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Quality Time with the Family
FICTIONAL DOCUMENTARY
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Fictional documentary arises in my art works when I use material from real-life sources. This could be in the form of images, sounds, text or real people, as in the case of Quality Time with the Family in which real members of my family took part in the project. The idea is that I blur the line between documented reality and fictional expression.
In the video version of Quality Time with the Family (2007), for example, what appears to be an unedited footage is in fact highly constructed. However, it is only in the last few moments that I reveal the footage has been manipulated in such a way that the objectivity of documentary is compromised.
I was more conscious of blurring the lines between documentary and fiction when I wrote the script for Made Up (2008). In this video, a gay man is interviewed about what he finds attractive in men, though it's hardly a real interview since the voice heard is mine, I am saying things that I rehearshed and there is no one asking questions (although none of this is made apparent in the beginning). There is some truth to it, since much of what I say are my real opinions, at least up to the point when I start describing masculinity, at which time I allow myself to become a character of the aspect of gay culture that I am critiquing.
In Lost (2007), every piece of dialogue used comes from real conversations I had on gay Internet chat sites, while much of the photographs used are ones I created for use in my online profiles. At some point during my chatting phase, I began saving conversations out of an instinct that I might be able to use this material for a project, which is exactly what happened. I went through these conversations and selected the dialogue that represented various aspects of the online chatting experience and organized them to form one continuous dialogue. On the one hand, every word in Lost comes from real life, on the other hand, I appropriated it to make something new, leaving me unsure whether to call this piece fiction or documentary.
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