Looking Back At Tribeca Hacks Archives

Our latest series from our Tribeca Hacks program, Tribeca Hacks <Archives>, was held in San Francisco March 21-23 in partnership with GAFFTA, along with support from Prelinger Archives and Internet Archives. Through open call submissions, 36 filmmakers, artists, designers and developers were chosen to participate. Ten teams collaborated to create visually rich and technologically exciting projects focusing on the Archives and archived material. At the end of the two-day hackathon, the teams presented their projects to a panel of distinguished media innovators—Tiffany Shlain, Malcolm Pullinger, and Jigar Mehta—where they celebrated their work at a public exhibition at Public Works in the Mission District.

We are so impressed with the amazing work everyone produced in only two days. Check out these descriptions and links to the ten wonderful and varied prototypes, projects, and tools created by our participants.

But first, here's a video recap of the event:

Tribeca Hacks from Tribeca Film Institute on Vimeo.

AR Noir

Team Members Daria Gabriel Valentin Burov Natalia Ricalde Liz Payne Description AR Noir is an interactive map which allows the user to experience San Francisco as a film noir narrative. Utilizing a mobile device users are able to trigger short vignettes linked to a location on the map. The short films are constructed out of archival documentary footage and Hollywood film noir narratives. The noir genre often explores subversive themes hidden from society. The map plays off of this idea of the hidden reality, by not revealing the vignettes until the user uncovers them.

Archive Android App [CONCEPT]

Team Members Kevin Gil Description A Concept/Demo/Prototype of what the Internet Archive needs, a mobile app!

Archive Drift 

Team Members Rami Musa Alayan Gabriel Dunne Emily Martiny Ben McChesney Alejandro Palacios Joe Stillwater

Description Archive Drift is an interactive project that asks participants to use physical movements to explore new and archival footage, creating a non-linear filmic walkabout. Created with archive.org, Final Cut Pro and Open Frameworks/C++, controlled with an Ipad accelerometer and a Mac Mini.

Illuminated Letters ~ Lost & Found Memories of My Father

Team Members Melinda Hess Patricia Antelles Tyler Freeman (odbol) Stephen Cady Nick Fox-Gieg Description We used our time at Tribeca Hacks to explore a series of small interactive experiences that are part of a larger Transmedia project. We used our time to play with gesture-based interactions, sound triggered associative archival media, location based data over narrative and interactive documentary interfaces. We produced one small piece, an interactive popcorn project for the documentary film Letter From Cloudcroft, illuminating letters from an engineer in the American V2 rocket program just after WWII. The Illuminated Letters project used popcornjs – Mozilla's JavaScript Framework for HTML5 media –to illuminate hidden letters uncovering American scientists and engineers working with post WWII ex-Nazis to develop U.S. V2 rockets launching the successful American Space Race and landing on the moon. 

Follow the Project Story Follow the Project Letters

Manipulative Moments 

Team Members Stephanie Sherriff Laura Neuhaus Myoung Kang Description Our interest is in remixing cultural history to find unexpected connections. By examining, manipulating, and juxtaposing glimpses of a daily life -- like a housewife's meat carving techniques, cartoonish radiation warnings, and twitching amoebas -- we hope to reflect on the original purpose of these pieces. Relying on layered movement, texture, and color, the resulting images challenge the viewer to discover a new way to interpret the intended use of the visual artifact. For the processing of these images we used Max/MSP/Jitter, a visual programming language for music and media.

Memory Mosaic 

Team Members Banker White, Project Lead/Director, The Genius of Marian  Shaleece Haas, Co-producer, The Genius of Marian Daniel Schwartz, Front-end development and interaction design Libby Falck, Front-end developer Lisa Woods, Visual and interaction designer Susan Doran, Information architecture/digital archives Description The Genius of Marian is a documentary film that explores the impact of Alzheimer's disease, the power of art, and the meaning of family. Memory Mosaic - an interactive, multimedia archive, and community - is being developed in conjunction with the film to honor those affected by Alzheimer's and their loved ones. The platform enables the audience to become both artist and archivist, and to co-create an evocative, visual, personal and communal experience of loss.

Opaque Transparencies

Team Members Alejandro Palacios Emily Martiny Description As temporal forms become frozen through undefined and critical practice, the viewer is left with a new agenda of the undefined of our world. New insights are distilled from both opaque and transparent textures. The viewer is left with a summary of the inaccuracies of our culture archives.

Peripheral Drift H4ck 

Team Members Gabriel Dunne Ben McChesney Joe Stillwater Description Peripheral Drift H4ck is a traversal cinematic document made using the same engine as Archive Drift. AD has been created during the Tribeca H4ck, while PDH4 has been created around AD and the h4ck event itself. PDH4 explores both the intimacy and focus that happens during a hackathon, while allowing the user to interact with it in an immersive way. Both PDH4 & AD are interactive projects that ask participants to use physical movements to explore footage, creating a non-linear filmic walkabout. Created with Final Cut Pro and Open Frameworks/C++, controlled with an Ipad accelerometer and a Mac Mini.

ReDream 

Team Members Matt Ball Takashi Mizohata Bret Petersen Jennifer Wong Mary Sweeney Jessica Jones Kortney Ryan Ziegler Brianna Torres Description See dreams reimagined with ReDream. ReDream is an application in which users submit a dream, and keywords are pulled from the text input. ReDream then draws video footage from Vimeo, YouTube, and Archive.org based on those keywords. Clips from the footage are woven together to create a transformed version of the user’s dream. Finally, the new interpretation of their dream is presented visually to the user on ReDream.us.

Visual Archive

Team Members Gabriel Dunne Susan Doran Description A tool for exploring footage collections on archive.org via images. Footage thumbnails animate on mouse over, and when clicked, a list of frames allow the user to jump to a specific timestamp. By browsing archive collections visually, one increases their chances of discovering interesting content.