Collaborations across Cinematic Objects A Conversation between Pong and Sensory Ethnography Lab, Mediated by the Graduate Research Training Group "Documentary Practices: Excess and Privation"

This conversation brings practitioners together from two different milieus of media production to initiate a dialogue about documentary practices as collaborative work, understood through a reflexive lens that also attends to the power relations and social differentiations inherent within its fabrication. As such, our conversation explores how filmmaking emerges through contingent and negotiated relations between filmmakers and film subjects, different representational modalities, the archive, (recording) technology and voice; the conversation also probes how the infrastructural conditions of collaborative work shape the ever-shifting horizons of the documentary imagination. Mediated by members of the graduate research training group on Documentary Practices, based at the Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, it features Philip Scheffner and Merle Kroger from pong, a production platform housed in Berlin, Germany, in conversation with Professor Diana Allan, a colleague of the Sensory Ethnography Lab based at Harvard University, a co-organizer of the new Critical Media Lab at McGill University, and a Canada Research Chair in the Anthropology of Living Archives.