Abstract

2008: Man With a Movie Camera is a participatory video shot by people around the world who are invited to record images according to the original script of Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera, submit them to http://dziga.perrybard.net where they are archived and sequenced to stream as a film.

The work is a global remake of Dziga Vertov’s film shot in 1929 in Moscow, Kiev and Riga. For the remake, material shot in different places but using identical scripts are uploaded to become part of a worldwide montage. Since all participants do not have the same technologies at their disposal that montage incorporates video, animated still images and text in different languages. As such the screen will simulate the urban
mediascape. It acknowledges both the transdisciplinary experience of the web and the local realities of people involved in using it – in Vertov’s terms the “decoding of life as it is”.

The intention of the project is to orchestrate a fluid work that invites participation, that will continue to grow after it is launched, and that results in a database of personal perspectives where evidence of politics and history is filtered through the lens of individual rather than state philosophies.

Achieving global participation is the greatest challenge in this work. Aside from the obvious privilege/access issues, uploads from Serbia for example, resulted in expensive phone bills, language remains a significant factor and despite lists and youtube participation remains a door to door type of endeavor.

I would like to present and discuss the hurdles and successes of the project.

Perry Bard Biography

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