Patrick Brodie and Patrick Brian Smith have recently published an essay in the online publication Pause Button, based out of the Milieux Institute at Concordia.
In
their essay “Documenting Capital: Intersections of Free Trade Zone
Architecture and Digital Filmmaking,” Patrick Brodie and Patrick Brian
Smith pose the question: What can digital filmmaking bring to an
understanding of the spaces of capital circulation and accumulation?
Established in 1959 to attract foreign and regional investment, the
Shannon Free Zone is claimed to be the world’s first free trade zone.
Driven by a motivation to document and visualize financialized spaces
like the Shannon Free Zone, Brodie and Smith embarked on a multimedia
project aiming to “cognitively” or “deep” map the abstract flows of
capital through the Shannon area. By visualizing the spatial
machinations of finance capital, they hope to confront its invisible
circulations by focusing on its material infrastructures and conditions
of labour. The presentation will introduce the theory and practice
behind the project, and will screen uncut footage from the research trip
conducted in the summer of 2017, partially funded by the GEM Lab
at Concordia University’s Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. The
research-creation component of the project was presented at the lab’s
Works-in-Progress workshop series in November.