Overheated Symphony was created by artist and film director Sarah Turner and sound designer Annabelle Pangbourn during the Birds Eye View Film Festival 2008 (www.birds-eye-view.co.uk)

They invited all women around the world to participate to their project by making a quick flick, between 40 seconds and 4 minutes long, on their mobile phone, and t osend it to them via the Internet. The theme that they selected was OVERHEATED (which developed in sub-themes such as: domestic technologies (cooking/boiling etc), sun/ light, burning/fire,’pressures of life’: routine/work/transport, etc).

Sarah Turner and Annabelle Pangbourn then finally edited live all the short films that they received during a final showing at the ICA – as part of the Birds Eye View Film Festival.

Find out more:

Watch the final cut of Overheated Symphony on YouTube, or just here below.

Read more about the project: Overheated Symphony’s blog.

My comments:

I did not go to the live mix of Overheated Symphony, so it is quite difficult for me to comment of the project (any person that did go: please do send me a comment!).

From what I read, and from the final mix that is available on YouTube, I find the project innovative, yet restricted in its interactivity. Although women did send their videos they have no control on the final use of their footage, and I wonder if they mind about this.

I can understand the challenge for experimental filmmaker Sarah Turner to mix live content that she has not produced, and I think the final film does show the multi-presence of the different filmmakers that have participated, but I wonder who is to benefit from the final film.

Is it a tour de force? But of whom?

Is it meaningful as a stand alone movie? to whom? the partecipators, Sarah Turner or us – the external viewers?

And is it a documentary? Probably yes, in the large definition of the term, yes: it is a documentation of women’s feeling of “overheating” mixed by a third person.

Something though, is still puzzling me. I cannot help thinking that it is a use of collaborative energy for the sake of a single author… and somehow this disturbs me.

Description:  (this project was proposed to the archive by João Martinho Moura – the following description comes from him)

YMYI (You Move You Interact) is an interactive installation, where one is supposed to build up a body language dialogue with an artificial system so as to effectively achieve a synchronized performance between the real user´s body and the virtual object itself. The project aims at exploring a spatial sphere,where the user/performer is invited to develop his own creative inspiration based on his own body gestures and movements.

Reflecting on the concept present in YMYI, we realized that the user expectations on our installation were twofold – narrative and image. Underlying these concepts, that relate to us as Humans, and our perception of ourselves and the surrounding environment, we truly believe that the following definitions presented by the scientist António Damásio constituted a resourceful enlightenment. According to Damásio, on the one hand “the images (mental patterns) may be conscious or unconscious (…) The unconscious images are never directly accessible. The images access is to be provided in a single first person perspective ( my images, everyone´s images). On the other hand, the neural patterns are to be provided in a third person perspective. If I considered the possibility of observing my own neural patterns resorting to advanced technology, I would be always doing it in the third person perspective.” ( DAMÁSIO, 2000:362).

Find out more:

Watch a video of the installation and read the documentation about the project here

My comments:

I have not seen this project… but I have watched the video and I had a sort of  Wow factor… This is for me what new media does best: it allows us to visualize things outside of our “natural” perception. The authors referred  to Damasio and his theories of consciousness… but I see a lot of Deleuze and Guattari’s Body Without Organs in this piece.

This project allows us to “see” how, while moving, we literally change the space around us… but also: “we” change too!! This links the project to all the concept of “co-emergence” that biologist-cybernetician Francesco Varela has described in The Embodied Mind. We are not “here” in a world that is “outside” of us… we are co-emerging, and co-defining the world and ourselves through movement in an embodied self…

Now my problem is: although I love this project, should I include it here? Is this Digital Art or Interactive Documentary?

As you have probably noticed I have entered YMYI as an installation and I tagged it as an “experiential mode” project. This means that I consider that this is an art project that sits in an art gallery… but that what it does is to construct a documentary narrative about our relation with the world. The fine line between art and documentary is impossible to define. So I take the liberal choice of seeing in YMYI an experiential narrative: a way to experience a fundamental condition of our being in the world that has been described in words (Damasio, Varela, Deleuze, Guattari & many others), that could be described by moving image (but how? by interviewing people that would speak about the philosophers that have debated the question?)… or that could be somehow “experienced”. The whole idea of an embodied mind is that, after all, it is through experience that we learn…

I understand that I am pushing the definition of interactive documentary quite far… but what interests me is not to encapsulate what is, or is not, an interactive documentary, but to think about the ways in which interactive digital technology allows us to speak/see/think/experience reality in an interactive way… and here this project is quite illuminating – at least for me… any comments on this??