Jan 18, 2023 John Sutter, Fall 2022 DM Graduate Fellow

Briefly describe your project and the challenges, lessons learned, and obstacles overcome in the execution of it. What were the professional, academic, and personal motivations underlying your project?

I’m directing a feature-length documentary called BASELINE: Part 1, and used the Digital Matters fellowship both to move that film toward completion and to explore digital and physical-world art installation ideas that might accompany the film when it is released.

The documentary grew out of my career as a journalist who covered the climate crisis for CNN and others for more than a decade. I became increasingly frustrated over the years with the idea that we are missing the magnitude and the timescales involved in the climate crisis. Our stories aren’t big enough to hold it. My own journalistic work often explored just one moment in time — one disaster, one event. I struggled to point to the fact that carbon emissions stay in Earth systems for about 1,000 years. It’s hard to think on that timeframe much less portray it in media, somehow. BASELINE is a visual letter to three kids growing up on the frontlines of environmental change. It’s modeled, in part, off of the Seven Up documentary series, which revisited kids every seven years from the 1960s until now. Part 1 of BASELINE hopefully will be released this year. I’m going to revisit their stories in the year 2050. The goal is to try to hint at the gaps in our collective environmental memory — and to try to stretch that memory a bit. Film and digital media can serve as a form of memory, I’ve realized through this project. So, one of the goals is that the memories of these kids won’t be lost. I also hope the project pushes viewers to think a bit about the “long-now” future that we all are living into. It’s like we already exist in that future, in a way, because our greenhouse gas emissions will certainly be living in it.

How did the Digital Matters Fellowship dovetail with your academic pursuits? What interested you in applying for this grant?

I’m pursing an MFA in Film and Media Arts. The Digital Matters fellowship helped me expand my studies beyond simply film and into the digital and installation spaces. As part of the fellowship, I’ve been researching ways that smartphone weather apps might be able to hint at longer-term trends in weather; and I’ve been exploring the idea of an outdoor installation that would get viewers to question what we do and don’t’ know about whether or not a given days’ weather is “normal.” All of this dovetails nicely with my studies and with BASELINE, which is a project I’m creating separately from my degree at the University of Utah.

What insights have you gained in regard to your specific field as a result of your project and grant experience?

It’s been fascinating to learn how researchers in various fields — from history to museum studies — think about digital scholarship. It’s made me think much more broadly about my own academic work, beyond the film studies silo. I think there is ample room for collaboration between storytellers like myself and academics who have deep knowledge of specific subject areas. Digital Matters held “reading groups” throughout the semester, and I loved those. Eliza McKinney brought several examples of historians trying to re-create the sounds of centuries-old spaces. That really got me thinking about what memory “sounds like.” Memory is one of the central themes of BASELINE and I am playing with sounds and soundscapes that can evoke a feeling of memory and of amnesia. For my reading-group week, I asked the group to watch Chile Obstinate Memory, a documentary that uses an out-of-tune piano to evoke a feeling of amnesia.

What would you tell potential graduate fellowship applicants to help them shape their own digital scholarship project?

Be ambitious, but also take stock of what you can reasonably accomplish in a semester. I ended up starting down several roads during my fellowship, and I’m going to keep following them long after the fellowship has ended. That’s exciting and motivating. So I guess my advice is to propose something specific and achievable but also be open to other forms of inspiration.

What do you see as the upcoming important issues surrounding digital scholarship in your field? What areas/issues could students and scholars investigate to extend the knowledge in this area?

In film and media studies, I’m fascinated by the issue of what is preserved and how. Media forms such a big part of the public’s collective memory. When we look back at early film, for example, we remember Nanook of the North and the Lumiere Brothers films in part because they were groundbreaking and iconic but also because they were preserved and then digitized. I think there’s a false sense of security that digital media is somehow “forever.” The opposite actually seems to be true. It seems safer to preserve physical film rather than always-changing digital formats. Of course, so much media is being created that almost all of it will be lost to history. But I think there needs to be more thought given to what we deem worthy of preservation.