Amateur Media in the Longue Durée: Historical, Experimental and Digital Approaches (Keynote)

Description

Throughout the twentieth century, various generations of amateurs have documented their daily lives using film, video, and digital media. How have changes in these so-called "technologies of memory" shaped new amateur recording and screening practices? And how can we effectively historicize these changing amateur media dispositifs? This presentation addresses these questions by exploring the complex interrelations between the materiality of film, video, and digital media technologies, their mediated content, and practices of use from a long-term historical perspective, employing three complementary approaches. Drawing on archival research and historical discourse analysis of a large corpus of Dutch amateur photography, film, and video magazines from 1895 to 2005, it first adopts a historical approach to investigate media transitions and user generational shifts. Secondly, it introduces experimental approaches for historicizing amateur media dispositifs, drawing on a series of media archaeological experiments with the Kinora motion photography viewer and the Pathé Baby 9.5mm film projector as early-twentieth-century home cinema technologies. The third part of the presentation focuses on digital methodologies in amateur media historiography. Utilizing the Distant Viewing approach to computationally analyze large audiovisual collections, it demonstrates the potential of data-driven techniques to explore historical amateur media collections at scale. Ultimately, the presentation advocates for a comprehensive approach that integrates historical, experimental, and digital methods to explore amateur media in the longue dureé.

Period	12 Nov 2024
Event title	Amateur Cinema: A Global History
Event type	Conference
Location	Barcelona, SpainShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International