Lebenverse: Living Video Memory (2009)

Lebenverse is a multi-medium 'living verse' that engages the issues of historical construction and its entangled relation with individual memory, social identity, political agency, and personal media. The documentary moves from the intersection of the first Persian Gulf War and the Rodney King incident to current digital landscape issues surrounding Iraq War videos, the Oscar Grant Oakland BART murder case, and the Iranian 'twitter revolution'. Beginning in Los Angeles, I drove across the country to film and explore sites of personal and historical memory, from the small Georgia military town of my childhood to the Carolinas, Washington DC, New York, Ohio, and Chicago. Conducting interviews with veterans, scholars, and activists along the way, the film creates a dialogical space for intervening in our assumptions of media and power. In exploring these geographical spaces, the film grounds the issues of identity, politics, and history within material conditions of socio-economic life while questioning our developing relationships with new media technologies and online social spaces.