[ISEA2011] Paper: Julian Konczak & David Alamouti – Identifying Place And Placing Identity In Transnational Transmedia: A Case Study Of Two Convergent Media Projects

Abstract

The authors are currently creating two video projects – ANTIGONE and TELENESIA – that explore audience experience, individual and place in differing ways.

ANTIGONE is a collaborative web documentary work that examines the effects of economic and political migration through the eyes of the individual narrative and personal story. This is being developed as a web based project, optimized for iPad, and it looks at how the realpolitik of national boundaries interfaces with the subjective.

Exploring the wider themes of change, loss, identity, and ultimately the meaning and notion of ‘home’, each documentary within the ANTIGONE interface presents a unique, “local” story from different parts of the world. When combined these unique and local stories become a chorus of narratives exploring the nature of migration and the experiences that go along with it.

TELENESIA is an interactive video installation that the audience engages with using an analogue interface of knobs and dials (physical computing) on “sculptural” boxes created from driftwood. Central to the project is the notion of the mythic “non-space” of the island of Telenesia – a place where an archive of “lost media” resides.

The work is situated in a gallery space comprised of computer-generated imagery of a sea horizon cycling through the changes of light through day and night. Amongst flotsam and jetsam strewn across this “island” lie discarded and weathered boxes that the audience can “tune in” to fragments of archive film clips edited to emphasize the textures of scratches, grain and glitch.

Both these works pay careful attention the narrative implications of the choices made around technical delivery and the paper will examine the reasons behind decisions made. The two projects have been in development for the past two years – TELENESIA will be exhibited in a UK gallery in late summer 2011 and ANTIGONE will launched in beta form during the period of ISEA 2011.

Full text (PDF) p.  1408-1410