The paper will describe a practical methodology designed to deploy found footage, animation, digital compositing and special effects techniques to critically evaluate the ontological status of found footage in reference to materiality and truth-value. In this framework, the construction of non-real spaces that synthesise animation and found footage are explored for their potential in describing alternate histories with regards to memory and ideology. How can the material aspects of found footage be deployed within spatial and temporal collage films that challenge linear notions of memory and the past?

The documentation of ephemeral artwork, works made to be transient, changeable and un-fixed, is often problematic for the intent and premise of creation as it aligns itself with a particular moment, place and viewpoint in time. Lens-based methods are mostly relied upon to communicate actuality and happening and to fix the un-fixed memory of the artwork, and this is part of that problem. Effectively, this type of documentary device works in opposition to the concept of the artwork, cementing into a fragmentary history when all it wants is to be fleeting in its temporality. The lens-made recording tends to generalise vision and, by extension, it does not fully communicate the experience of ‘being there’ and present. This is problematic for artwork whose very premise is to be transient and time-based, and for which direct experience is a priority. ‘Documents, Alternatives (#3)’ is an exhibition that includes time-based works that rely on performative process and created experience, which aims to resolve this issue by making the document and artwork reflexive. In doing this it acknowledges their need for change so that they remain continuous and in process through staging a practical and thought provoking visual discussion. The symposium accompanies this exhibition at BSAD, and acts in response to process with artistic practice and the experience of the artwork. It situates a series of opportunities for the experience of process through a structure of colloquialism adjacent to the exhibition, to open the nature of artistic process to critical debate. To enable a dialogue about process (as that exhibited and that discussed) informed by both academic and creative domains, symposium speakers are the artists with work in the accompanying exhibition. Hosted by the Art Research Centre, Bath School of Art and Design BSAD Gallery and BSAD main Lecture theatre. The symposium is staged simultaneously with the exhibition Documents, Alternatives (#3) at BSAD gallery, which is open to the public 20th April – 1st May 2018. The exhibition and symposium are part of the Alternative Document, a project by Dr. Angela Bartram, Associate Professor and Head of Arts Research, at University of Derby.

The paper will present a body of practice-led research within experimental documentary and animation that interrogates the use of found footage as a historiographical strategy. The research examines the capacity of found footage collage in articulating the layered temporalities present in the formation of collective recollection. How can the materiality of found footage be deployed within spatial and temporal collage films that challenge linear notions of memory and the past? The methodology draws from visual ethnography with regards to intersubjectivity, multivocality and the immaterial aspects of human experience. The approach aims to challenge notions of unitary meaning, objectivity and truth in historical representation. Can the fragmented, hybrid aesthetic of the moving collage render the partial and irregular experience of remembering, evoking the contingent and furtive conditions of personal and collective pasts? The work deploys appropriation strategies that decontextualize and recontextualise found footage as a method of ideological interruption, releasing the mutable, multiple meanings that accumulate and shift in the confluence of competing discourses. The paper will describe temporal structures that privilege simultaneity, overlap and layering in constructing unstable images that foreground a dialogical conception of the past. How can found footage collage and animation, as a historiographical practice, expand the language of non-fiction films that address memory and time?

With reference to historiography, the paper will ask how found footage can be manipulated to create alternate histories that challenge orthodox, ‘grand’ narratives within a hybrid aesthetic that foregrounds the diversity of its components, producing deliberate stylistic and ontological discontinuities. The practice echoes the ubiquity and malleability of video material in contemporary communications and media and examines the reliability and authenticity of the video image as a historical document. The work interrogates appropriation strategies that decontextualize and recontextualise found footage as a method of ideological interruption, releasing the mutable, multiple meanings that accumulate and shift in the confluence of competing discourses.

Documentary practice has long been encumbered with journalistic and pseudo-scientific expectations; the gathering of evidence, the balancing of material and the objective presentation of accurate and informative data. Overwhelmingly, documentary audiences are encouraged to believe in an objective reality and, by extension, to anticipate fidelity to it. Filmmakers' aesthetic choices are selected and organised to persuade the viewer that the resulting voice of the documentary is an honest, rational and sensible point of view. This paper will explore the documentary filmmaker's detachment from an obligation to deliver objective truth by applying the visual, aural and temporal distortions of animation to interrogate conventional notions of knowledge, reliability and authority. By taking a collaborative approach to the research project, the paper will explore the inherent transformative, non-representational and illusory nature of animation in relation to the construction of authorial voice for documentary. Drawing on the theory and practice of filmmakers Aleksandr Sokurov and Alexander Kluge, the paper will assess to what extent truth can be derived from expressionistic aesthetic components as readily as they can from the narration of factual information and photographic reality; can animation in documentary assimilate fiction into fact and synthesise truth and fantasy? Further, the paper will argue that the didactic voice of traditional, expository documentary encourages passive observation while animation can provoke a more poetic interpretation of the films' diegesis; how can the authenticity of documentary material be legitimised by foregrounding authorial mediation rather than attempting to camouflage subjectivity? The introduction of animation aesthetics into documentary realism offers the filmmaker a wider choice of expressive tools to define, extend and affirm their own personal voice. This paper will offer a practical assessment of these issues, offering new approaches for filmmakers to explore the epistemological resonance of their craft, and to extend the formal and thematic parameters that determine documentary's status as nonfiction testimony.

A guest edited volume by Angela Bartram. Contents: Introduction, by Angela Bartram; Absence makes the heart grow fonder: rethinking intentional material loss in temporary art, by Sophie C. Kromholz; The Italic I – between liveness and the lens, by Emma Cocker and Clare Thornton; I am here – you are there: let’s meet sometime, by Andrew Pepper; HOW – Heathrow Orchard Walks, observations and explorations of vibrant land, by Kate Corder; Documentation with the result of its own performing, by Una Lee; Constructions of the moving body: drawing and dancing, by Rochelle Haley; WRITING/ PAINTING/READING/DRAWING: something not yet, and yet, still something, by Steve Dutton; (Mythologies of) diving, flying and in-between, by Louise K. Wilson; A sense of becoming and alienation: the retrospective in the work of Jordan McKenzie, by Angela Bartram.

Paper presented to the MeCSSA and Journal of Media Practice Symposium ‘Language/Voice’, Aberystwyth University, 12 June 2015

Positivist thinking has been highly influential on the development of documentary film in the English-speaking world. Brian Winston (1995) argues that this is explained by the perception of the camera as a scientific instrument that provides the facility to deliver an unmediated reality intact to the viewer. This conceit has been central to documentary production in the English speaking cannon, underpinning the truth claims of direct cinema and its observational, objective ethos. In contrast, Documentary filmmakers such as Adam Curtis and Joshua Oppenheimer, working within strategies that openly embrace the synthesis of documentary with experimental and fictional practice, have suggested that the language of non-fiction must develop new tools for adequately addressing the heterogeneity and plurality of the social world. This implies that the complexity of unequal relations determining social forces cannot be adequately described by conventional documentary representation, particularly those conventions tied to tenets of objectivity and balance. The research aims to address this need by developing non-fictional collage as a method for interrogating the mechanisms that shape the social world. The project’s practical methodology emphasises fabrication, simultaneity and layering as tools with the potential to extend the vocabulary of documentary film. The paper will present a body of practice research that explores the intersection of collage, found footage film, animation, documentary and critical realism. The practice investigates digital compositing, hybridity and the capacity for spatial layering to generate an intermediate, unstable aesthetic that cannot be assigned to any singular, unitary ontological level. The paper argues that these conditions provoke an elasticity and ambiguity that dissolves binary distinctions between mimesis and abstraction, reflecting the non-dualist standpoint of critical realism at a medial point between positivist and idealist perspectives. The research deploys the particular constructedness and intermediality of collage as a disruption to ideologically conditioned appearance forms. This posits the practice as a challenge to reductive accounts of the socio-historical world in dominant visual cultures under capitalism. The paper claims that in contrast to unmediated live action images, the hybridity of collage has the potential to more adequately describe the complexity and contingency of reality. The paper explores the layered composite of colliding images as the locus of collage as political discourse. This lies in its facility to surpass the limitations of the monovalent image through the dialectical tension of simultaneity and coexistence. The capacity of collage to describe the interdependence and complexity of socio-historical phenomena is underpinned by the critical realist concept of stratified reality, an idea that advances an ontology comprised of co-dependent structures and mechanisms. The project draws from theoretical debates in experimental and animated documentary that assert the legitimacy of explicit construction and fabrication in non-fictional address. The paper argues that the persistence of collage lies in its continuing relevance as a process of working through and negotiating the complexity of an increasing interconnected and disorientating world.

Documentaries represent issues and aspects of the socio-historical world. They do so through a selection and combination of audio and visual components. Inevitably, this practice makes intrinsic claims about documentary’s ability to represent the world both accurately and reliably. Facts, information, balance and reliability are the bedrock of documentary vocabulary. Comparatively few practitioners have genuinely interrogated the veracity of their craft; authenticity, evidence and objectivity remain central to the language of their practice. As the result of a mediated process, a documentary film is, at best, a crafted version of reality and its conventions are designed and developed to convince audiences of the authenticity of their particular representation of the world. Documentary’s traditional journalistic and pseudo-scientific status has hampered its development as a discursive art form capable of exploring a much broader sphere of human experience. Using a selection of still images, this article aims to contextualize, reflect on and illuminate the short, animated documentary Fforest (2009) by G. Bevan and M. Bosward. Drawing on the practice and principles of collage, the film seeks to expand the language of documentary production by deliberately undermining traditional approaches to knowledge, authority and fact. It explores potential new terrain for documentary by generating a non-realist, visual aesthetic that is not bound to traditional discourses of ‘sobriety’, whilst reaffirming the documentary as a composition which must be designed and assembled, in which authorial voice must be constructed rather than simply stated, and in which meaning is not necessarily explicit.

The paper will present a body of ongoing practice-based research that interrogates the interface of live-action and animation, specifically, how found footage as an indexical element of lived experience functions within the aesthetic of a constructed ‘other’ world. Particular focus is given to how video collage, containing found footage components composed in the spatial as well as temporal dimensions, construct non-fiction explorations of the socio-historical world from an ontological perspective. The research explores how found footage elements are deployed to address themes relating to memory and history, with regard to how collective impressions of history are constituted and socially assimilated.