Social Software: Archives, The Digital and Radical Histories

This paper will present practice research that sits at the intersection of animation, found footage film and documentary. The research deploys archive film and animation in the production of experimental non-fiction collage that challenges hegemonic, institutional histories. The practical methodology, informed by critical realism, uses digital compositing and layering to render an explicitly constructed aesthetic that foregrounds the ontological distinction of the elements it combines. This fragmentation is engaged to rupture the seamless, unitary realism of conventional compositing, opening a space for a plurality of alternate voices that the flat, corporate realism of orthodox digital media obscure. This aims to connect digital compositing to the radical politics that drove collage practice at its emergence in the modernist movements of the twentieth century. The paper argues that the political reconfiguring of creative software must involve sensitivity to how dominant ideologies are conducted through digital technologies. The work aims to develop the role of digital media practice in addressing shifting notions of reality and politics, arguing that collage techniques can cut against the homogenising effects of capitalism in visual cultures, a homogenisation that collapses the complexity of reality, nullifies the recognition of real social relations and circumscribes the possibility of a more progressive politics.