A CONVERSATION BETWEEN PONG FILM AND SENSORY ETHNOGRAPHY LAB, MEDIATED BY THE GRADUATE RESEARCH TRAINING GROUP “DOCUMENTARY PRACTICES: EXCESS AND PRIVATION” 

What does it mean to conceptualize the making of a documentary film as collaborative work? Can we understand collaboration as a reflexive lens that also attends to the power relations and social differentiations inherent within the film’s fabrication? Such is the proposition of this event. Through this frame we aim to emphasize not only the formal aesthetics of the cinematic object, but also its infrastructure and the work expended through more-than-human relations. Emphasizing flux and movement over genre and medium, the graduate research training group “Documentary Practices: Excess and Privation” investigates the manifold practices that are involved in the emergence of the document(ary), a process that entails the social production of evidence effects, legibility, and expressive value, as well as their contestations.

In this event, moderated by members from the graduate research training group, we will explore how filmmaking emerges through contingent and negotiated relations between filmmakers and film subjects, (recording) technology, rhythms (of the sea), and the sedimentations of history; we will also probe how the infrastructural conditions of collaborative work shape the ever-shifting horizons of the documentary imagination.