1. Videosynthesis
Can you remeber playing a game when nothing more is lying around than a sheet of paper and a pen? You start to write down a sentence or you draw some elements on the sheet. You fold the paper so that the others are only be able to read a snippet of what you've written. You pass it on to the next person who repeats the schema... and after some rounds you have a surreal, funny story or painting.
How would it be like if this playfully method would be used to discover an urban environment by transfering it to the medium of video and the web? Several people - probably strangers - create one patchwork story with only a limited knowledge of the contributions of the others.
Concept
The game will start by recording a short sequence. This video will be shown to a different person, who – inspired by the sequence – will shoot a video in his own environment, always with the question in mind how the story could continue. And again only the last videosequence will be passed on to the next person and so on and so on and so on...
We would gain lots of different video sequences from a variety of environments and visual approaches and combine it to one surreal narration. The stylistic realization of the recording process shall be free and organized with only a few necessary structures to encourage the freedom of associative visualization and to gain a diverse synthesis of video elements - diverse as a city and in this case Istanbul - is said to be.
Observations
Particularly people without experiences in video and filmmaking had difficulties to evolve a narration and often seemed overcharged by the freely framed task settings. Therefore in my 4. Experiment I decided to give the filmmakers individual short instructions which changed from video to video. One instruction was to integrate a place into the video which had a special meaning for the filmmaker. The results of the submitted videos led to another video work which searches for emotional relations between people and their special places.