The Black Sea Tapes
Experimental Media Archive/Alternate Reality Game
Concept, Design and Puppetmastery: Jeff Watson
Exhibitions: The Black Sea Tapes is currently underway.
The Black Sea Tapes is a long-term cross-media storytelling experiment straddling the border between hoax and Alternate Reality Game. In 2001, I received a Media Arts grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to produce a cycle of films and media artifacts which were to be presented as the work of a decades-dead and hitherto unheralded Georgian filmmaker. These films and artifacts were not conceived of as ends in themselves, but rather as parts of a larger metanarrative that would be uncovered and co-created through the curiosity and imagination of an audience.
The Game
The Black Sea Tapes is a long-term Alternate Reality project. Unlike "traditional" ARGs, which thrive on "establishing a network of players who are in the know," (McGonigal, 44) this project seeks to evade identification as a game for as long as possible (and thus could be classified as a kind of "dark play" ARG). Currently-active game elements include:
- Engimatically-marked videotape copies of supposedly long-lost film works by the deceased Georgian auteur, "distributed" in washrooms, restaurants, film clubs and other public spaces in various cities around the world.
- Websites containing information about Georgian cinema and underground artists, most of which is "real", but some of which makes reference to the fictional filmmaker whose identity is at the centre of this experiment.
- Web posts on film- and Georgia-related message boards written about the fictional filmmaker by a "member of the family."
- Tangentially-related curatorial art projects involving another of the fictional filmmaker's family members, who is herself a filmmaker.
- Wikipedia entries that make reference to the fictional filmmaker.
The further growth and development of this project depends on the nature and scope of audience responses to the virally-distributed media components. At the time of this writing, the "mystery videotapes" and web components mentioned above have been in circulation for several months. Additional tapes will be distributed in a similar manner until media clips begin to appear on the internet, uploaded and posted by those who find the tapes and are curious enough about their enigmatic content to share them online. By monitoring a variety of video hosting sites (YouTube, Google Video, Daily Motion, etc) for descriptive keywords and phrases from the labels on the tapes themselves, I hope to engage with the discovery and discussion of these works and, in combination with the ongoing development of other metanarrational components, shepherd forward an emergent narrative concerning the emotional collapse of a young filmmaker at the end of Georgian Communism.
Background
In the context of the history of representation, the aim of this project is to explore, exploit, and explode the semantic structures that underpin the narrative cinema’s capacity to organize historical, social, and individual identity. At issue here are the ways in which film narratives can activate or deactivate the audience’s "metafilmic imagination" -- the ability to extrapolate the fictional world that lies beyond the confines of the frame -- by foregrounding or occluding questions regarding the origin, intention, and historical position of the film text. Suspense, for example, is created through a partial occlusion of the filmmaker’s intentions -- the question "What’s going to happen next?" is only interesting and engaging from the viewer’s perspective if there is some uncertainty as to what the author of the work is trying to say (or, minimally, how she is trying to express a commonly held notion), an uncertainty which is only relieved by the final resolution of the plot.
Suspense thus goes to the putative identity of the film’s author, questioning and ultimately resolving her intentions through figures of character. Importantly, however, there are a range of ontological questions which are rarely, if ever, asked of audiences by narrative filmmakers. In the world of commercial film production, publicity, star systems, formal conventions, and explicit ties to official organs (MPAA, etc) effect a pre-emptive strike on questions regarding the origin and social role of individual narratives: Genre-based advertising ensures that audiences do not have to bother asking themselves "What type of film is this?" or "Who is this film intended for?"; star power and official approval tacitly endorse the ideological position of the narrative, encouraging the audience to align themselves with, rather than question, the philosophy (or lack thereof) of the producers; studios, distributors, and the press release the audience from wondering about where, when, how, and by whom the film was made.
Even in the realm of the avant-garde, such questions are rarely at issue in a film’s reception: we almost always know who made it, when, where, and quite often, why. In both cases, the viewer’s concentration is focused, as it were, "within the frame": comfortably ensconced in a well-established ontological context, the fiction plays out within a "factual" setting. It is my contention that this "factual" setting -- an amalgamation of assumptions, conventions, and extrapolations based on extant knowledge and information received through promotional materials -- is no less fictional than the narrative of the film proper, and no less fertile ground for storytelling. The Black Sea Tapes addresses this issue by constructing a fiction of context that does not stop at the edges of the frame.
Canada Council for the Arts references and media clip samples are available to interested institutions and employers. Please get in touch with me at remotedevice-at-gmail-dot-com to request further information.