Parallel Narratives? Photographs in Boer Women’s Wartime Testimonies
Discussion here draws on our wider joint research about women’s testimonies of the concentration camps of the 1899-1902 South African War.1 Our research has focused, amongst other things, on a network of women cultural entrepreneurs whose activities in ‘working up’ Boer women’s testimonies as ‘the facts’ played an important part in the politics of Afrikaner proto-nationalism until the late 1930s. The research shows that these Boer women’s testimonial narratives, while presented as entirely factual, cannot be classed straightforwardly as either fact or fiction, but instead inhabit an ‘in-between’ area, with their factual claims – claims which may but sometimes may not be ‘true facts’ – often supported by what Eakin (1985) calls fictive devices.
Black labour and the concentration system of the South African War
Black people's part in the South African War, and also the existence of the black concentration camps, have received research attention since the 1970s. Most recently this has developed in two broad directions, one focusing on the black camps around the view that previous work "has greatly underplayed... [black people's] sufferings in the refugee camps", and the other on various African peoples and their involvement in and uses of the war, emphasising that "locality is an important factor in the way... [the war] was perceived and fought by black people...". Both have produced interesting published work. However, these two strands have developed largely separately from each other, with unintended consequences: it leaves the so-called 'burgher camps' being seen as white; and it fails fully to recognise that factors noted in different localities (increases in wage levels and in prices for agricultural produce, and increased demand for labour in a wide range of military, railway and harbour employment) were actually much wider phenomena.
FlowBrush: optical flow art
The depiction of motion in static representations has a long tradition in art and science alike. Often, motion is depicted by spatio-temporal summarizations that try to preserve as much information of the original dynamic content as possible. In our approach to depicting motion, we remove the spatial constraints and generate new content steered by the temporal changes in motion. Applying particle steering in combination with the dynamic color palette of the video content, we can create a wide range of different image styles. With recorded videos, or by live interaction with a webcam, one can influence the resulting image. We provide a set of intuitive parameters to affect the style of the result, the final image content depends on the video input. Based on a collection of results gathered from test users, we discuss example styles that can be achieved with FlowBrush. In general, our approach provides an open sandbox for creative people to generate aesthetic images from any video content they apply.