‘No Diving’: Recovered Film and Recovered Memories

Abstract

‘No Diving’ was a site-specific oral history and moving image installation funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund that examined the lido at Hilsea, Portsmouth as a locus for memories and recollections by the local community. The project set out to recover archive film of the building and record oral history interviews contextualising this found material, which would eventually be re-projected on to the building as a site-specific event. The project brought the artist to a personal, and the community to a collective moment of catharsis as the images and voices played over the lido superstructure. For the artist: a moment where personal and family history colludes with the sense of belonging embodied within an architectural space. For the community: a moment of reflection and re-projection of collective memories in which archive films and oral histories relocate the past within the present. The project was designed as an experimental/experiential documentary system that would engage with the community as producers of their own historical identity. The project questioned the nature of documentary since the real documentary could only be shown at the lido as a live performance event in which the audience participated as observers and the observed. In this way, the building served as a bi-directional apparatus, which simultaneously captures and re-projects historical identities through the camera lens of the project process. This project model is transferable and can be pointed at any building or architectural location. It turns a building into a living museum; a site of community practice that produces history and re-circulates identities.

Notes

[1] Momus. ‘VJ Culture’, 5. http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/thinktank/vjculture/ (accessed 12 may 2010).

[2] The film, ‘One Man and His House’, centres around the hapless Mr Novak who finds himself caught up in various situations which represent moral dilemmas. In a specially constructed voting cinema, the 124 audience members at each screening could vote on how Mr Novak should act at five key moments in the film by pressing red or green buttons on their seats: the majority vote would be carried out by the projectionist. During the screening, two on-stage ‘moderators’ introduced each choice and provided the human ‘interface’ to the film's branching structure: Chris Hales, ‘Cinematic interaction’, 54.

[3] Charles Green. ‘The Memory Effect’, 690.

[4] Laura Kissel. ‘Lost, found and remade’, 217.

[5] Gestalt narrative reformulates VJing as a practice of ‘live cinema’, an aleotorically layered assemblage of momentary sound-image associations. This re-conceptualisation of narrative allows us to see the logic of the mix as the flow of possibilities; as the logical story is played out endlessly, open ended, unrealised. The Gestalt effect: emergence, invariance, and reification, functions to synchronise audience and performer through rhizomatic refraction. In this way, as audio visual images are lifted from the screen the familiar is re-coded and de-familiarised. Meaning is re-synthesised and the audience become the cinematic object: Roy Hanney. ‘Gestalt’.

[6] James Clifford. ‘On Ethnographic Surrealism’.

[7] Olga Belova. ‘The Event of Seeing’, 101.

[8]Ibid., 101.

[9]Ibid., 96.

[10] The term is taken from Christian Norberg-Schultz, Genius Loci.

[11]Ibid., 1.

[12] Annet Dekker and Vivian van Saaze. ‘Sensational technologies’, 115–121.

[13] Miwon Kwon. One Place after Another, 210.

[14]Ibid., 211.

[15] Janet Smith. Liquid Assets, 32.

[16] Lucy Lippard. The Lure of the Local, 16.