International Week Workshop & TAF: 24-hours.in Tampere – interactive documentary workshop

In this interactive documentary workshop participants will explore new opportunities for participation, collaboration and the potential democratisation of documentary production. Utilising mobile device cameras, participants will produce a collaborative, participatory, experimental documentary project centred on 24-hours in Tampere. With reference to Dziga Vertov’s 1929 documentary film ‘Man with a Movie Camera’, we will aim to document the city of Tampere, the people that live there and their daily lives in a 24-hour period. Participants are encouraged to embrace Vertov’s pioneering avant-garde approach to filmmaking, utilising cameraphones and mobile devices to capture “life caught unawares”. Moving beyond the user-generated content model, the project will build up a database of location specific documentary material and aim to create a new system for collaborative documentary production and user-curated content. The resulting project will be presented as part of the International seminar and published online.

Richard Vickers, University of Lincoln

Richard Vickers is a principal lecturer at the Lincoln School of Media, University of Lincoln, United Kingdom. In 2006 (in part inspired by a visit to Tampere) he developed 15x15 (www.15x15.org), a project that utilised user-generated mobile phone video content and explored the democratisation of art in the age of digital production, with reference and homage to Warhol. The project won the Flashforward Film Festival art category in Austin, Texas and has been exhibited extensively around the world