Keith Marley
The Art of Fact
The purpose of this presentation is to explain how the use of contemporary technologies (1), which are rarely associated with documentary production, can produce radical narrative structures and complex patterns of signification in relation to both the visual and audio track of documentary practice. I will also suggest that by relocating documentary exhibition into the nightclub/warehouse arena, it will help to develop new forms of audience engagement and interaction with the text and implicitly links documentary practice with a culture of resistance, which was associated with the “rave scene” in Britain during the late 80s early 90s.
Much of the aesthetic inspiration for my work comes from ideas associated with the Russian Constructivist movement of the early 20th Century. Their concept of oestrenenie or to “make strange” is a central aesthetic theme running throughout my practice. Thus documentary footage, both aural and visual, is deconstructed using VJ/DJ technologies in order to produce kinetic impact, a term used by filmmaker Dziga Vertov, which relates to engaging cinema audiences in ways that previous film practice had failed to do. As such, the idea of bringing documentary audiences and the documentary text into the “club space” provides new locations and audiences for documentary exhibition, and allows the boundaries between audience and producer to become blurred, as well as redefining the relationship between sound, image and actuality.
The overarching aims of my practice is to make an attempt to disassociate documentary film with a discourse of sobriety (2), through the development of innovative representational strategies, combined with the relocation of documentary exhibition outside of its traditional home