opportunity to question this immersion first-hand, - as creative spectators and reflective storytellers. Who are we talking to, with and for? What kind of scripts are we consciously following, appropriating or reproducing? Where and when is the action taking place, for whom and with whom, what does context, temporal arrangement and spatial settings imply? Whose perspective are we taking, preferring or ignoring when we frame or edit? What kind of discursive agency are we granting ourselves (and potentially striping others from) when we ´re telling someone else´ s story?
What can we notice when we attempt to think and feel through the eyes and ears of another, - a friend or neighbour, a particular target audience or imaginary demographic? What is being constructed, why and how? Shifting between sets, p.o.vs, frames, temporal arrangements and sequential constructs , we learn to navigate between roles and situations, switching between first degree experiences and “bird´s views”, approaching places, people and things as discursive agents and potential meaning-making experiences.