 Kia ora tatou. I'm David Cook. I'm a documentary storyteller and this is an account of a recent collaborative multimedia project about Hamilton City that resulted in an exhibition at the Waikato Museum. Well, where did it start? When I was a research leader at WNTAC in Hamilton, I brought together a range of practitioners to do two things. Firstly, to create a space to explore the diversity of contemporary documentary practice and secondly to create a space for exploring the identity of the city itself. But before I go on, just a little complaint. Hamilton is a city that's dear to me. I've spent half my life there but I went to the Auckland International Airport the other day to the International Departure Lounge and I found this map here. It has Auckland, Hockaticka, Collingwood, Thames and all sorts of places but it did not have this little place here called Hamilton so I'm putting it back on the map. In our research phase for this particular project, we did ask, what do people think of Hamilton? Is it really on the map? We already knew that what outsiders thought of Hamilton, almost daily in Auckland-based media, you get Hamilton jokes, it's seen as boring, backwards or better still the home of hell-raising muntas. But what do Hamiltonians think of their place? Well, we discovered that although there is much contentment, there is also an equal amount of unease with the place. Its citizens have frequently tried to lift its status through rebranding. Hamiltonians also call it Hamiltonron, the city of the future. A councillor once proposed renaming it as Waikato City. We even have this proposal, Whamilton. It was another recent proposal, it gives a city impact of course, can't you see? And it's also a nod to W Hamilton, the inventor of the jet boat. I could go on. But seriously, what did we do in this project? How did we respond to these stereotypes? Well, we invited a range of storytellers to develop narratives with the people of Hamilton. And these citizen storytellers developed their own content based on the group's collective dialogue and their responses to the questions of identity. So, let's take a tour of the show and I'll let you know about our intentions as a group of practitioners and the audience's reactions. At the centre of the exhibition surrounded by still images were three interactive stations. Joe Citizen and Jason Long's piece called Oh Yes We Are is a counter to social realist conventions taking us into a pluralistic mode of mapping the city. It uses 360 degree camera technology and made familiar through Google Street View. It allows us to choose our own navigation through time and space, hitting on hotspots and being transported yet again getting lost in a world of artists, rappers and musicians. It's a performative narrative. Those who are documented are also co-creators in the piece and the city appears to be saturated with artistic creativity. We observed a range of user experiences with this. This is a gross exaggeration, but younger people picked up on the gaming navigation as they nimbly navigated through the spaces and finding hotspots and doors into other spaces, whereas older participants often tended to see it as a movie, acting more passively, sometimes completely missing the opportunity to use the mouse. I think we had a lot to learn as a group is how the user interface with a lot of these things. Another media station by Simon Nichols called Crafting Hamilton is based on the popular game Minecraft. The topography of Hamilton complete with river and contours, this time green, not in Gallipoli-Brown, was there for all to see and participants were then asked to reimagine the city as a place that can be reformed, rebuilt and remodeled. It asks us to question our reality of the city and imagine ourselves as agents of change. But this time through a gaming approach, at least that's what the label in the galleries that we wrote suggested. In reality it was an experiment that yielded more fun than provocation. I think we found out that older viewers or users tended to read the label and understand the concept at a hands-off level. In fact I tried it myself and I dug a large deep hole which I could not get escape from, not being a user of the game. Younger users tended to ignore the grand concept and didn't even need to read the technical instructions and launched into it as the familiar game itself. Whereas Crafting Hamilton deals with the future, Paul Nelson's reflections deals with the past in the memory of the city. He uses a similar interactive mode and invites us to use a 360 degree navigation to explore a homestead. By moving the cursor we can construct our own journey and make choices going into the past via the present. By locating hotspots we can hear a citizen telling us about the significance of things in the house. And it's a sort of a guided tour of a self-contained private space where we're invited to be the guides ourselves. In the very last space in the exhibition we're rewarded with a sonic art piece that presents the sub-aquatic sounds of the Waikato River. And the bridges that span it. In Confluence, Kent McPherson and Luke McConnell produce a spatial soundscape that, and the soundtrack interacts with the visuals creating a ripple effect like a heartbeat monitor on the silhouettes of the bridges. It takes us to a reality that no one normally hears and Confluence takes us to a place where we can ponder the nature and culture significance of place. Well, where does that leave us? Given the stereotypes that abound, were we able to create fresh representations of the city of Hamilton? Maybe we've done something for some of the citizens of Hamilton, but I think the impact was as much in the journey with the co-creators as it was with the exhibition audience. I think we may have done something for Hamiltonians, but I don't think we've made an impact beyond the city's boundaries. Maybe that's coming with the next iteration of the project as we develop a web-based platform and new content. Thank you very much.