“Processing” refers to the process of treating the film exposed to light, thereby revealing the latent image that was taken but is not visible, and fixing it permanently. Persona Processing is a project that 1) 〈Imports〉 the cross-sections of an individual who was a part of society, 2) 〈Edits〉 from a unique perspective on society, and 3) 〈Exports〉 the autoethnography video works as social discourse.
The three processes are organically linked to each other and show how three female directors build a documentary world with their own stories. This is the artist’s internal and external struggle to protect the meaning and justification of private works, which are considered “insignificant and worthless,” in an era where everyone takes pictures of themselves. Furthermore, it asks the question of how women’s private records are created and evaluated as work in a new cultural and technological environment. Persona Processing contains a message that encourages formation of a persona as the courage to bring out various stories inherent in oneself, rather than a persona formed by someone else’s standards.
Persona-L is a team of three documentary directors who produce a private documentary that begins with the story of each individual. The team members Areum Nam, Youngmi Lee, and Hanna Cho are all studying Broadcasting and Imaging at the Korea National University of Arts. The team name, Persona-L, is derived from “Personal” in “Personal Documentary,” which means private documentary; however, it contains the goal of the team to expand each persona into a variety of stories, moving beyond the narrow definition of the word “private.” Each of them is making new attempts to break away from the established documentary production and practicing various artistic methods that can elicit “private documentary discourse.” Through Persona Processing, which is a work that combines augmented reality (AR) and media installation, a convergence experiment was conducted to explore new possibilities in the “first-person private documentary.”