ABSTRACT

Keywords: crowdsourcing, cinema, mobile phone, video, mass-creativity, communication

Crowdsourced filmmaking is still largely unexplored as a creative process and as a social phenomenon. In recent months it has started to spread rapidly throughout the arts community as a cheaper and more democratic mode of expression than traditional filmmaking, and often manages to ignite unexpected tangential narratives and new meanings. The Lifemirror project is a crowdsourcing tool and cinematic system designed to enable collective creativity and filmic argumentation based on geotime tracked video through mobile cameras. The paper will explore the nature of the time-movement image within a considered virtual space of intentionality, and so aims to provide an insight into social behavior surrounding audiovisual communication. The data gathered from Lifemirror sheds new light on the collective activity of user-artists and provides a reframing of what it means to communicate through cinematics. In this way, we aim to identify emerging patterns and hierarchies of discord in the evolution of digital film and the communities from which it emerges. The system itself looks at the potential of the ‘collective artist’ as a seeker of truth and disrupter of accepted truths (referring in particular to the nature the raw-state digital video image). A series of collectively produced films informs the research and provides a ground level perspective of community issues, imagined narratives, political debate and activism. The Lifemirror system will actively accompany the writing of the paper and the conference presentation to create an active artistic representation of the theories and findings in the research.

• Oliver Case, HighWire, Lancaster University, UK

Full Text (PDF) p. 341-344