Gearóid Dolan’s “Protest NYC: An Interactive Archive”

A/V Works is a repository of films that document the various protests that took place in NYC. They are a select group of films from the greater group of such films started with the Iraq War protests in 2003 when the Protest project began. Each film is a semi-animated, time-remapped documentation, concentrating on the graphic nature of the protest signage and police presence, accompanied by audio montages of the protest chants and environment sounds. This project limits itself to protests after 2010 and presents a sample of the films made for each theme (there are many more films of Occupy Wall St, Black Lives Matter and Not My President protests). The full set of films are available on the main screaMachine site as well as the screaMachine YouTube Channel

Performances is a repository of films that document performances that were enacted using the films in A/V Works. These include performances in galleries, street interventions and live VJ remixes

Street Interventions is a repository of films that document performances and installations with video projections on the urban landscape of NYC using those same A/V Works, in many cases multiple channel multi-projector arrays. These interventions are a form of re-enactment of the protests, taking the content captured on the streets and re-presenting them as new incarnations of the voices of the protesters and, as such, form a new participation in the protests, time displaced, by both the artist and those viewing and/or interacting with the projections.

A/V Mashups are interactive pages that present content from the films in animated forms. The participant uses their mouse to “play” different audio content while navigating through the array of video content, while dodging the interference of animated protesters, who traverse the screen, often blocking the participants mouse interactions

Non-Linear Films offer an alternative, self-guided manner of viewing the films. Each features a center screen surrounded by clip thumbnails that the user clicks on to populate the center screen, which will then loop until the next decision is made. The user may only choose the next clip from the thumbnails as, when they do, all the thumbnails are randomly replaced by new ones, so the user cannot plan the sequences of viewing in advance. With over 50 clips available there are so many possible trajectories through the content that no two persons will see them in the same order (or the same person viewing a second time). This involves the user such that they remain actively engaged in the content

Puzzles provide one more interactive way of consuming the content, this time in the form of a jigsaw puzzle. The video content is broken into multiple different size rectangles that are jumbled at the start. The user has to move the pieces around and assemble the screen while the video and audio content plays. Because the content of the pieces are moving the puzzles are quite difficult to solve, despite there being a small number of them. Each puzzle is different: solve them all!