The Gaza Flipcam Project

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The Gaza Flipcam Project

Concept:  New technologies create the opportunity to create a new kind of journalism. The Flipcam, (a small, hand held and extremely inexpensive video camera) married to a web that carries and distributes video gives us a chance to redefine journalism and coverage of news events.  This is what we are going to try and do.

The Project:  We will supply 100 citizens of the Gaza Strip with HD quality Flipcams.  We will instruct them in how to use them, and will ask them to film what they consider to be elements of their daily life in Gaza.  What they choose to film is entirely up to them.  We will, however teach them to shoot and edit coherently.

We will simultaneously create a website to which they can upload their images.

There are numerous Internet Cafes in Gaza, as well as internet access in many homes.  Getting the images out should not be an issue.

Our website will be dominated by a 10×10 video presentation; that is, 10 frames of video x 10 frames of video, all running in real time that would present a 100 frame tapestry of what day to day life is like in Gaza.

By passing a cursor over the 100 frame board, any one of them could be enlarged and viewed.

The project would run for 3 months.

A New Kind of Journalism:  The explosion of technology has brought a wave of creative destruction to conventional journalism.  Newspapers and now television news outlets, which once had a monopoly on both access to information as well as distribution were once our only source of news and information.

New technologies, most notably the web, bloggers and now vloggers are wiping away the barrier between information and the public. While it is clear that the old model longer functions, it is unclear what the new model is going to be.

Cheap and simple video technology allows us to democratize video news. Much of this has taken the form of ‘citizen journalism’, a place where ‘average’ people get their hands on cameras or blogsites and effectively ape what conventional reporters and journalists have been doing for years.

But perhaps these new technologies can give birth to a kind of journalism that is, from the start, different.

What we are seeking to build with the Gaza Flipcam Project is not an extended kind of citizen journalism, where we would find 100 journalists in Gaza, but rather a kind of digital tapestry of life in Gaza on a day to day basis; and in so doing, create an ongoing and living (and close to realtime) portrait of what life is truly like there.

The people we would select for the cameras would represent a cross-section of the population of Gaza: young and old, men and women; political radicals and those who only wanted to make their way in the world.

They would share only two things:  A dedication to contributing to the project and a desire to tell their own ‘personal’ stories – a portrait of their own lives, to the rest of the world.

We would not instruct them to ‘find news stories’. Quite the contrary, we would simply tell them to show the world the way in which they see the world on a daily basis.

The resulting digital quilt, if we might, would then represent a living portrait of life in Gaza.

Where Art and Journalism Collide:  In the 1940s and 50s, the advent of small, hand held still cameras gave rise to a new kind of photojournalism. Small cameras like the Leica and faster 35 mm roll film allowed photographers to create a vision of the world that was far more intimate and immediate.  Magnum and Life Magazine were the products of this technological revolution.

In 1955, Edward Steichen, photographer, curated a ground-breaking exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in NY entitled The Family of Man.

It was here that this new kind of photojournalism crossed the divide between journalism and art. The photography was so powerful that it was both reportage and fine art simultaneously.

Today, this is a given, but in 1955, it was a relatively new concept.

The work that will be produced by our Gaza Flipcam Project will in many ways take videojournalism into the realm of art as well.

Toward that end, I would seek to exhibit the 10×10 panel not just on our website, but first in partnership with a major newspaper or online journalistic enterprise that could provide a platform for the work.

At the same time, we would seek to ‘hang’ the panel (a series of large format plasma screens), in art galleries or Museums in Berlin, Paris, New York, LA, London, Tel Aviv and Dubai.

Visitors to the website or the newspaper site would be able to view the ever shifting visions of Gaza – and get a sense of what life is really like there for millions; but so would those who visited the galleries or museums.

Yet those who viewed them on newspaper websites would perceive them as journalism first, art second; while those who viewed them in galleries would see the reverse.

In both cases, the site would be open to an ongoing online dialogue and commentary through the Internet.

Comments would appear online, and in the case of the museums, would appear as a running commentary in plasma screens next to the video display.

A New Kind of Journalism:  The rise of photography in the late 19th Century also gave rise to a kind of creative destruction in the world of art.  The talents of portraiture were suddenly obviated by the mechanical perfection of the still camera.

A talent that had held power and prestige since the time of antiquity and that had reached its heights with the work of Rembrandt or Holbein was suddenly rendered next to worthless.

It might have seemed that fine art, like newspapers in our own era, were destined for destruction.

The technology however, freed artists to begin to capture more than just a perfect rendition of reality, and rather to expand their metier to capture emotion as well.  Impressionism, and latterly, modern art were the result.

Today, conventional journalism is suffering a similar kind of technologically driven destruction.  Yet is it possible to drive journalism as well to a kind of Impressionism, whereby the journalist, and the viewer, receive more than simply a direct capture of reality, but rather a multi dimensional transmission of emotion as well?

We believe that the video tapestry that we are going to construct might be seen as analogous to a Seurat painting – a kind of video pointalism that, when seen from a distance, tells a far more complete story.