Institution email:  pauline.vmbroekman@network.rca.ac.uk

My PhD explores the social and technological continuum between a post-revolutionary Soviet Union and our contemporary 'network society', focusing on the possibilities for digital film as an artistic medium. The practice of Dziga Vertov and his collaborators (specifically Man with a Movie Camera, 1929) has long been key to discussions of machinic vision and 'post-human' art. The proposal argues that the capabilities of mobile, networked video – which not only allow all of us to become 'wo/men with cameras', but foster complex modes of co-production, editing and sharing – newly animate lesser known aspects of Vertov's legacy, which centre on the relationship between artist and subject; individual and collectivity; labour and medium/means of production. Using literature on revolutionary Soviet film, twentieth century collaborative art practices, digital culture and economy, the project will engage historical and contemporary debates on realism, narrative, artistic autonomy, individual and mass production to stage a dialogue between successive artistic avant-gardes. My practice-based research will start with a series of basic 'transcriptions' of Vertov's films – redeploying the artist's working tropes (e.g. “life caught unawares”) to create basic databases of content. This initial material will support further experiments with distribution, composition and editing, taking guidance from collective artistic practices which use the database as their primary medium (e.g. the Pad.ma film archive, Aaaaarg text archive, or Public Library of Marcell Mars).

http://www.metamute.org and http://www.maydayrooms.org