Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of Westminster
A Short Film About War
A Short film About War is a narrative documentary artwork made entirely from information found on the World Wide Web. Within a 10-minute screening, this two-screen gallery installation takes viewers around the world to a variety of war zones as seen through the collective eyes of the online photo sharing community Flickr, and a variety of military and civilian bloggers.
The output is a collaborative project with Jon Thomson (Slade).
Please see the accompanying portfolio for a detailed overview of research.
This work is situated in an emerging area of documentary moving image work that combines found footage from social media sites. Whilst the use of found footage for documentary form is a common contemporary trope (Price), little work has been produced that combines found footage with online material as this project does. It can also be differentiated from new media art forms that employ social and other online material in its native form as interactive or web-based projects (Delappe 2007). The project explores how global conflicts can be articulated in documentary form using online databases and social media repositories as a medium. How is information used in this way distorted as it is mediated? All the information comprising this work was collected online and under Creative Commons attribution licences. The focus of this material was on first-hand accounts of war as mediated via online social media, e.g. from blogging soldiers, aid workers and civilians caught in war zones. This material was then combined with online images from the photo-sharing community Flickr, derived from the geographic locations of the original source’s material. Voice actors and amateurs from each region were then used to provide voice-overs for this material. The project produces a unique hybrid documentary form by developing innovative techniques synthesised across moving image and new media art practices. By dramatising blog fragments in this way, Thomson & Craighead were able to cinematise the still imagery from Flickr, indicating a narrative collective gaze. Simultaneously, a second screen displays the same information as text, allowing the viewer to experience the data in two forms, thereby opening a critical space for them by drawing attention to the constructed nature of the data and its basis in real events.
