On August 24, 2009 documentary filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris and his team headed to Boston to carry on the next leg of the their community outreach project Digital Diaspora Family Reunion. From Harris’ use of archives to stimulate new ways of looking at his community and the world explored in his own documentary films stemmed a desire to open up a space for the African American community to connect with their own family archives. DDFR asks members of various communities to pull from their own collection of photographs and memories to share their family stories and claim their space in this country’s history. The idea is to create a new way of thinking about African American experience in the US and worldwide – a way of taking from the past in order to create a new future. Within the history of media in this country, African Americans like many minorities in America have rarely found authentic and diverse representations of themselves and their own stories. In a attempt to bridge this huge gap in the country’s media records of the past, Harris has traveled to several destinations in the US including Atlanta, Maryland, and now Boston to engage with their personal and collective history through family archives and stories.
Boston served as an ideal setting to dig deeper and further into the Black American past. As one of the oldest cities in the country, this state capital has gained particular significance in Afro-American history and culture, ever since the first Africans entered the region in the 1700s. The timing seemed just right, when the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture asked Harris to join them as a contributor for their annual conference in Boston, the theme of which was Commonwealth, a topic chosen because of great change, we as a nation and world are experiencing. This theme was used to explore the ideas of “collaboration, common spaces, public funding ownership, and democratic participation.”
At the conference Harris presented the Digital Diaspora Family Reunion project, and demonstrated how new and traditional media can be merged and used to engage audiences in the experience of connecting with the larger community and shared history. By asking the audience to participate and “use their own materials,” he explained, “the goal is to ultimately create a richer and more holistic product.”
With much help from the conference leaders as well as local media support, a request was then sent out to the people of Boston to participate in Digital Diaspora Family Reunion project. A temporary station was set up at Emerson College to take in interviewees, owing to the generous co-operation of the team’s liaison Anna Feder.
While at the NAMAC conference Harris also participated in a panel discussion, about the future of art and media, and it’s growing collaboration with the public titled “The People Formerly Known As The Audience.” The panel consisted of Brian Reich, author of Media Rules!: Mastering Today’s Technology to Connect With and Keep Your Audience. Adrienne Russell, Board of Directors of Denver Open Media, and Professor of Digital Media Studies at the University of Denver, as well as Lina Srivastava, the Principal of Lina Srivastava Consulting, LLC. Jessica Clark, who directs the Center for Social Media’s Future of Public Media Project, moderated this panel of established, lauded media professionals.
