Now this really is like what I have always had in mind as the ideal of distributed ‘Mob’ filmmaking. Interesting that one of the principal contributors to the Deptford TV project was a central person in facilitating the process of footage exchange / pooling at no-global protests which I contributed to and made films from. I’ll be going back to have a closer look at the mechanics of this project/site. From a cursory look it appears that they are using all free software including dyne: bolic 2.1

Since September 2005 we started assembling AV material around the regeneration process of the Deptford area, asking community members, video artist, film-makers, visual artists and students to contribute statements, feedbacks, critiques of the regeneration process of Deptford.
This rough material as well as edited media content will be made available on the Deptford.TV database and distributed over the boundless.coop wireless network with an open content license such as the creative commons and the gnu general public license. Source

Here’s a long documentary film I spent about six weeks around Christmas 2005 editing with my sister. It was a mindbending process because primarily of the two languages but extremely interesting in terms of the subject matter. I think it stands up as a very ambitious piece of work considering there was no budget to speak of and a very very very limited crew. Aisling shot and directed (and translated) it herself and two of us assisted in the post-production. That was it. Here’s a bit of the blurb:

Art/Conflict: 2 X Zones is a feature length documentary shot on DV in 2004/2005 in Ireland and The Basque Country. The documentary is based on a multiplicity of interviews conducted over a year long period in Ireland and the Basque country. It takes a look back at these localised conflicts from the perspective of a post September 11th World and explores how fine artists in The Basque Country and Ireland from the late 1960’s onwards understood their roles in the midst of situations of ongoing civil conflict.

This page will lead you to another film I worked on earlier in the year. It’s an insta-documentary about riots which took place in Dublin in Febuary this year.

It was an interesting working experience because for the first time (in an ‘activist’ context) I did post-production on a film without actually attending the event it was about or meeting any of my collaborators in the flesh. I simply downloaded the raw materials in the form of an extended opinion/analysis piece and a lightly edited chunk of video and combined them in a rough and ready way. This kind of shit would have been unimaginable to me five years ago.

Here’s an article I wrote at the same time as making the film noting how new swarming media formations chose this riot as an Irish coming out party.

Here

When Ulysses finally enters the public domain worldwide, we will witness, just as we did some years ago when copyrights in Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man expired in the United States, an explosion of cheap reprints and new editions of Joyce’s Irish epic. We will also see uninhibited use of the work in streamed Internet performances, public readings, dramatic and cinematic adaptations, and multimedia digital presentations complete with period photographs, Dublin maps, sound clips of Irish songs, and hyperlinks to critical interpretations and manuscript sources. On that red-letter day for the public domain, Ulysses will finally take its place with The Odyssey as raw myth-making material for some future national epic. Indeed, it can be argued that a work does not really become a “classic” until it is unqualifiedly available for cultural exploitation. It would follow that overlong copyright protection is an inhibition on the full organic development of a classic.

There are no sovereign media.[37] The more excluded or invisible a group, the more interesting it becomes for representation. The more violent the fight, the more self-destructively it resists representation, the more difference it produces, so the media sets its focus of investigation to the maximum. Terrorism is the continuation of communication with other means to send ‘messages without words’.[38] Total mediation does not allow any outside, any existence in the shadows; it only allows unrepresentable noise, chaos, decay and disintegration - or a peaceful life in a subordinated normality. Therefore the line of the outside becomes the center of attention. Focusing on the extremes of catastrophe and violence, the uncanny chaos becomes symbolized and fixed in a commodity value exchange, and economy ultimately turns into a matter of faith. The power user serves as an active agent of mediation: she works on the overlappings of old and new electric media, and tests the boundaries of the new interfaces between internet, television, radio, telephony and other gadgetry for a possible answer.[39] As free capitalism enlightened by free media aims at the total domination of space and time, the power user delivers to the all-seeing eye, as it operates on its surface through image media, to objectify what it ’sees’, and what it sees is what you want.[40] Source