Project Statement

"Ah New Riddim," 2021 is a hybrid documentary that utilizes technology and spectator interactivity to create a simplified concentric narrative structure. The Project explores the collapse of "Suture," the logic of signifiers, in ideological film theory, modeling the nonlinear effects of memory in recalling a Dancehall house party in July 1988.

The Project utilizes four sensors within the gallery to control the film's chronological structure. When activated by the viewer, each sensor triggers a visual: subject interviews, archival performance, surreal dreamscapes, or abstracted montages and interfaces with a programmed script to produce a non-linear narrative with varied trajectories on screen.

But how does this format disrupt suture?

In suture, the spectator is a signifier within a system of signifiers that communicates meaning within film discourse. The spectator's participation in interactive cinema disrupts the spectator's relationship to film as a "signifier." The line drawn between filmmaker and viewer is blurred, and in this entanglement, the film takes on a new context.

I am interested in how the collapse of suture can further inform my queries on the spatial-temporal relations of memory and place in contemporary Dancehall culture. In "Ah New Riddim (working title)," 2016, Dancehall serves as a cultural artifact of the Caribbean diaspora that reconfigures the role of absence and presence in Caribbean communities in the US and abroad. How will the collapse of suture further inform this narrative?