Memories of the Future
2014
Memories of the Future is a mobile cinema project created with Hometown Security Laboratories and a group of spoken word artists from the Hunts Point section of the South Bronx. Moving through a series of 14 location based videos, the poets articulate encounters with mass incarceration and environmental discrimination, traces of which remain encoded in the surrounding landscape.
Poetry was written from the point of view of personified locations that had witnessed significant events in the poets lives. Elements of the urban landscape, such as detention facilities, waste management plants, industrial parks and strip bars provided a backdrop for adversity, but also for intense creativity, and the possibility for reinvention. Together, the texts create a portrait that captures the dialectic nature of Hunts Point, both gritty and beautiful.
Performances were shot on location, and visuals were augmented with digital effects to complement the other worldly aspect of HP’s landscape. Vignettes were assembled into a location-aware mobile app that leads viewers through the landscape of the story.
The collective narrative was featured in a Poetry and Cinema walk event sponsored by the Bronx Museum in June 2014. Audiences accompanied poets as they performed at each location in the story sequence, walking the narrative route to discuss the project in a mobile conversation.
MotF was originally created as a mobile app for iOS and Android. It has since been updated to a webapp, found at motf.org, currently in beta.
Poets: Caridad La Bruja De La Luz, James Peach McClory, Simply Rob Vassilirakis, Paula Ramirez, Robert Comanche Romero, Audrey & Sandy De La Luz, Marta & Izzy Latimer, Rita Jones, Shandle Burton, Rachel & Mawa Erkalo, Antuan Thug Love Sumpter, Gabby Nelson, Big Rob Kimble, and Melissa Lomba.
Directed and photographed by Melanie Crean; Produced by Jordan Parnass; Casting and Production support by Melissa Lomba of Majora Carter LLC; Application Development by Dimitri Stancioff, Apon Palanuwech and Jane Friedhoff; Visual effects by Enrique Maitland and Ekatarina Efimova.
Memories of the Future by Melanie Crean is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
