Spinning a Collaborative Web

Abstract

Shirley Clarke’s shift in the 1970s from producing 16mm films to an improvisational video practice in the Chelsea Hotel with her Tee Pee Video Space Troupe should be seen as an early call for a more collaborative theory of authorship and understanding of the documentary project. The use of the Internet for the preproduction of documentary films and the outreach/commentary following their exhibition may be just as interesting, or, perhaps, more historically significant than the documentary materials themselves. Documentary scholars are returning to the history of early video because these predecessors bear striking resemblances to the current digital landscape (Boyle 1997; Coffman 2012; Cohen 2012; Juhasz 2003; Tripp 2012). Media collectives — the Videofreex, Raindance Corporation, Kartemquin Films — forged participatory paths in the late 1960s and early 1970s through handing cameras to their subjects and publishing training manuals and operating instructions on how to record both persuasively and democratically. Whether taking cameras to interview the soon-to-be murdered Black Panther leader Fred Hampton or experimenting with feedback loops and interactive installation projects, these collectives shared equipment, funding resources and apartments to produce a different kind of documentary practice.