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"Video documentation began soon after Machine started in 2003. We have produced about three hundred videos, all viewable at vimeo.com/machineproject. Additionally, the complete archive of all the unedited footage we’ve ever shot is available for researchers, scholars, time travelers, alien astrosociologists, xenobiologists, and anyone else interested in seeing the unedited footage of a specific artist’s work.
Early events were recorded by an SD camera, primarily from a tripod. We shot approximately one hundred events in this fashion. While this footage may have some historical value, the single camera angle, low resolution, poor sound, and nonexistent editing tends to make these videos of limited interest. After about five years of shooting boring video of fascinating events, I began to question the ability of documentation to record the things that make an experience notable.
Photography and video capture only fragments of a situation, and they might miss the most interesting parts. Every viewer brings a personal history to a performance, and what an artwork says depends a lot on who is listening: context creates meaning. The same event can be experienced totally differently by multiple people simultaneously. Observation itself through video or photography alters the texture of a performance before, during, and after; an intrusive video crew can disrupt the sense of community in an event, or the audible sound of a camera lens, every click pointing out you’re not the real audience for what you’re watching.
I love performance documentation from the late sixties and early seventies. It’s so easy to watch it and imagine you are there, like looking through a window to see something happening in the past. But it bothers me how easily I forget about the performance’s context. Who is in that room? What was happening in the world and how was that historical moment inscribed on the actions? I distrust documentation that claims an objective or definitive view. Actually I’m opposed to definitive anything. The definitive impoverishes complexity, tries to shut out other perspectives.
Once we accept the live event is in some sense unrepresentable, we’re freed to discover what pleasures and possibilities come from embracing subjectivity and incompleteness. All the documentation shows a specific event, a cultural moment, but also the choices and aesthetic and subjectivities of the people who make the documentation. What choices did that filmmaker make?
I enjoy thinking about the relationship of documenter to documented, instead of pretending God shot a video while no one was watching."
"Video documentation began soon after Machine started in 2003. We have produced about three hundred videos, all viewable at vimeo.com/machineproject. Additionally, the complete archive of all the unedited footage we’ve ever shot is available for researchers, scholars, time travelers, alien astrosociologists, xenobiologists, and anyone else interested in seeing the unedited footage of a specific artist’s work.
Early events were recorded by an SD camera, primarily from a tripod. We shot approximately one hundred events in this fashion. While this footage may have some historical value, the single camera angle, low resolution, poor sound, and nonexistent editing tends to make these videos of limited interest. After about five years of shooting boring video of fascinating events, I began to question the ability of documentation to record the things that make an experience notable.
Photography and video capture only fragments of a situation, and they might miss the most interesting parts. Every viewer brings a personal history to a performance, and what an artwork says depends a lot on who is listening: context creates meaning. The same event can be experienced totally differently by multiple people simultaneously. Observation itself through video or photography alters the texture of a performance before, during, and after; an intrusive video crew can disrupt the sense of community in an event, or the audible sound of a camera lens, every click pointing out you’re not the real audience for what you’re watching.
I love performance documentation from the late sixties and early seventies. It’s so easy to watch it and imagine you are there, like looking through a window to see something happening in the past. But it bothers me how easily I forget about the performance’s context. Who is in that room? What was happening in the world and how was that historical moment inscribed on the actions? I distrust documentation that claims an objective or definitive view. Actually I’m opposed to definitive anything. The definitive impoverishes complexity, tries to shut out other perspectives.
Once we accept the live event is in some sense unrepresentable, we’re freed to discover what pleasures and possibilities come from embracing subjectivity and incompleteness. All the documentation shows a specific event, a cultural moment, but also the choices and aesthetic and subjectivities of the people who make the documentation. What choices did that filmmaker make?
I enjoy thinking about the relationship of documenter to documented, instead of pretending God shot a video while no one was watching."
excerpt from Machine Project THE PLATINUM COLLECTION
By MARK ALLEN, CHARLOTTE COTTON and RACHEL SELIGMAN
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