Arts-Based Video Research: Teaching Young People How to Mobilize the Kino-Eye of Early Experimental Cinema

• In Event: Fairmont Roundtable Session Three
  In Roundtable Session: Youth Perspectives and Identities Through Artistic Modalities (Table 8)

Abstract

This paper discusses a research project that used arts-based video techniques to cultivate young people’s power to engage and experiment with urban mobility and digital technologies. We show how young people learned and deployed cinematic concepts and techniques for intervening in current urban situations of ubiquitous digital surveillance. Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) and “kino-eye” became the catalyst for workshops conducted with young people in Manchester, Berlin, and Stockholm. Our workshops were organised around film-making techniques for building youth capacity to collectively re-imagine the city. The project involved collaboratively recording, editing, and screening a film in a single day, using GoPros, iPads, and wireless projectors to experiment with the heterogeneous temporal flows of the city.

Authors

• David Rousell, RMIT University
  Presenting Author

• Laura Trafi-Prats, Manchester Metropolitan University
  Presenting Author

• Elizabeth De Freitas, Adelphi University
  Presenting Author