Slivers of Necessity

BACKGROUND Mobile Innovation Network Aotearoa (MINA) is an international network promoting cultural and research activities around mobile media. The Screenings are part of a symposium program which provides a platform to explore ubiquitous technologies in creative environments. Drawing on the deep discourses of spatial haunting, Berry researched ways to create a sense of nostalgia so that a modern video of mundane scenes would be haunted with a sense of otherness: the aura of time and dislocated histories of living in suburban Australia. She shot this video on an iPhone using faux-vintage filter apps to evoke 8mm camera imagery. The soundtrack combines the voice of 'Twitter buddy' Joe Hesch reading her poem, Slivers of Necessity, with the background noise of a projector. CONTRIBUTION Mobile filmmaking and mobile creative practices are challenging existing filmmaking forms. As a new genre, mobile films are gaining prominence internationally though festivals such as iPhoneFF, Mobile Film Festival (USA), LIIMF and SEISFF (Korea), Cinephone (Spain), Mobile Film Festival (Macedonia) and Ohrenblick and Mobile Steifen (Germany). This poetic video exploring chance, necessity and being exiled, out of place experiments with slow media aesthetics to create an auratic presence and relationship to place and thus contributes to research into the emergent forms of visuality enabled by smartphones and linked to social media. SIGNIFICANCE Slivers of Necessity was chosen for MINA by a peer panel and the program was curated by Laurent Antonczak (AUT) and Dr Max Schleser (Massey University). This output was identified as an exemplar of mobile media creativity in an age of smartphones where new types of emplaced visuality and geospatial sociality are emerging. Berry and Schleser subsequently edited Mobile Media Making in an Age of Smartphones, published by Palgrave Macmillan.