Cultures In Webs is an interactive CD-ROM which features hypermedia approaches to cross-cultural filmmaking, photography and new media. The documentary studies interweave text, photos, video clips and audio to offer a discussion about cross-cultural film, photography and the practices of visual anthropology. The CD-ROM offers examples of how to create multimedia documentary works using digital tools.
One section of the CD-ROM includes a study filmed and photographed in Ghana that explores how international images of power are interpreted through Ghanaian visual culture. Another piece combines photographs and bands of text in a scrolling storyboard presentation about the narratives of a harvest in a small village in the French wine growing region of Burgundy. A further section rethinks arts of cross-cultural representation through a discussion of exemplary works by Robert Gardner, Vincent Monnikendam, and Trinh T. Minh-ha, among others.
NOTES FROM THE ROAD
APRIL 5 2003. An introduction to the Cultures In Webs essay, “The Harvest,” was presented at the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) meetings. I was joined by Shelley Jackson, Marsha Kinder, Joseph Tabbi, Larry McCaffrey, Colin Campbell, Thomas Bartscherer, Ray Federman, Michelle Kendrick to discuss the how language and images function in new media.” A sample of the talk about "The Harvest"explores how the idea of the “page” is changing the way information is organized, while juxtapositioning, rollovers, and links provide contexts to the reading of images.
APRIL 16 2003. At the Art Institute of Chicago, we discuss authorial voice. New media methods can bring forward the ethnographer-artist’s process by showing step by step how the researcher arrives at the final object. The final object is shown to be inevitably incomplete; it exposes the paths not taken. In naturalistic works, this “incompleteness” is often covered over. But, as anthropologist Clifford Geertz once wrote, "Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is" (Geertz 1973:29). In learning ways to combine diverse materials using digital tools, one discovers ways to show how a multiplicity of stories, ideas, emotions, nuanced views and, even, contradictory positions can co-exist. "In works like Cultures In Webs..." Lucien Taylor( Harvard) writes in the forward, “... language — literal and metaphorical, expository or poetic — and imagery — figurative and non-figurative, moving and still — and sound — vocal and non-vocal, animate and inanimate, realistic and abstract — all rub shoulders with each other literally as elements of the work itself."
NOVEMBER 15 2003. Patricia Search and Karen Thornton organize a tele-conference with students and faculty at RPI to discuss the nature of cross-cultural analysis in an era when the researcher is both social scientist and artist. We look at how digital tools might offer fruitful ways to represent interpretive relationships and to construct transdisciplinary modes of analysis. In talking about the essay “Conceal Narratives,” I ask how a layering of text and images on the Webpage might situate a reader between modes of analysis and allow for the meaning of cultural signifiers to shift over time. In Ghana, for example, proverbs often decorate busses and buildings; they become a common part of the background of events in public spaces and their sayings offer a curious kind of commentary on what is happening. These proverbs (such as “bless my helper,” “no condition is permanent,” or “only the lion eats from the bowl of a leopard”) can take on surprising meanings in the evolving contexts in which they are found. Through the use of interdependent text, sound recordings, video clips and photos, the researcher can show how diverse interpretations of visual objects co-exist and intermingle during events. Digital tools can be used to engage the reader-viewer in the process of interpreting evolving and parallel narratives.
Cultures in Webs was recently reviewed by Pat Bandini for Rhizome
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Next talk: Wesleyan March 2004
Brilliant and compelling.... Roderick Coover raises hypermedia ethnography to the level of art. Cultures in Webs is state of the art story telling as well as a user's guide to the world of representations of cultural difference, which is, of course, the world in which we live, tell our stories, and in telling our lives construct our communities. -- Michael Joyce, Professor of Digital Media at Vassar College and author of Afternoon, A Story.
The time has come for anthropologists to realize that using only books and films to communicate their research has become inadequate. Roderick Coover's Cultures in Webs points us to the future - a future that is most exciting and promising. -- Jay Ruby, Professor of Anthropology at Temple University and author of A Crack in the Mirror: Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology.
