Dancing to Architecture

a vital focus production

Dancing to Architecture was the first open source documentary of its kind and is to date the only existing motion picture account of the phenomenal This Is Not Art festivals (TINA) - held in Newcastle, Australia every year in October. Filmed in 2002, Dancing to Architecture is essential for anyone who wants to gain an impression of what the TINA festival is like. It is rapid, chaotic, anarchic and urgent. It is dramatic, electric, technical, and socially relevant. It is Australia’s biggest event for communications, new media arts, music and activism.

If you are expecting this film to tell you what This Is Not Art is, then we suggest you stop and go look at their website instead:

www.thisisnotart.org

If you are looking for an AV impression of TINA, with an experimental and expressive edge and subtle narratives, then you should watch Dancing to Architecture.

Dancing to Architecture was made with a budget of AU$1000 and a hell of a lot of begging. It was shot in Mini DV, Digital 8, Video 8, Hi8, DVC Pro, and Webcams, and edited in Premier and Media100. Audio was recorded in DAT, Mini Disc, cassette tape, and mini cassette tape and edited with Protools.

Basically any format and editing tool we could get our hands on was good enough, so long as we could record and log as much as possible, then edit together what we wanted. By the end of the festival we had collected over 140 hours of interviews, presentations and workshops, events, exhibitions, performances and time-lapse recordings. All of this footage has been thoroughly logged and made available online as open source to anyone who wants to watch it or even make another piece about TINA:

see DTA open source archive

So that’s where the real documentary lays – somewhere in all that 140 hours or more of raw footage. What we have made is a preview to it - an invite to look at the source material.

Dancing to Architecture is a challenge to documentary makers, a challenge to thoroughly break with tradition, confront the notion of documentary and become more creative and innovative with it. We want open source documentary, we want performance documentary, we want experimental documentary, and we want copy left documentary.

Dancing to Architecture is inspired by the early work of Dziga Vertov (Man With a Movie Camera), the conceptual framework established by Michael Snow and co (Wavelength), Ron Fricke and co (Baraka) and the numerous VJ's and performance video artists for their successful popularisation of this particular film genre.

Dancing To Architecture - a motion picture about TINA
by Vital Focus is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia License.
Based on a work at www.minskimedia.com.