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Studies ill Documentar Film is a refereed scholarly joual devoted
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)on Dovey
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Bor fm
FSC
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ISSN l/0-]280
LN1LN1b
Editorial
l2]-l2 i-Docs special edition
Articles
)UDITH ASTON, )ON DOVEY AND
SAND RA GAUDENZI
l2-l]y Interactive documentary:
setting the fiel d
)UDITH ASTON AND
SAND RA GAUDENZI
ll-l/ Documentary's metamorphic
form: Webdoc, i nteractive,
transmedia, partici patory and
beyond
SIOBHAN O'FLYNN
ly-l/] We're happy and we know it:
Documentary, data, montage
)ON DOVEY AND MANDY ROSE
l/-188 Locative voices and cities i n
crisis
MARTIN RIESER
l8y-202 'Walk-In Documentary':
New paradigms for game
based interactive storytel l i ng
and experiential conflict
mediation
KERRIC HARVEY
20]-2l Visual research and the new
documentary
RODERICK COOVER
2l-22/ On pol i tics and aesthetics:
A case study of 'Publ ic Secrets'
and 'Blood Sugar'
SHARON DANIEL
22y-22 The case of Gu8O|k3,U|ul3
de Gu8//3,the first Catalan
interactive documentary
project
ARNAU GIFREU CASTELLS
Interview
2]-2/ A conversation on engagement,
authorship, i nterstitial spaces
and documentary: Matt Adams,
twenty years of Blast Theory
ANN DANYLKIW

I'
l2l
I .
CaLaancurnac
CcmmunicaLicnc CuLuraSLudies
ISSN: 17571898! On l ine 15SN: 17571901
2 issues per volume] Volumes, 2013
Aims and Scope
The Catalan journal ofCommunication & Cultural Studies (CJCS) is an academic
journal committed to publishing peer-reviewed works on media, cul tural studies
and communication. The journal pays particular attention to the Catalan media
and cultural systems although it is open to other national and cultural contexts.
Call for papers
CJCS's approach is multidiscip!inary and encourages articles by schol ars,
researchers and professionals working on the following issues among others:
Media and communication history
Media and cultural policies
Audience and reception studies
Cul tural and national identities
Media discourses and representations
Language and l anguage uses
The cultural impact of new media
Sports, identity and media
Tourism, heritage and communication
Public relations and political communication
Gender Studies
Editor
Enric Castel l 6
Rovira i Virgili University
Associate Editors
josetxo Cerdan
Rovira i Virgi!i University
jordi Farre
Rovira i Virgili University
Hugh O'Donnell
Glasgow Caledonian University
All communications to:
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I ntellect is an independent academic publisher of books and journals, to view our catalogue or order our titles visit
www.intellectbooks.com or E-mail: jourals@intell ectbooks.com. Intellect, The Mil l , Parall Road, Fishponds, Bristol , UK, BS16 3JG.
SDF 6 (2) pp.123-124 Intellect limited 2012
Studies in Documentary Film
Volume 6 Number 2
2012 I ntel l ect ltd Editorial. English l anguage. doi: 10.1386/sdf.6.2.123_2
L1HL
JUDITH ASTON
)ON DOVEY
SANDRA GAUDENZI
i-Docs special edition
Tis special editon presents a collection of artcles that came out of i-Does
2011, the first interational symposium exclusively devoted to the rapidly
evolving feld of interactve documentary-making. The symposium was held
at the Watershed Media Centre in Bristol, on behalf of the University of the
West of England's Digital Cultures Research Cente. Its aim was to showcase
recent projects and discuss the artistic, economic and politcal implicatons of
new forms of factual representaton. The artcles, case studies and interiew in
this editon represent the range of themes and debates that were raised and
can be seen as a unique snapshot of a complex and diverse feld of study that
is in its early stages of development.
Whenever we ty to understand the impact of the digital world on mediaton
and culture, we begin by tring to distinguish between the genuinely novel
and the contnuing taditons of media cultures. Our specic interest in this
project has been in seeking the continuation of a shared idea of 'documenta
riness' in the miasma of factualit, data and informaton circulating through
the ecosystems of digital media. This is a deliberately ambiguous mission.
Emergent felds always elicit competing attempts to defne and taxonomize, to
make manifestos and stake territorial claims. Whilst the sense of discovery is a
motvatng force in much of the material in this special editon, we have sought
to keep the space open. Of course we need to develop some useful discursive
protocols that w help us to speak in commensurate critical tongues - but
we also want to shape the feld as an inclusive and dynamic conversaton. The
speed of platform development alongside the force of aesthetc endeavours
l23
judith Aton 1 ]on Oovey 1 Sandra Gaudenzi
124
to wrestle reality into documentar form ensure that i-docs are moving a
the tme. So we include considerations of the linear and the database formal
arrangements of documentary material, and the debates around authorship
and collaboration, navigaton and discovery, which rehearse the grounds of
hypertext theory as applied to documentar materials.
However, we also include audio, immersive and mixed reality projects that
use actuality, reportage, oral history and poet to open up whole new terrains
for documentary away fom the histories of visual screen practices. Theate,
cinema, television assume certain things about their audience; you w be
sittng in a seat, more or less silenty, quite probably in the dark, attending
to the experience as it unfolds. In the developing arena of Pervasive Media,
participants are often not in the theate or the sittng room. Instead, they are
out in the world, moving in and out of buildings, following a-route, maldng
a jouey; their sensorium open to a whole range of stmuli competng for
their attenton. In these instances, designers are required to make work that
can respond fuidly to a constantly shg context, a work that is defned by
people's actons. The environment is less controllable, already a mise-en-s&ne
populated by the demands of everyday life. Tis approach to i-docs puts audi
ences into the midst of a relatonal signifcaton system where their actons
shape the experience. In so doing, it promises to move documentary stud
ies from its obsession with representation to a wider focus on documentary
systems. From questions of what does documentary mean to questions of
what does documentru do?
5 November 2012
judith Aston, )on Dovey and Sandra Gaudenzi have asserted their right under
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identifed as the authors
of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.
SDF 6 (2) pp.125-39 Intellect Limited 2012
Studies in Documentary Film
Volume 6 Number 2
20nlntellect Ltd Article. English l anguage. d oi: 10. 1386/sdf.6.2.125_1
JUDITH ASTON
University of the West of England
SAN ORA GAUDENZI
University of the Arts London
Interactive documentary:
setti ng the field
ABSTRACT
This article articulates the author' combined vision behind convening i-Docs, the
first interational symposia to focus eclusively on the rpidly evolving feld of inter
active doCumentar. In so doing, it provides a case study of practice-driven research,
in which discussion around the act of developing and making interactive documen
taries is seen as being a necessary prerequisite to subsequent theorizing in relation to
their impact on the continuing evolution of the documentary genre. A an essentially
interdisciplinar fonn of practice, the article prooides a cnceptual overoiew of what
interactive documentaries (i-doc) are, where they come fom and wlut they culd
become. The case is made that i-doc should not be seen as the uneventfl evolution
of documentaries in the digital realm but rather as a fonn of nonfction narrative
that uses action and choice, immersion and enacted perception as ways to construct
the real
:
rther than to represent it. The reltionship between authorship and agenc
wzthzn 1-docs zs also conszdered as bemg cntral to our understanding of possibilities
within a rpidly evolving feld of study.
THE CONCEPTUAL EVOLUTION OF THE IDOCS GENRE
In order to begn the discussion, a defnition of i-docs is needed. The position
taken in this artcle is that any project that starts with an intenton to document
the 'real' and that uses digital interactive technology to realize this intenton
KEYWORDS
interactve
documentary
constuctng reality
authorship
agency
enactve kowledge
collaboraton
actvism
ethics
125
judith Aston 1 Sandra Gaudenzi
J. The reasons for such
a broad definition of
i-docs are explained
by Gaudenzi
her interactive
documentary entry
of The johns Hopkins
Guide to Digital
Media and Textuality
(forthcoming).
2. Draft version of all the
chapters available at
httpJ/www.interactive
documentary.net/
about/me/
126
can be considered an interactive documentary.1 This is a deliberately broad
definiton of i-docs, which is platform agnostic. Whilst it is in part attuned
to Galloway et al.'s defniton of interactve documentary as 'any documen
tary that uses interactvity as a core part of its delivery mechanism' (2007:
330-31), the defniton provided here recognizes the fact that interactvity in
i -does often goes beyond a 'delivery mechanism' to incorporate processes of
production. I additon to this, most of the current literature (Gifreu 2011;
Crou 2010; Hudson 2008) confnes i-docs to web-does (documentanes that
use the World Wide Web as a distrbuton and content producton platform)
but the i-Docs symposia have expanded the definition to include any digital
platform that allows interactivity (such as Web, DVD, mobiles, GPS devices
and gallery installaton). As such, interactivity is seen as a means through
which the viewer is positoned within the artefact itself, demanding h, or
her, to play an actve role in the negotaton of the 'reality' being conveyed
through the i-doc. This view of interactvity requires a physical action to take
place between the user/partcipant and the digital artefact. It involves a human
computer interface, going beyond the act of interpretaton to create feedback
loops with the digital system itself.
A brief historical overiew of how the evoluton of digtal technology has
allowed the emergence of diferent types of i-docs demonstates that a variety
of i-doc gentes is already established, and that each of them uses technology to
create a di erent interactve bond between reality, the user and the artefct. A
yet, there is no formal consensus on how to classif i-docs- with Gifeu (2011)
and Galloway et al. (2007) having already proposed their own suggestons.
This article builds on the taxonomy proposed by Gauden in Chapter 1 of her
Ph. D. (forthcoming.' Her approach is to analyse i-docs throug their interactve
logc, rather than through the digital platorm that they use, their topic or their
message. She draws upon some key understandings of interactvity and argues,
silarly to Lister et al. in New Media: A Critical Introduction (2003), that di erent
understandings of interactvity have led to diferent tyes of digtal artefacts.
By selectng four dominant understandings of interactvity- as a conversa
ton with the computer (Lippman, in Brand 1988: 46), as linkng within a text
(Aarseth 1994: 60), as interactve computaton in physical space (Eberbach et al.
2004 : 173) or as partcipaton in an evolving database (Davenport and Murtaugh
1995: 6) - Gaudenzi proposes four interactve modes: the conversatonal, the
hypertext, the experiental and the partcipatve. These modes were used as a
starting point fom which to discuss our approach to the i-Docs symposia, out
of which further debates and ongoing discussions have emerged.
- Iheconver$tonlmode
The Aspen Movie Map (Lippman, 1978) is often referred to as the frst attempt
to digitally document an exerence. By using videodisc technology, and three
screens, the user was able to drive through a video reconstucton of the city
of Aspen. The use of digital technolog to simulate a world where the user
has the illusion of navigatng feely has also been used in video games, MUDs
and sandbox games, so it is with no surise that jouralists, and new media
artsts, have been inspired to create 'factual games', or 'docu-games', such as
Gone Gitmo (Pefa, 2007) or Americas Anny (Wardynski, 2002). This type of
i-doc, which uses 3D worlds to create an apparently seamless interaction with
the user, lends itself to the Conversational mode because it positons the user
as if 'in conversation' with the computer.
2. IheHperteXtmode
One of the frst digital artefacts to be offcally called an interactve documentary
was Moss Landing (Apple Multimedia Lab, 1989). Dung one day several
cameras recorded the life of the inhabitants of Moss Landing's Harbour. Those
assets where then organized as a closed database of video clips that the user
could browse via a video hyperlink interface. This logic of hypertext documen
tary has later been applied to CD-ROMs (such as Immemory by Marker, 1997)
and DVDs (such as Bleeding Through the Layers of Los Angeles by Kein, 2003).
Currently a multtude of projects that follow the same logic of 'click here
and go there' are being produced for the Web; those are often referred to
as web-does. Inside The Haiti Earthquake (Gibson and McKenna, 2011), Out
My Window (Cizek, 2010), Joure to the End of Coal (Bollendorf, 2009) and
Forgotten Flags (Thalhofer, 2007) are just a few examples of this style of inter
actve documentary. This type of i-doc lends itself to the Hypertext mode
because it links assets within a closed video archive and gives the user an
exploratory role, normally enacted by clicking on pre-exstng optons.
3. IhePrtCptvemode
The advent of Web 2.0 has, however, allowed people to go further than
browsing through content: the afordances of the media have made possible
a two-way relationship between digital authors and their users. Although in
the late 1990s the MIT Interactve Cinema Group, led by Glorana Davenport,
tied to develop 'Evolving documentaries' where 'materials grow as the stor
evolves' (Davenport and Murtaugh, 1995: 6), it was only after 2005, when the
penetaton of broadband in wester countries reached a critical mass, that
interactive documentary producers started exploring ways to actively involve
their users within the producton of their digital artefact. In what is often
referred to as collab-docs, or partcipatory-does, the documentary producer 'is
called upon to 'stage a conversaton', with a user community, with research
subjects, with participants, eo-producers and audiences' (Dovey and Rose,
forthcoming 2013). In other words, i partcipatve documentaries the user
can be involved during the production process- by for example editing online
(see RiP: a Remix Manifesto, Gaylor, 2004-2009) or shootng in the steets (see
18 Days in Egypt, Mehta and Elayat, 2011)- or dung the launch and dist
buton process (e.g. by answering questons online, like in 6 Billion Others
(Arthus-Bertand, 2009), or by sending material and helping translatng it as
in the Global Lives Project (arris, 2010). This type of i-doc is described here
as being Participative, as it counts on the partcipaton of the user to create an
open and evolving database.
. IheEXperentlmode
Finally, mobile media and The Global Positoning System (GPS) have brought
digtal content into physical space. 34 North 118 West (Bight, Knowlton and
Spellman, 2001), allowed people to walk in the streets of Los Angeles armed
with a Tablet PC, a GPS card and headphones. Depending on the positon
of the partcipant, stories uncovering th_ e early industal era of Los Angeles
were whispered into the ears of the urban faneur, accompanied by historic
illustrations on the computer screen. In 2007 Blast Theory created Rider Spoke
(Ads, 2007), a bicycle ride where people could record very personal ers
via the use of a mobile device (Nokia N800) mounted on the handiebar of their
Interactive documentary
I
|
j:l
127
Judith Aston 1 Sandra Gaudenzi
3. Aston began her career
working with the BBC
Interactive Television
unit in the mid-l98os
and then went on to
study for a Ph.D. i n
interaction design
128
and cross-cultural
communication at
the Royal College of
Art (2003). Gaudenzi
worked for tenyears i n
television production
before doing an MA
in i nteractive media
at the London College
of Communication,
which lead her to
teach there. She then
started a Ph.D. on the
topic of interactive
documentaries at
Goldsmiths that is, at
the time of writing. in
its completion stages.
bicycle. Those testmonies were then made accessible to any other partcipant
passing in the area where the message was frst recorded. This type of locative
documentary invites the partcipant to experience a 'hybrd space' (De Souza
e Silva 2006: 262) where the distncton between the vrtual and the physical
becomes blurred. I -does of this nature tend to play on our enacted percepton
while moving in space. As the partcipant moves throug an interface that is
physical (although enhanced by the digital device) embodiment and situated
knowledge are constantly elaboratng new situated meanings. This category is
named as being Experiential because it brings users into physical space, and
creates an experience that challenges their senses and their enacted percep
tion of the world.
WHY ARE SUCH MODES IMPORTANT?
Since each interactive mode creates a diferent dynamic with the user, the
author, the artefact and its context, the argument presented here is that each
one can be seen as afording a d erent constcton of 'reality'. While experi
ential i -does can add layers to the felt percepton of reality, to ceate an embod
ied experience for the partcipants, conversatonal i-docs can use 3D worlds to
recreate scenarios, therefore playing with options of realit. Participatve i-docs
allow people to have a voice and to participate in the constuction of reality,
while hypertext i-docs can constct multple pathways through a set 'reality'
to provide a range of perspectves on a common set of themes or issues. I this
sense, each form of i-doc seems to :r:egotate reality far beyond Stella Bruzzi's
vision of documentaries as 'performatve acts whose tth comes into being
only at the moment of fg' (2000:7) because the 'moment of tuth' is now
also placed into the actons and decisions of the user/partcipant. We see this
way of tg about i-docs as ofering a tool as much for the eo-creation of
reality as for its representation. This is a positon that has led us into placing
debates around the relatonship between authorship and agency within i-docs
at the centre of our discussions.
THE FIRST IDOCS SYMPOSIUM AND ITS TIMELINESS
First meeting in London at the Documentary Now! conference in January
2009, we found common ground in having worked within the feld of inter
actve documentaries for a number of years, both in the emergent indust
and through Ph.D. study.' We noted that over the previous two years there
had been a real explosion of productons in the feld. Big productons such as
I-Iighrise (Ozek, 2009-ongoing fom the NFB, had been launched, and the
television company Arte had created a portal at http://webdocs.arte.tv/ which
hosted a variety of projects, fom the recent New York Minute (Rochet and
Venancio, 2010) and Prison Valley (Dufesne and Brault, 2010) to a whole series
of twelve web-documentaries dedicated to the 50 years of independence of
Afica. French television France 5 had also produced 24 web-docwnentaries,
part of a series called Portraits d'un Nouveau Monde!ortraits of a New World
(Hamelin, 2010).
These were big projects produced for mainsteam audiences leading to
our conclusion that i-docs were no longer a niche form. Whilst te Natonal
Film Board of Canada had also invested in an impressive portal of interac
tve documentaries - of which Highrise and Out My Window, fom Kat Cizek,
are probably the most well known - but there were also oters such as Welce
to Pine Point (Sions and Shoebridge, 2011), GDP (Coquette, 2009-10), Waterli
(Mcmahon, 2009) and Maping Min Street (Oehler, Heppermann, Shapins
and Burns, 2009-ongoing. Finally, a range of independent productons were
emerging: projects such as the French Breve de Trottoirs (Lambert and Salva,
2010), pervasive games such as Blast Theor's Rider Spoke (Adams, 2OO//,and
university research projects such as Gone Gihno (Pefa, 2007).
Given this observation, it seemed a logical next step to create a commu
nity of like-minded people by organizing a conference on the subject. Whilst
there were new media awards attached to larger documentary festvals, there
were no events dedicated to interactve documentar. The focus of the i-Does
symposia was not to be about debatng the merits of linear versus interac
tve forats, but more about understanding the new opportunities that were
being opened up by the development of interactve technologies within
a twenty-frst century context. At the heart of our combined interest in the
feld was a fundamental belief in the human need to try to make sense of
the world around us, using whatever toolS are to hand, and in the role of
narratve and storytelling in that process. I acceptng the idea that, in our
contemporary tmes, digital media plays an important part in shaping culture,
and in inuencing the ways in which we relate to the world, our a was to
explore how interactve technologies might ofer new ways to help us both to
understand the world and to shape it. The Digital Cultures Research Cente
at the University of the West of England4 agreed to host the conference and
ffteen months later in March 2011 the world's frst symposium dedicated to
the interactve documentary genre was held.
CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR THE PANELS AND
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Our Cl for Papers for i-Docs 2011 was deliberately broad, to accommo
date a range of approaches to i-docs and stimulate debate around the full
range of possibilities. Given her background in anthropolog and inter
cultural communicaton, Aston in particular wanted to make sure that there
was space to push at the edges of taxonomies, and that consideraton of
authorship, intent and purpose remained cental to the discussions. This was
based on her belief that the most interestng work in i-docs often arises when
gerue is tanscended and boundares are blurred. Our two different stang
points in relaton to the analysis of i -does created a strong dynamic for discus
sion, through which we created our stucture for the frst two symposia. The
common ground that we kept retg to was our belief that the analysis of
i-docs should be seen as an open and interdisciplinary process within a feld
of endeavour that is necessarily fuid, dynamic and in constant fu.
Based on our discussions around modes of interaction, authorship and
agency within i -does, we decided that the panels and keynote speakers would
be organized around four main themes. These were: partcipaton and eo
collaboraton; cross-platform and tansmedia production; locatve, perva
sive and game logics; non-linear stategies and database-driven documen
taries. m additon to this, we convened two additional sub-panels around
conceptual approaches to i-docs and the relatonship between archives and
memory in the creaton of i-docs. I trms of establishing the feld and rais
ing awareness of the curent state of play with i-docs, we felt that this was
a good refecton of the state of play and that it would stimulate discussion
around a wide range of work and issues. Discussion around taxonomies was
included in the Clfor Papers with the deliberate intenton to test Gaudenzi' s
Interactive documentary
4. Where Aston has
been developing
teaching and
research programmes
in interactive
documentarysince the
mid-1990s.
129
judith Aston] Sandra Gaudenzi
s. www.watershed.eo.uk/
6. www.pmstudio.co.uk
7. httpJfWww.dcrc.org.
uk/projects/fluid-
130
i nterfaces-narrative
exploration#
proposed modes. In an emergent feld such as that of interactive documen
tary it seemed appropriate to involve the early adapters of the genre (both
practtoners and academics) in mapping the feld. In the same way that user
testng is needed in interactive design, it was felt that peer approval was
essential to accurately map such a partcipatory feld.
From the range of proposals that were submitted, it soon became clear
that the themes that we had set for the symposium did indeed refect a shared
understanding of emergent genres and debates. Given that the frst of these
themes related to documentary intent, whereas the other themes were more
focused on stuctural approaches to i-docs, we began the day with the partic
pation and eo-collaboraton panel. The symposium was a one-day event, held
at the Watershed Media Cente5 in cental Bristol, with a follow-up discussion
in the Pervasive Media Studid on the next day, around where to take it next.
The event was very well attended and had a stong interatonal favour, with
many of the delegates commentng on how it had ofered a condensed and
clearly defned snapshot of an exciting new feld of practice and study.
KEY ISSUES AND DEBATES RAISED BY THE SYMPOSIUM
What follows is our interpretaton of the key themes that emerged fom that
frst symposium, followed by a discussion of how these temes led into the
planning for the second syposium. The key themes that are discussed relate
to the ethics and nature of partcipaton, whether encouraging participaton
was an innately good thing, discussion around tansmedia stortelling and
multplatform producton, questons around the imperatve to categorize a
fuid feld of study, and discussion on the place for authorial communicaton
in i-docs where the inter-actant becomes an actve agent in the construction
of the documentary 'reality'. These themes are discussed below with partcu
lar reference to our own views on i -does and to the issues raised by the four
keynote speakers, whom we selected to refect the range of debates that we
wanted to stmulate.
As CEO and Interactive Producer for Upian, Alexandre' s Brachet' s pres
entation focused on two of his company's seminal web-based projects-Ga
Sderot (2008) and Prson V alley (2010). Both of these projects combine authored
narrative with a fuid and intuitve interface to ceate a meaningful and engag
ing experience for the user. This represents a real step on fom many of the
problems around the stop start nature of the point and click style interfaces of
earlier hypertext-based works. As part of his presentaton, Brachet was keen
to point out that good interaction design is integral to the successful delivery
of content and to the creaton of meaning. In this sense, fnding a common
language to connect computer progammers with desigers and producers
remains one of the key challenges for i-docs producton. I design is part of
the content, then the authorship of an i-oc does need to include the design
ers as part of the editorial process.
Gaz Sderot was of particular interest to Aston, gven her work around the
development of fuid interfaces for narratve exploraton', developed throug
her ongoing collaboration with the Oxford anthropologist, Wendy Jaes
(As ton 2010). What makes Gaza Sderot so successful for her is that it negotates
a happy medium between temporal narratve and spatial juxtapositon, with
the fluid interface playing an important role in conveying meaning through
its ordering and presentaton of vdeo segments. This is achieved by using a
split screen technique, by which the user can compare and contrast a series of
f clips fom across the Israeli/Palestnian divide recorded over a set period
of time. The viewer is offered various ways to engage with these recordings,
through a timeline, through a map or through a thematic approach. This
represents a signifcant development on fom Manovich's work on spatal
montage (2001), in that it moves beyond his interest in random juxtapositon
to create a more authored and cohesive approach, out of which documentary
meaning can be generated.
I additon to this, both projects ofer a limited degree of user partcipaton,
with Gaza Sderot encouraging discussion of issues raised through an integated
forum and Prison Valley going a step further by inviting users to send messages
to the subjects of the ,thus breaking the conventonal border between flm
makers (observers) and subjects (observed). Given that Prison Valle is a more
recent producton than Gaz Sderot, Brachet was asked i his work is gradu
ally moving towards faclitatng a greater degree of participaton in i-docs. His
response was that each of his i-docs projects has its own integrity and that
participaton arotmd an i-doc can be just as valid as participaton within an
i-doc. This became an important theme, which re-surfaced on several occa
sions over the course of the day and is one which is central to our own ongo
ing discussions around different modes of interactvity within i-docs.
As Multiplatform Commissioner for the BBC, Nick Cohen focused on
his insigts into transmedia storytelling gained fom his work at the BBC
as multplatform commissioner for factual and art programmes. Working
his way through a number of recent projects, he described his intentons to
move audiences away fom obsering the world throug the knowing eyes
of the progranue-maker towards a logic of gaining understanding through
more active forms of involvement and participaton. For h, a stong trans
media concept needed to be platform neutral, with such projects beneftng
greatly fom a singe creatve lead across the derent platforms. Encouraging
people to partcipate was still a major challenge for insttutons such as the
BBC who need to create stong motvational drivers, such as tapping into
peoples' emotions, ofering them some form of personal gin, the oppor
tunity for self-expression and recogniton or appealing to the greater good.
He referred to the 90-9-1 principle, as cited by Jacob Nielson (2006), which
suggests that there is a participaton inequality on the Interet with only 1%
of people creatng content, 9% editng or modg that content, and 90%
viewing content without actvely contibutng.
Cohen's interventon was important in showing how much broadcasters
are very much aware of changes in consumpton patters of their younger
audiences. It is not true that the bor digital watch less television than their
older generaton, it is just that they watch their favourite programmes on
demand and on their computer rather than on a television set. In order to keep
their audience tuned in, broadcasters are increasingly commissioning mult
platform projects, in which a television programme has an interactve coun
terpart. This is making broadcasters one of the major tansmedia producers
of the market. This view of tansmedia producton contasted with an earlier
comment made by Brachet, who stated tat his projects were created frst and
foremost for the web. Whilst many of them exsted across a range of difer
ent platforms, for Brachet a good wel-doc would always be conceived first
and foremost for that medium. This raised an important point about tansme
dia production, as to whether one platorm would always drive the others or
whether a genuinely equal relatonship could be established in terms of the
content being conveyed across the diferent platforms.
Interactive documentary
131
judith Aston I Sandra Gaudenzi
l32
Transmedia storytelling and changing habits of audience engagement
is linked to the wider issue of convergence and changing media literacies.
As digital technologies are evolving, we are witnessing the development
of a widespread assumpton that consumers of media content are gadu
ally becoming more actve partcipants in the creaton and interpretaton of
content. However, it is our view that tis assumption is not a foregone conclu
sion and that, authorial communicaton is not necessarily being replaced by a
logic of shared partcipation. We believe that it is more mu to envsage a
creatve tension between these two imperatives, with each i -doe taking an
approach to authorship and partcipation which is approprate to its aims and
intentons. I additon to this, authorship should be seen as someting that
can exst on several levels, fom the more taditonal approach of the author
as subject expert,. through the author taking on a more curatorial approach, to
the authorship being genuinely distibuted trough a user generated process.
As eo-founder of Blast Theory, Matt Adam's deliberately positioned Blast
Theory as "just a bunch of artsts'. This was in keeping with our observation
that many of the works that could put into the i -does basket are not called as
such by their creators. This may be partly because the ter is not well estab
lished enough, but it is also linked to the fact that the creators often come
fom other worlds than the documentary one (as artists, game designers, new
media producers and so forth). For such new media autors te use of video,
and of a taditonal narratve struchrre, might not be essental at all to medi
ate reality. I what is asked of documentar is to present an authorial point of
view, then the link with a longer tadition of documentar making is clear.
However, dgital and partcipatory media are also a ording new goals, one
of which is to positon the audience "in the place of' a character - and there
fore fnding meaning in a 'what would I do i logic-rather than 'tis is what
has happened'. I this new logic, a perasive game experience (such as Rider
Spoke), or a locatve a project (such as Wrike and Eamon Compliant) is not
even aiming to represent reality because it is creatng real-tme lived experi
ences that bring the partcipant in a positon of spatial and personal discovery.
This links back to a core theme witin this artcle that i-docs ofer new ways
not only to represent reality but also to construct it.
I a world where it i understood that reality and percepton are subjectve
ters, a valid approach to i-doc is to focus more on our etical choices than on
illusory objectve facts. As Adams explained, Blast Theory's work plays with the
blurred distncton between the real, the fctonal and the imag. His claim
is that, since universal 'tuth' does not exst, it is our positon in relaton to the
tuth that matters. Blast Theory's work elegantly leads users/parti cipants to those
moments of choice -that wlefectvely say more about themselves than about
the world around us. As such, the role of immersion and play efectve tools for
ceatng dialogue around etical questons i a key area for fuher development.
Blast Theory's work illustrates hm partcipants can engage in an active
experience, which is embodied and which evolves through a dynamic interac
tve process. The idea that enacted percepton-as opposed to an interpretaton
oIare-audorcdversono|eaity-cabe at the centre of the documentary
experience is one of the aspects which is new and excitng about i -does and
which is elucidated upon in Gaudenzi' s writng arotmd the relational obect
that adapts to its environment and transforms itself while changing its envi
ronment too (Gaudenzi 2011). I tis sense, pervasive and immersive games
should not be seen as being supercial forms of entertainment, but rather as
offerng new ways to positon ourselves within nonfcton stories.
Florian Thalhofer' s desciption of his diffcult experience in editng his frst
linear fbn Planet Galata (2011) for Arte television, raised issues relatng to
the affordances of both the linear and non -linear form. As the inventor of
Korsakow (an authorng tool for interactve video), he claimed that 'the f'
(the linear Planet Galata) made h lie. He used humour and provocation to
explain how the Artistotelian narratve form-with its need of a beginning a
complicaton, a middle and a resoluton at the end-"forced' him to construct
a story that was not fttng with his real life experience. Contrary to the argu
ment that most documentary makers have about the use of interactvity in
documentaries - that the lack of authorial voice ultimately leads to a multi
tude of meaningless stories - Thalhofer argued that interactvity can set up
scenarios whilst at the same tme feeing the author fom forcing a point of
view onto his audience.
1-docs certainly do afford new ways to present multple points of view
whether fom the perspective of a single authorial voice or fom the perspec
tve of a community of authors working collaboratvely around a common
theme - and they can be used to present contested points of view, allow
ing users to come to their own conclusions. Aston takes the positon in her
own work that, whilst this is stll achievable within documentary flms, i-docs
can offer more scope for in-depth engagement with a set of complex ideas
trough the presentaton of multiple ent points and simultaneous storylines.
lhis is an area that she has been concered with for a number of years, given
her ongoing engagement with ethnographic archives and multlayered narra
tve (Aston 2008). For her, authorial intent remains cental to these debates,
with some i -does adoptng a linear and didactc approach to their stortelling,
and some documentar flms doing everything they can to create more open
ended and non -linear forms of storytelling.
Aside fom the issues rased by the four keynote presentations, a series
of other important contributons were made by the panel presenters of the
day. Although it would be impossible to gve justice to the richness of the
debate, here are a few points and contibutons that are relevant to the ongo
ing debates among the i-docs community that were established through the
2011 symposium:
A taxonomy of i-docs is very much needed, as it is the only way to avoid
confusion when speaking of emergent genres within the i-docs family.
Peter Dukes (Westinster University), Sandra Gaudenzi (Goldsmiths)
and Aau Gifeu (Universitat de Vie) have diferent propositions and are
contnuing the academic debate on this subject.
The array of partcipatory projects presented at i-Docs reinforced the feel
ing that both tansmedia and collaborative documenta are very current
themes. Siobhan O'Fyn (Toronto) gave a concise overvew of the key
issues within her presentation and Kerric Harvey (Washington) raised
importat questons about the ethical consequences of user collabora
tion in documentares. The point was made that it is necessary to consider
both who is held responsible for the content of a collaborative i-doc and to
also cla what partcipation really means and what are its limits in terms
of the documentary genre.
.
I oppositon to this current tend, the question was asked by Rod Coover
(Pennysylvania) as to whether there is a place for long-form scholarly texts
in i-docs, in which users are invited to enter into a pre-authored world,
which combines spatial exploration with narrative organisaton to deliver
Interactive documentary
l33
judith Aston |Sandra Gaudenzi
134
a sustained argument through non-linear means? I so, is it legitimate for
these texts to have a single authorial voice or should they always present
their ideas through a multtude of voices?
Given that i-docs need to create meaning, questons were asked around
the role of user testng i the design and development of i-docs, and at
what stage in the development process is user testng most appropriate. Is
user testng more appropriate to some types of i-doc than others and how
important is it to create pleasurable and engaging interfaces? These ques
tons led to a somewhat heated debate around the purpose of an i-doc
and whether or not artistic expression is a valid form of enqu within
the genre. Rod Coover (Pennysylvania) presented the view of the indi
vidual artst, whereas Matt Adas saw his role as an artst as being very
much part of a collaboratve and iteratve process involving feedback fom
pacipants.

User generated content has emerged as particularly powerful when paired

with social and activist causes. By tansforming watchers into users, and
then users into doers, the combinaton of a shared cause and social media
is very effectve. Could this mean that i-docs might become a new form of
actvism, where informaton and acton can fnally meet? Sharon Daniel
(Santa Cz) provided a moving example of this, describing herself as a
context provider who works wit communites, collectng their stories,
solicitng their opinions, and building online archives to make this data
available across socal, cultural and economic boundares.
CONCEPTUAL APPROACH TO THE SECOND IDOCS SYMPOSIUM
The interest generated by the frst symposium, and the discussion that ensued
fom it suggested that i -does are fourishing and here to stay - even i they
migt be given other names such as web-does, collab-docs, tans-media does,
cross-media does, database does and hypertext does. As the convenors of the
i-Docs symposia, it was no longer necessary for us to proclaim that interactve
documentary exsts as a genre, since this is now a given. Instead, the ongoing
aim became to provide a space where new trends can be explored, concers
can be debated and critical questons can be shared. It was with this view in
mind that four main questons were established as startng points for debate
at i-Docs 2012. These were questons that came directly fom the issues that
emerged at i-Docs 2011 and fom our own knowledge of the sector. We were
also keen to make sure that the multtude of authoring and content manage
ment tools have emerged in the last two years (Klynt, Popcor, W3Doc, Zeega
to state a few), were represented at i-Docs 2012. Our aim was to establish a
set of ongoing conversatons between the authors of these tools and with the
practtoners that are using the various tools to make i-docs.
The four cental questions for i-Does 012 were:
1. User participaton in i-docs: how can the act of partcipatng change the
meaning ola i-doc and what is the role of authorsip i this process?
2. Layered experience, augmented reality games and pervasive media: are
locatve i -does changing our notion of physical experience and space?
3. Actvism and ethics: how can i-docs be used to develop new strategies for
actvism?
4 . Open source and the semantc web: how are tagging video, HTL and
the semantc web opening up new routes for i-docs?
The second symposium, held in March 2012, adopted a fluid form to respond
to these questons, with a mixture of panels, workshops, labs and feed-back
sessions providing the right settng to generate in depth and critical debate.
To facilitate these debates, the symposium was set up both to look forwards
at emerging possibilities and to look backwards at ongoing concers within
the wider feld of documentar endeavour. Cental to this approach was our
belief in the value of establishing an arena for constructve debate based on
the principle of grounded research. This research is practce-led and predi
cated on the establishment of a community, through which core theoretical
concers and their connecton to a longer history of documentary making can
begin to be identfed within an interdisciplinary context. Whilst it is beyond
the scope of this article to discuss the outcomes of this second symposium,
space was specifcally provided for reflecton on the place of i-docs within a
wider contnuum of documentary making.
CONCLUSION
It is important to us that the community that has sprung up around the
i-Docs symposia remains open to new technologies and ideas, whilst at
the same time recognizing stong areas of continuity with the wider tradi
tion of documentary making. Our view is that interactive media creates a
dynamic relatonship between authors, users, technolog and environment
that allows for fuidity, emergence and eo-emergence of reality. One of the
things that we fnd to be new and excitng new about i-docs is the relations
of interdependence that they create between the user and the reality that
they portray. Feed-back loops that are not possible in linear narrative
can give the opportunity both to participants and to the artefact to re
define themselves and to change. Where this is the case, it is through
enacted engagement with the artefact that the reality being portrayed
comes into being. At the same time, it is also important to consider where
the authorship lies in an i-doc and to recognize the fact that some i-docs are
developed through a more collaboratve process than others. Whilst contem
porary debate around i-docs does seem to be focused on user generated
content and participatory processes, we want to positon these approaches
alongside equivalent discussion of the role of expert knowledge and more
artistic forms of expression within i-docs.
I -does that follow a hypertext, a partcipative, an experiential or a conver
satonal logic w vary in terms of their look and feet but also in terms of
their political impact. Whereas hypertext i -does ofer new ways to access and
engage with a pre-authored set of ideas and arguments, collaboratve i-docs
can fundamentally queston the role we want to have i society to give us actve
choices that can re-defne who we want to be. Locatve i -does, on the other
hand, can add layers to the felt percepton of reality by transforming the user
into an embodied enactor, while conversatonal i-docs can be good at placing
the participant in font of hypothetical ethical choices. These are just some
of the distnctons that we can already see i the burgeoning family of i-docs
and that the i-Docs symposia have been able to highlight. No doubt, many
more forms wlemerge in the coming years to challenge our views of partc
ipation by creatng new opportunites to negotiate and eo-create reality. In
these tmes of constant fux, it is hoped that i-Docs wremain the place to
debate, ponder and anticipate where the tides are bringng us and how to
navigate the waves.
Interactive documentary
8. The programme and
speaker details for both
i-Docs 2on and i-Docs
2012 can be found on
the i-docs web-hub,
along with an evolving
series of blog posts i n
relation to the ongoing
development of the
genre: httpl/i-docs.org/
135

I
I
I

judith Aston I Sandra Gaudenzi
136
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CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
judith Aston is a senior lecturer at the University of the West of England,
specializing in multiplatform documentary and digitally expanded flm
mang. She has a background in Visual Anthropology and Computer-related
Design, holding an M.A fom the University of Cambridge and a Ph. D. fom
the Royal College of Art in London. She was a pioneer in the emergent inter
active media industy of the mid-1980s, working on a range of early projects
with the likes of Apple Computing, the BBC Interactve Television Unit and
Virgn Publishing. In her capacity as eo-convenor of the i-Does symposia, she
is particularly interested in placing debates around authorship, agency and
new approaches to storytelling at the cente of the ongoing discussions.
\
Contact: University of the West of Engand, Bower Ashton Campus, Oanage
Road, Bristol, BS3 4QP.
E-mail: judith.aston@uwe.ac.uk
Sandra Gaudenzi started her career as a television producer and has been
teaching interactve media theory at the London College of Communicaton
(University of the Arts London) since 1999. Her research interests include
interactive documentary, interactve narrative, mobile video, locative media
and augmented reality. Sandra is also eo-convener of i-Does: a conference
totally dedicated to interactive documentaries, held in Bristol in 2011 and
2012. She is currently fnishing her Ph.D. - 'The living documentary: fom
representing reality to eo-ceating realit in digital interactve documentar'
at Goldsmiths (Universit of London).
Contact: 1 Barrister Mews, London NW6 3RQ U.
E-mail: sgaudenzi@yahoo.com
judith Aston and Sandra Gaudenzi have asserted their right under the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identifed as the authors of
this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.
Interactive documentary
139
J J 0 0' Jl /l' 0C' 0 0
ISSN 175lr922l l On line ISSN 1754-923X
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Aims and Scope
What defines African cinema? Is there an African i dentity, and if so, how is
it represented in film> }AC explores these questions whi l e exami ni ng the
i nteractions of visual and verbal narratives in African fi l m. lt explores how
i dentity and perception are positioned wi thi n diverse African fi l m languages,
and how Africa and its peoples are represented on screen.
Call for Papers
The editors are seeking articl es, reviews and comparative analyses on African
ci nema throughout its historical and contemporary legacies. The journal
wishes to concentrate on:
The fi l m of the everyday and the 'every-African':
popul i st fi l ms and their language
Shifting sites of authoritative di scourses from
knowledge to meani ng
The propagation of the verbal cul ture-based fi l m
Editors
Keyan G. Tomasel l i
Universityof KwaLilu-1
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Murdoch University
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SDF 6 (2) pp. 4-57 Intellect Limited 202
Studies in Documentary Film
Volume 6 Number 2
2onl ntellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 1D.1386/sdf.6.2.l4l_l
SIOBHAN O'FLVNN
University of Toronto
Documentary's metamorphi c
form: Webdocl i nteractive
transmedi a1 partici patory
and beyond
ABSTRACT
This article emines the evolution ofinteractive, cross-platfonn and transmedia
documentaries within the context of the earlier model ofdatabase narratives and
the impact ofWeb 2.O technologies. Specifcdocumentary projects illustrate ht the
interactivity suported byonline plators has infuenced the aesthetics ofform and
altered conventional models ofproduction and distribution.
A visit to the Interational Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA)
DocLab website in December 2011 attests to the vibrancy and variation
of form found in interactive documentaries (i-docs) produced i the past
decade. What is also clear in surveyingthe featuredworks is that there is no
single template for production in terms of either the design of the interfaces
and interactivity or the design of mult-platform distibuted documentaries.
Although this latter form is nowmore often designated transmedia, follow
ing the Producers Guild of America's creaton of the 'Transmedia Producer
Credit' in April 2010, it is important to recognize that the term denotes a
design strategyof distributngnarrative content across platforms rather than
KEYWORDS
tansmedia
web documenta
interactve
documenta
crowdsourcng
Web 2.0
database narratves
141
Siobhan O'FJynn
142
a distinct and singular model of production. Importantly, in the context of
American flm and television, this evolving production model is also being
driven by commercial concers. What is evident in contemporary practce
is that experimentaton with new models of production, particularly cross
platform design, social media usage and new technologies are driving a
degree of accelerated innovaton in the form of i-docs that is remarkable.
With the increasing popularity of Web 2.0 platforms, documentary makers
are increasingly inviting content created by fans (crowdsourcing and turn
ing to audiences as communities that can pacipate in funding documen
tar projects (crowdfunding. The fuidity of this space of practice in the
adopton of new platfors, sceens and technologies is recognized in the
description on the IDFA site, which extends the realm of digital storytelling
into 'other' to be discovered realms: 'Throughout the year, IDFA DocLab
showcases interactve webdocs and other new forms of digital storytelling
that expand the documentary genre beyond linear flmmaking' (ID FA2007).
It is this notion of 'beyond linear flmmaking' that marks the porousness of
this emergent and changing feld of practce and which presents a challenge
in creatng a stable taxonomy of forms.
Sandra Gaudenzi's doctoral thesis maps current variants as hyper
text, conversatonal, partcipative and experiental while foregrounding the
digital interactive documentary or i-doc as a relational object that requires
the agency and interactvity of the audience (Gaudenzi 2009: 3). Here, she
extends Bill Nichols' parsing of documentary points of view that organize to
the flm-maker, the text and the viewer (Nichols 1991: 12), and his taxon
omy of modes of representation1 (poetc, expository, observational, partici
patory, reflexve ad performatve) (Nichols 2001) to understand the logic in
the shift to the viewer's experience in interactive design. I terms of form,
i-docs ca then be analysed in terms of how they make meaning via the
viewer/user/participant's engagement with the specific project (Gaudenzi
2009). This focus of analysis can then be thought of in terms of the design
of interactivity and user experience, which this article will address. As such,
i-docs ca be contrasted with web-based documentaries (webdocs) that use
the Web as a broadcast platform for traditional linear documentaries, and
which may or may not have interactive paratextual components. I 2012,
two landmark examples of webdocs that combine traditional documentary
form with cross-platform paratextual and participatory components are
Caine's Arcade (Mullick 2012) and Kony 2012 (Invisible Children 2012).
Both of these documentaries were launched online and achieved global
viral success using social media campaigns and cross-platform extensions,
leveraging the may-to-many (M2M) sharing capacity of social platforms
to create global networked communities around traditonal documentaries.
In contrast, i-docs are often designed as databases of content fagments,
often on the web, though not alw<ys, wherein unique interfaces structure
the modes of interaction that allow audiences to play with documentary
content. The story or stories are encountered as changeable non-linear
experiences, the narratve or storyline is often designed as open, evolving
and processual, sometimes including audience created content. In prac
tice, however, documentary makers such as Kat Cizek of the NFB's multi
year, multi-platform Highrise project use both analogue and digital forms,
complicating further the defnitional criteria associated with interactive
digital documentaries, incorporating performance in real-time installations
(Cizek 2010-2011).
Documentary's metamorphic form
Transmedia documentaries add a further nuance in that naratve content
is desiged as distibuted across multiple platorms (digtal and non-digital),
often (but not always) designed with interactve components. Designing for
partcipation has become an almost required component in the discussions
of tansmedia documentaies, partcularly in the context of social concers, as
documentary makers seek to leverage socal media platorms to invite audi
ences to contibute content and to connect with each other. The artstc and
aesthetc calibre of digital i -does, transmedia and partcpatory documenta
ries and their metamorphic quality in the blurng hybridizaton of multme
dia forms are now being recogized in interational awards such as the IDFA
DocLab, the MIPDOC 2010 WebDoc Trailblazer and the Shefeld Doe/Pest
innovatonAward, which ackowledges 'the project that exhibits orignality in
approach to for, storytelling and delivery' .1 The emphasis on innovaton in
formand the creatve use of the a ordances of digital and web platorms and
a shift away fom taditonal linear form are evident in a sampling of the list
of recent award winners: the NFB's Highrse for the IDFA 2010 (Cizek 2010);
ARTE's Gaza/Sderot for the MIPDOC 2010 WebDoc Trailblazer (Brachet
2008); and the NFB's Bear 71 for the Shefeld Doc/Fest innovaton Award2012
(Mendes 2012). Having been a member of both the MIDOC 2010 and the
Shefeld Doe/Festival innovaton Award 2012 juries, a key point of discussion
for both juries was the queston of innovaton in the digital space in adaptng
and using the affordances ofweb and digtal platforms and technologies.
What this article examines is the evolution of a now distnct yet ever
changing cinematc form and practice that contnues to be rooted in what
John Grierson's termed documentary's 'creative treatment of reality'. As
two forms that deploy non-linear content design models, it may be useful
to establish a distinction between interactive and transmedia documen
taries, as numerous projects exst as hybrids. A i-doc can be web-based
or created as a physical installation, but it is a discrete contained work
encountered on a single platform, and in earlier examples tends to func
ton as a closed database. A trasmedia documentary distributes a narra
tive across more than one platform, it can be participatory or not, can invite
audience-generated content or not, tends to be open and evolving though
not always. This article will consider how both forms can be understood
within two contextual and interrelated fames. The frst fame is defned by
the structural principles underlying database narratives and a consideration
of how the emergent phenomenon of i-docs should be understood as both
an extension of and deviation fom earlier conceptons of database narra
tives as randomized algorithmic cinematic forms as theorized in the early
2000s. The second fame foregrounds the Impact of ubiquitous computing
and the development of Web 2.0 platforms, social media, mobile and tablet
devices as multiple screens that have contributed to the uptake of partcipa
tory, collaborative and social stategies often underlying transmedia produc
tions. The instantaeous connectivity of Web 2.0 platforms have ampled
and extended the effcacy of what Bill Nichols termed the twenteth centu
ry's non-fctonal 'discourses of sobriety' ad documentary's uderlying
ideological and actvist stace in relation to its audience (Nichols 1991: 3).
Here i-docs continue established prfctices of documentary makers who
have sought to activate audiences in response to social justice issues and
crisis initatves. Simultaneously and paradoxcally, though, digital and Web
2.0 technologies are also blurring prior divisions between fction and non
fction, text and paratext, director and audience.
13
Siobhan O'Fiynn
144
FIRST LINE OF ENQUIRY: EVOLUTION OF INTERACTIVE TO
TRANSMEDIA DOCUMENTARIES
I the context of the frst fame of database narratves, a key distncton of
t Porary works is that i-docs are desiged to be coherent and concep-
==
.
all
. .
tually unifed experiences. This is chieved by st

tegtc y org

mg
dynamic content within a clear thematic andor
P
Olermcal fame
.
that
!
mdes
the meaning of and engagement with the expenence. Alteratively, 1-docs
can be organized as fagmented naratves focused on an individual though
more often on a community or communities. These faming devices are one
response to a tension artculated by Lev Manovich in his statement that 'data
base and narratve are natural enemies',1 a postulate that critical engagement
with the potential of database narratives has wrestled with over the past
decade (Manovich 1999). Manovich's own 2005 database cinema project, Sof
Cinema: Navigating the Database, illustrates the lack of affect that results fom
the absence of stong narrative andor paratextual fames. Sof Cinema was
designed as a (re)combinatory work for DVD or screen that mixes audio and
video clips in an algorhythmic sequence that ensures no single viewing is ever
the same. Yet, the experience lacks meaningful complexty in adhering to a
stuctural model artculated here: 'As a cultural form, database represents the
world as a list of items and it refuses to order this list. In contast, a naratve
creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events)'
(Manovich 1999). What is lost in this concepton is the complexty ofnarrative
stuctures that layer meaning through patters, juxtapositions, associatons
and reversals that can telegraph meaning througthe poetcs of the text.
Antecedents can also be found in surrealist flms, the complexty of
poet and taditonal documentary. BiNichols includes the poetc mode in
his Introduction to Documentary as an additon to his earlier taxonomy of
four categories (Nichols 1991; Nichols 2001). Manovich's reductonist view
of narratve as a simplistically linear stucture driven by cause and efect, i.e.
acton based, which the interactve work then 'breaks' i order to 'choose
your own adventure', is also evident in Crolyn Handl

r Miller's state

ent
that 'The viewers can be gven the opportunity of choosmg what matenal to
see and i what order. They might also get to choose among several audio
tracks' (Miller 345; see also Aarseth 1994). When interactivity is reconceived
as an engagement with a dynamic interface that is playl, exploratory and
not based on expectatons of utilty, our relatonship to the work fundamen
tally changes and we become interactants (O'Flynn 2011). In the interest of
recognizing how radical the quality of a shift to experental design for the
audience is in an interactve medium, I will use two distinct terms, 'user' and
''interactant' i order to acknowledge the utilitarian and consumer orientaton
of the ter, 'user', and highlight in contast the agency and partcipation of
the 'interactanf in playing with dynamic interfaces that then shape and fame
the experience of a givenwork.
1
A review of critical tg on interactve cinema and database narra
tves of the past decade reveals key breaks between past and present practce
driven by specic technological innovatons. Janet Murray in Hamlet on the
Holodeck defned the four essental propertes of digital media as: procedural
(rule-based); partcipatory (interactive in that they are responsive to input);
spatal (interactive works of necessity are designed to encourage exploration
througa system of networked and/or linked content and/or through hyper
text or graphic environments); and encyclopaedic (interactvitynecessitates an
Documentary's metamorphic form
exponentallyincreasing database of alteratve possible content depending on
the degree of choice) (Murray 1998: 71-83). Signifcantly, Murray's concluding
discussion looks to the more expressive potential of digital media in capturing
human experience and its potental for pleasure, heralding the very impor
tant questons: why do we play with interactive content and what generates
pleasure and satisfacton in interactve environments? Marsha Kinder revisits
Manovichin 'Designing a database cinema' to argue that narrative and data
base 'are two compatible stuctures whose combinaton is crucial to the crea
tve expansion of newmedia, since all narratives are constructed by selectng
items fom databases (that usually remain hidden), and thencombining these
items to create a partcular story' (Kinder 2003: 348-349; see also O'Flynn
2005). She recognizes the importance ofpatterg and our cognitve engage
ment in digital narratives of contolled randomness in that these textual
landscapes require ' . . . a constant refguring of our mental cartogaphy with
its supporting databases, search engines and representatonal conventons'
(Kinder 2003: 353). Interactve works add complexty to the break of immer
sion necessitated by interactvity, as pleasure can be generated as a result of
experiental design inweb interfaces. In contrast to utty-oriented interfaces
that functon as content delivery systems (Netflix), the mechanics of
interactvity can initate exploraton, discovery and pleasure in the unexpected
and idiosyncatc design.
David Hudson's essay 'Undisclosed recipients: Database documentaries
and the Intemef makes a valuable contibuton to the feld of documentary
studies in adapting Marsha !inder's theory of 'database narratves', as 'dual
process of selection and combination' (Hudson 2008; Kind er 2002: 6), as a
fame for investgatng i-doc as a form. He argues 'that database documen
taries loosen assumptons about documenta fom fxed modes (expository,
observatonal, personal) and towards open modes (collaborative, reflexve,
interactive)' (udson 2008: 2). One consequence of this shift he identes is
'fom object-based "push" media (celluloid, video, even visual display of a
graphical user interface (GU)) towards act- based "pull" media (user acts,
hyperlinks, algorithms)' (Hudson 2008: 2). A he taces through a number of
examples, this process of selecton and engagement in negotatnga database
stcture online can mimic the archival stucture of the Interet itself (Hudson
2008: 6). Recent interactve storytelling platorms such as Mozilla's Popcor
HLhave been designed to pull real-time content fom the Web in rela
ton to exstng designed content, taking the idea of an Interet-based docu
mentary to a logical next phase. Hudson also cites examples of Interet
documentaries that combine the representational strategies of conventonal
documentary with what he terms 'the less conventional mode' of 'dialoguing'
(Hudson 2008: 6), foreshadowing the partcipatory, community networking
that is now characteristic of many 2011-2012 i-docs and tansmedia docu
mentaries. Rather than presentng documentaries as closed stuctures, this
hybridizaton supports 'multiple perspectives of partcular situatons, empha
sizing movements towards collaboratve, open -ended knowledge' (udson
2008: 6). The impact ofWeb 2.0 platforms is evident in the expectaton nowin
2012 of partcipatory design in i-docs, invitng content generation, collabora
ton and sharing througout 2011 and ,2012. Attenton to the user experience
in individual projects is now a necessary design component, in contast to the
conventional tajectory of documentar flm production, cnema release and
broadcast mechanisms.
15
Siobhan O'Fiynn
When considering (user) experience design within these earlier works,
the conception of interactivity is based on a concept of a sliding scale of
contol, functioning as a zero/sum equation where the flm-maker cedes
i varying degrees authorial and/or editorial contol to the user who has
a limited degree of choice within a discrete and finite database of content.
In these earlier models focused on user as editor, a recurrent promotional
mantra was the allure of 'now you can edit your own flm'. A good exam
ple of this early form is Florian Thalhofer and Mahmoud Hamdy's non
linear documentary (2003), Seven Sons, which was produced in Thalhofer's
Korsakow software, which works with a simpler interface that focuses
attention on the question of editorial control rather than user experience
(Thalhofer 2003). Gaudenzi usefully refers to these highly structural and
controlled works as hypertext documentaries (Gaudenzi 2009b). Korsakow
uses a -rule-based system that preloads available clips based on predeter
mined algorithms that tag images, audio and video clips as linked or not
linked to preceding clips. Thalhofer's software allows flm-makers and
audiences to experiment in a highly controlled way with non-linear fl
and create an associational structure moving fom element to element via
an associational tagging system, allowing for a more detailed understand
ing of the database structure. Seven Sons does this with tags such as 'Sand',
'Water' and so forth. As a design tool, Korsakow is one answer to what Lev
Manovich defned as the challenge for 'new media' when he stated that we
'expect computer narratives to showcase new aesthetic possibilities which
did not exst before digital computers. In short, we want them to be new
media specifc' (Manovich 1999).
Yet, interactve onne fhns (documentar or drama) designed in this form
are more often reifed experiences that rarely create an emotonal resonance
with the interactant and this is a consequence of two factors. The frst is that
the removal of a fxed editorial structure results in the absence of a sense of
a narrowing horizon of choice leading to a dramatc climax and conclusion,
in what Robert McKee termed the archetype stucture (McKee 1997). The
second is the often 'fat' or 'static' interface design that takes only minimal
advantage of the affordances of web interfaces, where the focus of interac
ton is only on what content to view next. One can retur to Murray's fag
gng of the importance of pleasure as a significant aspect of engagement with
digtal media and increasingly more recent dynamic interfaces are desiged
to be pleasurable and exploratory in their own rigt. Notably, it is this aspect
of experience design that often offsets and balances what can be challenging
and/or distessing content.
Looking back over the past fve years, the evoluton in form resultng fom
tecnological shifts is clear. Winner of the Prix SCAM 2009 digital interac
tive artwork award, the French i-doc Jourey to the End of Coal (Bollendorff,
2009) is designed as a 'choose your own path' experience within a highly
constrained set of choices that do not impact on how the narratve unfolds,
a binar choice stucture that can work well in games, yet which adds little
narratve enrichment to the beautl cinematc content. Sandra Gaudenzi's
discussion of three modes of interactvity in i-docs: 'semi-closed (when the
user can browse but not change the content), semi-open (when the user can
participate but not change the stucture of the i-doc) or completely open
(when the user and the i -doe constantly change and adapt to each other)' is
also useful here (Gaudenzi 2009a).
Documentary's metamorphic form
A key feature of the web documentaries discussed so far is that they are
stuctured to tell a reasonably coherent 'story'. The interactve website for
Errol Morris' Standard Oerating Procedure (2008) fts here telling the stor of
military particpants in the Abu Ghraib prison abuse, but through a spatial,
dynamic presentaton of the infamous photographs and an organizatonal
stucture that supports multiple modes of accessing the content (Morris 2008).
The home page displayed a group of the infamous photos taken by the US
military personnel and images taken fom Morris' interviews with the military
personnel scattered around the film title. Rolling the cursor over individual
photos triggered each photo to scale larger in t and encouraged the inter
actant to click on a gven photo, causing the images to reorient with that photo
as the now cental image. Smaller peripheral images are then organized with
headings indicatng: Personal Account, Commentary and Photos. A menu
in the upper left opened tabs to reorganize the content as: The Events, The
Profiles, The Prison and Director's Q & A, corresponding to Aristotle's funda
mentals of the good drama defned as plot, character and settng. Clicking
on The Events produces a horizontal chronological tme line, whereas The
Profles reconfgures participant photos in a vertcal line, organized hierarchi
cally with the commanding ofcer Brigadier General J anis Karpinski at the
top, followed by the descending order of ofcers to privates, with the contract
interrogators at the bottom of the vertcal stack. A such, the website design
worked as an elegant and intuitve interface wherein the associatonal and
causal links between reordered images was always clear or easily recuper
ated. Its dynamic interface and recombinatory structure positioned Standard
Oerating Procedure as a more complex experiential Web documentary that
demonstated how more immersive webdocs are when the interface desig is
aesthetcally and thematcally linked to the content.
Another i-doc that broke new ground in the thematc integraton of
content and interface design and that worked wit a closed database narratve
was the NFB's i-doc Waterlife (2010), which also provides an excellent exam
ple of how the experience of a dynamic interface design can be expressive of,
and integrated with, the content or subject matter in a highly pleasurable way.
With this kind of dynamic interface, the user becomes the interactant, and is
positoned in a more exploratory mode in relaton to the content (McMahon
2009). NFB producer Loc Dao has described the process behind the produc
ton of the webdoc and how all elements within the interface design had to
support a sense and experience of liquidit, fttng given that the subject of the
documentar was North America's Great Lakes (Dao 2010).
I all of these instances of integrated design, the experience of negotat
ing the database/website is as important as a design element as the choice
of colour palette or conventions of cinematography or graphic style. Here
too, the creators ofi-docs, unlike flm-makers, have to constantly innovate in
form in the marrying of interface and narrative, and no individual work estab
lishes a template for future i-docs. I the digital space, the replicaton of an
exsting stucture or desig is more than likely a failure to think throug the
idiosyncracies of the core experience to be communicated in a gven project.
Manovich's insight that 'new' media foregrounds the database of editorial
possibilites always latent in flm prodpcton is still a valid refection on the
underlying database stuctures of the i-doc form. Yet, the frst marked evolu
ton away fom a cinema-rooted form arose because of a shift to experiental
interface design.
17
Siobhan O'Flynn
>48
SECOND LINE OF ENQUIRY: THE IMPACT OF WEB 2.0
TECHNOLOGIES AND PRACTICES
My secondline of enquiry extends fom this frst phenomenon in ta:mgho
i-docs have increasingly leveraged the phenomenon of Web 2.0 socral media
platforms and the affordances of the Intere
.
t to us
.
e extend doc

entary
projects across multiple platforms, and to inVte audiences to apate as
collaborators. Here, i -does extenda logic of engagement that taditonal docu
mentarymakers have oftendesigedfor, whichis the capacityof documentary
to serve as a catalyst forpublic outcryandhopefullysocial actvism. Combined
with the networked capacities of Web 2.0 platforms, the development of
mult- or cross-platform documentaries has led to the rapid coalescence of
an array of stategies under the desigaton of transmedia documentary. As
these practces are fuid and evolving any snapshot given here wlikely be
repositoned as a past moment in the light of newtecnologies and platforms
by the time of publication.
One source of mobilization and creative innovaton stems fom the
recogniton by content creators that the Interet can support an immediate
dialogue and exchange withand between a global audience via Web 2.0 plat
forms. When webdoc, i-doc and transmedia creators establish clear narratve
fameworks, partcipator, i-docs positon content producers and the commu
nites they engender as deliberate catalysts for social actvism. While this as
been a goal of traditonal social change documentaries withthe foregrounding
of directorial voices and expose practces in the works of Errol Morris, Michael
Moore and Morgan spurlock who call for reformin industry andor gover
ment, the connectvity of the net is unprecedented. Where the fhns of Morris,
Moore and Spurlockattest to Nichols' cathat 'documentaries always were
forms of "re-presentaton" of reality ... the flmmaker ... always a partcipant
witess and active fabricator of meaning' (ichols 2005: 18), digital technolo
gies and social platforms providemore immediate andwidespreadopportuni
tes for multiple interventons, engagements with, and re-representatons of
experience through the M2M functonality of social media platforms. Stella
Bruzzi has defned the documentar flm-maker as one who invades real
space wherein the documentary manifests as 'a dialectcal conjunction of
.
a
real space' (Bruzzi 2000: 125). In contrast, Web 2.0 platforms empower audi
ences as networked communites who can intervene, critque and on occa
sion mobilize in response to the calls to acton embedded in documentary's
re-presentation of real-world crises. Keytothischange has been the shift fom
what can be defned as the one-way channel of communication in taditonal
documentary where films are of necessity linear in presentation, where the
f is a discete artefact viewed in cnema or on DVD. In contrast, Web 2.0
technologies and platforms support M2M conversations between audiences
and content creators via multple platforms including blogs, social media
platforms and wikis, where tis exchange can be immediate, ar

hived

d
networked online. Debra Beatte's essay, 'Documentary expressiOn online:
"The Wrong Crowd," a history documentary Io "electrate" audience'
examines the process and challenges of making an Interet documenta for
Australia's ABC Interet Portal in 2002 (Beatte 2008). A she notes, design
ing for the Web in 2002 was uncharted territory in terms of audience recep
ton to non-linear database narratives
.
Yet, in a conclusionsimilar to that of
Marsha Kinder, Beatte asserts that the experience of 'ordering the real' fom
fagmentary, polyphonic narratives was a familiar protocol, established by
Documentary's metamorphic form
directors such as Errol Morris inThe Thin Blue Line (Beatte 2008, 68). Of great
signifcance is her obseraton that 'even within the changed and fagmentary
reception platform of the computer screen', audiences retain an impulse to
narratvize non-linear content (Beatte 2008, 69). The documentarmaker can
design 'to engage the empathy of the viewer. It is possible to present a well
researched database of verifable documents embedded in cinematic images,
whichsustain in a fagmentarmanner the essence of the documentary argu
menf (Beatte 68).
Because of the Interet's connectivityand gobal reach, i -does are increas
inglyprocessual in that theycan be designed as ongoing project
:
vitng the
submission of partcipant-generated content (GC). Where taditional docu
mentaries were presented in the fnal edit as a static closed artefact, online
documentaries can be open in form and practice, extending across mult
ple platforms, as expanding, interactve, porous and partcipatory databases.
Within this fuid digital space, the hybrdizaton of forms is nowas rapidas the
emergence of distnct forms. Transmedia documentaries that rely on curaton
and collaboraton of PGC are distnct fomthose that designhighlystuctured
and authoredcontent systems. Most importantly, these distnct forms require
very different approaches to narrative design. Another hybrid form occurs
with the blur ng of fact and fcton, and increasingly transmedia' is used as
the catch-all phrase for a disparate set of strategies mixed in varying degrees
.
A a design stategy, the concept of tansmedia in 2012 now functons in two
overlappingthoughnot always integatedways. HenryJenkins formalized the
term in his analysis of The Mt(The Wachowskis, 1999) as a transmedia
entertainment property that 'unfolds acoss multiple media platforms, with
each new text making a distinctve and valuable conhibuton to the whole'
(enkins 2006: 95-96; Wachowski 1999). As Jenkins noted, tansmedia prop
erties depended on fan willingness to discover distributed content, which
necessitated a highdegree of engagement foma core audience Qenkins 2006;
see alsoJenkns 2009).
Since then, the rapiduptake of social media and the clear evidence of fan
enthusiasmfor connecting, creatng, remixng and sharingcontent online has
been leveraged by artists and the entertainment and advertising industies
in the promotion of partcipatory storytellingwhere fans as connunit
:
s

e
invited to eo-create content. This secondmodel often overlaps Withthe frst 1
what again is often a sliding scale bet een authorship and curation. Hybrid
documentaries such as Jane McGonigal's World Without Oi and Urgent Evok,
Lance Weiler's Pandemic and Tony Pallotta's Collapsus have used hypothet
cal fameworks projectngnear-future scenarios to inviteaudiences to address
and/or 'solve' crises and generate naratves in the process. The catalyst crises
for these ARGs were, respectively, the global oil industcollapse; a gobal
developed world food shortage in which Afican elders held the key for
survival; a global virus that inunobilized adults, leaving children to save the
day; and a second peak oil crisis.1
In Angelica Das' post Transmedia for socal documentary' on the Tribeca
Future of Film website, one of her examples presents another hybrd merg
ing of fact and fction (Das 2011). Jacqueline Olive's documentary project on
lynching in America, Always in Seasop, uses a Second Life simulaL envi
ronment to engageparticpants inof a 1930s lynching (Olive 2010). This gami
fcaton of a compositing of historical events invites participants to respond in
the game space to a intended lynching of anAfican American man, which
the game curtails fomits conclusion.
>49
Siobhan O'Fiynn
>so
Crowdfunding has also become an important factor in media creaton
in the Web 2.0 sphere, changing the dynamics of curaton and/or collabo
raton. One should note, however, that crowdfunding is a strategy used to
fund any and all enterprises fom iPhone cases to dental surger to tans
media documentaries. What is significant in the context of how the digital
sphere has impacted i-doc producton is that media creators are now reach
ing out to audiences through crowdfunding initatives, often at the begin
ning of the development of a producton rather than targetng audiences with
marketing campaigns six weeks or less prior to release. I would emphasize,
though, that crowdfunding is a business development model that is content
agnostc and in itself is in no way determinant of whether or not a project is
tansmedia. Vincent Mosco's work on the myth of new media technologies as
'bring[ing] about revolutionary changes in society' flags 'a genuine desire for
community and democracy'. (2004: 19). Lina Srivastava's TEDx Rome Talk on
'Transmedia documentary and social change' details a number of tansmedia
documentaries that use cross-platorm and participatory stategies and that
have been stctured to provide catalysts for audience actvism (Srivastava
2011). Her criteria of the necessar characteristcs of the successful transmedia
documentary integates the twu steams of authored and partcipatory state
gies discussed here:
Each project has at its core the use of local voice, in direct partership
with the platform creator. So they are trly communit-centered partcipa
tion. Second, each uses its platorm to move beyond awareness ... to connect
participants to commit to a particular worldview, to advocacy or to acton.
Finally, each project uses a number of di erent platorms to cross boundaries
and borders to foster transformation. (Srivastava 2011). The ease of uploading
content to YouTube, Flickr and Facebook for supporters of a gven project has
also contibuted to the global enthusiasm for partcipaton evident in many
i -doe projects.
This model of inviting an audience to contibute content within a specifc
constraint or fame is also idented as one of a number of categories Nora
Barry defnes in her essay 'Telling stories on screens: A history of web cinema'
(Ban 2003; Ba n.d). Here, Ban:y provides a taxonomy of form and prac
tce that had emerged with the impact of digital technologies and artsts'
experimentaton with creating content for new screens. A ret to this not
so distant critcal overiew and the questions posed by Barry in the conclusion
of her essay is illuminating, as the categories she notes continue to anchor
curent tends in the development of interactve online content yet tace these
trends to practces before the phenomenon of social media. In the typology she
creates, we fnd a range of interactve practces supported by web platforms
and digital technologies that still defne the scope of what are grouped under
the term interactve works today. Her 'pass-along narratves' are defined as 'a
flmmaker starts a story and places it online, and other flmmakers or viewers
fom around the world add toW (Ba 2003: 546) and align closely with what
Sandra Gaudenzi terms 'collab does'.
A 2011 post by i-doc producer Mandy Rose identes a similar phenom
enon in collaborative documentar in what she terms the 'Creatve Crowd'
model (Rose 2011). Here, 'multple partcipants contibute fagments to a
highly templated whole, analogous to the separate panels within a quilt'.
Examples given are video artst Perr Bard's Man with a Movie Camera: The
Global Remix and Mad V's The Message and the distnctive characteristcs of
these works are 'energy and repettion' (Bard 2007-; Mad V 2009). Bard's
Documentary's metamorphic form
ongoing partcipatory remake of Dziga Vertov's 1929 flm Man with a Movie
Camera invites a global audience to submit footage corresponding to the 1276
shots fom the flms 57 scenes in order to remake the flm shot-for-shot.
The online iteration of the flm changes daily dependent on the number of
images or clips of PGC as the site loads diferent content elements each day.
A an ongoing project, the website changes daily in response to the ongoing
submission of content fom a potentially global audience is searchable and
designed with simple utlity oriented rather than experiential interfaces.
I awards are an indicator, there is wide agreement that the NFB's multi
platform documentary project, Highrise, is one of the most innovative tans
media documentary projects currently ongoing. The focus of this project is
the enquiry into the experience of life in high-rise towers, which Ozek and
producer Gerry Flahive call the world's vertcal suburbs. 1his core concer is
exlored through multiple platforms including the two-authored i-docs, The
Thousandth Tawer and Out My Windaw, launched in 2010, the Fickr goup that
invites submissions of photos taken fom anyone's high-rise window (Cizek
2011c), feeding the curated Highrise: Out My Windaw Partcipate compo
nent on the N website (Cizek 2011b), an HTML5 interactive video that
animates one tower's residents revisioning of their high-rise (Cizek 2011a).
Future extensions w include a game, possibly as an app, and future part
nered research projects lg tansnatonal sites.
it should be noted that the NFB producers are in a relatvely privileged
positon in terms of funding as even with budget cuts, the NFB is a gover
ment supported insttuton. For documentary makers reliant on broadcast,
distributon, arts grants or crowdsourced funding, the challenges of produc
ton and fnancing are further complicated in that there are no template
business models for revenue generation for webdocs, i-docs or tansmedia
documentaries (the same applies to dramatic cross-platform content). The
last signicant shift that should be touched on in terms of what has changed
with the evoluton of the i-doc is in the complications to business models, as
these new documentary forms have no reliable or standard business model.
This rapidly evolving and disruptve aspect of media producton is insepara
ble fom the actvist orientaton of Web 2.0 documentary practices wherein
one can argue that the partcipatory stategies of contemporary i-docs and
tansmedia documentaries are intentonally designed to empower audiences
as active members of galvanized and sometimes activist communites. A
such, partcipatory strateges would seem to contemporize Brecht' s challenge
within the theate space to tansform passive audiences to actve 'spect-actors'
(Harris 2001). Clearly, content creators in 2012 (documentary and dramatic)
are scrambling to leverage social media platforms to connect with audi
ences where they already are. I one tacks the rate of adopton of YouTube
and Facebook as broadcast channels and community sites for contempo
rary content, it is evident that cross-platform distributon and social media
outeach have been reactive stategies, intended to emulate the viral success
of home-made, non-professional videos (dDavid at the Dentist). Today's
media landscape further complicates the efficacy of what Brecht proposed
as the contradictory text designed to challenge the passivity of consumer
oriented audiences (Belsey 2002: 126) ._ I 2012, the 'artst' and/or studio no
longer contol the text or the media landscape, which are more porous, unsta
ble and changing than that of the twenteth century. Consider the di erence
of today's media landscape to what Catherine Belsey observed in 1992 build
ing on Brecht and Barthes' theorizing of the 'writerly' text (Barthes 1970: 5):
Siobhan O'Fiynn
152
'In what I have called the interrogatve text there is no simple hierarchy of
voices such that the reader is ofered privileged access to the work's 'tuth'.
Instead the reader constucts meaning out of the contadictory voices which
the text provides' (Belsey 2002: 129). Meaning today is no longer provided,
controlled or conveyed solely by the 'authored' text as eiter Brecht or Barthes
conceived. Instead, texts are disrupted, remixed, created and dishbuted by
audiences who bypass earlier models of producton and recepton. Meaning
is also generated in the interactions of audiences as networked communities,
responding to online content and to each other, shifting the centre of gravity
and l contol away fom taditional old media content producers.
Ironically, although the partcipatory stategies of contemporar i -does and
tansmedia documentaries arguably extend Brecht' s challenge to audiences to
engage as 'spect-actors', by hopefully galvanizing core communites towards
activism, those participatory stategies are also necessaly undertaken in the
interest of promoton, marketing, dishibuton and box offce and merchan
dising revenue. Brecht's disruptive strategies have been incorporated into
marketng campaigns as a means to engage consumers wit a given brand,
as the authors of 'Customer paicipaton in retail serice: lessons fom Brecht'
detail (Haris 2001). To be blunt, for the creators of webdocs, i-docs and
tansmedia documentaries, the goal of communit-building is often directed
simultaneously towards actvism and revenue generaton, as taditonal busi
ness models often no longer apply. Both goals exst as intertined, necessa
components i what contributes to success. As such, the determination as
to where power and agency ultmately reside, with the documentary maker,
audiences andor subjects of a given documentary project remains unstable.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, notions of interactivity have changed over the past decade in
response to two key factors. One, a sh away fom a binaristc 'choose your
own adventure' orientaton towards plot as an either/or stucture and narra
tve causality to an exploraton of experiental interface design. Here, i-docs
of the last fve years have demonstrated an increasing attention to interface
and user experience design as dynamic structural elements exressive of a
thematc core to the given narrative. Two, the impact of social media and the
rise of pacipatory strategies of engagement have positoned audiences as
collaborators and ceators who can expect an immediacy of response and the
opportunity for agency. And as the digital sphere provides opportunites for
webdoc, i-doc and transmedia documentary flm-makers that are unprec
edented, the shift fom flm-maker to transmedia producer, curator and
collaborator now demands a fexbility and wl gness to experiment with the
means of communicaton and a commitment to engage in communication.
Further, traditonal models of fnancng and revenue generation no longer
apply, and the opportunity to create new business models for fnancing and
revenue generaton abound. Jon Reiss and Sheri Candler's How to Sell Your
Film Without Selling Your Soul provides a series of case studies of idiosyncratc
transmedia business stateges tailored to specifc documentar and dramatc
projects (Reiss 2010). Within this constantly evolving mediascape, it is also
clear that an af ectng fame andlor invitaton to collaborate is as powerful and
effective as a well-told story. Interactvity can occur in multple ways: in the
interactvity of a well-designed interface, as a cycle of engagement between
media creators and audiences who can become partcipants generating
Documentary's metamorphic form
content, or in communities supportng social change and producton fnanc
ing. At this juncture, documentaton of the individual works (webdoc, i -doe,
tansmedia documentaes) and the processes of interacton and flows of PGC
is vital, as digital works have no lastng material substance and there is no
guarantee that a web-based work will be online for any length of tme. My
hope is that this critcal refecton on the evoluton of these rapidly metamor
phing documentary forms, though necessarily incomplete, can contibute to
our understanding of the historical context and future trajectories of the inter
actve, transmedial documentary.
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SUGGESTED CITATION
O'Fyrm, S. (2012), 'Documentar's metamorhic form: Webdoc, interactive,
tansmedia, partcipatory and beyond', Studies in DocumentarFilm, 6: 2,
pp. 141-157, doi: 10.1386/sd.6.2.141_1.
CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Siobhan O'Flynn is a Senior Lecturer in the Canadian Studies Programat the
University of Toronto and Faculty with the Canadian Film Centre's Media
Lab. Her academic research examines the functon, design and experence of
narratve in interactve environments; coss-platform to tansmedia design;
foresighting emergent trends in digital storytelling and entertairunent in
a Web 2.0/3.0 world; and pyschogeographic practces across media. She is
Documentary's metamorphic form
currentlyengaged in a two-yearresearch/data visualizationproject, fundedby
SSHRC, on Nuit Blanche and tansformatonal publics withher collaborator,
Faisal Anwar.
Contact: 115 FultonAve, Toronto, Ontaro, Canada, M4K1X7.
E-mail: siofym@gmail.com
Siobhan O'Flymhas asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be idented as the author of this work in the format
that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.
157
] 0 0 0J' 0l] JJ033
0 3J0' 030J
ISSN 1756-4905 1 On line 155N 1756-4913
2 issues per vol ume I Vol ume s, 20l3
Aims and Scope
The i ncreasingly transnational status of Japanese and Korean cinema under
lines the need to deepen our understandi ng of this i mportant film-making
region. These nei ghbouri ng countries, so often in di scord pol i tical ly, never
theless share many cultural attributes, providing scholars with a rich source
of research.
Call for Papers
Submissions may i ncl ude essays devoted to issues specific to either Japanese
or Korean cinema, but articles on i nteractions between them wi l l also con
ti nue to be considered. Topics for essays for future issues may concern:
Historical C00SluC|8Il0nand reconsiderations
Authorship
Genre
Spectatorshi p and audiences
Reception of Japanese and Korean cinema regionally and globally
d|tors
David Desser
Uni versity of I l l i noi s
desser@iflinois.edu
Frances Gateward
Ursinus College
fgateward@ursinus.edu
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SDF 6 (2) pp. 59-173 Intellect limited 20u
Studies in Documentary Film
Volume 6 Number 2
2012 l ntel l ect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10. 1386/sdf.6.2. 159_1
JON DOVEY AND MAN DV ROSE
University of the West of England
We're happy and we know it:
Documentary datal montage
ABSTRACT
This article is concd with the soda[ praxis ofdocumentary in the sea of'ubiqui
tous data' that is both consequenc and driver ofonlin social mediation. The topic
is given importance by the morphing ofthe character ofvideo in the contet ofth
latest web coding language, mMS. Until nl, web video has been impervious to
its networked cntet, reroducing the conditions ofthe T screen in a hye ediated
space. Na eisting databases and live infonnation drawn fom social media can be
connected to the documentar environment, ofering opportunities for the production
ofnew kinds ofkniledge and application. The afordances ofnetworked connectiv
ity ofer the potential to recntextualiz documentary material through mobilizing the
enonnous e-creative potential ofhuman discurse cptured in the Web. The chal
lenge in these marriages ofmass media fonn and rhizomatic network is to fnd new
ways ofshaping attention into a coherent eperience. To do so, we have to reinvent
the soda[ praxis ofdocumentary, creating new visual and infonnationl grammars.
l. I NTRODUCTION
We believe that humanityis on the verge of a revoluton. We've moved
beyond the web of pages and the Interet of people. Soon, we'll take
ubiquitous data for granted. Our every glance wl be augmented; our
everypurchase shared and analyzed. Big data, available to everyone, in
compelling, convincing interfaces will change the ver nature of how
KEYWORDS
documentary
digtal
data
online
Web
interactve
semantc
159

l
Jon Dovey J Mandy Rose
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we tn. It w unseat and launch entire industies, hold goverents
accountable, and empower society. There's an industial revoluton of
data coming. The power of data will change us as surely as the power of
steam did a century ago.
(O'Reilly 2011)
Our opening quotaton is the marketing blurb for a 2011 conference aimed at
the business and technology community. The aim of the event was to invest
gate 'the change brought to technology and business by data science, perva
sive computng, and new interfaces'. I asserting that the 'power of data wl
change us as surely as the power of steam did a centur agd, the authors
offer us a useful enty point to the historical perspectves that w underpin
our analysis. I this article, we want to explore what might happen to docu
mentary n the sea of 'ubiquitous data' conjured by the marketeers of Web 2.0.
Oassical documentary might be understood as a product of the 'age of steam',
a form that evolved fom the mechanical optical technologies of the nineteenth
centur combined with the operatonal needs of newly complex industalized
and urbanized societes to create mediated mass communications systems.
As one of the innovatve miracles of nineteenth-century technology, photo
chemical image-making and its subsequent mechanical reproducton brought
the wonders of the world to an enthusiastic public. A the 'pencil of nature'
the photographic process was conshucted as an indexcal means of register
ing the visual world- its assemblage simultaneously a wonder and a scientifc
instument. The mission o the documentary flm has been to mediate society
to itself, to let one part of a society see another and to create a very particular
kind of dialogue. I its taditonal constuction, documentar has been under
stood as part of an electonic public sphere, as a 'discourse of sobriety' akin to
others - science, the law, educaton - that shapes social reality (Nichols 1991:
3 ). A privileged relatonship to social reality is one of the leading 'claims' of
the taditonal discourse of documentary. However, documentary fh in the
twenteth century was as much about changing the world as it was observng
it. Nichols sums up this taditon in his well-known positon that documen
tar presents us with arguments about our shared world, propositons about
the world that are made as part of a process of social pras. Brian Winston
has a similar sense of documentary history when he writes about documen
tary fnding its place on the 'battlefelds of epistemology'; he captures some
of the ways in which documentary flm-makers and critcs argue about the
world we share when they argue about its documenta representaton (1995).
Whilst this idea about a 'documentary tradition' has been widely critiqued
(e.g. Dovey 2000; Renov 2008; Bruzzi 2000), this article will work within the
memory of documentary as a social praxs in its attempt to argue for new
modalites of coherence within the emergent online environment.
We are concered with the forms of social praxis available for documentary
in its emergent online modes. Never has there been more documentar mate
rial available to us; the online video world is awash with an impossible excess
of doLuLnI agcnts. Ye havc deaIt eIsewhete wiIh the dymics of
collaboration as producers explore forms of eo-created documentary produc
tion (Dovey and Rose 2012). Others in this special edition deal with the emer
gent forms of i-Docs. I this article, we want to d about what happens
when documentary iaging occurs within the new data-rich contexts referred
to in our opening quotation above. With the latest generaton of the web
coding language HLS, video is becoming an integrated web technology
rather than an add-on requiring a separate player - it is 'of the Web' rather
than 'on the Web'. This allows for a new agility in the way that connectons
can be made between video and other Web information sources. Existing
databases and live, up to the moment, informaton drawn fom social media
can be connected to the documentary environment. What new possibilities
does this unlock for documentary?
2. FOOTPRINTS IN THE DIGITAL SAND
Coloured dots dance across a black screen apparently at random. Where the
cursor rests, they cluster around it, jostling to get close. The dots are of vary
ing sizes, colours and shapes. From some dots, words for feelings appear -
'disappointed', 'sick', 'great', 'real'. Sometime these are located in place;
'United States, Oregon, guilty', 'Saudi Arabia, Riyadh, Shemaissy, strong'.
When you click on a dot, a sentence appears in the headline on the top of
the page, with a curious form of attibuton: 'I did feel sadness for puttng my
children through it, fom a female, in chester, va United States when it was
cloudy'. What are these dots? What's happening here?
1his is the frst interface you come across in We Feel Fine, 'an almanac of
human emoton', created by sampling the world's blogs ever few minutes for
the words 'I feel fne' or 'I am feeling'. The work, by jonathan Harris and Sep
Kmvar, made a str when it was launched in 2005 and soon became an iconic
piece. The sentence containing the words is captured, along with informa
ton relating to the author. Each dot represents a feeling. The colour, inten
sity, shape refecting the feeling's character, intensity, mood. When the user
chooses fom a menu of optons, the dots/feelings organize themselves into
one of a number of 'playful interfaces' relating to demographic and contex
tual information. These 'movements' present the data in a variety of ways.
The section called Montage, for instance, uses images fom blogs 'to ask what
happiness looks like', Mobs shows the most fequent feelings in a population
and Mounds represents how the feelings look in the whole database.
Stll live, We Feel Fine still impresses for its innovaton and for its realiza
ton, brnging computer science, data visualizaton and storytelling to bear on
content that is unlocked by tapping into the common metadata structure of
blogs. The aesthetc of We Feel Fine combines machine and human in a manner
at once witty and empathic. A Maria Popova says in reviewing the We Feel
Fne book in 2009: 'With its unique software-driven model, We Feel Fine is a
revelation of emotion through a prism of ratonal data that only makes the
emotonal crux deeper and more compelling' (2009).
jonathan Har s became interested in storytelling through 'the partal
glimpse into somebody's life' that he saw in personal fagents, the scraps of
presence left by our online behaviours (2007). While studying computer science
at Princeton, Harris obsered that, 'suddenly people en masse were leaving
scores and scores of digital footprints online that told stories of their private
lives; blog posts, photogaphs, thoughts, feelings, opinions [ { . . ) so I started to
write computer progr es that study very large sets of these online foot
prints' (2007. What Har s was identg was the emergence of a new type
of social informaton that was neither quanttatve - thin data about a mass of
people - nor qualitative - deep data about a few. The beautl y simple idea
of sampling the blogosphere was one way Ha is went about investgatng this
new domain, working with the human data in the snatches of self -expression
being accrued moment by moment on social media platorms. I Want You to
We're happy and we know it
Jon Dovey I Mandy Rose
162
Want Me (2008) continued this line of creatve enquir, exag contempo
rarylove and desire througthe content that people post on datng sites.
In 1926, John Grerson defned documentaras 'the ceatve teatent of
actuality'. I using the term 'actuality', he was referring to a specic form:
the newsreels - short m obseratons of topical events - that were shown
alongside features in cinemas then. The snatches of self-expression, which
are Harris's rawmaterial, can be seen as 'actualites' of the Information Age,
units of content reflecting the world that can, with a creatve treatment, be
fashioned into a documentaryartefact. We do not have the space or the incli
natonto discuss whether WeFeel Fine is art or documentary. The point we are
makinghere is that the Web is nowa vast repositoryofsocial informaton that
is potental documentarycontent. The live and changing nature of that data
is a new afordance. We Feel Fine is not statc, but generatve. According to
Harris and Kamvar's online statement:
At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authoredbyeveryone. It will grow
and change as we grow and change, reflectng what's on our blogs,
what's in our hearts, what's in our minds. We hope it makes the world
seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the
everyday ups and downs of life.
(2012)
We Feel Fine ventures into a new creative territory - sculptng social media
data to create what we might call a LivingDocumentary.
3. THE SEA OF DATA
We Feel Fine can be understood a 'documentary' response to the ocean of
data that is both consequence and driver of online socal mediaton. The work
exploits environment that produces data in wild profusion. All of our online
interactons produce data an almost accidental afordance. Our computers
holdandtansmit records ofwhat we have been doing(withour attenton) and
our mobile devices holdrecords ofwherewe are (orwhat we are doigwithour
bodies). Our devices caneasilyrecordourbehaviours. This informatoncanthen
be netwurkedin unexected andunplannedways. The ocean ofdata offers new
opportunities for the production of new knds of knowledge and applicaton.
Te entre feld ofmashup inwhichdiferent exstngapplicatonprogamming
interfaces (AP!s) can be plugged into each other to produce unexpected new
insigts is a product of the unforeseen consequences of data profusion.
'Mappiness', for instance, is a research project by the London School
of Economics; a free phone app asks you twice a day to rate your level of
happiness, relaxaton and 'awakeness' on a scale of 1-10. These data are
then collated against locaton of t:pe respondents' phone, time and respond
ents' scores. The researchers are interested in correlatng feeling to environ
ment (the project is by researchers in the Department of Geogaphy &
Environment). Users are asked to take and upload a photo of what's exactly
in font of them, so that researchers can map photographs of the sites of the
feelings of their participatng sample at any one time.
It ts out that people are happier in every other environment than
the urbanenvironment, and the efect appears to be between about one
and fve points. Mountains and coniferous forests have come out as the
happiest places so far - four or fve points higher than a continuous
urban settng. Beingin the suburbs scores about one point happier than
a contnuous urban environment.
(Heathcote 2011)
This evidence may not come asmuch ofa surprise but it does serve to illustate
the unforeseen consequence for knowledge formaton in our world of newly
available data. A fundamental methodologcal problem for social scientists
and historians is that almost no evidence exsts of howpeoplefelt; the experi
ental grain ofeverydaylife canbe imputed fomcertain kinds of documentary
record such as diaries, letters or Mass Observation reports, but the evidence
just has not been there tll recent times. Nevertheless, this was considered an
inevitable methodological problem, an accepted limitaton. Researchers were
not seeking to invent a permanently updatng aflect polling system. But the
afordance of the mobile device, locaton and time data, wirelesslynetworked
cloud computing, the database and the cultural experience for users of 'being
polled all the time' combine toproduce an entrelynew(andrather amazing
body of statstical kowledge that could not have been there before.
Thereis, however, a distincton to be made between data and communica
ton, or perhaps, better, between data and language. Nowthat media exst i
digital forms and language can be tansmitted through our everyday commu
nicaton devices, there is a geat deal of defnitional slippage between 'data',
'communication', 'media' and 'language'. Whitelaw(2006) in Diamonddefnes
data as 'a set of measurements extracted fom the fux of the real that are
abstract, blank meaningless' (2010: 1). Data may be extacted fom the 'flux'
of our socal media but data and social media are not the same thing. We can
derive data fom language-based forms of social media communicaton and
expression, which is what Harris and Kevmar do in We Feel Fine. This is what
a tag cloud does; it calculates fequencyof use andts those numbers into a
graphical form. It is this tanslation between the searchable language of social
media communicatons, todata (asnumbers), toalgorthms that predict behav
iours and taste, that is the economic driver of Web 2.0. When Tim O'Reilly
made his prescrptonfor Web 2.0 i 2005, he declared: 'Data is the newIntel
inside', implicitly replacing the hardware of the computer chip with the soft
ware produced by user interaction as the newdriver of computng in society,
'Users addvalue [ . . . ] Web 2.0 companies set inclusive defaults for aggegatng
user data andbuildingvalue a side-efect of ordinary use of the applicaton'
(2005). Data, he foresaw, wouldbe the engne and the driver of the newsocal
media Interet, but by this he did not mean that our interactions, searches,
likes, uploads or tweets were the same as data. He meant that what could be
abstracted from these interactions wouldbe the gold nuggets ofWeb 2.0. Trends,
predictons and recommendations have made targeted marketng the main
revenue opton formanyonline operatons. However, this data profusion does
not just ceate capital for Googe, eBay, Amazon andFacebook, it also has the
potental to create cultural, public and educational capital.
4. VIDEO GOES WEB NATIVE
The topic is given an added dimension by the morphing of the character of
video in the context of HL. We have been used to video sittng on the
Web within a player, aloof fom the linked and networked character of its
environment, reproducingthe conditons of the T screen i a hypermediated
We're happy and we know it
jon Dovey 1 Mandy Rose
environment (Bolter and Grusin 1999). Even in interactive formats, although
the user may choose how he or she navigates and orders video segments, the
media players for online video have made them impermeable to the wider
data riches of the Web. With HL, this is suddenly changing. Video coded
into the web page enables a dynamic relatonship to statc and live web data.
In the same way that a hyperlink allows a connecton between a word and
another locaton on the Interet, so now such a connecton can be made fom
a point within a video tmeline or image. This changes the character of video
tansforming it in the context of the emerging Semantic Web fom a media on
the Web to a media of the Web. This phenomenon has been described vari
ously as 'semantic video', hyervideo' and 'web-natve' video.
A number of tools are in development to facilitate creatve work that takes
advantage of these new afordances. These include Zeega and 3WDOC, both
platforms for creatng interactve documentaes. Among them is the Popcor
Maker, released in November 2011, an open-source authoring tool built by
Mozilla's Open Video Lab, Web Made Moves. According to Mozilla,
Popcor allows web flmmakers to amp up interactvity around their
movies, haressing the web to expand their creatons in new ways.
Popcor uses JavaScipt to link real-tme social media, news feeds, data
visualizations, and other context directly to online video, pulling the
web into the acton in real tme.
(2011)
The Popcom.js libray frst went live i autumn 2010. The earliest demo pulled in
AP!s fom Google, Fc, Wikipedia and Twitter, as well as automatc machine
tanslaton fom Google Translate and attibuton data fom Creatve Commons.
Multple windows were arrayed on a web page. A video about the Interet
played, and as people, places and themes appeared related data were tiggered
and windows around the video player showed relevant text and stlls.
The demo was clumsy aesthetcally, with the numerous on-screen
windows competng very uneasily for the viewer's attention. But it was an
important proof of concept for a new and potentially signcant a ordance for
web video, as Ingrid Kopp suggested, writng about Popcom.js on the Tribeca
Film Insttute blog in September 2010:
the new technology is allowing video to be part of a connected web that
creates links to new sources of informaton and new methods of inter
acting with that informaton [ ... ] We aknow that the web is changing
the way we watch flms but it is also fundamentally changing the way
we can tell stories.
(2010)

The Director of the Web Made Movies project is fm-maker Brett Gaylor who
made, 'rip! A Remix Manifesto', the award-wn g 2009 collaboratve feature
documentary investgaton into remix culture and copyright in the digital age.
Gaylor demonstated his interest in pursuing the potental of semantc video
for the development of cinema aesthetcs early on. I September 2010, he
proposed a Popcom.js work that would fuse Kuleshov' s renowned experiment
in montage with Hars and Kvar' s We Feel Fine. Cheekily enttled, 'Lev' s
alright!', it signalled Gaylor's creatve ambitons for Popcor. In the event, most
of the frst generation of Popcom.js projects did not push the boundaries of
documentary for. The approach tended to be to take a fnished factual video
or documentary and use Popcor.js to annotate or add further informaton. One
might see this simply analogous to adding captons or voice-over, although
the live nature of some of the source content provides a signicant new poten
tal. The always historical 'document' can have always 'live' dynamic context.
The semantc remix of Right Wing Radio Duck by Rebellious Pixels stands
out among the 2010 Popcor demos. This brilliant remix fuses Donald Duck
footage with audio of Fox News' Glenn Beck. The Popcor famework allows
the numerous sources to be displayed, which is a pleasure to watch, as it
reveals the virtuoso construction of the piece. At the same time, it makes
evident a politcally signifcant functon of semantc video, as the attributon of
sources can provide a legal basis for quotng copyright content under Fair Use
and can support Creatve Commons use.
I a rougher state, but tantalizing for its documentar potential, is a proof
of concept for 18 Days in Egt -the crowd-sourced documentary that is being
made fom the media that people produced during the revoluton in Egypt in
Januar/Februar 2011. Rather than use Popcor on a video steam with addi
tonal media around it, the 18 Days team have used full-screen video, offering
links to details within a shot. Stlls, news coverage and video content taken
by participants can be accessed through hotspots within footage of a protest
crossing the Qasr-al-Nil Bridge in Cairo. A extended long shot becomes an
interface to explore the event. Eyewitess interviews, newspaper reports, A
Jazeera coverage, the histor of the bridge and its signifcance in the city are
all made available as a live archaeology of the document itself. The process
opens up the world of the footage, ofering multple viewpoints and a sense of
three-dimensionality, a powerful methodology for depictng the dynamics of
those unlolding events. (Though it should be noted that the 18 Days team
have subsequently abandoned Popcor i favour of their own custom built
crowdsourcing jouralism software 'GroupStre.a'.)
After a year of development work, Popcor 1.0 was released at November
'11's Mozilla Festval in London. The same festval saw the premiere of Kat
Cizek's One Millionth Tower, a documentary spin-of fom the Highrise project,
made with open-source tools - Popcor and Web GL, which enables the
interactive generaton of 3D graphics. Te work was heralded by Mozilla as
'the world's frst open-source 3D documentary', and simultaneously launched
on the home page of Wired.com - surely a documentary frst. One Millionth
Tower allows the viewer/user to explore a 3D environment in which animators
have realized redesign ideas that Toronto tower block residents have devised,
working in collaboraton with architects. Alongside these examples, the user is
invited to access related Flickr images, Wikipedia enties and even the current
weather in Toronto drawn fom the Web. In One Millionth Tower, we can
begin to see what HL might mean for documentary. Reviewing the work
on the i-Docs website, Sandra Gaudenzi relates the piece to her concept of
the 'relatonal object', an idea of the interactve documentary as a nexus of
connectons, a powerful concept for tg about semantc video; '[ . . . ]if we
believe that the media is the message', she wrtes, 'we can also start to see our
own world differently. A world where everything is dynamically connected
and where relatons are the bone stcture of life' (2011).
The documentary made in H can be contnually recontextualized,
updated and amended, through content drawn in by automatc search engines
and APis. Tis goes far beyond the interactvity that allows users to comment
or create their own mashup fom the material. Here exsting information
We're happy and we know it
165
jon Dovey I Mandy Rose
166
online can be linked to the video footage. Tweets being sent in a ten-mile
radius of the video" s locaton,. Wikipedia enties within the same radius,. blogs
linked by thematzed search or newspaper archives fom the date of record
ing can all be made available to elucdate the video fagment. I The Are You
Happy? Project experiments with Popcor Maker, which we wl discuss,. it is
these connectons that interest us.
5. START MAKING SENSE - TOWARDS SEMANTIC DOCUMENTARY
The queston arises, 'Why is this potential interesting or useful in the feld
of online documentary producton?'. Watching work online is, some might
argue, already dfcult enough, and fnding it in the frst place is already a
challenge. Then vewing in a permanently interptible multplewindowed
screen with other information ever available at the click of a mouse might be
said to challenge the flm"s address to its audience. The "documentar' might
just drown in the sea of "data'.
We argue, however, that there are ways in which these afordances can
address some of the problems of the online viewing environment rather than
compounding them. These problems have to do with the apparent randomness
of navigaton, with the lack of perspectve produced by the excess of millions of
documentary video clips, the dominant temporal logic of online communica
tion that tends towards the perpetually unedited present. The propositon that
our current practce-based research explores is how an online documentary
migt encompass data to .take advantage of the new forms of social kowl
edge that are emergng, reflectng community and lived experience that can be
seen and represented (in video), but alo mang vsible alongside that those
other wider contextuallzing forces (hiding within the data and the Web).
just over 50 years ago, jean Rouch and Edgar Morin filmed French people
answering the queston, 'Are you happy?' in what became an early sequence
in the seminal documentary, Chronique d'un Ete (ouch, 1961). That flm
haessed the latest sync sound technology to explore the lives of the 'tibe of
people living i Paris'. The Are You Hapy? Project is fnding out what happens
when we ask the same queston i the global environment of the Web today.
Film -makers and enthusiasts have been invited to restage or reinterpret Rouch
and Morin' s sequence and upload the results to the video sharng site Vim eo.
Sequences have now been gathered fom diverse locatons across the world.
I the second stage of Chronique d'un Ete, Rouch and Morin followed
a number of individuals across the summer of 1960, staging exploratory
dialogues about life and society with them, individually and in goups. I the
second stage of The Are You Happy? Project, we are replacing that tempo
ral enquiiy with an enquiry across the network of the Web. Using Popcor
Maker, we are juxtaposing the vox pop sequences that have been submitted
with images and text on related
1
themes drawn fom social media platorms.
We also want to choreograph a coherent documentary experience for the user.
As the Popcor Maker has just been released at the tme of writng we offer
some early observatons fom this work-in-progress.
Experimentng with the Popcor Maker on this footage is a quite heady
experience, suggesting an aray of creatve possibilities and emergent docu
mentar poetics. The frst shock is that the authoring tool makes the montage
of video and content fom the live Web, side-by-side within a screen, as
easy as cutting two images together i sequence in iMovie. This i itself is
a revelation. It is over a decade now since Manovich (2001) came up with
the concept of spatal montage to describe the juxtapositon of images within
multiple computer windows. Manovich defned spatial montage in opposi
ton to temporal montage, the mode of cutting images into a linear sequence
initiated in flm editing, which became the dominant practce of twenteth
centur moving image culture.
While spatal montage is common now in computer-based culture - in
interactive documentar, for example - and there has been a flowering of
multple screen installations in the a world, creatng those juxtapositions in
computer-based work has untl recently involved a process where the visual
experience of the juxtaposition had to be imagined, planned through story
boards and wirefames, and brought into being throug hard coding by devel
opers. While it is now technically possible to create multple streams in various
desktop-editng systems, this is not everyday expertse. So it is remarkable that
the Popcor Maker allows you to ty out combinatons of video and live web
sources as readily as sketching. I 1948, Alexandre Astruc published his essay
calling for the 'camera-style', a system of cinema that would have the fex
ibilit of the written word. With the emergence of video recording as a func
ton of mobile phones, this vision has been realized i the realm of shootng.
Popcor Maker gives a foretaste of how spatal montage that includes tpes of
web data can become a veracular, a 'camera stylo' for web documentary.
But what logic should gover the combinaton of edited video and social
media fagments drawn in algorithmically? What is the value of combining
these sources? And what does the interface contibute to the efect of their
combinaton? How does spatial montage a ect meaning-makng?
It can be argued that the fg process efectvely lifts individuals out of
context, metaphorically deracinating them. As we have observed, documen
ta makers adopt a variety of stategies to address this problem. Beyond the
street interviews, Chronique d'un Ete can be seen as a series of dialogues that
illuminate the lives of the main characters through and in relaton to various
contexts -work, family, memory, current events. Semantic video might allow
an alteratve response to the challenge of context. I our experments with
The Are You Hay? Project, we are haessing the Popcor famework to
reinscribe the social and cultural context of the interiews.
As descrbed earlier, a number of early experiments with Popcor involved
adding informaton to fnished documentary content. Web pages and Wikipedia
enties would appear in windows alongside video, making for uncomfortable,
i not impossible, viewing. Our objectve is not to ceate an informatonal layer.
Our interest is in the potental for spatal montage, where montage is under
stood in the cinematc sense, as in the "Kuleshov efect', with a third mean
ing being produced through juxtapositon, in the blin of an eye. We have
therefore customized the Popcor Maker interface, losing the spaces outlined
for other content, so that the video sits within a black surround. A number of
sources - Flick, Twitter, Googe Maps - are defned so that they can appear
in spaces around the video, but these destnations are unmarked, so that the
content appears as the next shot appears in a linear edit -unannounced.
The frst experments are with Twitter. The Are You Happy? Project inter
views feature both common themes and noteworthy particularities. In
Mongolia, many people menton 'coun,try', saying, for instance, 'I am happy
to see my county prosper' and 'I am happy I was bor in Mongolia'. But
what does this mean to the viewer who knows little about Mongolia? I is not
self-evident. The words alone do not tell you what is happening there politi
cally or economically, or where these sentments might sit on a spectum fom
We're happy and we know it
jon Dovey 1 Mandy Rose
168
postcolonial relief through national pride to rampant nationalism. Puling in
Tweets tagged Mongolia alongside the video can play a signifcant role here.
Gobi Mega-mine puts Mongolia on brink of worlds biggest resource boom.
Mongolia cuts short Dalai Lama lecture tour under China pressure'. Tweets
offer considerable information in a fewwords.
Asked in diverse cultural contexts, the queston Are you happy?' elic
its revealing partcularity, such as this, but also gathers certain universal
responses. People everywhere say that happiness comes fom family, chil
dren, grandchildren. I migt seem that we ale al the sa>ne. Playing a twit
ter feed alongside the video disrupts this cosy impression. A twitter search
on Mongolia' and 'children' produces micro-narratives behind which lie
economic hardship and deprivaton. Some Mongolian children are clearly
adopted out of the count. Steet children ale a social challenge. Life is very
dif erent fom that in the United Kingdom. Video creates an illusion of near
ness, of similarity. Juxtaposing that with web data can reinscrbe specifcity,
d erence.
However, experimenting with Twitter also entails editorial and aesthetc
challenges. Incorporatng written social media content into a gobal project
is problematc. First and foremost, social media platforms are not universally
accessible and uptake is veryuneven. There is also an issue of language. While
there are Twitter comments available in Mongolian, for example, a systemfor
live translationis not. For now, the experiment is with tweets i English, bear
ing in mind that these are likely not to be indigenous content.
From an aesthetc perspectve, tweets work well playing alongside visual
sequences, but TheAre You hapy?Project ismostlysync soundinterviews, and
neither tweets nor subttled content get the viewer attenton they need when
Figure 1: Tweets about Mongoliafom 'The Are You Happy? Project'.
they are on-screen simultaneously. So we plan to explore alteratve ways of
incorporating Twitter. What would the efect be if the fa>ne fled with the
micro-posts for a fewseconds before the video started to play? What would it
be like toreplace the mainvideo imagewithtweets at certainpoints? The idea
is to use the text in a creatve tensionwiththe videoratherthanas explanaton,
to combine word and image in the spirit of Godardrather than current afairs.
Working with visuals - combining edited video with Flickr images -
immediately feels fitful and less problematic than text. The interiews
producedbyJohnBa>ryinTrinidadforAre You Happy? ale dominatedby spir
ituality and Christian imagery. For these Caribbean interviewees, happiness
is inextricably linked with the presence, absence and search for God. When
an inteiViewee in Trinidad mentions the church, we tag the video 'Trinidad'
and 'church', and pictures fom the photo-shaling website Flickr ale called
up. Tis has an interestngefect. Ione illustrated the word church with one
church, this might be so literal as to be comic. The profusion of churches that
is called up produces quite another efect. The catalogue of grand bulldings
dominating the landscape and images of rapt worshippers speak of history,
power and awe. To borrow a term fom the work of anthropologist Oifford
Geertz, this 'thickens' the visual/auditory 'descripton' provided by the video.
This is the work that the director generally does in making a documenta.y -
through in-depth inteiViews, shot selecton, cut-aways, voice-over. Here that
workis eo-created, and left somewhat to chance. The stills have been created
by authors not known to us, who have uploaded and tagged their images,
and made them available through a Creatve Commons license. We have
identifed themes i the flmed content and tagged the videos accordingly.
Figure 2: Interviewee in Mongolia with Flickrimagesfom 'The Are You Happy?
Proect'.
We're happyand we know it
169
]on Dovey 1 Mandy Rose
170
The images are then drawn in through an algorithm. As the Flickr feed is
live, the particular juxtaposition of still and video is left open, introducing
an element of unpredictability. That this eo-creation is productve is a value
judgement that people may disagree over. The random quality will, however,
be an aesthetic feature of HL documentary, and deseres further consid
eraton, which space does not allow here.
The crowd-sourced Flickr images then add context and texture to the video
content. Te fact that they sit side-by-side, that they are montaged in space,
plays a part in what efect that has. For Manovich, temporal montage repre
sents 'a logic of displacement', while spatial montage represents 'a logic of
additon and co-exstence'. In the Trinidadian example, the images of places
and people drawn in fom Flickr do not replace the interiewee on the screen.
They are alongside her, with her, placing her in a cultural context. Thus, we
can see how spatial montage lends itself to the presentaton of connections -
in this instance between individual and community, but equally between
places and across cultures.
Manovich (2001) predicted that spatial montage would ret to promi
nence in the twenty-frst century, citng a prescient statement by Foucault to
suggest why this aesthetc is so apt for our networked, globalized world, 'We
are now i the epoch of simultaneity; we are in the epoch of juxtaposition,
the epoch of near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed' (Manovich
2001: 325) . Popcor Maker points the way for documentary-making in this
environment.
7. CONCLUSION
The conclusions for the arguments and speculations in this article are contn
gent on the results of further exerimentation with Popcor. However, we
have established here the start of a process which, we argue, will tansform
the potential for documentary and see another new stage in its history. Video
content 'of the Web', live to the a ordances of networked connectvity, has
particular attactons to the documentary producer. It has the potential to
introduce different voices into a linear text, to offer in-depth investgaton of
particular sequences, and to recontextualize documentary material through
mobilizing the enormous eo-creatve potental of human discourse captured
in the Web. It ofers the potential for new ways to construct argument and
bring evidence to bear i documentary's attempt to shape our shared world.
However, we are also cautous and careful. For our aspiration to be real
ized, HTML5 requires the development of a whole new form of visual and
informational gr ar. Our technological moment produces the need for a
new generation of Kuleshovs and Eisensteins to develop montage aesthetics
for the database. This development will need rigour and care the documen
tary project is to survive in a recognizable form i the chaotic environment of
online mediaton. This is a rigour
'
that wl require a new set of understand
ings of the politics of search, that is to say the way in which meta-tagging
and search engines can combine to produce useful, challengng, argumenta
tive insight rather than bland 'trending now' updates. Such new forms will
be predicated on new literacies for the attention economy, in which search
becomes a function that producers can write and read, an active interenton
rather than a passive subjecton.
It seems likely that these forces will shape a different kind of documentary
in which the control over material assumed by a particular strand of its history
wl be challenged. In this domain, the user experience of a body of documen
tary material may change fom person to person and moment to moment.
The exact nature of the experience will emerge fom the interacton between
the search terms actve in the text and whatever is available online to respond
to them. I this sense, the documentary becomes a more open text, avail
able to polyvocal annotaton, its authority to name the world replaced by an
understanding that namin defnin arguing is always an encounter that is
relatonal, contngent, specc and emergent.
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SUGGESTED CITATION
Dovey, ). and Rose, M. (2012), 'We're happy and we know it: Documentary,
data, montage', Studies in Documentar Film, 6: 2, pp. 159-173, doi: 10.1386/
sd.6.2.159_1.
CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Jon Dovey is Professor of Screen Media at the University of the West of
England. He is the Director of the Digtal Cultures Research Cente (http://
.dcrc.org.uk/). He also heads up REACT, the AHRC Creatve Economy
Hub for Wales and the West that aims to connect arts research with the
Creatve Economy. He was a flm-maker and video artist before becoming
an academic. He has been working with Mandy Rose and the i-Docs team at
DCRC; see more at http://i-docs.org/. He is the author of Freakshmvs - First
Person Media and Factual T (Pluto Press, July 2000) and a co-author of Ne
Media -A Critical Introduction (Routledge, 2002/2008). He is also co-author of
Game Cultures (McGraw Hl , 2006).
Contact: Digital Cultures Research Centre, University of the West of
Engand, Peiasive Media Studio,. Watershed Media Centre, 1, Canons Road,
Harbourside, Bristol BS1 5T.
E-mail: jonathan.dovey@uwe.ac.uk
Mandy Rose is a senior research fellow at the Digital Cultures Research
Centre, University of the West of England. Her practce-based research looks
at the intersection between documentary and the social, semantc and open
Web. Mandy has devised and overseen a number of award-wn g interac
tve and partcipator projects. She was eo-founder and producer of BBC2's
'mass obseiVaton' camcordet project - Video Nation (94-2000), Executive
Producer of Capture Wales (2001-2007), a pioneering digital storytelling
project in the United Kingdom. She devised Voices (2004) - a major pan
platform collaborative exploration of language, accent and dialect across the
United Kingdom (Webby nominated) and MyScienceFictonLife (2006) - a
collectve historyof Britsh science fiction (WebbyHonoree). Mandy' s workas
a director includes Meeting the Msai Mob (BBC 2, 2001) and the series Pictures
in the Post (BBC 2, 1999). Mandy blogs at CollabDocs (ttp://collabdocs.
wordpress.coml) and is a contbutng editor to the i-Docs website (http://i
docs.org/).
E-mail: mandy.rose@uwe.ac.uk
)on Dovey and Mandy Rose have asserted their right under the Copyright,
Desigs and Patents Act, 1988, to be idented as the authors of this work i
the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.
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Studies in Documentary Film
Volume 6 Number 2
2onlntellect Ltd Article. English l anguage. doi: 10.1386/sdf.6.2.175_1
MARTIN RIESER
De Montfort University
Locative voices and cities i n

Ll bl b
ABSTRACT
This article principally examines two projects: Codes of Disobedience &
Dsfnctionality and Urban Digital Narratives undertaken in the spring and
summer 2011 in central Athens, which comprise an attempt to document a city at
the centre of the European fnancial frestorm by using the direct voices oflocal
people, through easily accssed locative markers using mobile phones. The locative
projects were undertaken as public engagement workshops using inner city street
locations, where personal stories were constructed and developed b volunteers using
Empedia software' to create trails trigered by GPS or QR codes. A series ofvideo
scnes, based on documentary experiencs ofplace and the communities in Athens,
were fetingly revealed at di erent positions in the chosen streets by the public
scanning QR codes on poster and sticker (visually related to either local peole or
places) with their mobile phones.
The widespread adoption of technologies that facilitate social actvity
aong prospectve users infuences comunt dynacs and into
duces the emergence of unique social interactons. The cityis augmented
trougmultidirectonal processes. Digital information is embedded in
persistent architectural forms (the built environment), yet at the same
time, environmental representations of the urban settngs are being
displayed on the screens of mobile communicatons devices.
(HybridCityConference Catalogue, Athens, 2011)
KEYWORDS
mobile media
tails
interactve
documentay
collectve reporting
citenpolitcs
Greece
l. Developed for iphones
by De Montfort
University and
Cuttlefish Multimedia
during a Knowledge
Transfer Partnership,
which deal with
information in the field
using a combination
of authored and user
generated content, see
www.empediainfo
175
Martin Rieser
2. Curator Daphne
Dragona and
participating organizer
Dimitris Charitos
(University of Athens),
technical support from
Phil Sparks (Cuttlefish
Multimedia) and jackie
Calderwood (Ph.D.
Candidate De Montfort
University), additional
technical support
Haris Rizopoulos,
Aris Tsakoumis
(University of Athens),
see, empedia.info/
maps/41and http//
globalgatewayproject.
eu/codes-of
disobedience
disfunctionality/
3. Curation, organization
and research: Eva
Kekou (Freelance)
Organization:
176
Athens Information
Technology College
(AIT), Technical support:
Jackie Calderwood
(Ph.O. candidate De
Montfort University),
Financial support The
British Council, lntalot
and HTC and see
http//empedia.info/
organisations/digital_
urban_narraUves/maps
INTRODUCTION
Karlis Kalnins coined the phrase 'locatve media' as the title for a workshop
hosted by RC, an electonic art and media center in Lala during 2002.
Whilst locatve media is closely related to augmentd reality (reality overlaid
with virtual reality) and to pervasive computing locative media concentrates
on social interacton with a specifc place through mobile technology. Hence,
many locatve media projects have a background in social, critcal or personal
memor. I this artcle I wdescribe attempts touse location-specc media in
documentary contexts, both as a researcher's tool and a wayto bring contem
porary documentar stories alive for the newtechnologcally aware public.
These two pilots investgated appropriate forms of content and deliver for
locatve textual, aural and visual media to animate urban landscapes through
the development of a shared contemporary archive, and should ultimately
help us to evaluate the public uses of such systems and the reactons of users.
In doing so, we attempted to establish the best forms of open source website,
updatng and distibutng mult -authored locatve documentary through the
Empedia platform. It was intended as a demonstator of the potential for loca
tve and Web technologes combinedwith collaboratve documentaton in the
feld, in creatng knowledge networks mapped to topography. Contextually
relevant 'texts' were annotated through appropriate forms of aural and visual
inscripton for interpretaton in the feld using locatve tiggers. A key objec
tve at the project end w be to evaluate user behaviours and reactons to
both interface and content - this is still work in progress, but we anticipate
interest in these pilots foma range of public insttutons.
The aims of the two 2011 Athens-based workshopswere to study elements
of the urban environment and to create newlocatve tails in the form of a
stuctured collaborativenarrative, enriching the citythroug interactve content
which refected its contemporary tansformations. Codes of Disobedience &
Dysfunctonality2 was part of the Hybrid Cit Conference initative, spon
sored by Global Gateway. Inspired by the numerous posters and the dense
grafft encountered in the city cente, the workshop cmmected the urban
surroundings of Athens to opinions and statements of its inhabitants towards
the challenges imposed by current social, political and fnancial circum
stances, namely: anger, disobedience, oppositon and dysfunctonality. The
features of the contemporary metopolis in the midst of a period ofcrisis were
the main focus of the project, posing at the same time questions about the
role of and scale of mediaton by technology in urban everyday life. The work
formed after the completon of the workshop was presented at the premises
of the Natonal Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, on the Interet and
in the cente of the city (on the steets Skoufa-Navarinou-Tzavela). QR coded
stckers, ca g imager fom the immediate environment, were placed in
selected locations and by scanning themwith a mobile phone, access to the
audio-visual material, created duHng the workshop, was accessible to the
public. Combining elements of installaton a, urban intervention, gaming
and performance, Codes of Disobedience & Dysfunctionality refected my
long-term practice using art and technolog. A couple of months later, Urban
Digtal Narratves3 1ooked at the crsis of immigraton and gentrifcaton in the
Gazi area and the impacts of neo-liberal economic processes on the locally
diverse social and ethnic groups. Funded by the British Council, the project
explored the new possibilites offered by technolog and attempted to ask
whether one could really capture the social needs and atttudes of in city like
Locative voices and cities in crisis
Athens, and whether the patters and characteristics of urbalife could be
identfed by adaptng the uses of these communicaton systems?
THE PARADIGM
As computng leaves the desktop andspills out onto the sidewalks, streets and
public spaces of the city, we increasinglyfind information-processing capacity
embedded within, and distibuted throughout the material fabric of everyday
urban space. Ubiquitous computng evangelists have heralded a coming age
of urban inastructure capable of sensing and responding to the events and
activites tanspiring around them. Imbued with the capacity to remember,
corelate and anticipate, this near-future 'sentent' city is envisioned as being
capable of refexvely monitorng its environment and our behaviour within it,
becoming an actve agent in the organization of everyday life in urban public
space. However, even the use ofpassive, simple code-based technologies can
giveagency to the public and create a newtype of embedded history, whichi
these projects represents a ver diferent formof 'sentence'.
Our mental representatons of ctes are necessarily complex, and to me it
seems problematc for artsts to merely map literal representatons back onto
space usng locatve technologies, but this appears to have been the predomi
nant practce of many early projects such as the frst Locatve Media workshop
(2003)' and UrbanTapesties (2002-2004).5 Research into spatal representaton
shows how mental maps create subjective distorton, descibing not space, but
the objects or nodes in it, and so our inner representatons appear to be a direct
contadicton to the contnuous Euclidian 'space between' of a (Googe) map,
whichis the dominant tope ofthe age of GPS (Tverskyet al. 1999). The projects
described are an attempt to viewthe city as a series ofmarkers, landmarks and
human presences, rather than as anabstact representaton of space.
Figure 1: Codes ofDisobedience, The trail online Martin Rieser.
4. The international
workshop entitled
Locative Media
focusing on
GPS, mapping
and positioning
technologies took
place froml6 to 26 July
2003 at the K@2 Culture
and Information Centre
on an abandoned
military installation in
liepajaon thecoast of
the Baltic Sea.
s. The Urban Tapestries
software platform
allows people to
author their own
virtual annotations
of the city, enabling a
community's collective
memory to grow
organically, allowing
ordinary citizens
to embed social
knowledge in the new
wireless landscape of '
the city.
_ ...._ ..
*Y*
.
i~w~== w
-
PP
.wm
..__________
177

Martin Rieser
6. Mobile Bristol is
a professional!y
co-ordinated team of
business and academic
researchers from
Hewlett Packard,
Bristol University, UWE
and digital product
experts The Appliance
Studio, http://www.
mobilebristol.co.uk/
QueenSq.html
7. See httpJ/empedia.
info/maps/20
178
I westerart's historcal taditon, the renderngof landscape has not only
elucdatedthe relatonshipbetweenbeauty, aesthetcpleasure andthe represen
taton ofthe nahrral world, but has also made visible systems ofpower, control.
dominaton and surveillance. New media technologies, such as GPS , digital
data visualizaton and sanifcaton, can potentally reformulate and expand the
possibilities for representng 'nature' and 'environment' by altering, frst, the
ways we conceptualize and experence our bodily relatonship in the urban
landscape, and second, our teatent of landscape as 'object' or 'picture', and
third, through our sense of landscape as a repository of history; as aninhuman
body that is marked, scarred, or massively reshaped by the passage of human
and geologcal tme. Artworks that use technologies such as GPS have tans
formed landscape fom a 'picture' into a mult-layered, mult-channel experi
ence, often incorporatng multple sense modalites and extending beyond the
instant into a highly duratonal, expanded spata-temporal feld. Such projects
were usually artworks with stong documentary features and were predicated
on this newsense of embodiedrepresentatonof the urban landscape.
Te use of locatve media in documentarcontexts is not new, but in the
past has relied heavily on customized equipment and live project guides.
I can think of the early examples of Riot!' (2004) fomMobile Bristol, which
depicted the Bristol Riots of 1831. This frst GPS-enabled locative drama was
an immersive and powerful experience, engaging with the immediate spaces
of history, mapped onto a Georgan square where the original events took
place. Jeff Knowlton, Jeremy Hight and Naomi Spellman's 34n118w (flight
2002) dealt with a similar historical hinterland i L and used locatve media
to 'read' a spacewithGPS andoterwireless technology, exagthe many
layers of citspaces. To quote Hight:
The story world becomes one of juxtaposition, of overlap, of layers
appearing and falling away. Place becomes a mult-tered and malle
able concept.
(2003)
Marking narratve tiggers through locative media, both projects drewmult
ple lines fom archaeology, fction, archltectrue and design acoss the urban
terrain, but these projects tended to deal with an historical past rather than
the lived present. Newer projects such as Heygate Lives (2010), which was a
student-led iphone project inthe area of Elephant and Castle, London, made
for a more immediate contemporary documentary engagement on publically
available technology. The Heygate estate was due to be demolished in winter
2010 and had been emptying of residents since 2008. A few months before
its L demolition the students organized a tour of the estate to on an
iPhone. Using the GPS capabilities of the device, Heygate Lives sensed the
participant's locaton and steamd a pre-recorded video corresponding to
that locaton. A Sandra Gaudenzi observes inher forthcomingPh.D. thesis:
Hegate Lives is a locative narratve that uses a branchingnavigation: the
story does not unfold the user is not physically in the spot that gives
meaningto the narrative.
(Gaudenzi 2010)
Our ownprecursor for theAthens projects was Riverains} similarly executed
in a London venue in the same year as Heygate Lives. Riverains created a
Locative voices and cities in crisis
story trail along Old Steet and Shoreditch High Street, accessible through a
user's mobile phone. It mappedboth the taginaryundergroundworldof the
Riverains and layers of London's history onto the urban landscape. Through
text messaging, 'Layar' Augmented Reality, GPS locaton sensing and QR
barcode code reading, participants could use their mobile phone to discover
a hidden underground world, which corresponded to real locations on Old
Street and Shoreditch High Steet. Participants could hear the Riveralns'
voices at sixteen sites and fullyexperience their video narratves.
Riverains was frst commissioned as an experimental concept work by the
B'tween Festval in Manchester, i 2008 8 I was then piloted in London at the
luFestival in Shoreditch in September 2010. Riveralns approached local
history by ceatng a mult-user story space accessible throUgmobile phones,
which collaboratvely mapped an taginaryworld and a cit's history onto an
urban landscape. Riverains were imagned as souls tied to watery energes,
r g under our cities inrivers, cables, sewers, tunnels and caves. They could
tavel unseenbyteseinvisibleroutes andcluster around sites oftheirpast expe
rience. ThroughGPS and QRcode reading, partcipantswere encouraged touse
their mobile phone like a douser, to discover this hidden world, which corre
sponded to real undergroundlocatons aligned witthe sites of past events.
Both Manchester and London have rich underground worlds of hidden
or 'lost' rivers, nuclear fallout facilites and command centres and Second
World War bunkers, in additon to Victorian sewers and underground rail
way systems. They also have an archaeology going back through medieval
to Roman tmes. The Riverains were drawn fom this rich history of poverty,
industrial revolution, immigraton, political protest, commerce and innova
ton, gangwarfare and crime. Once piloted, the project planned to map video
and photo-stories across cental areas of other cites.
Riverains was in Pilot form at the ll u Festval in September
2010 tacing a portion of Old Street and Shoreditch High Steet. 'Secret
Figure 2: Riverains on Empedia platonn showing media locations Martin Rieser.
8. See http//www.
youtube.com/
watch?v=ltxmjJVFWk
179
Martin Rieser
Figure 3: Riverains workshop Interaction in Shoreditch. Photo: Jackie Calderwood.
180
Subterranean London' was the third Il u event, curated by Jane Webb,
and located in the basement of Shoreditch Town Hall. Over 50 artists/artist
groups exhibited and performed during the week-long festval, which also
included guided underground tours, ast talks and workshops. Over 3300
people attended the opening evening, Thursday 9 September 2010, and 9247
people in total visited Ilumini during the whole week's event.
Riverains at Ilumini was desiged to comprise four elements, offerng
interacton to users with varying levels of technical requirement (users were
expected to provide their own mobile phone). The work built on Riverains'
development for Manchester's B'tween festival, extending it through collabo
raton with artists Ximena Alarcon and Kasia Molga, with technical develop
ment by Sean Oark and Phll Sparks (Empedia by Cuttlefsh Multmedia) and
Gareth Howell (using Layar). Two 'guided walks' followed in which partci
pants were supported in using te QR code reader version, and Layar (for
those with suitable phones), as they followed the tail along Old Steet and
Shoreditch High Steet. Those without appropriate phones were able to share
the experience using spare iPhones during the walks. Riverains was aimed at
the broad spectm Ilumini audience.
The video pieces by Alarcon and Rieser were either tiggered by photo
gaphing QR codes distbuted on stckers along the route, ca g visual clues
as to locatons associated with the video content. Wile encouraging audiences
to download in advance in areas of fee WiFi, the 3G downloads took no more
than a minute and in fact began steaming almost instantly. The Layar version
was equally successful and it is hoped that the next incaaton wlfully develop
all the intended game elements and the user software to upload further stories.
A it was, the rich history of Shoreditch was exlored with pieces on early
Shakespeare usingimagined voices of characters or actors fomthe plays Henr
W and Romeo and Juliet; verbatm readings fom the coroner's report of the
'Ripper' murder of May Kelly: held in the Town Hall site of the exhibiton,
with interjectons by the Ripper's imagined persona; inunigrant voices fom
Jewish, Huguenot and contemporary naratves were available, as were refec
tons on the Plague in London, ceated in dramatsed monologues based on
Daniel Defoe' s Joural ofthe Plague Year. Sufagette histories became audio-visual
sound-image montages echoing their teatent in Holloway Prison. Finally
there were refectons on the early history of underground rivers that css-cross
the area and notonally held the historical presences, which are the Riverains.
From this pilot we went on directly to develop a more abrasive, contem
porary and collaboratve documentary form in the Greek context. One of the
problematics we had idented fom Riverains was the self-conscousness of
phone use in public and the complex relationship users had to interacting
with materials in the steet. Perhaps part of the general problem with this
new mobile documentaton is the one identified byVirilio- that of the change
Locatlve voices and cities in crisis
fom considered diegesis to continuous and automatic present; where the user
creatng the narratves becomes both subject and object, in a new form of pan
cinema. Paul Virlio uses the example of Michel Kier, and his m Der Riese/
The Giant (1984) in materializing the change of the function of the cameraman
in the m. Te m is a montage of images that are recorded by automatic
surveillance cameras in German cities, and their major public places. Klier
himself held this video to be the end of his a. This is according to Virllo,
because the visual subject has been transferred to a technical effect, which
forms a sort pancinema, which turs our most ordinary acts into movie action,
into new visual material. This means to Vil o the culminaton of the progess
of representatonal technologies, of their military, scientifc and investigative
instrumentalisation over the centuries (1994).
I our tvvo described projects we have ted to unpack some of the tacit
assumptions, latent biases and hidden agendas at play behind the new and
emerging urban infastructures and to avoid the de-natung of the content
through the technology employed. Codes of Disobedience took an emblematc
street in cental Athens running fom the fashionable Kolanaki distict down
towards the cente of resistance to the austerity measures, crossing the site of
the Shrine to Alexander Grigoropoulou, the boy who was shot by the police
which set of the riots of December 2008, on the corer of Mesolongiou, now
unoficially renamed Alexander Grigoropoulou Street and Tzabella Steet, and
on to the anarchistic regions of the city where early self-curated social projects
posited a communal alterative to the new austerity.9
Figure 4: Codes ofDisobedience: QR Code Sticker emples Martin Rieser.
g. There are several
'people's parks' that
were squatted bylocals
to thwart the city's
plan to turn them into
parking lots.
181
Martin Rieser
182
I Athens, home toalmosthalf of Greece's 11 million-strongpopulation,
the sigs of austerity - and poverty - are everwhere: in the homeless
and hungrywhoforage through municipal rubbish bins late at night; in
the cash-strapped pensioners who pick up rejects at the street markets
that sell fuit and vegetables; in the shops nowboarded and closed and
in the thousands of ordinary Greeks who can no longer a ord to take
family outings or regularlyeat meat.
(Helena Smith, The Guardian, 13th May 2011)
With the Greekresponse to the austeritmeasures of the Papandreou gover
ment in mind, we askedpassers by:
'Do they see disobedience as a positve or negative issue?'
'How has their life been afected in the last months?'
'What forces them (Ianything to disobey?'
'Is it a matter of ideology, ofsevereeconomic diffcultes?'
'Has it perhaps become a lifestyle choice?'
'What would theywtite on the walls?'
Stories emergedthroughmanysuch street encounters andalso throughdelib
erative interiews'vithlocal workers, includinga survivingtraditional plumber,
a street vegetable stall-holder and the owner of a juggling emporium! Other
narratves were more generic, ranging fom the serious (examining the drug
Figure 5: Codes ofDisobedience at The Shrine to Aleander Grigoropoulou showing
both sticker and poster in situ Martin Rieser.
Locativevoices and cities in crisis
culture of the Navarino end of the street) to the hilarious-satrizing the Greek
Orthodox church's obsession with barcodes as 'works of the devil'. I addi
tion, at the gentedKolonaki end ofthe street virtual graffti was re-imposed
on walls where it had been previously painted out. I both projects the link
between the stckers and posters to the place is crucal. We were attemptngto
get the participants torevisit the textures and the faces of the location in great
detail, to notce the texture and uniqueness of each place, to re-imagine the
city as a place of potential and beauty through the energies of the everyday.
The intenton was to reapply some of the earliest felicites of documentary
practce to the new fagmented genres of micro-documentary, as is vividly
exlainedin this quote fomartst Duncan Speakan:
Grierson described documentary as 'the creatve teatent of actual
ity', flms like 'Nightmail' and'Coal Face' seemso farremoved fomthe
type of 'documentary' that fls our sceens today. They took everyday
realites and famed then within beautful soundtracks, creatve musi
cal editngtechnques, poetyandabstracton. I guess that's the knd of
docwnentaryI'm tring to make, ones that showus nothingmore than
the everyday, but trand showus howbeautful it can be.
(Watson2010)
I his book The Practice ofEveryday Life, Michel de Certeau defnes urban
space accordingto the patters ofthose who use it. He suggests that ' . . . space
is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated by
the ensemble of movements deployed witin it . & I short, space is a prac
lced place' (1984). This very much became our startngpoint for the project,
since the disbict was a deeply pattered space defned by the proxmity and
distance of its mixed communites. Digital Urban Narratves was realized
Figure 6: Outside the Jugling Emporium-showing poster and sticker in use.
Mrtin Rieser.
Martin Rieser
184
, -=
Figure 7: Urban Digtal Narratives: Kyra Koula Tripolemou, Shopkeer
Martin Rieser.
through a collaboratve workshop in the Gazi-Keramikos distct of Athens,
which constucted a locatve route via collaboraton with another mixed group
of students and architects, artsts, photographers, video-makers and computer
scientists fom Athens Insttute of Technology (^.
The chosen area of Gazi-Keramikos was a very mixed inner city area, where
gentrcaton had created a pleasure zone of clubs and cafes surounded by
established artisan communites and migrant communities to the north. These
disparate elements faced multple problems, above all - a sense of powerless
ness in the face of the ill-formed status for recent migrants and of displace
ment by rising property prices and rents in the south of the area, together with
an iu of noisy and youthful revellers, with hedonistc values into conserva
tve workng neigbourhoods.
Naturally tensions were created between these disparate groups, and we
found an underlying reactive anger in the settled Greek community, which
compromised the project i its fnal stages. Lakhou Steet taverses the area
around the metro station. It had been radically transformed durng the prev
ous fve years, with old buildings, houses and warehouses being converted
into modem bars, cafes. Leonidou Steet stll maintained a residental char
acter. By succeeding Lakhou Stret and traversing the neighbourhoods of
Keramikos and Metaxourgio, it helped us trace the tansformaton i urban
character along its length, almost in the form of a history.
After the Olympic games and given the absence of a progam or
plan to answer the pressing issues of a Mediterranean metopolis in
tansformaton, the cente was almost abandoned to its fate. As a result,
for many years now, the city has resembled a ship tossed helplessly on
stormy seas. As central Athens gew in the characteristic marmer of a
disordered Mediterranean cty, the market forces privileged the creaton
Locative voices and cities in crisis
of entertairunent zones and we saw phenomena of arbitary and ruthless
commercializaton by wrrestained private developers, instead of the cea
ton of well-planned residental areas for the middle classes. The displace
ment of local inhabitants appeared as a clear tend,10 but in the long
it did not prove partcularly advantageous for the upper middle class and
their aspiratons; instead, it created profts for short-term speculators and
especally, the owners of nigtspots and black economy enterprises.
(zirtzilaki 2011)
At frst the workshop progressed happily, with its ver mixed group of partci
pants fom desig, architectural and arts backgrounds - some experienced
practtoners and some post-gaduate students. Multple and complex nara
tves were recorded i audio-visual form, sourced fom all the disparate socal
groups in the neighbourhood, who were photogaphed and interviewed after
giving consent. It was only durng the fnal stage of the project when QR code
stckers featuring video story characters were posted up in the neighbourhood
south of the meto, that one elderly Greek's wife objected vociferously to his
image being made public and forcbly made a citzen's arrest on a partcipatng
flm-maker! This was in spite of the subject having given consent. It revealed
a deep well of suspicion and anger and a community closed against outsider
interventons, no matter however well-intentoned. Althoug an isolated inc
dent in an otherse successful project, it showed how close to the surface hurt
and suspicion exsts in these challenged and displaced taditonal communites.
However, the populaton compositon in Metaxourgo is stll rather mixed.
Old residents wth a working class backgound reside in the antparohi
building next to immigants. The members of the Roma minority live in
the low-rise, not well malntalned buildings, while the high class genti
fers renovate architecturally interestng buildings. Te bohemian gent
. .ers either live in aparhents next to immigrants and old residents, or in
the well-maintained pichrresque housing stock. The Cinese community
has developed and many Ornese shops have opened in te area, mainly
specag on clothing tade, designatng parts of the area as the China tow
of Ath, while many Arabic dells and restaurants are in close proxit.
(zirtilaki 2011)
It is a striking feature of the area that the playground of afuent young
Athenians, lies cheek by jowl with successive immigrant waves and the tradi
tonal white Greek remnants.
It is not surprising that Athens has recently become the focus of resistance
to the impositon of draconian nee-liberal disciplines on its economy and that
it remains the flash point for any fuhrre European economic crisis and the space
where the contradictions of the market and its efects on the contemporary
city appear in their acutest form. The uses of dlgital technology can highlight,
augment and interret these contradictons, giving voice to the dispossessed,
though ultimately their soluton remains a political one.
While media arts using locatve tools have naturally tended towards urban
environments and been drawn fom eier game or Situationist orientatons, I
am more concered to develop a theory and practice of situated and embod
ied arts related to a broader spectm of ambulant practce, referencing back
wards to the earlier art forms, but making use of the new digital affordances.
What I think we could postulate now is that there exst two domains of locatve
10. The majority of the
Christian community
consists of elderly
people, who claim that
most of their friends
and former neighbours
have left the area
because they could not
tolerate the loud noise
from clubs during the
night hours.
185
Martin Rieser
186
practice-the

digital tame

of social media, online consumer culture and most
digital arts, and the 'wild' where addressing citcal conditions in the 'real'
world- poverty disempowerment and engaged locatedness have yet to fnd
a meaningl voice in perasive digtal media. The two projects mayhave had
a fawed documentary methodology given the imperatves of tme and their
combined artistc directon, but theywere genuine attempts to document and
present local voices in as unltered a way as was possible.
Gai i partcular gave rise to resonant examples of inner city migrant
lives. One boyfoundpushing a supermarket trolley flledwith scap was !iter
allymarooned. His fatherhad died in India the weekbefore. He hadno pass
port, home, relatves or other means to eahis living. His narratve contasts
cruellywith typicallyupbeat tavel guide informaton:
In recent years the Gazi has been repaired, restored and re-established
as an entertainment distct due to its proxmity within the center of
Athens. This transformatonhasbrought aniuofa exhibits, musical
festvals, and numerous bars and restaurants to the area. Gazi is home
to the Technopolis whichis a 30,000 squaremeter industial museum of
modem architecture that plays host to many different kinds of exhibi
tons throughout the year. In the past ten years, Gazi has also become
the gayvillage of Athens which was formerly located in Kolonaki and
SyngrouAvenue. Gazi is an up and coming neighborhood that contin
ues to grow inpopulationas the area continues to be reformed and new
more expensive housing is built.
(The Historof Gazi 2011)
The historyis further complicatedby a complex clash of inunigraton polices.
In the 1970s Muslims were seen as a source ofcheapLabour,
Duringthe 1970s the govergdictatorship decided to employMuslims
fomN orthemGreece to the Gas factory. These were the frst Muslims
to reside in the area; they rented abandoned houses, whose land
lords had left the area. However, the exstence of an ethnic minorit
led to fuer outward migration of the local populaton. Additonally,
during the 1980s the social - democrat party (PASOK), which was in
power, ofered ethnic minorities the opporhit to work for the public
sector. Hence, many Greek Muslims migated to Athens, and rented
abandoned buildings in the Gas neigbourhood, in order to gain prox
imity to the exstingMuslimcommunity.
(Alexandri 2009)
Whereas i the 2000s Greece became a soft entpoint formigrantsandasylum
seekers fomAfghanistan and Iraq,, whose right to entry in the European Union
led to Greece beingused as a catchment withno ext andno goverent aid.
Above a , immigraton has played a deterg role i the tansfor
maton of the cty cente. Initally, interal migrants arrived lookng for
shelter and set up their cofee shops, goceries and associatons. They
gatheredin and around Omonoia Square, met their kin and with other
members of their socal group to subsequently disperse around the city.
After 1990, thereare newarrivals. These are displacedurbannomadswho
had been moving around in emergency conditons. They start a iving
fomdiferent locatons. Due to its geography the city of Athens was to
become one of the main entances of migrants directed towards Europe.
Once more, we see the creaton of gathering places, cofee shops and
groceries, restaurants Interet points andphone call centes. Bycontast
there is stll no ofcal recepton policy for immigrants and asylumseek
ers. Atheyare facedwith is a systemof brutal arbitariness.
Locativevoices and cities in crisis
(Alexandri 2009)
As I write, a technocratic impositionof austerityhas been imposed on Greece
igoringthe democratc call of the nowdeposed Papandreoufora referendum
on further austerity measures, which no matter how calculated his call, laid
bare the nahrre of the EUproject andits real imperatves. The stories collected
durng the two projects are a snapshot of a country whose basic systems are
breakingdown, where dysfunctionalityandresistance are the emergingurban
behaviours in a broad swathe of the public.
AsJordanCrandell speaks ofthenew' computatonal culture', describedas 'a
machine-aided process of discplinary attentveness, embodied i practce, tat
i boundup within the demands ofa newproductonandsecuritregme'.
The challenge in this Brave NewWorld
. . . is not only to endeavour to understand this operational constuct,
but to understand the forms of oppositon to it that are emerging in
the globalized world. For the operational is oniy one 'window' onto
realit. There are other orientatons that counter it, and for which by
its very nahrre, it is unable to account. It is powerless to envision terms
of engagement that do not operate according to its logics. It can only
assig them to the realm of the barbaric or irratonal: that which lies
outside of its license on reason.
(Crandell 2011)
REFERENCES
Alexandri, Georgia (2009), 'The gas district gentrcaton story', Master's
thesis of Science in Sustainabilit, Planning and Envirorunental Policy,
University ofAthens, Greece
Crandell, Jordan (2005), 'Operatonal media', 1 June, CTheory, c theory.net.
Accessed 21 November 2011.
de Certeau, Michel (1984), The Prctic ofEveryday Lie, Berkeley: Universityof
Califora Press.San Francisco,USA
Gaudenzi, Sandra (2010), 'The experiential documentary through the lenses
of the live documentary', Interactive Documentary: Tlards an Aesthetic of
the Multiple, chapter 6, http://w .interactvedocumentary.net/about/me/.
AccessedNovember2011.
Hight, Jeremy (2003), 'Narrative Archaeolog, S er, Steetnotes, http://
w .xcp.bf.org/hight.htl. AccessedJuly 2005.
Smith, Helena (2011), 'Greek crisis forces thousands of Athenians into rural
migraton', The Guardian, 13 May, http://w .guardian.co.uk/world/2011/
may/13/greek-crisis-athens-rural-migration#history-link-box. Accessed
September 2011.
Tversky, Barbara, Kim, Joseph and Cohen, Andrew (1999), Mental Models
ofSpatial Relations and Transformations fom Language, StanfordUniversity/
Indiana University Indiana, USA http://w .psych.stanford.edu/-bt/
space/papers/tverskykimcohen99.doc.pdf. Accessed September 2011.
Martin Rieser
188
. . *

--
Tzirtilaki, Eleni (2011), 'Athens: A Mping of Contrasts', Greek Lft Review,
http:/ /geekleftreview.wordpress.com/2011/01/12/athens-social-ecology
and-territorial-justce/. Accessed May 2011.
Virilio, Paul (1994), The Vision Machine, London: BFI.
Watson, Jeff ( 2010), 'Bloginterviewwith Duncan Speakman: Frming Everday
Realities', Remote Device.net, 7 October, http://remotedevice.net/blog/
subtlemob- creator-duncan-speakman-on-faming-everyday- realites/.
Accessed 21 November 2011.
The History of Gazi -Athens (2011), 'Placesonline-world travel guide, tourst
informaton, hotel, travel and vacatons', http://w .placesonline.com/
europe/greece/athens/ladmarks_and_historic_sites/the_history_of_gazi.
asp. Accessed April 2011.
WEBSITE REFERENCES
Hight, Jeremy (2002), '34 north 118 west', Art in Motion Festval, 15 November,
http://www.xcp.bf.org/hight.html. Accessed July 2005.
'Empedia', http://w .empedia.info. Accessed October 2011.
'Mobile Bristol', http://w .mobilebristol.co.uk/QueenSq.html. Accessed
July 2005.
'Urban Tapesties', http://urbantapestries.net/. Accessed July 2005.
'Locative Media Workshop', K@2 Culture and Information Cente, 16-26 July,
(2003), http://locatve.x-i.net/. Accessed July 2005.
SUGGESTED CITATION
Rieser, M. (2012), "Locatve voices and cities in crisis', Studies in Documentary
Film, 6: 2, pp. 175-188, doi: 10.1386/sdf.6.2.175_1.
CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Professor Rieser has worked in the feld of interactive arts since the early
1980s. He has been a pioneer curator of interatonal exhibitons in elec
tonic art, including The Electronic Eye: Euroean Electonic Art 1986, and the
frst Interatonal survey exibiton of Digital Printakng: The Electronic Print,
Aolfni i Bristol, 1989. More recently he eo- curated the Inside Out exhibiton
of rapid prototped miniature sculptures made as an asts' exchange between
Austalia and the U, shown at venues in Austalia and acoss the U.
He is research Professor at the Insttute of Creatve Technologies in The
Faculty of Art, Design and Humanites at De Montfort University. His art
practices i interet and interactive narrative installation art have been seen
around the world including China, France, Holland, Austria, Greece, London,
USA, Germany, Italy and Austalia. He has published numerous essays and
books on digtal art including New Screen Media: Cinema/ ArtNarrative (FII
ZK, 2002), and has recently edited The Mobile Audience, locative technology
and a (Rodopi, 2011).
Contact: 1,The Gateway, De Montfort University, Leicester LEl 9BH, U.
E-mail: mrieser@du.ac.uk
Martn Rieser has asserted his right under the Copyght, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be idented as the author of tis work in the format that was
submitted to Intellect Ltd.
SOF 6 {2) pp. 89-202 Intellect Limited 20u
Studies i n Documentary Film
Volume 6 Number 2
20l2 1ntellect Ltd Article. English l anguage. doi: 10.1386/sdf.6.2.189_1
KERRIC HARVEY
George Washington University
'Wal k-I n Documentary':
New paradi gms for game
based i nteractive storytell i ng
and experienti al confl i ct
mediation
ABSTRACT
In this article I explore the useflness of adapting Alttive Reality Gaming (ARG)
paradigms to 'interactive documentr', an emerging new media genre with great
apeal for generl flm audiencs, as well as an innavative new tool fr use in public
anthropology and in Drama for Confict Trnsformation (DCT). The potential
success of ARG-based documentary as a new media stortelling format, I argue,
rests on interactive documentar's ability to transfonn conventional non-fction flm
viewing into a vibrantly engaging exeriential practic in which prducer, subject
and audience have the ability to eo-create more nuancd modalities for non-fction
media narratives than are currently achievable using traditional ethnographic and/
or storytelling paradigms.
KEYWORDS
new media formats
interactve documen
tar
alteratve reality
games
iersive media
va storelling
augmented reality
media
189

Kerric Harvey
190
THEORETICAL ARGUMENT
Specically, I suggest that an entrelynewtype of non-fction fhn experence
can be achieved by combining the cental principles of Web-based interac
tive documentarywith the operatonal practces of' alteratve reality gaming'
(AG). The core argument here is that, being a game, the success of an AG
depends on the continued and active participaton of 'players' rather than
on the passive viewing of an 'audience', a phenomenon that is reminiscent of
interactve documentary, per se.
Additionally, I theorze that AGs have the potental to help equalize the
relatonships betvveen tvvo double sets of players that populate the conven
tonal documentary m universe - documentary creators and documentary
audiencesJ on the one hand, and the producers and the subjects of documen
tary h_ on the other. I anthropological terminology, I argue that AGs can
help ameliorate unintentonal objectification of 'the other' in the visual data
collection phase of documentary work. This is because the AG format can
assist in situatons in which the documentarian's own cultural world-viewis
superimposed on the naratve material during the editing process, a chronic
storytellingriskagainst whichnon-linear and/orviewer-contolled storypres
entational designmayverywell provide some measure of safeguard.
This is achieved, I theorize, byimmersingall three signatories to the docu
mentary flm-making process - producers, subjects and audiences - in the
shared imaginary environment that surrounds the storytelling act. In closinSt
I propose several techniques for importing this paradigm shift in how we
mabout documentary h_ per se, into fhn-based ethnogaphy as well
as into Drama for Conict Transformaton C, a feld of practcal as well
as intellectual endeavour in which theatical technique is fused with ethno
gaphic practce to promote productve intercultural dialogue across intacta
ble political, religous or economic divides.
'INTERACTIVE DOCUMENTARY' THEORY AND PRACTICE
Meadows (2003) describes the basic notion of 'the interactive narratve' as:
'a time-based representation of character and action in which a reader can
alect, choose, or change the plot' (eadows 2003; Vladica and Davis 2008),
but more nuance is needed to illustrate the intricate relationship betvveen
'form' and 'content' within interactve stortelling genres.
Unlike taditonal documentary film, interactve documentary provides
opportunity for content producers and their intended audiences to actually
eo-create either the media product itself or the viewer's cogitve and tempo
ral experience in 'consuming' the media product, often using the Interet to
engage in critcal dialogue that shapes both the content and the formof non
fcton m, video and online multimedia. Forian Thallhofer and Beake Bas'
Galata Brdg (2010; online at: htt
p
://planetgalata.com/) and David Dufesne
and Phillipe Brault's Pson Valle (2010; vewable at: http://prisonvalley.arte.
tv/?langen) are tvvo excellent examples of slightly dif erent types of interac
tive documentar i which this occurs.
In some instances, however, the 'interactve' part of an interactive
documentary involves a m of online and offine material; that is to say,
people partcipate in the documentary by engaging in a series of actons out
in the physical landscape. In one interretation of the word 'interactive',
for example, the 'eo-creation' aspect of the documentary results not fom
online interactvity, but fomthe way in which decisions about the inclusion
or exclusion of narratve material have been made - in other words, about
what goes into an otherse taditonal, linear narrative product. This method
of achieving 'interactivity' is illustated by the increasing number of online
non-fictonvideo sites that use a crowd-sourcingmodel ofcollectve decision
makingin all stages of the 'i-doc' creaton.
Stcturally, the main malleable elements of an interactive documentary
are: Authorial voice; producton philosophy and protocol, and; conditons of
recepton. Ontologically, interactive documentary can differ fom taditonal
documentary and traditional ethnographic fhn in at least four fundamental
ways, although not every 'i-doc' displays each distinguishing characteristic.
Martn Lister (2003) has provided a useful and comprehensive analysis of
interactvitin the newmedia, emphasizin&among other things, the impor
tance of media interactivity as a means to interene in ideological processes.
For the purposes of this article, however, I'll focus on the following four
elements as the key taits of an 'interactve' documentary:
Authorship. A interactve documentary is not necessarily the product of a
single authorial vision or a ued voice, or even the result of work by an
identfable creative team. To some degree, this is always the case with flm
making it is an intensely collaboratve medium. But the concept of 'multi
ple authorship' in the interactve documentary world goes far beyond simple
collaboraton. In many ways, it is not 'multple authorship' as much as it is
fagentedauthorship. One ofthe signature taits of many types ofthe 'i-doc'
is that the flm's audience and or its subjects are often pulled into the produc
ton process as eo-creators. Subject communities are tured into authoring
communites, often through the mechanismof online crowd-sourcing creatve
and stuctural decisions, and/or at the point of collectng or, later, manipulat
ing the actual content of the piece.
Non-Linearit. Interactve documentaries oftendepart fomthe conventionally
linear stortelling structure that, historically, characterizes the documenta
genre. Multple storylines may be pursued shnultaneously in ways whichfar
exceed the conventon of the 'sub-plot', while the hyper-textualityof the Web
can also let interactve storytellers abandon, entrely, the idea of a dramatc
arc with a beg & a middle, and an end. Instead, non-fction material can
be presented to viewers according to a wide variety of orgag principles.
For example, 'scenes' might be linked 'sequences' according to the social
dynamics of the people in the flm, or according to their relationship to some
critical natural resource, such as water, or by virtue of their centrality in a
major conct in the host culture at the tme of the documentarian's visit.
This non-linearity is achievable by several means, but is exemplified by an
online editing progamme called the Korakow System, in which decisions
about which shots to place next to one another - the very essence of the edit
ing process - are left up to a kind of cinematc randomnumbers generator.
The fhn-maker has proganuned the system to construct sequences accord
ing to a series of rules but not with any replicable consistency.
In other words, theKorsakowcomputer programcreates dif erent versions
of a flm using the same raw material, but arranged in a different sequence
each time the fhn is vewed (ttp:/lkorsakow.org).
This method of editing is an interesting technique for counter-acting
situatons in which the fhn-maker may unknowingy impose a culturally
'Walkln Documentary'
191
Kerric Harvey
192
inappropriate 'fame' onto the flmic narratve. I addition to its usefulness
in side-stepping 'author cultural bias' in the telling of someone else's cultural
stories, for museum organizatons this offers the possibility of adding 'media
scopes' and 'narrative spaces' to taditonal forms of exhibit design and
installaton.
Active viewing as an integral part of the documentar eerience. Unlike tradi
tonal documentar, the 'audience' is not just peritted, but is often expected
to contribute to the on-going, ever-morphing creation of the interactve
documentar through his or her choices regarding content and stucture.
Tug the act of viewing into a creative undertaking is a signature tait of
the interactve documentary geme, whether it be throug ofering choices
within a pre-determined set of parameters or through offerng more open
ended interaction with an evolving experience. Titis ceative undertaking can
implicate the physical environment within which viewing the work is situ
ated through the additon of locatonal components such as Gee-Positoning
Satellite (GPS) technology. Perhaps the most radical iteraton of this, thus m,
is the documentary deliver device called the 'museum wearable', which, as
Sparacino describes:
. . . is a wearable computer which orchestrates an audiovisual narration
as a functon of the visitor's interests gathered fom his or her physical
path i the museum. It ofers a new type of entertaining and informa
tve museum experience more similar to mobile immersive cinema than
to the taditonal museum experience.
(Sparacino 2008 cited in Vladica and Davis 2008: 320)
Other technologically exotic fors of interactve documentary include 3-D
imaging and inunersive documentary, which employs virtual reality technol
og to literally sur ound the audience member in the 'reality' of the narratve.
Eectations about 'truth'. Interactve documentares often raise questons
around the idea of capturing 'universal' cultural or social tuth on fhn. For
those who are rooted in the notion of multiple na atves told fom varied
character perspectives, the very notion of 'getting the story rigf is basically
irrelevant. Attenton to accuracy, to context factuality, and to a level of specif
city that captures events, issues and artefacts - as well as people and places
is stll important to the interactive documentary flm-maker, but there is a
much wider range of acceptable variet in the teatent of a topic, subject,
issue or event than one fnds in linear non-fction narratve. I tuth is already
elusive in taditonal documentary flm-making, it is even more elusive in the
interactve version of that endeavour.
In sum, the 'interactvity' aspect of an interactve documentary can take
many diferent forms and can be located at any given point in the producton,
transmission and recepton proces. It can appear in the way in which visual
and audio material is gathered (crowd-sourced content); it can be inherent in
the way in which 'authorng' is perceived. It can dictate how the 'stor stuc
ture1 unfolds, and it can be especially conspicuous in the process by which
'audiences' actually afect the f itself.
I any and al of these iterations, however, the driving idea is a move
ment away fom tg of the screen media as something that one set of
people create and another set of people consume, to that of the audience
and the producers as eo-constructors of social meaning as well as storytelling
form and content for sceen products. Even more to the point for this artcle,
each one of the four signature taits one is likely to fnd inhabiting interactive
documentary is also a core principle in the ARG narratve structure.
VISUAL ETHNOGRAPHY AND THE ARG DOCUMENTARY
By the 1980's, a signifcant proporton of practicing anthropologists and ethno
graphic flm-makers had begun moving away fom an idea that had defned
their respective work for almost 80 years (Geert 1973; Tuer 1979; Marcus
1986; Babcock 1980). This was the noton that the ethnographic researcher
was capable of obtaining complete 'objectivity' during feldwork and the crea
ton of its subsequent scholarly artefacts, a notion that eventually resulted in
an alterative methodological philosophy known as 'refexve anthropolog'.
A key concept in refexve anthropology is that both the observer and the
observed contibute to shared experiences which, eventually, yield 'inforaton',
'data', possibly, even 'tuth' of one sort or another (artnez 1995; Geert
1973; Babcock 1980). This attitude is consistent wth the mult-authoring and
often deeply iteratve nature of the interactve documentar, i which the actual
material of te documentay 'product' is released fom the constaints of linear
presentaton as well as fom the singe-author, top-down producton process.
The net efect of this, in anthropology, is to re-empower the target popu
laton (those under anthropological scrutiny) by including erc (insider) as
well as etc (outsider) informaton in a much more balanced rato than was
previously the case. Ethnographic flm-makers, then, are a rich secondary
community for the noton of the interactve documentary, and even more so
for interactive documentaries that capitalize on the ARG model of informaton
delivery (Harvey 2012).
Consequently, it can be argued that, in an interactve documentary, just
like in refexve ethnography, multiple authors shape the narrative fom a
series of diferent perspectves regardless of their respectve positons within
the producton chain. I would suggest that this is especially true of interac
tve documentaries modelled after ARGs, since in those cases the audience/
participants actually dve the direction of the storyline by their personal
choices and reactions.
'ARG' AS AN INTERACTIVE NARRATIVE
Relatvely new on the media landscape, ARGS are, essentially, a combination
intellectual teasure hunt and experiential leag event. Real-world, real
tme narrative elements are integrated into the ARG's 'master plan' gover
ing incremental informaton release, which in t provides propulsion for
narratve development within the gaming environment. Wrapped within the
compettve dimension of 'the game' is a fully developed narratve line, a
story arc that is just as robust and mature as those that can be found in tradi
tonal stage productons or conventional screen media such as flm and televi
sion. Unlike those conventonal media formats, however, ARGs weave their
narrative materal into the audience's everyday life, making the inforational
content of the 'progam' palpable in ways that are not just intellectual inter
ludes but which are concrete, lived exp,eriences as well. Titis is because ARG
players', who are the functonal equivalent of documentary f 'audience
members', actually 'play through' the program's educatonal content, interact
ing with it in a dynamic way that is markedly diferent fom the more passive,
consumpton-oriented paradig of taditional screen media.
'Walk-In Documentary'
193
Kerric Harvey
>94
I anARG, real-world, real-time narrative elements are adapted to follow
an intensely non-linear narrative framework, which can unfold in a variety
of different directions depending on choices made by the ARG players.
Partcipants utilize mobile phones and e-mail, as well as all forms of socia
media - Twitter, Facebook, text-messaging and so on - to move through a
semi-scripted 'storline'inwhich they are 'competng' and 'cooperating' with
other 'players' to achieve a specifc goal.
However, these virtual points of contact are interspersed with a variety of
'real-world' (W clues and information tails, including 'chance' encounters
with 'random stangers' who are really actors facilitating the ARG by deliv
ering scrpted content as it were spontaneous conversaton. ARG partici
pants/audience members also receive informaton fom 'things' like posters,
fyers, hand-writtennotes across whichARG players 'happen' to come across,
like maps or riddles tucked under their automobile windshields, or via public
announcements made in public places like hotel lobbies. Each 'clue' leads
players to the next round of the 'story' which, in m, intensifes both the
tempo of the game and the level of informational content needed to contnue
playing. In other words, knowledge absorption - leag - must occur in
order forplayers to advance to the next stage of the game itself.
A of the various vehicles for this far-flung, mult-dimensional informa
tion release scheme, everythingfomthe Tweets to the livingactors, are coor
dinated and subsequently player-accessed via a cental website used byARG
players world-wide, called 'Unfiction.com'. By following these pre-scrpted
cues delivered through a varety of media modalites, the ARG 'audience'
actuallyhelps to shape the narratve stucture of theARGthrougthe choices
they make and the actions they take, or do not take, as the trail of infor
maton-rich 'dues' contnues to unfold in lockstepwith the ARG's storyline.
Hundreds of people can participate in ARG at a given tme, if desired, and the
'game experience' can last for anythingfoma fewhours to several months.
Based on the ARG core characteristcs, I would argue that the genre's
potental as a distnct and adroit communicatonvehicle is not yet f y realized,
and that the storytelling efcacy of the ARG geme qualifes it as a remarkably
efectve piatformfora newtypeof interactvedocumentary. Re-conceptualizing
ARG as a kind of partcipatornarratve takes interactve documentary ofthe
computer screen and tluusts it into the audience's three-dimensional, real-life
world. A such, what I termcolloquiallyas the 'walkin documentar' format
the ARG -combines the eo-creative experience of the interactve documentar
with the high 'audience' engagment level of the ARG, resultng in a media
experience i which the audience both leas and 'feels' the narratve material
that constitutes the 'walk-in doe's' informatonal core.
GAMING STUDIES AND THE 'WALKIN DOCUMENTARY'
\
The potential of the ARG paradigm as a type of interactve documentary
relates to a larger set of social issues regarding the best ways to 'reach' rising
generatons of gobal citizens and local decision-makers, who comprise that
segment of the populaton that came to adulthood holding a BlackBerand
forwhom their mobile phone is the digital equivalent of the Swiss Armyknife,
as a Silicon V alley technical writer once wrote (Evangelista 2004).
There is neithertime nor opportunityhere toexplore this important subject
with the thoroughness it deserves, but just a fewobservations may be useful
to illustate the range and the creatvity of crrent conversatons around this
topic as it relates to leang both inside and outside of the university envi
rorunent, and especially in museums. Although the literature indicates a fair
amount ofvaretyin what actually consttutes 'extending the museumexperi
ence', more and more executve, educatonal and curatorial professionals are
exploring ways of achieving it, even that sometmes means working with
audience/visitors in an exclusively online capacity. Colleen Dilenschneider at
the Centerfor the Future of Museums notes that:
Online communities create personal connections to the museum:
Because online communities take place in a virtual realmin which inter
actions can be preserved, these interactons allow museums to listen
to audiences so that they may better meet visitor needs. Preserved
interactons provide the abilityfor museum professionals to respond to
inquiries and meet the interests of certain demographics without alien
atng others. This kind of attention paid to the museum audience and
individual fans and followers often results in the feeling of a personal
relatonshipwith the museum.
(Dilenschneider 2008)
'The Digital Generaton', as described by Evangelista (2004) does not simply
use their personal media technolog; they live inside ofit, a profound anthro
pological shift withequally profound implicatons forall areas of collectve as
well as individual life - goverance, community, political identity develop
ment, interpersonal and inter-group relatons, and, of course, documentary
m_ the screen media version of the curated exhibit. Liu argues that media
producers for the twenty-frst century must develop informaton delivery
techniques that are consonant with digital residents' emerging social and
cognitve expectatons and assumptons, a point easily tansferable to docu
mentarym
The interactve relatonship between museums and their visitors is
further pushed forward to multiple-way communications due to the
wide prevalence of the web . . . In order to help museums to attact
more consttuents, manyforwardthinkers and practtoners have experi
mented and proposed diverse online stategies, social technologes, and
communicatvemethodsformuseums todeploytheirresources effectvely
on the web, extending their educational functon to untapped areas.
(Hsiang-Yi Lui 2009)
A case stu.dy of the first museum-sponsored ARG provides encouragement
for the idea of embedding documentary hmaterial in ARG presentational
fameworkthat bridges the museumand the documentaryuniverses. In 2008,
curatorial staf at the world-renowned Smithsonian Insttuton worked with
author and Interet entrepreneur John Maccabee and other ARG experts to
design, develop, and deploy the frst educational ARG sponsored by a major
museum and educatonal complex, based on te Luce Collection at the
Srthsonian's American Art Museum.
Using clues embedded in compuh;r code, worked into poster content,
delivered by mobile phone and twined into Twitter, as well as some star
tlingly dramatc in-person encounters, the ARG enttled 'Ghost of A Chance'
led its several hundred players/audience members on a merry romp through
the Luce Center Foundaton collecton of American paintings, in search of a
'Walkln Documentary'
>95
Kerric Harvey
196
fctonal set of gosts haunting the exhibit. As noted in the project's ofcial
report, the Smithsonian ARG was a huge success as measured by a variety of
criteria (Gupta 2008; Simon2008):
The game ofered both new and exstng museum audiences a novel
way of engaging with the collecton in its Luce Foundation Center for
American Art, a visible storage facility that displays more than 3,300
artworks in floor-to-ceiling glass cases . . . . invitng gaers to create
objects and mail them to the museum for an Lexhibition' curated by
two game characters posing as employees. But the 'game within the
game' was also a challenge to uncover clues to the narratve that binds
those objects, and to investgate the wayobjects embodyhistories. The
game culminated on October 25 witha series of six scavenger-hunt-like
"quests" designedfor players of all ages. Over 6,000 playerspartcipated
online and 244 people came for the onsite event.
(Bath 2008)
jane McGonigal, of Palo Alto's insttute for the Future, helped design 'Ghost
of a Chance' for the Smithsonian Instituton, built around the organizing
narratve that one of the Smithsonian's a collections were infestedwithmali
cious spirits that had to be detected, identified and neutalized before they
destoyed the paintngs in which they lodged. McGonigal is highly enthusi
astc about the usefulness and the importance of this level of interactivity in
museum 'visitors' of the future:
(She) . . . believes the ideas people imagine today are the keys to the
planet's future - and that games have a way of pushing people to be
creatve problemsolvers. Museums, she says, need to get on the bd
wagon; they can no longer afford to simplybe places that house collec
tons. 'The fate of humanity hangs in the balance over whether we're
goingto get crowds to do anythinguseful or not,' McGonigal says. 'Are
they going to put a of their cognitve bandwidth into virtual worlds, or
are theygoingto contibute?'
(Blair 2009)
The Smithsonian example illustrates howwell the ARGformat canmeshwith
immersive leag experences in a museumsetting. However, the usefulness
of ARG leag games is not limited to the museum settng. In recent years,
McGonigal's insttute has helped develop other ARGs that relay the same
types of material one might fnd in a documentarm, but that are ofered
to viewer/players via an ARG paradigm, and have no basis in a museum
collecton. Perhaps the best known of these is 'WorldWithout Oil'.
WORLD WITHOUT OIL simulated the frst 32 weeks of a global oil
crisis. It established a citizen 'nerve center' to tack events and share
solutons. Anybody could play by creating a personal story - an email
or phone call, or for advanced users a blog post, video, photo, podcast,
twitter, whatever - that chronicled the imagned reality of their life in
the cisis. The WWO site at worldwithoutoil.orglinks toall these stories.
The game encouraged excellence withdaily awards and recogniton for
authentc and intiguing stories.
(Hiphop 2012)
i anthropologcal terms, the World Without Oil ARG is capitalizing on a
concept frst explored by anthropologist Victor Tuer, in his work on using
the 'subjunctive mode of culture', or group imaginaton, to explore what is
and is not conceivable, permissible or even possible within any given soci
ety's cosmology, when adherents to that cosmology are confonted with a
hypothetcal event outside the normal range of socially constructed reality
(Turer 1992). 1his is a powerful methodological as well as ontological notion,
which seems to be as signifcantin gamingstudies as it is in the anthropology
ofperformance.
THE 'WALK-IN DOCUMENTARY' AND DCT
The notion of ARG-platfonned interactive documentary is partcularly inter
estngin the context of using online and virtual media as twenty-frst-century
tools in DC. Basically, DC is:
. . . a specialt area within the conflict mediaton literature that uses the
conventions of dramaturgy as a medium for exloring. expressing. and
eventually alleviating fammable issues between and within various
tpes of contastnggroups.
(Arendshorst 2005)
1his extemely focused use of the ARG format re-fames the conventional
understanding of'documentary flm' foma fnished story to an ongoing and
enriching visual conversaton across a real-world conct divide. It uses non
fction visual material that is collected and subsequently shared by partici
pants in a real conict as a means of facilitatng better understanding of each
other's lived experience of that conict and the cultural, social, politcal and
emotonal issues that surround it.
1his new way of thg about non-fction screen media intersects
productvelywithmypreviouswork ofrevising. re-vampingand re-purposing
conventonal DC to refect pertinent material fom communications theory
and to capitalize on ubiquitous personal and social media technologies such
as mobile phones, blackberry, ipads, Facebook and Twitter (Harvey2007). In
brief, this theoretical re-vision argues that:
Traditonally, DC is ofered as a remedy for confict management
between opposinggroups afterescalatonhas occurred, andusuallyafter
criticality has been reached and conventonal methods for stopping the
spiraling aggression have been tried and discarded. In contast to this,
(mynewtheory of 'dialogic DC' is intended primarlyfor use w:thin,
not between, the opposingsides ofa conct situation, and oe/oreintac
tability has settled into place ... The whole point of the dialogic DC
model is to avoidpolitcal stalemate fomhappeningin the frst place, by
leveraging emotonal inconsistencies w:thinrous as a positve force
for keepingopen the communicaton channels oetweenrous. . .
(Harvey 2006)
I am especially hopeful about using ARG-based documentaries for this
purpose because they engage people who might otherwise become antago
nists as players in the same interactve 'game'. Three specific aspects of inter
actve documentarysupport this theoretcal possibility.
'Walk-In Documentary'
197
Kerric Harvey
198
First, interactive documentaries, as defned in this article, are firmly rooted
in the lived experiences of the people and groups who are also the focus of
the media product, per se; they are not subjected to having a storyline or a
presumed world-view imposed on them fom an 'outside' documentary
producer or ethnographer, no matter how well-meaning. Media content
producers who approach the documentary flm-making enterprise fom the
'etc' (or 'outsider') perspective the risk of unintentionally but unhelp
fully superimposing their own systems for cultural meaning-making onto the
authentc experiences of their subjects.
Second, because interactve documenta can capitalize on the democra
tzing dimension of the Interet by re-purposing everyday technology that is
already in play within the flm-makers' lives (notably those that employ the
video capture feature of the ubiquitous mobile phone), they can be unobtru
sive, low-tech and low-budget -all desirable taits in academic feld research
as well as i independent documenta flm-making. Tis re-purposing of
a familiar personal communicatons device (PCD) as an ethnographic video
capture tool can be useful on both sides of the classic tension between adopt
ing the 'insider' versus the 'outsider' narratve voice, since simplicty of opera
tion means that in many cases it might be possible for the subjects of a f to
use that same equipment to produce content about themselves.
A dual data steam of visual informaton is thus made possible, which can,
in t, be formatted for analysis and, ultmately, public presentaton as an
interactve visual ethnography, including an ARG This is, literally, the visual
equivalent of 'walking in someone else's shoes' via virtual technology. In
addition to its utlity in the ethnographic flm-making process, it can be of
enormous value in allowing the antagonists in a confict situaton to get a
sense of how it 'feels' to be the 'other side'.
The third and related reason that interactve documentary is so useful in
DCf is that it brings the audience right into the heart of the 'confict experi
ence'. Using everyday PCD' s instead of bulk, intusive film and video cameras
as to collect the visual material can leverage this advantage even further,
intoducing into the actual conict situaton itself the possibility of on-going,
enriching and almost real-time dialogue between confict partcpants and the
'audience' to a degree that has not been possible before, since technical tain
ing and fnancial constaints drop dramatically once mobile phone cameras
replace 'real' ones.
Once adapted to the ARG format, this, in tur, makes available to interac
tive documentary audiences a rich mof Web-platformed and 'real-world'
material that is encountered experientially, not just cognitvely, by the 'audi
ence'. The potential boon to confict mediaton of having partcipants even
temporarily get a chance to experience the confict in which they are embroiled
fom their 'opponent's' perspectve is enormous.
LIMITATIONS OF THE ARG FORMAT AS A TYPE OF INTERACTIVE
DOCUMENTARY
The ARG 'walk-in doe' paradigm may not be equally suitable, it is important
to note, for al types of interactve documentar content. The special challenge
of adaptng the ARG format to create a new type of interactive documentary is
that, by and large, documentaries are not 'scripted' in the same way as narra
tve flm or curated like museum exhibits. Depending on the genre, docu
mentary scripts often emerge from what the flm-maker has found when he
or she has entered the world of the documenta subject, not fom what they
might impose upon that subject as a storyline before they even begin the f
ing process. Of course, this is not the only philosophical approach to docu
mentary fi -making-in fact, debate regarding the best way to orgaze and
subsequently present feld material has swirled throughout the entire lilespan
of the documenta genre, interactive or not (Hampe 1997; Nichols 1992).
When it comes to 'walk-in documenta' story constuction, however, the
discussion takes on a much more practical dimension, since the audience
led nature of the content development imposes certain demands 'upstream'
fom the experiences of the players themselves (this being the ARG equiv
alent of 'watching the programme). Consequently, an ARG-based docu
mentary must begin fom a fairly cohesive, informaton-rich script, for the
simple reason that the audience fagments it every time they make a game
playing 'choice' within it. This, in t, suggests an important conceptual
limitation about the ARG format as a fame for interactive documentary
storytelling. Consequently, I would argue that an ARG model is likely to
work most efectively in those sub-genres of documentary in which pre
scripting the 'story' plays a legitimately signifcant role in the production
process, such as historical pieces, biographies, and science and technology
proges.
CONCLUSION
Arenschoft (2005), 0aitn (2003), LeBaron (2003a, 2003b, 2003c), Tuer
(1979, 1992) and a host of other scholars writng in cultural theory, media
anthropology, and new media studies, all maintain that a universal founda
ton of the human experience is the ability, the desire and the need to tell
stores. The d erent approaches of virtual technology discussed in this art
de illustate the vast and exciting aray of possibilites ofered by interactve
documentary, in general, and ARG-based interactve documentary, in partc
ular, for precisely this type of storytelling.
None of these new forats can, or should, replace extant forms of docu
mentary flm; rather, they can supply an excitng and important adjunct to
traditional documentary cinema, and offer new storytelling functionalities
within the over-arching genre of non-fcton naratve. Their shared allure
is that each of these new storytelling formats promises both producers and
audiences the abilit to ceate new types of 'documentary fi' as a type of
dynamic, robust meaning-making experience in which they both have an
actve relatonship to the story being told. Game-based interactive documen
tar fonnats such as the 'walk -in documentary' can also off er a pmerfl tool in an
updated and eanded array of confict mediation prctics.
Additionally, visual ethnographers can enrich their practice by explor
ing the marriage of very small screen (VSS) image-capturing devices (such
as mobile telephones, blackberries, and Flip-type point-and-shoot video
cameras that upload directly to the Web through a computer's USB port) with
the dynamic, non-linear narratve format options made possible by the Web
design and delivery technology that underlies interactive documentary as a
whole. In the end this gives ethnographic flm-makers the opton to eo-create
the fnal product with full support and partcipation of their subjects.
With their emphases on simultaneous multiple storylines, eo-creatve rela
tonships and non-linear narrative structures, interactve documentaries, in
general, and interactive documentaries stuctured and shared as an Alteratve
'Walkln Documentary'
I
1 1 ,I;
'
199

' mmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Kerric Harvey
i
1 1
; !
200
Reality Games, especially, offer rich new media storytelling techniques for
organizing ethnographic and non-fction narratve material and sharing it
with the public.
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'Walkln Documentary'
20>

!'
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Kerric Harvey
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SUGGESTED CITATION
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CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Dr. Kerc Harvey is the Associate Director of the Center for Innovative
Media (Cand an Associate Professor in the School of Media and Public
Afairs at GeorgeWashingtonUniversityin Washington, D.C. She studies the
anthropological impact of emergng media technologes and develops ways
of extending face-to-face drama for conict transformaton into virtual and
oniine landscapes. In additon to beinga workingplaywght, Dr. Harveyalso
explores cell phone flm-making and interactve documentary within fcton,
non-fction, and ethnographic contexts.
Contact: Associate Director, Center for Innovatve Media, and Associate
Professor, School ofMedia and Public A airs, GeorgeWashingtonUniversity,
Washington, DC 20052, USA.
E-mail: kharvey@gwu.edu.
Kerric Haey hasasserted her right under the Copyght, Designs andPatents
Act, 1988, to be idented as the author of this work in the format that was
submitted to Intellect Ltd.
SDF 6 {2) pp. 203-214 Intellect limited 2012
Studies in Documentary Film
Volume 6 Number 2
2012l ntellect Ltd Article. English language. doi; 10.1386/sdf.6.2.203_1
RODERICK COOVER
Temple University
Visual research and the new
documentary
ABSTRACT
This paper refects upon theoretical, prctical and ethicl issues facing the production

f interactive documtar cinema projects that are based on in-depth, disciplinar,

mtellectual and/or arhshc research questions, such ofthose concring anthrpologi
cl observation and visual studies. The paper considers ways in which percptions
ofh documentar images fnction in digital environment impact documentar
practice and production. The interdisciplinar paper drws upon writings in poetry,
philosophy, visual studies, dnema studies and art with special attention given to the
writings ofDai Vaughn, Nelson Goodman, Charles Bestein, John Berger, Alain
Robbe-Grillet, and Michael Renov, as well as to cinematic and digital works by
Sharon Daniels, the Labyrinth Prject, Jean Rouch, Samuel Bollendorf and Abel
Segretin, among other.
Documentaryalways exceeds it makers' prescriptons.
(Vaughan 1999)
. . . (You can't make bacon and eggswithout slaughternga pig.
(Charles Bemstein's mother as remembered by
s
Berstein 2011)
KEYWORDS
interactive
documentar
antropology
worldmaking
editng
refexvity
realism
panorama
203

I
,
I

I '
I
I

I '

i
I
Rode rick Coover
1. For more on how
computing is impacting
the terms of research,
and hence, disciplinary
frameworks, see
SwitchingCodes:
204
Thinking through
Digital Technology
In the Humanities
andArts (Bartscherer
and Coover 2o11). l n
this volume, scholars
and artists in diverse
fields discuss how the
terms of their practices
are being altered
through computing.
As researchers and
artists become trained
on the same tools,
they understand
each other's practices
and incorporate
terminology that was
once alien. However,
these tools and terms
may hold differing
implications and result
i n surprising evolutions
due to the varied
contexts of their uses.
1.
Charles Bemstein' s collecton, The Attack ofthe Difcult Poems (2011) maynot say
much to directly guide readers to make sense of any partcular, or pacularly,
diffcult poem. Rather, through shape-shiftng arguments, Bemstein reminds
readers in this era of presumed, shortened attenton spans that not all ideas
are quickly digestble, and he cautons that some poems may seem easy simply
because they are not saying anything. Berstein' s propositon, which applies
across the arts and most certainly to those interactve docwnentaries that are
developed through extensive research, is that works which challenge the easy
consumpton of ideas may require tme and efort on the part of the receiver,
just as they probably did on the part of the maker. Exeriencng concentated
engagement, duraton, immersion and the gathering of ideas over several
sittngs even may be of the essence of such works, both in form and content.
While there dO stll exst readers and viewers who are eager to plunge into works
that are challengng, the entertainment industies may not always appreciate
works that slow down either the rush to consume or the speedy disseminaton
of a capitalist logic, which may be embedded much in the clicking functon
in any content. The rhetoric of ease and brevity pervades discourse on digital
media design including that of digital, cnematc media arts, where short-lived
design aesthetcs often prefgure how innovatve questons get asked.1
At a recent conference dedicated to interactve documentary, for example,
a discussant leading a panel on documentary research projects announced
displeasure at failing to quickly make sense of (or, indeed, stay with) the
works to be discussed when attemptng to digest them the evening before.
She felt that the works demanded too much of the viewer, and she proposed
that such interactive documentaries should, like entertainment works, be
tested on focus groups to improve usability. The presumption was that an
interactve documentary project should be readily consumable in a single
sittng even a hybrid one that may be the result of many years of research
and producton. Beyond the momentary surprise of her response given the
academic conference context in which research projects are more often the
rule than the excepton, the queston provided illumination upon signifcant
dif erences in expectatons about what documentaries are or do, even if, in
practice, borderlines between different docuentary modes and genres are
fequently blurred. Tis artcle responds to these concers to articulate some
of the issues facing interactve documentary cinema projects that are based on
in-depth, disciplinary, intellectual and/or artistic research questons.
2.
There are many kinds of cinematic works that might be considered docu
mentaries or which incorporate docuentary forms
.
For example, there are
documentaries that tell stories or builp arguments; there are those that picture
places or record events; there are essay flms that present personal observations
and subjective viewpoints, actvist media, community documentary projects,
expressionist studies (including, famously, city syphonies), nature flms,
reportage and flms that grow out of scholarly or artistc research questons.
In addition, there are numerous hybrid forms such as mockumentaries, which
blu borders of fction and non-fcton, and mixed media or mult-monitor
installatons, which may set documentary flms or segments in juxtaposition
with other forms. While defning what is or is not considered a documentary
is unrealistic, the understanding of how images of actuality function in human
Visual research and the new documentary
p

o
.
cesses of making sense of exstence is both challengng and evolving in the
digital age.
Film p

ojects based in visual research, such as those that are fequently

produced m felds such as anthropology and visual studies are themselves
richl
y .
varied. They range fom documentary studies that aaempt to present
empmcal data, such as those of the Britain's Mass Observaton Movement of
e 1930s, to highly expressive and artistc approaches, such as anthropolo
giSt Robert Ascher's hand-painted, animations based upon Tlingit myths such
as Blue: A TlmfI Odysse (1991). There are countless works that use orignal
recordings as well as many, such as Vincent Monnikenda' s Mother Dao: The
Turtlelike (1995), which are made entrely fom archival recordings. Many of
thes

projects grow out of and through years of research, and in many, flm_
makg ay be com

lernented by other kinds of practces such as writng,

quttatve

d qualitatve data, language acquisition and participant obser

vat

n.
_
Many m
:
orporate refexve questons about the relatonships between
subjectve expenence, research models and representaton.2 One of the excit
ing feahlres of el

ctronic media is how such diverse practces, processes and

cotent may be srmultaneously presented to allow users insight into relaton
shi

s between documentary representatons and the contexts fom (and by)

which they were constucted. Makers can combine observational and refexve
media, and users can follow how flms emerge out of lived experience and the
data it ofers.
Documentaries are constitutive (Vaughan 1999: 82). There is far more
content in a moton image that a viewer can digest; the viewer, not unlike the

aker
:
constucts understanding fom the informaton fashing by.3 Film view
mg rurrors,
_
and perhaps articulates, a fundamental human process by which
the mmd distingwshes, sorts and connects sensor informaton in tme to
construct, and continually reconstruct, a more or less cohesive sense of whole.
Following upon works by Emst Gombrich (1969), Rudolf Aeim (1954)
and others, Nelson Goodman defnes these largely unconscious processes of
making sense out of visual and other sensory stimuli as worldmaking (1978).
According
.
to Goodman, seeing is motvated, and it is built upon memory. The
uman mmd chooses what to look at and what to ignore, making sense of
informaton through at least fve processes: (1) composition and deletion, (2)
weightng (3) ordering (4) deletion and supplementation, and (5) deforma
ton. Throug these processes, new realites are built out of old ones.4
The question ofhow flm stmulates these kinds of perceptve and cognitve
processes has shaped a century of flm theory and producton beg g with
works by lummanes such as Dz1ga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov,
Hugo Musterberg and Rudolf Aeim (see e.g. Aeim 1954; Eisenstein
1975, 1977; Kuleshov 1974; Miinsterberg 2002; Vertov 1984). Eisenstein,
m partcular, demonstated the capacity of flm to build meaning through
contra

tng f
?
s

d visual
_
qualities, both in faming and in montage.
That E1senstem s wntngs on flm, which were written in the context of flm
making after the Russian revolution, have more recently impacted felds of
cultural research i works byJaes Oif ord (1988), George Marcus (1990) and
Michael Tauss1g (1987) among others, suggests how cinematc characteristics
ave
.
illuminated
_
broad questons about. the nature of percepton and cogni
ton m teologcal societes. Meaning in documentary is mediated throug
technologies, and any student fhn-maker soon leas that the mind after a
period of producton or intense spectatorship, starts dreaming in clse-ups,
pans and match-cuts. However, the lens and camera are not like huan sight.
2. There are many
works that address
the reflective turn ln
ethnography such as
James Clifford and
George Marcus (1986).
3. If images didn't offer
more than what
could be imagined
and controlled,
Vaughan points
out, ethnographies
could be entirely
made in studios with
actors(1ggg; 82).
4. For more on Nelson
Good man's theories of
worldmaking and their
relation to cinematic
practices of editing
and anthropological
theories of tropes, see
Coover (2001; 2003).
205
Roderick Coover
s. Asaresultof the
conditions of video
tape, analogue video
editing makes greater
use of logs that are
referenced to stacks of
time-coded tapes.
206
The human eye is actve, contnually partcipating in a process of seeking out
informaton and making choices in what and how it sees.
The constitutve condition in cinema occurs throughout producton and
in recepton. The documentar flm-maker chooses where to direct attenton,
what to fame and focus upon and when to t the camera(s) on and of. Every
flm-maker knows the exctement (and foreboding) of watching rushes and
discovering how an original experience has become rendered (or tanslated)
through the camera and its elements - flm stock, analogue tape, bits, etc.
Films are assembled for what feels right as well as what seems to make sense
on paper. I watching a documentary, the viewer constitutes meaning through
perception and refection. Consciously or not, the viewer interprets the visual
experience based on prior experiences. No two viewers, therefore, wl see a
f in exactly the same way. The primacy of consttutve processes to single
channel documentares (aka flms, videos, television progr es) may not
hold tue for interactive documentaries, or at least not in the same way.
3-
I their book Another Way of Telling (1982), John Berger and Jean Mohr present
a 142 page photo sequence that is part narrative, part expressive montage and
part visual essay. They argue that their montage of images, while appear
ing cinematic, operates di erently fom cinema because of the opportunity
aforded to readers to tur back and forth across the images. Tills navigation
allows users to expand their understanding of the photographs by seeking out
correspondences and other relationships in the visual content and composi
tion. This is a kind of non-digital hyertextuality that results in many possible
versions and readings of the same work. The efect is not unlike that of using
key frames in cnematc storyboarding and editing.
Film editng is, and, has always been, hypertextual. In celluloid editing
practces, clips are examined as discreet physical objects that hang fom bins or
are coiled on cores. They are arranged and often re-arranged into sets, which
are spatal confguratons, and they are given tags and annotatons through
logs.' The clips are gathered, taped and later glued in various physical vari
atons. The editor fngers and scrolls through these, at tmes making cuts as
much by the physical lengths of the clips as by their contents. Likewise, digital
editng environments also arrange clips, or more corectly icons that signif
clips, spatally. Bins, tmelines and menus represent forms of spatial organiza
tion fom which temporal experiences of actually watching clips are tiggered.
Where time-based viewership largely stmulates spontaneous constitutive
processes (or, worldmaking, editing and other hypermedia actvities more
signifcantly emphasize conscious and reflexve constitutve processes in
which questons that are raised by one image get explored through another,
or another, or another. The editing prqcess requires choice-making and selec
ton. The editor may imagine and ceate sequences fom clips in almost in
nite variatons, even if, in the fnal result, all but one of those variatons are
discarded, and the rejects are forgotten along with the myriad lessons and
alteratves they may have offered.
As has been written elsewhere, hypermedia offers a superior form of edit
ing (Coover et al. 2012). I providing diverse ways of moving between the
spatial organizaton and temporal expression of clips, digtal and interactive
tools expand the editor's refexvity and choice-making. Digital technologes
enable the inclusion of materials recorded or organized through difering
Visual research and the new documentary
modes as well as the incorporation of other kinds of research materials such
as text, maps and photographs. They can allow for contnual updatng and
ofer opportunites for using algorithms to create versions generated by the
computer or user inputs. Further, in locatve media projects, virtual 'edits' may
even be created by users physically walking among actual places, conjoining
located materials en route. Therefore, the editor may also be a theoretician,
technician, writer, explorer, researcher and designer, and this may result in
projects that are equally experiental or intellectual. There is a risk, however,
that structural and technological advances are not developed in relation to
in-depth content; in such cases, the exhibitons of technological innovation
are prmarily self -serving to the technological apparatus of which they are a
part, and as such there is less opportunity for a two-way exchange, apt appli
caton of metaphors or stuctures, and ceative growth.
For the creators of digital works, navigaton-based forms of interaction
are shaped by computer interface, program metaphors and design possibili
tes. Materials, such as icons, videos and text are displayed spatally. Just as
icons are moved about the desktop on personal computers, so, too, are icons
pertaining to video clips moved between folders, bins and/or telines in
programs like Adobe Premiere, Adobe After Effects, Avid, DVD Studio
Pro, Final Cut Pro and Media 100, and they may be placed in other
programs that are desiged for other kinds of creatve and critical practices
such as Microsoft Word or Eastgate Story Space. Furthermore, the nature
and form of the documentary image itself is transformed through spatial
arrangements such as juxtapositon, layering or compositing (Coover 2011b;
Coover et al. 2012; Manovich 2001, 2006). However, it should be added that
the arbitary assignment of f terms by software companies poses chal
lenges for new maers of moton images. The assignment is presumably
designed to make software terms recognizable. However, it shapes ways in
which clips are gathered, named and placed within a project based on the
logcs of prior media not new ones. As few flm students under the age of
30 have ever seen a bin or actually cut a piece of celluloid, the assignment of
such terms is abstact and obscure, yet their designs impose constaints that
direct users in familiar directons. Other terms for the sorting and conjoining
practices migt expand tg about what time-images are and how they
might work together.
Berger and Mohr stess that an important di erence between viewing (or
reading images in a book and watching such images in a flm is the forward
temporal force of the technology, which Berger characterizes as producing a
kind of temporal anxety caused by the technological provocaton to attend to
each forthcoming fame. Berger writes,
Eisenstein once spoke of a 'montage of attactons'. By this he meant
that what precedes the f -cut should attact what follows it, and vice
versa. The energy of this attraction could take the form of a contast,
an equivalence, a confict, a recurrence. I each case, the cut becomes
eloquent and functons like the hinge of a metaphor . . . Yet there was
in fact an intinsic difculty i applying this idea to flm. I a flm . . .
there is always a third energy in play: that of the reel, that of the flm's
rn g through time. And so the two attractons in a flm montage are
never equal . . a . I a sequence of still photogaphs, however, the energy
of attraction, either side of a cut, does remain equal, two way and
mutual . . . . The sequence has become a feld of coexstence like the feld
6. This by no means
rejects the importance
of film, video,
photography or
other media; there
remain expressions
far better articulated
in an optically printed
film or a silver nitrate
photograph, for
example, than through
a digital work. Each
stimulates differing
perceptive and
cognitive responses
and each expands
the world in differing
ways, articulating
and engaging
life's experiential
ambiguities.
207
'!
i:
Roderick Coover
7. The relationship
208
of visual montage,
language and walking
was developed
through a four way
conversation between
Larry McCaffery, Lance
Newman, Hikmet Loe
and Roderick Coover
(Cooveretal. 2010)
relating experiences
of walking in desert
landscapes to the
development of the
interactive, browser
based documentary
Canyon lands (Coover
2011c) and works of
literature and land art.
How spatial metaphors
relate to montage
and movement is
also addressed i n
Aston (2010) through a
discussion of works by
Wendy james.
of memory . . . Photographs so placed are restored to a living context:
not of course to the original context fom which they were taken - that
is impossible - but to a context of experience.
(Berger and Mohr 1982: 288-89)
In short, this kind of interplay maxmizes the conscious, consttutive char
acteristics of documentary images in ways that resemble the experience
of navigating among clips in editing programs, browsers and various other
interactve media environments. Video clips like photos may be accessed at
various tmes and for diverse reasons. I similarly discussing the sequencing
of photographs, Berger contnues, 'The world they reveal, fozen, becomes
tractable'. The choice to use a navigatonal technique is particularly apt for
Berger and Mohr because they are making a project about navigating among
the associations, desires and ruptures of memory. Navigaton allows users
to cross-reference images to discover formal, topic, narrative and exposi
tory signifcatons. The ability to juxtapose and link diverse kinds of materials
expands the potental for reflexvity. The navigable spatal arrangement of the
book enables choice and subjective temporality, where the instant forward
motion of single-channel cinema does not. Interactive documentaries may
accommodate both forms of cogniton by ofering a mix of temporal and navi
gational experiences.
Envronments that bring together di ering kinds of research materials can
enable users to follow the media maker's process, whether by allowing users
to read feld notes and supportng documents or to follow how particular sets
of materials led to the development of an edit or argument (Coover 2003).
When supporting materials and data are available, the user can see how
choices were made and consider alteratves (Coover 2011a, 2011b, 2011c,
Coover et al. 2012). The media maker is not deprived of the power to make
an argument and have a voice (expressing one's ideas is among the impor
tant reasons that individuals make works). In fact, the maker may ofer many
arguments that would not ft together in the logics of a singe-channel work.
As evidenced in works by Jefey Shaw, Pat Badani, Flavia Caviezel, Nitn
Sawhney, Ku Fend! and Ellen Cracker (see Coover et al. 2012; Shaw et al.
2011) among many others, such works can express relatonships between the
user, maker and subject that raise interestng ethical questons about single
channel media and the messages they may convey through form.
As exemplifed by the Quicktime Virtual Reality (QTVR) based media arts
work, Mysteries and Desires: Searching The Worlds of John Rechy (Rechy et al.
2001), interactve environments can employ modal shifts that clar relation
ships betvveen maker, viewer and subject. Mysteries and Desires is an interac
tve DVD produced by the Labynth Project out of the University of Souther
Califora. The DVD presents a sort of autobiography of the writer John Rechy
whose works articulate, among othe issues, the conditons of being queer
in 1960s L. The project combines scrapbook collectons of interviews and
drawings, dance, cartoon and interactve play to present a multmodal expres
sion of some of the author's life experiences. A short intoductory video loop
links users to one of three sectons, the themes of which are 'Memories',
'Bodies' and 'Cruising'. I these sections, viewers navigate QTVR environ
ments, choosing links that lead down interactve paths or into collectons of
materials. The participation required of the user to discover links in the pano
ramic environments is thematcally important in a work about the concealed
methods of expression in gay cultural life in that place and era.
Visual research and the new documentary
Forms of expression represented in the project include expositon, inter
views, audio of Rechy reading excerpts fom his books, photographs, graffit,
stained gass imagery, dance and a comic stp narratve, and locatons include a
lonely path in the woods, urban barooms, a back alley and a church confession
booth, among others. In short, Rechy demonslates, there is no one mode of
expression good for all seasons. Some of Rechy' s exeriences are best expressed
throug narraton, while others require comic illuslaton, dance movements
and user partcpaton. The interactve approach enables both the inclusion of,
and the movement betweef these fors. The mode-shg blurs conventonal
borders of documentary representaton and art as well as challengng distnc
tons between viewing, reading and other forms of engagement.
While documentary images are constitutive and may draw upon diverse
modes of experience and representation, documentary conventions may
expand or limit this constitutive potential, as for example, when images
primarily serve to illustrate a narration. 1his iss.ue is central to Berger and
Mohr's discussion of how their collection of photographs maximize the
ambiguity of the documentary image. Identifing ambiguity in images,
they argue, engages the imagination. The reader involves herself in the
act of making meaning and in so doing, she interalizes those images and
animates them within the context of her own life experiences - her memory.
The reader makes meaning. By contrast, the authoritative voice (whether an
actual voice or a productive mode) limits choices in how to read images
and their meanings. To some degree, a viewer of such works receives a
message rather than building and engagement. The supposed pay-of in
exchange for this decreased activity is ease: authoritative works fequently
seem to be more easily (and passively) received.
There are sigcant ethical consideratons involved in the relatonship
betveen these difering forms of representation - ethical consideratons that
concer relationships between form and content. For example, in his essays
'New novel, new man' and 'From realism to reality' (1963), French New Wave
era fction writer and fim-maker Alain Robbe-Grillet challenges that natu
ralism claims an unfair monopoly on the real. Robbe-Grllet explores rela
tonships between subjectve observation and intellection constructon (or
rationalization).8 Making a claim for the ethical necessity of a new approach
to writing and the relatonship between form and content, Robbe-Grillet
counters what he considers to be misconceptons about the vanguard writ
ing of the era, that the new novel: (1) imposes methods of writng, (2) erases
the past, (3) expels humans, (4) airos a perfect (et presumably unobtainable)
objectvity, and (5) the novels are just too difcult. His responses might as
well apply to the uses of interactve media in documentary arts of this era. 9
Adapted slightly for this artcle, his approaches essentally argue for the crea
tion (1) of works that are defned as a quest, not a theory, (2) of works that
partcipate i an evoluton of a form (or with multimedia, of forms) without
merely recastng old forms in new clothes, (3) of works that create partcipa
tion by drawing attenton to the ambiguity of appearances and false sense of
authortatve truth that genres (including documentary genres) can impose on
them, (4) of works that mae subjectvity, (5) of works that insist on depth
and specfcity as a basis for creatngwor for broad consumption (notably, in
the relaton to popular documentary, this might also be suggested as respect
ing the intelligence of viewers and their capacity to partcipate as opposed to
dwnbing down works to some presumed lay - or lying down - audience),
and (6) of works that do not ofer ready-made meanings. Robbe-Grillet argues
B. In Robbe-Grillet's
works, it might be
added, the fictional
observers are always
untrustworthy or
unsure of their
own experience, a
condition that is also
true of informants of
documentary research.
g. As happens equally
these days to
digital media artists
presenting imaginative
and often complex
digital projects to
audiences who may not
be familiar with digital
structures, Robbe
Grillet finds himself
fighting off common
preconceptions about
reading experiences of
novels written in new
ways. The resistance
may result from a
seemingly natural
human tendency to
settle for exp,eriences
that are familiar and
comfortable, even
when, in the back of
the mind there may
be an awareness that
there may be serious
implications for
subsuming oneself
in the apparatus of
mass media, whether
through cinema, tv,
the Internet or mobile
technologies.
209
Rode rick Coover
10. Such characters i n
these films soon find
their lives shaped by
a series of accidents
rather than actions.
11. There are practical,
technological
conditions why such
practices might have
seemed constrained
210
in the era of single
channel production,
despite the efforts
of many groups to
make film accessible
as a tool of exchange
rather than one of
observation. Such
efforts are wide
ranging and include
initiatives such the
participatory film and
video projects such as
the National Film Board
of Canada Challenge
for Change, that was
active 1967-1980, to
community video
collectives, such
as Philadelphia's
Termite T Collective
(1992-). Common
issues include limited
access to equipment
and materials, access
to distribution and
access to screening or
broadcast facilities.
that any other choices for a writer would simply rea old worlds and the
powers that maintain them.
Refectng upon the vanguard artstc positons of European1960 and the
French New Wave in their essay 'Gnema of appearance' (1972), Gabriel Pearson
and Scott Rhode argue that the New Wave flm-makers countered naturalism's
tendency to resolve diferences into a stable and single reality by depicting an
unstable world. Gnematc realism (or naturalism) obscures the fux and insta
bilit of actulity by neatly resolving events into single and totalizing represen
tatons. By contast, Pearson and Rhode argue, in works of the French New
Wave such as Breathless (Godard 1959), individuals constuct words through
improvisaton. With no stable realit, the characters respond to the conditons
at hand - to a surface of appearances. Characters must come to decsions in
response to conditons of actuality for which there are no preconceived rules.
Where there are no stable realites, taditonal moralites are untstworthy
and cannot be relied on; rather they must be contnually created and negot
ated through acton and exchange. Each character must therefore defne his or
her own ethics and live with the moral implicatons of choices that are made;
characters that do not sustin t engagement become objects in a system and
powerless to it.10 Pearson and Rhode argue that this similarly ofers co

ditons
for more ethically aware engagement with images by te viewer (and, mdeed,
the maker) who must make choices. When viewers partcipate in makng judge
ments about scenes that may be unpredictable and open-ended, the issues are
interalized and made meaningl within the viewer's own interal fame
works of world-making and refecton; just as images become interalized and
animated throug te imagnaton in Berger and Mohr' s model.
Such subjectve engagement in meaning-making is cental to ethical
arguments raised by numerous visual research and documentary theorists
(see e.g. Gross et al. 1991; Renov 2004). For example, in addressing the repre
senttion of the subject documentary theorist Michael Renov writes:
In the ethical context, geater value may be attached to the circum
stances surrounding the creative process . . . than to the fnal product,
understood in the commercial arena to be the 'bottom line.' I the
instance of some ethically charged works, the openness and mutual
receptivity between flmmaker and subject may be said to extend to the
relatonship between the audience and the flm. Open exchange may
begin to replace the one-way delivery of ideas. This ethical challenge in
the feld of documentary practice echoes those in contemporary art and
philosophy that queston models of mastery or absolute certainty, plac
ing greater emphasis on open-endedness, empathy, and receptivity.
(2004: 130)
The ethical position challenges the authorjty implicit in documentary cine
ma's illusion of verisimilitude, which might rather be described as the impo
sition of one version, carried out throug the authorty of the camera, over
the perspectves and subjectivites of others. However, the struggle against
such authority in single-channel flm-making has long been famed in rela
ton to how technological characteristcs of flm producton and distibution
constrained this kind of exchange. 1
1
The technological limits are fast changing (albeit faster in the developing
and developed world). Projects such as Sharon Daniels' Public Secrets (vectors.
usc.edu/issues/4/publicsecrets/) or those based on an individual's experiences
Visual research and the new documentary
such as Samuel Bollendorf and A bel Segretn' s Jourey to the End of Coal ( .
. honkytonk.f/mdex.php/webdoc/) mae fagmentary information and
aVIgaton structures to draw users into intellectual (and empathetic) partcipa
ton, to engage the worlds being represented by actng within them to search
out informaton and hear opinions that one might not otherwise have access
to, such as American female prisoners in Public Secret or Cinese coal miners
fearf of being idented talking about working conditions i Jourey to the
End of Coal. That these two works, notably, maudio, text and photography,
demonstates how blurred borders become in new media. In additon, there
are projects such as those of Pixel Press (www.pixelpress.org, A Kurcistan
(ttp:// .akakurdistan.com/), or 360 Kurdistan (http://360.tzianoproject.
org!kurdistan/), that demonstate potental for the direct inclusion of diverse
voices. N

t all works that create participatory conditons need to directly include

oth
_
er vmces or feedback however. These direct and immediate responses,
which have prov

n to be ver valuable in some crcumstances such as gg

reports on breaking news or identg old photographs, may be less help
m
:
ors ofenng deep research in an area of the author's (or authors')
specializaton. Responding meaningfully to extensive research proects often
calls for comparable levels of engagement, just as meaningl reader response
to a complex book may take on forms such as critcal writng, research, art
response or ?I'oup dialog. Partcipaton may be contained within a work; or a
work may stmulate and engage participaton as part of broader cultural proc
esses. This Issue 1> pomted out famously in Chronicle of a Summer, the 1961
flm by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin. In that flm, students posing broad and
abstract questons to passers-by on Parsian steets predictably received broad
and abstact answers. When the flm-makers refexvely focused.attenton on
a few subjects, they developed a middle gound between the various partci
pants, and a search for answers resulted equally in a refexve examination of
the questons and questoners. The result was an open-ended work that lead
to fer

orks and discussions about the research process. Documentary is a

quest, and It can take many forms. Recepton, too, may be famed as a quest,
and quick user-feedback responses may not be the valuable ones.
4.
In his r

flect
?
n upon fequently voiced resistances to diffcult poetry, Carles
Bemstem
.
pomt

out that a reader might not find the experience of easy
consumption mte so touble-fee the reader paused to consider the appa
ratus, conventions and attending ideologies that have resulted in that feel
ing of ease. However, in terms of the cinematc experiences, context is also
important. There are times when readers and viewers alike may seek out
attention-demanding and intellectually stmulatng exeriences, and there
ar

other momets when viewers seek spontaneous, sensorial spectator
ship. Tese are diferent, although richly complementary, human needs and
cinema touches upon both by diflering degrees that are often antcipated by
contxt. Interactive documentaries may also be created fr engagement i
specifc contexts, however convergence has resulted in the common condi
ton that works made for one form or co;ntext are often viewed in another. The
multtasking contions of c

sual Interet use may not provide as appropriate

a context for looking at proJects that demand attention as, say, a museum, a
dedicated library kiosk or a classroom, and many Interet-based interactve
documentares may not do enough to fame, or refame, recepton contexts.
211

Roderick Coover
12. works such as Loss
Pequeio Glazier's
Digital Poetics (2001),
Lev Manovich's
Language of New
Media (2001) and
212
Step hen johnson's
Interface Culture (1997)
propose ways in which
forms of media alter
terms of understanding
and use, and that these
terms, in turn, alter
practice, product and
modes of enquiry.
The discussant's response to complex works cited at the beginning of
the artcle demonstates that there are patters of using media that come
fom differing traditons such as viewing television, reading books or look
ing at gallery exhibitons. The discussant's difculty in satisfactorily digesting
a multmedia documentary the night before the conference may have been a
conditon of context. Looking at works on the Web brings them into a mult
tasking environment of distracted engagement that is very different fom
looking at an interactive work in a dedicated space, just as viewing a movie on
a mobile device while tavelling about a city on subways ofers a very diferent
experience fom watching the same movie in a cinema. As with many kinds of
scholarly and literary books, non-fction visual research projects often take a
lot of tme and attenton to make, and they often take plenty of tme and atten
tion to view as well. Many cannot be viewed in a single sittng, while others
may require a combinaton of viewing, reading and/or other intellectual activ
ity. As media converge, it therefore may be necessary to establish conditions
by which once di ering media are famed for recepton and engagement.12
Digital juxtaposing, layering, merging and manipulaton expand ways
to draw out and artculate signifcatons within and between images. Such
methods may draw users into actve processes of building connections and
making choices. Such methods may blur and refame the actvites of read
ing, viewing, wurldmaking and meaning-making. In research, they enable a
mixng of such modes to bridge the experiences of production and presenta
ton, and they allow users to engage with those same processes and choices.
While creating these conditons for deep reads and viewing experiences may
be all the harder to do in the age of multple, simultaneous and steaming
media, that may sigal all the more reason to do it - to escape fom distac
ton to attenton.
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No longer in distibuton.
Aston, judith (2010), 'Spatial montage and multimedia ethnography: Using
computers to visualise aspects of migration and social division among a
displaced comunity', Forum for Social Research, 11: 2, p.36.
Bartscherer, Thomas and Coover, Roderick (eds) (2011), Switching Codes:
Thinking Thrugh Ne Technology In The Humanities and Arts, Cicago:
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Bazin, Andre (1967), What is Cinema, Vo/.1, Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of Califora Press.
Berger, John and Mohr, jean (1982), Another Way of Telling, New York:
Pantheon.
Bemstein, Carles (2011), The Attack of the Difcult Poems, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Bollendorf, Samuel and Segretn, Abel (2008), 'jouey to the end of coal', htip://
w .honkytonk.f/index.php/webdoc/. Accessed 12 December 2011
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Oifford, james (1988), The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Centur
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Oifford, james and Marcus, George (1986), Wrting Culture: The Poetic And Politic
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Visual research and the new documentary
Coover, Roderick (2001), 'Worldmakng, metaphors, and montage in the
representaton of cultures: Cross-cultural flmmaking and the poetcs ofRobert
Gardner's Forest Of Bliss', Visual Anthropology, Vol. 14: 4, pp. 415-433.
-(2003), Cultures m Webs: Working in Hyermedia with the Documentar
Image, Interactve CD-ROM, Cambridge: Eastgate.
-(2011a), 'The digtal panorama and cinemascapes', in Tomas Bartscherer
and Rodenck Coover (eds), Switching Codes: Thinking Through Digital
Technolog m the Humanztles and Arts, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, pp. 199-217.
-(2011b), 'Interactive media representation', in Eric Margolis and Luc
Pauwels (eds), The SAGE Handbook of Visual Research Methods London
SAGE Publicatons Inc., pp. 617-638.
'

-- (20llc), 'Canyonlands', Unknown Territories Project, www.unknownte

mtones.org. Accessed 11 January 2011.
Cover, Roderick, McCafery, Larry, Newman, Lance and Loe, Hikmet (2010),
A dialogue about the desert'. Roderick Coover, Larry McCafer, Lance
Newman and Hikmet Loe', Electronic Book Review, February, http://
.electrorcbookrevtew.com/thread/criticalecologies/ecoconnected.
Accessed 1 March 2012.
--
.
(2012), 'Digital technologes, vsual research and the non-fcton image',
1 Sarah Pmk (ed.), Advances in Visual Methodology, London and Los
Angeles: Sage, pp. 191-209.
Daniels,
_
Sharon (2007, 'Public secrets', http://vectors.usc.edu/issues/4/
publicsecrets/. Accessed 11 November 2011.
Eisenstein, Sergei (1975), The Film Sense (ed. and tans. Jay Leyda), New York:
Harcourt, Brace and World.
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D1ego: Harcourt.
Glazier, Loss Pequefo (2001), Digital Poetic: The Mking of E-Poetries
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'
Godard, Jean Luc (1959), bout de soufeBreathless, Paris: Les Productons
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rges de Beauregard and Societe N ouvelle de cmematographie.

Gombnch, Emst (1969), Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial
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.
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)ohnson, Stephen (1997, Interface Culture: How the Digital Medium _from
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Wmdows to the Web-Changes the Way We Write, Speak, New York: Harper
ne.
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Manovich, Lev (2001), The Language of Ne Media, Cambridge, M: The MIT
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Marcus, George E. (1990), 'The modeist sensibility in recent ethnogra
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.
the cinematc metaphor of montage', Society for Visual
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214
Meiselas, Susan (2003), A Kurdistan, http://w .akakurdistan.com/.
Accessed 11 December 2011.
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Braudy (ed.), Focus on Shoot the Piano Player, Engewood Oi s: Prentice
Hall, 25-45.
Renov, Michael (2004), The Subject of Documentar, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
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the Worlds of John Rechy, Los Angeles: The Labyrinth Project.
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The embodiment of virtual space', i Thomas Bartscherer and Roderick
Coover (eds), Switching Codes: Thinking Thrugh Digital Technology in the
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SUGGESTED CITATION
Coover, R. (2012), 'Visual research and the new documentary', Studies in
Documentary Film, 6: 2, pp. 203-214, doi: 10.1386/sd.6.2.203_1
CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Some of Roderick Coover's recent projects include Switching Codes: Thinking
Through Digital Technology in the Humanities and Arts (University of Chicago
Press), Unknown Territories (Unknownterritories.org, From Verite to Virtual
(Documentary Educatonal Resources) and The Theory of Time Here (Video
Data Bank). A recipient of Mellon, LEF, Whiting and Fulbrigt awards, Dr
Coover is Associate Professor of Film and Media Arts at Temple Universit,
where he teaches courses in visual research, experimental media arts, and
cinema. More at N .roderickcoover.com
Contact: Film and Media Arts Department, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA.
E-mail: rcoover@temple.edu
Roderick Coover has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be idented as the author of this work in the format that
was submitted to Intellect Ltd.
SDF 6 (2) pp. 215-227 Intellect limited 2012
Studies i n Documentary Film
Volume 6 Number 2
2012 1ntellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/sd f.6.2.21S 1
SHARON DANIEL
Uni versity of California, Santa Cruz
On pol itics and aestheti cs:
A case study of ' Publ i c
Secrets' and 'Blood sugar'
ABSTRACT
This
.
article presents an in-deth, theorized discussion of two database-driven new
:;mentaries, 'Public Secrets' (http://publicecret.net) and 'Blood Sugar'
n oandsugar.neas cse studies of hybrid fors of art, scholrship and
achvzsm. Publzc Secrets and 'Blood Sugar' represent the first hal of a series of
woks that re the result of a sustained collaboration with human rights organi
zahon, Justce Now,
_
HEPPAC (the HW Eduction and Prroention Pro am
Alameda County), ezghteen homeless injection drug users, and twen om-
zncrcerted at the largest female correctional facility in the United stes. For
bt of these groups, zn;echon drug users living outside the norms of society in the
s a
.
ow of the cnmmal JUStice system and women trapped inside the rison s stem
thezr rcordd statement,are acts of juridical and political testiony. ubli
Seets and Blood Sugar bnng their voics into dialogue with other, /ego/ politi
_
_
and soaa/ theonsts. The article exlores how, in these specifc cases, iteifac
eszgn constitutes a form of 'argument' (as writing does for a scholar), and user
navzgahon fnchons as a form of 'enquir' (a distillation and translation of the
research enc
?
uter of the Documentar-maker). The author addresses the tensions
d
d
contradzchons that emerge between the goal of theory and aesthetics and those
o a vocac and actlvzsm.
KEYWORDS
a
actvism
interface design
informaton
architecture
politcs
testmony
215

Sharon Daniel
216
I there exsts a connection between art and politcs, it should be cast in
terms of dissensus . . ..
(Ranciere 2010)
Like many artists, I am troubled by a queston - one that has become a
kind of refain -what is the politcal effcacy of art? This is not a queston of
criteria for the political evaluaton of works of art - their correctess, their
radicalism, their a ectve power or critical acuity. The queston that tou
bles me goes beyond interrogatng the power of representation. It is about
the tensions and contradictions that emerge between the goals of theory
and aesthetcs and those of political activism. It is a queston of how to
re-imagine the politcal and the aesthetic, in tandem. To address this ques
tion wrequire setting aside the common defniton of 'politcs', localized
in the state and reduced to the struggle for power, and the common view
of 'art' as conned to the realm of the cultural (resticted fom entering the
space of power) and adoptng, for the moment, the vocabulary of French
philosopher jacques Ranciere. For Ranciere, politcs is not the exerctse of
power. Rather, art and politcs each consist in the '
:
fects of eq

alithat
they stage' through 'forms of innovaton that tear bodies fom therr asstgned
places and fee speech and expression'.(Ranciere 2010: 37-38, 60).
1 do not pretend to any sort of analysis of Ranciere's thought here. am
not a Ranciereian scholar and that is not my brief.) I only intend to appro
priate and interpret selected terms fom his lexcon to constuct a theoretical
space in which to explore the queston of the politcal efcacy of art.
I am much less interested in Rancere' s analysis of the 'politcs of aesthetcs' -
i.e. his 'regmes' and his citque of contemporary movements- than I am in
his 'aesthetcs of politcs'. Rancere is actually quite sceptcal of politcal art and
wary of its 'schizophrenic movement' betvveen the museum and its 'otside'
(2010: 1919-2). It is what he allows art and politcs to share - the noton of
dissensus and the redistibuton of the sensible -that I fnd usefl.
Art and politics each define a form of dissensus |. . . ] there is such
thing as an 'aesthetcs of politcs', it lies in a re-configuraon
.
of e
distribution of the common through political processes of subJechvaton
[ . . . ] The 'aesthetics of politcs' consists above all in the faming of a we,
a subject, a collectve demonstraton whose emergence is the element
that disrupts the distibuton of social parts, an element that I call the
part of those who have no part.
(Ranciere 2010)
For Ranciere, what defnes politcs is a particular kind of speech situation
when those who are excluded fom the political order or included in only
a subordinate way stand up and speak for themselves. For me, this defines
the form of artstic work that I will call 'database documentary' or 'idocs'.
Through this form of practice, I appropriate Ranciere's formulation of poli
tcs and transpose it into the register of art, thus materializing a space of
'dissensus' -not a critique, or a protest, but a conontation of the status quo
with what it does not admit, what is invisible, inaudible and othered. I do not
wish to make claims of politcal efficacy (as commonly understood) for data
base documentary, but instead to ident and descibe a genre and method
that can function as 'politcs' in Ranciere's terms -a politics that I believe has
the potential to circumvent the intansigence of the state.
I what
.
follows, I will use two of my own database documentary projects
as casstu
.
es
,
that
,
dem
.
onstate s premise -providing functonal examples
of the politcal by stagmg equalit' and enabling political subjectvaton.
METHOD AND FORM
The efcacy of art resides not in the model (or counter-model) ofbehav
ior +at it provides, but frst and foremost in parttions of space and time
that 1t p

oduces :o define ways of being together or separate, being in

font or m the rruddle of, being inside or outside, etc.
(Ranciere 2010)
'Public Secrets' (http://publicsecret.net) and 'Blood Sugar' (http://blood
andsugar.net) provide interactive interfaces to online audio archives of
conversations r

corded with incarcerated women and injecton drug users.

These are the fst two works in a series designed to allow individuals fom
what Ranciere identes as 'the part that has no part', to testi to the social
and c
?
noic
.
injustices +ey experience in the context of a broad spect of
public shtutions -the cnminal justce system, the prison industrial complex,
the public health system, and the public educaton system.
In this work, my role is that of a context-provider. I provide the means,
or :ools that will induce others to speak for themselves, and the context in
which they may be heard. I engage with groups of participants who live at
the margns, outside the social order, and attempt to create a space for the
asserton of their politcal subjectivity. The process of subjectivation occurs
both in speakng and being heard. For injecton drug users living outside the
norms of society in the shadow of the criminal justice system, and women
tapped inside the prison system, the statements they make, and allow me to
record, are acts of judical and politcal testimony. I amplifed and contex
tualized, therr speech can tur the capacity for empathetc response towards
broader social and personal change.
I the space circumscribed by subjectvizing speech and transformative
understanding there exsts a productive tension between the partcularities
of invidual hist

ries that are, in one sense, the most compelling aspects of

narratve persuasiOn, and the force capacity of the collectve voice. Where
one v

ice, an individual stor, is intended to stand in for a class of subjects,

there 1b dangerous and disabling tendency to ident the subject as a case
of a tagcally fawed character or unusually unfortunate victm of aberrant
injustice - rather than one among many af ected by structural inequality.
':hen multple VOices speak, in a manner that is intmate and personal, collec
tve and performative, fom the same experience of marginalizaton, the scale
and scope of injustice is forcefully revealed.
For example, before I started visiting the Califora Correctional Women's
Facility (CCWF) in 2002, I held, on an intellectual level, a rather typical, liberal
distaste for the idea of prisons but, like many, I had not seriously questioned
my assumptions about justice and punishment. I assumed that those who
were being punished had committed crmes and that by and large the punish
ment they received would be just. I ifnagned that cases of prosecutorial
malpractice, racial bias, human rights violations and wrongful convicton were
the tagic but rare stuff of investigatory joualism and documentary h.But
aer spending time at the prison - after meetng the women inside and, visit
aer visit, hearing one after another test to the same injustices, the same
On politics and aesthetics
217
Sharon Daniel
218
egregious, pervasive, human rights violatons - the weight of the evidence,
the repetition, the shared experience threaded through the vast amount of
testimony, changed my assumptions and destoyedmy complacence.
Mygoal as an artist is to provide a parallel of this experience to the public.
Mystrategyinvolves addressingan issue, context or marginalized community
as a 'site' (or scene or field) rather than through a story or individual narra
tve. I collect a significant amount of direct testmony fom a 'site'. Then I
design an interface stuctured in a manner that w both crcumscribe and
describe this 'site' of socio-economic and politcal experience as articulatedby
the partcipants. Rather than buildinga single road across that site toget fom
point A to point B (or the beginning of an argument to its resolution), the
designmaps out anextensive territory-say, 100 squaremiles -and the inter
face sets the viewer down within the boundares of this territory- allowing
her to findher own way- to navigate a difcult terrain, to become immersed
init, andthus to have a tansformatve experience. Theinterface and informa
tion design consttute a formof 'argument' (as writingdoes for a scholar), and
a user's navigaton becomes a path of 'enquiry' (a distllation and tanslation
of the encounter throughwhich the speech of the participants emerged.)
The data and interface are famed by what I dof as anecdotal theory
(after Michael Taussig and Jane Gallop), which combines narratves drawn
fom my encounter with my interlocutors, annotated research and analysis.
The passages of anecdotal theory, which canbe foundi n the intoductions and
conclusions, as well as dispersed througout the works, create a point of entry
that allows the audience to become immersed in the 'subjective plurality' that
is manifest in the 'site'. Taken togeter, the recorded interiews or conver
sations, the inforaton and interaction design and theoretcal famework,
materialize the Ranciereian 'political', creatng a space of 'dissensus' both for
participants and for viewers - one that intoduces new subjects into the field
of percepton. (anciere 2007: 65).
DESIGN AND ARGUMENT
While my two case studies, 'Public Secrets' and 'Blood Sugar', are companion
pieces that are very closely related in terms of content, partcipant-group,
socio-politcal argument and visual identity, their underlying information
architectures and resultng interacton designs refect two signifcantly dif er
ent types of interviewcontent.
Te 'site', or space of dissensus, produced through the project 'Public
Secrets' consists of approxmately 500 statements made by incarcerated
women. Their testimony, taken fom conversatons recorded over a period
of six years, reveals the secret injustices of the war on drugs, the criminal
justce system and the prison industrial complex. These narratves of frst
hand experience represent the kind of 'speechsituaton' thatRanciere argues
constitutes all the 'diverse historcal instances of politcs' (2010: 97-101). And
'Public Secrets' performs a fuer 'staging of equality', or disrupton of the
hierarchical status quo, by bringing the voices of these incarcerated women
into dialogue with those of other legal, political and social theorists such as
Giorgio Agamben, Michael Taussig, Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson,
Catherine Mac!nnon and Angela Davis. While this is a dialogue that I have
constructed, by design, between interlocutors whose perspectives originate
fom very diverse social locatons, for me all of their voices emerge out of a
shared ethos and converge in critcal dissent.
0}bN|01U00|
ta!gubE1ll yr
t|t
TOPICS
WHATYOUCANDO
E!T
Figure 1: 'Public Secrets' screen shot of splash page. The piec begins with a voic
oeznt
r
od

ction that zs zntended to address issues of accss and privilege - the

soc1etal znstde and outide.
The atoc
_
ithat ha come to be kown as mass incarceration' is possi
ble ecause It 1b a public secret - a secret kept in an unacknowledged but
pubhc agreement not to know. The public percepton of justce _ the fgure of
Its appearance

elies

n the

ublic not acknowledging that which is gener

ally known. Tis 1b the Ideologtcal work that the prison does. Feminist Legal
Scholar Catherne MacKinnon has analysed the cultural patter by which we
are able to deny, Igore and assimilate atrocites that occur locally and globally
n a daily basis -13efore atocites are recognized as such, they are authorita
tvely re
?
Mded a

e

ither too extaordinary to be believable or too ordinary to

be atocrous [ a . . ] iht's happening, it's not so bad, and it's really bad, it isn't
happening' (2007: 3).
When something is both too violatng and too ordinary or pervasive to be
acknowledged, the 'public secret' is in play. Its stcture is that of an aporia _
an mesolvabe

temal contadicton. Public Secrets' is built on this concept.

The three pnnc1ple branches of navigaton, inside/outside, bare-life/human
life d public secret/utopia, are structured as aporia. Each aporia fames
mtple themes and threads elaborated in clusters of narratve, theor and
eVInce. To

ether, tey explore the space of the prison-physical, economic,

politcal and Ideologtcal- and how the space of the prison acts back on the
space outside to disrupt and, in efect, undermine the very forms of legality,
secunt and feedom that the prson system purportedly protects.
In the mterface, the recorded statements made by incarcerted women and
excerts fom theoretcal texts, are displayed algorithmically in constantly hift
mg constellatons orgaruzed by topic, theory and speaker. Instead of imagery, the
mterfce IS constucted out of quotes. Each screen or view consttutes a kind of
en
:
ergent and tsient

mult

vocal text. These text/views are famed by animated

vmce-over narraton - m the mtoducton, a piece of anecdotal theor walks the
On politics and aesthetics

219
Sharon Daniel
220
Figure 2: 'Public Secrets' screen shot. Each aporia is intoducd in a screen view
that is split horizontally between its two states -for exampl, as seen here, 'inside'
and 'outside'. By rolling aver a quote, viewers triger its corresponding audio clip -
clicking on the quote opens a new screen viW - selecting a clip on the 'inside' half
of the aporia screen view leads to a new screen view with more quotes related to
'life inside'.
viewer acoss the boundary between inside and outside, and in the conclusion a
voice-over leads to an advocacy tool-kit ttled 'what you can do'.
Editor Tara McPherson' s introducton to the publicaton of 'Public Secets'
in the Vectors Joural describes her experience of navigatng its interface:
The design of the project - its algorithmic stcture - calls one's atten
tion to the shg borders between inside and outside, incarceraton
and freedom, oppression and resistance, despair and hope. Throug
navigaton of the piece, the fine lines demarcating these binaries morph,
shift, and reconfgure. Rather, inside and outside mutually determine
and constuct one another illuminating relations between individual
experiences and broader social systems.
(2007, http://vectors.usc.edu/projects/index.php?project=57
'Blood Sugar', the second work in this seri.es of database documentaries,
exposes the social stgmatization and resultng criminalizaton, of poverty
and addicton, through many hours of conversation with injection drug users
recorded at a needle exchange progr. e and ) preventon centre in
Oakland, Califora.
I contrast to the array-like structure of 'Public Secrets', which allows
the women to speak collectvely on topics that arose repeatedly in all of our
conversations, the interviews in 'Blood Sugar' are kept intact and whole. This
sigificant difference between the to projects in both interface and infor
mation design is due to qualitative differences in the nature of the interviews
Figure 3: 'Public Secrets' screen shot. Screen view of 'lie inside' toical arr in
Whlch mcrcer

ted woen is

ss their status as social outsiders and praoi e

acounts of thezr own lives tnSlde the prison. A panel at the top of the activated
q ate-block allows VIewer to oen a coresponding transcript while listening and
another panel at the bottom with 'More ' leads to a new s

F
1
.
&
creen vzew. or
ex
r
p e, each quote dzsplayed in this view opens to a new view on a particul
top1c related to 'life inside'.
r
Figure 4: 'Public Secrets' screen shot. When 'view connections' appears in the anel
at the bottom of a selected block it leads to new kind of screen space that acces.s
assoczations between ztems of content based on conceptual themes and threads.
On politics and aesthetics
22>

I
ll

Sharon Daniel
J. Reference to the
commonly used
moniker that became
the title of the book
Righteous Dopefiend
by Philippe Bourgois
and ]eff Shonberg
(Berkeley, University of
California Press, 2009).
222
Figure 5: 'Blood Sugar' screen shot.
themselves. The women who offered their testimony in 'Public Secrets'
were, for the most part, highly politicized. They consciously welcomed the
opportunity to join their fellow prisoners, speaking to a variety of issues in
a collective voice. By entering the prison as a 'legal advocate', I was able to
interview most of the particpants on multple occasions and in a confden
tal setting. Over tme, I gathered considerable material, both personal histo
ries and politcal opinions that crossed a wide range of topics in which all
the women shared concers.
I contrast, I interviewed most of the addicts whose voices are heard in
'Blood Sugar' only once. The settng where most of the interviews were held,
dung group therapy and educaton sessions at a hann-reducton-based socal
service facility, infuenced the nature of our conversatons. None of the addicts
I met at the exchange presented te identty of the 'righteous dope fend','
which is, very likely, the identty they commonly present on the steet. On the
contary, each act of self-narraton began with a kind of confession of weakness
or disease. The messy details of each life history would then unfold according
to the syntax and gr ar of te disease-and-recovery discourse that is leat
in the type of quasi-therapeutic settng where we met. For the most part, my
interlocutors did not fame their accounts in terms of social critque or analysis.
Their focus was more on self-refecton than social crticism.
For this reason, I decided that the interviews should be available in their
entrety as contnuous narratves and that the interface should present each
interlocutor as both a subject and a body. craphically, each partcipant is
represented as a vertcal waveform or 'audio-body' and functonally each
interview can be listened to or 'scrubbed' throug in contnuous, linear form.
While complete in themselves, the individual 'audio-bodies' that represent
each interview are linked together throug what I considered as 'parasitc'
connections revealed in their stories of pain, violence, abuse and oppression.
These links allow the viewer to cross fom one story to another to follow a
thread of shared experience.
The space the audio-bodies inhabit and the way they are encountered by
the viewer is structured in terms of both the social and biological constuction

igure 6: 'Blood ;ugar' screen shot. Viewers can select an 'audio body' and allow
1t to play, zoom m and 'get closer' by clicing on it, or 'scrub' through to select a
new
r
omt m the mteriew by clicking mz one o)the quotes ]oating around it or by
movmg the play head on the le)side o)the screen.
of adicti

n - a

the boundary of the skin. The metaphor for interaction is

the z

om, the
_
Idea that we must 'get closer', we must not look away, we
must, m a certam se

e, pass through the looking glass -in order to see and

understand the realities of the lived experience of one of the most li-
t a1 ' h
, nnpo
c, soc1 Y at ered - the street junkie. The interface is designed to draw
Figure 7: 'Blood Sugar' screen shot. 'Parsinc' links appear as small black holes
(la be led 'abu
.
se', 'despair', etc.) that ]oat through the screen spac once the viewer
has o
.
omed u

to an audw body and reached its 'nucleus' view. The names o)

parhczpants lmked-to appear on roll-over.
On politics and aesthetics
223

I
Sharon Daniel
224
Figure 8: 'Blood Sugar' screell shot. Here the 'zoom' has pmetrated the llucleus of
the audio body which activates colltellt that is focused oil the bzologzcal expenellce
of addictioll.
you in - frst navigating the exteral/social
.
space of eacpartcpants' story
and then gradually moving towards what 15 embedded m the mtemal, the
biological - metaphorically penetrating the skin.
The interviews are famed by anecdotal theory through a series of' queson
texts' and my own audio-body, which is seen and heard in the introduction
and conclusion. The fourteen 'question texts' respond to a set f someat
rhetorical questions -posed fom the perspective of the enfachisepohtic
subject - such as 'what do we hold against the drug adct?
.
The answers
to these questions carry the principal argument of the p1ece m the form of
a narrative. The texts relate the story of my own transformatve education -
Figure 9: 'Blood Sugar' screm shot showi1Zg the author's introduction.
Figure 10: 'Blood Sugar' screen shot showing active 'question' tet.
what I leat about addiction through my encounters with addicts and my
research into the neurobiology of addiction. They are intended as a point of
suture or identifcaton that should guide the viewer's educaton in paallel to
mine. I is an educaton that I feel must be shared, across the socio-economic
and political spectrum, to foster effective resistance to the criminalizaton of
illness, poverty and the lack of comprehensive public health care - because,
as the piece concludes, we are all living with addicton.
FICTIONS AND REALITIES
A interview is a performance of something true but not necessarily or
always factual. I takes fight, lands somewhere between emotional truth and
constucted memory, is always inected by the context of the interlocuton
and the potental for misrecogniton. I don't assume that the men and women
who allowed me to record our conversatons at the needle exchange and in
the prison ofered natural, objectve descriptions of an unambiguous real
ity. A interview is always an affectve encounter. The defnition of 'affect'
includes, 'asstune' and 'pretend'. The interview is a 'fction', as articulated by
Ranciere - not the opposite of 'real' but a refaming of the 'real' - a way of
building new relatonships between reality and appearance, the individual
and the collectve (anciie 2007: 35-1).
The personal narratves of those trapped in poverty and addicton are
a very particular form of 'fcton' in this sense. They resist translation into
rational linea form-they loop and repeat - theyare both horrifcally compel
ling in their individual accounts of personal tragedy and astonishingly similar
across the board. Addict's stories, especially, can be fustratng and incompre
hensible. 1his is part of the nature of the disease. Their historical trajectories
are not logical. They do not advance ua traditonal narratve ac or resolve
in a satisfing conclusion. To understand and empathize, to hear and accept,
a listener must be moved beyond the logic of cause and effect and into the
realm of affect. Taking affect and 'fction' seriously may be the point where
'real' 'politcs' begins. (ertelsen and Murhie 2010: 2065-67).
On politics and aesthetics
225

|
Sharon Daniel
226
CONCLUSION
What is the politcal efcacy of Art? Despite his insistence on 'aesthetc indif
ference' ('a f remains a f', etc.) and the 'aesthetic cut' (what separates
'consequences fom intentons'), Ranciere acknowledges:
There is no 'real world' that functons as the outside of a [ . . . ] There
is no 'real world'. Instead, there are defnite conguratons of what is
gven as our real, as the object of our perceptons and the feld of our
interventons. The real always is a matter of constucton, a matter of
'fction' . . .
(2010: 1967-73)
The conguratons and constructions that database documentary, as an art
practice that facilitates

political subjectvation, allows constitute a feld of
interenton that maps directly onto and into 'politics', re-imagining and
reconstructing the 'fctons' of the real. Such acts of subjectvaton attempt
to undo the status quo and implement the only universal in politics: we
are all equal' (Ranciere 2007: 86). But there is stll the problem of the 'real'
that is manifest in the operations of power. There is the dif culty of the
material realities my interlocutors experience despite their politcal subjec
tivation - realities that are the result of structural inequality. To get to 'we
are all equal' wl require relocating politics, in a fundamental and material
way, outside the logic of the state. Clearly, the state is not susceptible to the
persuasions of a, or, necessarily, the politcized speech of 'the part that
has no part', but if art can produce new politcal subjects who generate new
'fctions' of the real, it can change both the conversation and who is partici
pating in it. Each event, each body, carries the affective potental for things
to tur out differently.
REFERENCES
Bourgois, Philippe and Shonberg, Jeff (2009), Righteous Dopefend, Berkeley:
University of Califora Press,
Rancere, Jacques (2007), The Politics of Aesthetic (trans. G. Roc ), London:
Continuum.
-(2010), Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetic (trans. S. Corcoran), London:
Contnuum, Kindle editon.
MacKinnon, Catherine (2007), Are Women Human? And Other Inteational
Dialogues, Cambridge: Belknap-Harard University Press.
McPherson, Tara (2007), 'Editor's introduction to "Public Secrets"', Vectors
Joumal, 4, http://vectors.usc.edu/projects/index.php?project=57. Accessed
December 1, 2011.
Bertelsen, Lone and Murphie, Andrew (2010), 'A ethics of everyday ites
and powers: Felix Guattari on afect and the refrain', in M. Gregg and G. J.
Seigworth (eds), The Affect Theor Reader, Durham: Duke University Press.
pg. 138-160.
SUGGESTED CITATION
Daniel, S. (2012), 'On politics and aesthetcs: A case study of 'Public Secrets'
and 'Blood Sugar'', Studies in Documentar Film, 6: 2, pp. 215-227,
doi: 10.1386/sd.6.2.215_1
CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Sharon Daniel is an artst who produces new media documentary projects
that reveal hwnan rights abuses across a spectrum of public institutions. She
employs digital technologies, documentar practces and humanites-based
analysis to examine how state institutions, social structures and economic
conditons (fom inequality in health care and educaton to racial and economic
discrimination in the justce system) produce social injustces and undermine
domestic human ghts
:
Dani
:
l' s work has been exhibited interatonally at
museums and festvals mcluding, WRO media art biennial (oland), Artefact
2010 (Belgium), Transmediale 08 (Germany), the ISENZeroOne festval
(2006 and 2010), the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival DEAF03 (Netherlands),
Ars Electronica (Austra), the Lincoln Center Festval (/USA) the Corcoran
Biennial (Washington, DC and the University of Paris I (Frane), as well as
on the Interet. Her essays have been published in books including Contet
Pravtders (Intellect Press, 2011), Database Aesthetics (Minnesota University
P

ess, 2007) and the Sarai Reader05, as well as in professional jouals such as
mema Joural, Lo

ardo and Springerin. Daniel has been awarded the prestig

1L1 Rockefellerffnbeca Film Festival New Media Fellowship and honoured
by the Webby Awards. Daniel is a Professor in the Digital Arts and New
Media MFA progamme at the University of Califora, Santa f.where she
teaches classes in digital media theory and practice.
Contact: 355 1" Street #S1508, San Francisco, C 94105, USA.
Sharon Daniel has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be idented as the author of this work I the format that
was submitted to Intellect Ltd.
On politics and aesthetics

i"
227
!30 S 0 3L | 003' L| 0 0 03S
l 55H zcc__zG j 0n| | ne| 55Hzcc___|
_|::Je:pe|vc| Jejvc| JeG, zc1z
Aims and Scope . _ .
Transnational Cinemas has emerged in response to a sh1 ft 1n global film
cul tures and how we understand them. Dynamic new mdustnal and
textual practices are being established throughout the world and the
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Call for Papers .
Transnational Cinemas covers a vast and diverse range of fi l m related
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Transnationa! Cinemas
Principal Editors
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XiJn jiJotong Liverpool University
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Oeborah Shaw
Portsmouth University
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Portsmouth University
ruth.doughty@porta L. uk
Intel lect is an independent academic publisher of books and jourals, to viw ou catalogue or ord
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SDF 6 (2) pp. 229-242 Intellect Limited 2on
Studies in Documentary Film
Volume 6 Number 2
20I2 1ntellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: lO.l386/sdf.6.2.229_1
ARNAU GIFREU CASTELLS
Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF)
The case of UEl0K8_ [0lUl8
0EUEll8 the fi rst Catalan
i nteractive documentary
project
ABSTRACT
This case study sheds light on the interctive documentary genre, which is a result
ofa double fsion between the audio-visual (documentary genre) and interaction
(interactive digital media), and between information (cntent) and entertainment
(interactive interfacs). Interactive documentaries combine the modes for reresent
ing reality proposed byBill Nichols with new methods ofnavigation and interction.
Through this cse study, defnition is prposed ofwhat is meant b modes ofrepre
sentation, navigation and interaction, along with an enumertion and classifction
ofnavigation and interction tes. All theoreticl research about the classictions
of the audio-visual documentary and forms ofinterction and navigation ofthe
interctive documentr apply to the proect Guera, pintura de guerra
.
This is
considered to be the frst Catalan documentary ofthi format and nature.
KEYWORDS
interactve non-fcton
interactve
documentary
Interet
navigaton and
interacton modes
inormaton
entertainment
229
Arnau Gifreu castells
J CCRTV lnteractiva is
the company run by
CCMA- the Catalan
Audiovisual Media
Corporation - which
provides interactive
services for T3 and
Catalunya Radio.
Website available at:
httpJ/www.interactiva.
cat.
2. Haiku Media is an
agencyfocusing on
230
the creation and
execution of strategic
and interactive
marketing projects
including websites,
applications for
e-commerce and social
networks, multimedia
presentations, online
advertising and
collateral marketing.
Website avai lable at:
httpJ/www.haiku
media.com/Home.aspx.
1. INTRODUCTION
In the current ecosystem of digital media, how to display inforation quickly
becomes appreciated when we see how taditonal media and related audio
visual productions (fction and nonficton) have increasingly given way to
the creaton of projects that hybridize inforaton (content) and entertain
ment (m).Incorporating interactivity takes this one step further by allowing
the particpaton and involvement of the user. The formats have created new
platfors for interactve display capable of collectng vaous tpes of content
and achieving a break fom the linearty of the prevailing discourse of more
taditonal formats.
Thanks to technical and stylistic developments, today we begin to think in
terms of 'multmedia' and 'interactve' and associate them with the complex
terrain of documentary making. In this ecosystem, a new format has emerged
that is stll in its definiton phase, the 'interactve documentar'. It is di
cult to determine the limits of this new format and also to prophesy about
the future of tis new means of communicaton. The a here is to examine
how digital technologies transformthe logic of creaton and production of the
audio-visual documentary through a specic case study.
2. CONCEPT AND DESCRIPTION
Technical details
Project name: Gueika, War Painting/Guerik, pintura deguera
UL: http://www.tv3.cat/30minuts/guemica/home/home.ht
Produced: 2006, Spaln
Company/producer: Interactva CCRTV' and Haiku Media'
The German a force, 70 years ago, on the orders of General Franco, bombed
Guemika, the sacred city of the Basques. The brutal attack inspired Picasso to
paint his masterpiece: Gueik. Since then, the paintng has become a univer
sal condellU1aton ofthe savagery ofwar. This idea led to the creaton ofa linear
documentary called Gueika: War Painting, a project produced durng 2006 by
the prestgous team of Televisi6 de Catalunya's 30 minutes programme.
The novelty and importance of tis documentary lies in the fact that,
in additon to the producton of the audio-visual documentary, Interactva
CCRTVworked with the 30 minutes team to produce three pieces of interac
tive content that users were able to consult using three different platforms:
the web, digtal terrestial television T and Windows Media Center. The
Windows Media Center is a software module designed for digtal entertain
ment through television and designed for the operating system Microsoft
Windows X and Vista. This additonal content explored the format of the
interactive documenta and broadened the1 viewer's experience beyond
the conventonal documentar. The three applications included information
on the history and provenance of Guerika, an analysis of the iconography,
composition and conservaton of the paintng, and biographies of those who
have had a close relatonship with Picasso's masterpiece.
With Gueik, pintura de guerra, Televisi6 de Catalunya created an inno
vative interactive experience. The documentary programme 30 minutes on the
paintng's history was broadcast on television on Sunday 21 January 2007, as
well as simultaneously on three digital plators: DT, Media Center and an
Interet website. 1his enabled viewers to interactvely access a great deal of
The case of Guernika, pinturadeGuerra, ..
aaditioninforaton, including analysis of the painting, documents, inter
VI
:
w

,
.
oaphies and games. The added value was based on the fact that
this Imtiatve comined the extensive experience of 30 minutes, the leading
p

ogramme for maJor reports and documentaries for the 1V3 news services
With new
_
generaton interactve applications developed byCCR1VInteractiva.
short, It wa a newwayof w
_
atching television and conceiving of an audio
VIsua producton fom a multiplatform perspectve. The regional television
ch

el explained that the documentary was shown on a double screen: one

showg the documentary and another with a menu providing interactve
ac
:
es

to
_
a lar

e amot
.
of additonal informaton, such as analysis of the
pamtng,
_
U
:ter
:
ws, additonal documentation and games.
TeleVsiOn Vewers with an interactive DT decoder and MHP3 could
consult all the informaton in the interactve content, both while the docu
mentary was being broadcast and on subsequent days. They could also play
an intera

tiv

question and answer game related to the content of the report.
Mean

hile, m a further development of the interactive television experience,

verst
_
o of the content was developed for users of the Media Center, where
m additon to further informaton about Gueika, users could also access exta
mat

rial fon
:
the document

such as interiews, documents and images
not
.
mcuded m the montage. VIewers were also able to experience new ways
ofVlewg the content of Guerika, pintura de guerra, which linked the images
m te doc

ent

and the content in the application using remote-contol
ed mteractVI- Fmally, interactive legacy of this interactive digital format
IS the completon of the mteractive content with a website where users can
browse the extensive content related to the history of the paintng and view
the documentary, as well as additonal interactve materal. This interactve
documentary also includes the Shafazi Experience applicaton, where users
can become 'Tony Shaazi' - the man who spray-painted Guemika in 1970
Figure 1: Interactive )ormat using conventional television.
3. The digitalization
of television allows
the opportunity of
interaction between
the user and channel
in the media,
traditionally passive
and linear. To enhance
this relationship in
terms of interactivity,
it is necessary to
have a back channel
information, currently
provided by MHP
devices.
231
tu '
Arnau Gifreu Caste lis
4. Available at: http//
WWW.tv3.CaV30minuts/
guernica/home/home.
htm.
s. Available at: http//
prod.promaxbda.org/
index.aspx.
232
Figure 2: Second screen after the presentation of the interactive format on television
if the viewer chooses the Documentar ctegor.
in protest against the United States positon in Vietam-and paint an image
over the painting.
The combinaton of the audio-visual documentary and interactve content
was the frst of its kind in Spain and it received a number of prizes in the
United States. It won the gold meda in the Horizon Interactve magazine
and news category and silver in the Flash category. At the prestgious Promax
awards5 in New York, it won the gold, silver and bronze medals across
different categories.
3. BASIC DISTINCTION BETWEEN REPRESENTATION, NAVIGATION
AND INTERACTION MODES
In the interactve documentar genre, it is not as important to attempt to
portay reality it is for the traditonal documentary. What is more important
is the way in which the author enables the viewers to interact with the real
ity being portayed, by allowing them to intervene at the level fg editng
and display. As such, this form offers new ways of thg about reality, and
thus of forging it. Setting this key distncton involves being able to identi
the different logics of the documentaton of req:ity and new modes of subjec
tivity made possible by digital media. This involves a leap fom looking at the
modes of representation of reality to conceiving of new ways to navigate and
interact with it, that is, fom analysing what you want to represent to consid
ering how you want to represent it
.
According to Gaudenzi (2009: 9), the various forms provided by Bill Nichols
(1991, 1994, 2001) in recent years are not valid indicators to analyse how the
interactve documentary exploits the possibilites of representaton of real
ity. They are moving fom an analysis focused on the different attitudes and
logics that took the linear documentary flm-makers (documentary modes of
The case of Guerika, pintura de Guerra, ...
representaton) to di erent ways or scenarios that the interactive authors offer
to their users through technology (non-linear navigation and interaction
modes). Partcularly, this case study proposes modalities for navigation and
interacton, as follows:
1. These modalities ofer di erent ways to navigate and interact with reality.
2. The basic distncton between types of navigaton and interacton lies in
the degree of interaction that the user has in the categories of non-linear
navigaton.
3. A system becomes interactve when it has an interface that allows for
communicaton with the user. In the case of the navigaton modalities, this
interacton can be considered as being weak (when a command is used to
interact with predetermined content), or as strong (when the modes of
interacton contribute to the generaton of the work itself.
e in the linear documentar the viewer is not responsible for any response
m the stronger sense (beyond giving a cognitve interpretation of what is being
exposed and drawing conclusions based on their own subjective percepton),
in the case of interactve documentaries this kind of negotiaton is a necessary
part of the experience.
Modes of representation show the atttude of the director in relaton to
the world. Examples of these modes are the expositive, poetc, reflectve,
interactve, observational and performatve forms (ichols 2001: 102-38)
Modes of navigaton allow for diferent ways to navigate and penetate
the reality being portayed, and set a non-linear multmodal deployment that
does not exst in Bill Nichols' modes of representaton. Examples would be the
tes of temporal and spatal arrangements made possible throug interactve
documentaries that use symbolic layerng and branched narratve as means
through which to represent reality.
The types of interaction can go one step further to propose a scenario
in which receivers can become tansmitters, leaving a mark or tace of their
passage through the work. Examples would be the modalites of generatve
interacton or interacton with Web 2.0 applicatons.
.
While t is true that a movie can mix different modes of representa
tion, the VIewer always ends up seeing the same images within a certain
order. The navigation and interaction modalities, when combined, can
bring different perspectves to the user. They can also mix and match the
paths and options to produce the potental for an immersive and interactive
experience that is very different fom the experience of viewing a traditional
documentary.
4- METHODS OF NAVIGATION AND INTERACTION OF THE
INTERACTIVE DOCUMENTARY
After a deep analysis of a set of signifcant examples of interactive docu
mentaries (an initial volume of around 200 examples) as part of the
author's own research - doctoral thesis - that argues and justifes the fact
of considering the interactive documentary as an audio-visual genre, a
division between different types of navigation and interaction has been
established. Among the types of navigation, the following have been
identifed: the Split, the Temporal, the Spatial, the Testimonial, the
Branching, the Hypertext, the Preferred, the Audio-visual, the Sound
233
Arnau Gifreu Castells
PRNTIA NAY!UQOD1
AO!OY>A^`!!/"M!
NA NPN
. MOE
IW
A\DIO/YlD1OlANDION
^DlOHOTO
Figure 3: List ofdigital navigation modalities and sub-modalities.
234
The case of Guernika, pintura deGuerra, ...
and the Simulated, and the Immersive navigation mode. Regarding the
modalities of interaction, Web 2.0 Interaction and Generative Interaction
have been identified as offeringkey opportunities for the interactive docu
mentary. The followingtable specifies the different navigation modes and
their sub-modalities:
The followingtable shows the dllferent digital interacton types and their
sub-modalites:
mO0 I1 sU8mDoM E8
!

-
GFNkA1iVFiNIFkAC1IONMODF AUDCONIFNI1OTHsYs1FM

2.0 ArLiCAIiONsP1FkAC1iVMODF 2.0AvLiCA1IONsCONNFC1iON
Figure 4: List ofdigital interaction modalities and sub-modalities.
5. IMPLEMENTATION OF THE NAVIGATION AND I NTERACTION
METHODS TO THE 0UEKNIKA PROJECT
5.2 The different parts of the interface and its browsing modes
Guenzika, pintura de guerra is an interactive documentary that has a series of
non-linear and digital interaction browsing modes. Apart fombeing inter
esting fom the multiplatformpoint of viewfor which it was produced, this
work is also very rich in terms of the various modes presented and their
combination. I is one of the fewprojects analysed that combines browsing
\vith interaction in the strictest sense. The non-linear browsing modes in
the interactive documentary are temporal, spatal and testimonial. Browsing
is completed with the generative interaction mode. They are listed and
described below.
TT History. Tme browsing mode (years submode)
In this part of the interactive documentary, users can browse on a time
line basis using two different criteria: frst, the one explaining the history
of the painting (called 'Chronology') fom when it was commissioned
until its retur after the dictatorship; second, users can access a map
with a timeline at the bottom (called 'The travels of Guerika') where
they can also use the years submode to follow the painting on its various
joureys.
T.2 The Symbol. Spatial browsing mode (geographical map, visual
map and photographic map submode)
The part called The Symbol uses spatial browsing to disseminate its content.
This mode uses three submodes, which are the geographic map, the visual
or graphic map and the photograph viewer. Te geographical map takes us
235

I
I

I
Arnau Gifreu Caste lis
Figure 5: Basic interface ofthe webdoc proect.
to the various cities where the paintng was hidden during its enforced exle
over several decades (although this submode is part of the History section);
meanwhile, the visual map submode presents various sections, including
'Discovering Guerika', a browsable image of the paintng to discover the
meaning of the various areas and 'Te Health of Guemika', which shows
damaged parts of the painting and the restoration work ca ed out; fnally,
the photographic submode is illustrated using the sections 'Painting against
the Wa and 'Picasso and Peace'. The former refers to graphic representa
lions that have been inspired by this great work, and the latter to icons and
emblems that have been based on the painting and whichare directly related
to the desire forworldpeace.
Figure 6: Cronology. Illustration ofthe time browsing mode. Years submode.
The case of Guerika, pintura de Guerra, ..
Figure 7: Paintng against war. Illustration ofthe spatial browsing mode.
Photographic map submode.
l_ The figures. Testimonial browsing mode (historical figures and
interviewees submode)
This part uses the two existng submodes to provide a twofoldanalysis: first,
varied information on the historical fgures related to the painting; second,
a series of interviews provides a more moder and critical perspective on
the events surrounding the production and history of this masterpiece of
painting.
Figure 8: DiscoveringGuera. Illustration ofthe spatial browsing mode.
Graphic map submode.
237
1 1
l
I


Arnau Gifreu Castells
238
Figure 9: Pamtng agamst war. fllustration of the spatial browsing mode.
Photographic map submode.
_.} Shafrazi Experience. Generative interaction mode.
Besides using different submodes to illustrate some specifc modes - with
the consequent increase in browsing richness and the substantial increase
in routes offered to the user to look at the story under discussion - users
can also play a part that is more closely related to the opportunity to leave
their mark on the system while generating content in a personal way, leav
ing their name or anonymously. This part aims to create an interpreta
tion of the picture with preset tools and specific actions. Moreover, once
they have fnished adding their final touches to the original work, they can
name their creation and explain its importance and meaning to them. The
Figure 10: Caracters. Illustration of the testimonial browsing mode. Historical
fgures submode.
The case of Guerika, pintura de Guerra, ..
Figure 11: Interviews. Illustration of the testimonial browsing mode. Intriewees
submode.
contributio

, both visual and textual, is added to an online gallery where

other creatwns by other users can be viewed. In order to browse and inter
act using this option, it is frst necessary to register on the 13 website, so
that the autonomous regional television channel has a large community
of followers, can send news (if the user wishes) and ultimately generate
loyalty among a type of audience that is gradually combining the teleVision
and interactive platforms.
Figure 12: Shafazi experience. Genertive interaction mod. Access to the
practicl part (generating drawings) or visualising content that has already been
created (online galler).
239
Arnau Gifreu Castelis
240
Figure 13: Shafai experience. Generative interaction mode. Eample ofgraphic
generative contribution.
Figure 14: Shafrazi experience. Generative interaction mode. Eample ofteal
genertive contribution.
Figure 15: Shafazi experience. Generative interaction mode. Online virtual galler.
The caseof Guerika, pintura de Guerra, ...
Figure 16: Complete scheme ofthe modalities in the web i-doc.
b.CONCLUSION
FeranOavell andAdria Serranote' thatto canyout uproject, CCR1worked
withthe companyActva Multimedia. CC1i dedicated to developinginter
actve products andActve Multmedia to developingdiferent technologes. The
project took placeduring the secondIof 2006. Accordingto Oavell and Serra,
the project Guemika required a huge investent and, apart fom the website,
it was exhibited and conswned in one day. This leads to the conclusion that
the business model of the project Guewas not exactly proftble for those
involved. The estmated cost ofthe project was fom60 to 70 thousandeuros for
the interactve part, including the productonfor television and the Web.
Currently, according to Oavell, via the Web -Windows Vista and 7 - the
user can actvate the Windows Media Center, but the company has not done
enoughmarketngfor this product and it has not been standardized, although
the project remains also accessible fomthis platformtoday. This has certainly
limited the audience reach of this aspect of the project. However, there are
now similar experiences that have been developed and made more widely
available, such as AppleT.
Powerful extras were created through the project where users couldwatch
the docwnentarand i some places gainaccess to other informationpausing
the fh and accessingthe extra content. What changedbetween the website
and the Media Center was the user experience, with the Web version also
oferingpofthe additonal content. 1his is the main support that is still actve
andavailable online7
The main goal was to experiment in television practces, with Catalan
television always having been a pioneer of this. A with many stations or
producers, who in a concete moment decided to 'experiment' with a novel
format, the idea was not developed beyond the frst experence. I terms of
acquiring experience and prestge, both goals were achieved, with awards
6. These conclusions
are drawn, in
part, through two
interviews conducted
by the author on 1
May 2011 The first
was held at the
production company
El terrat, where
Adria Serra works
at the Department
of Contents of this
company and is the
project manager of
digital content {New
Media). At the time
when Guerika was
produced,Adri. was
the coordinator of the
project. The second key
interview to discover
important details of
this production was
done to Ferran Clavell,
director of contents of
the Interactive Catalan
Radio and Television
Corporation {CCRTVI).
7. Available at: hitpJ
www.tv3.caV3omin u t/
guernicaJhome;home.
htm.
241

Arnau Gifreu Castells

242
having been eaed tat cert the quality beyond the Catalan borders. As such,
this case study stands an early demonstaton fom CCRTVI that it is possible
to achieve new forms of audience participaton on T with interactvity as an
essental factor. It makes the project an important milestone in terms of explor
ing new possibilites and ceatng new knowledge for futre development.
REFERENCES
Gaudenzi, S. (2009), Digital Interactive Documentar: From Representing Reality
to eo-creating Reality, London: Cente for Cultural Studies (CCS) of
Goldsmiths, University of London.
Gueika, pintura de guerra (2007a), '1VC (Television of Catalonia)', audio-visual
documentary (3 a la carte), http://w .tv3.cat/videos/219786691
-- (2007b), 'CCR1V Interactva (Corporaci6 Catalana de Radio i Televisi6
Interactiva)', Haiku Media, Barcelona, http://w .tv3.cat/30minuts/
guerca/home/home.ht
Nichols, B. (1991), L representaci6n de la realidad: Cuestiones y Conctos sabre
el Documental, Barcelona: Paid6s.
-(1994), Blurred Boundaries. Question of Meaning in Contemporar Culture,
Bloomington and Indiana polls: Indiana University Press.
-- (2001), Introduction to Documentar, Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press.
SUGGESTED CITATION
Castells, A. G. (2012), 'The case of Gueika, pintura de Guerra, the frst
Catalan interactve docuentary project', Studies in Documentar Film, 6: 2,
pp. 229-242, doi: 10.1386/sd.6.2.229_1.
CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Aau Gieu Castells is a lecturer, researcher and producer i the audiovisual
and multimedia feld. He is an audiovisual communicaton graduate fom the
Universitat AutOnoma de Barcelona (UAB), has a Master's Degee in Digtal
Arts and is a PhD Candidate at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (|. He
has been visiting professor at TAMK (fampere University of Applied Sciences,
Finland), Universita degli Studi di Milano (Italy) and research professor at the
University of York (Toronto, Canada, pre-doctoral fellowship for research). He
has been working on a Thesis focused on Interactve Digital Communicaton
at the UPF since 2006. He has worked in the producton of television such
as 25T or TVC as well as in producton companies Tasmania Films and
MediaPro. He is currently producing documentaries for television and the
Interet. As for the Interactves, he has created and desiged the navigation
system of diferent portals, with special attention given to UC (Audiovisual
Research Group), the Audiovisual Production Observatory and the digital
magazine Fonnats , all of them linked to the Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
Contact: San! Gabriel45 3r la 08350 Arenys de Mar, Barcelona, Spain
Aau Gieu Castells has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identfed as the author of tis work in the format that
was submitted to Intellect Ltd.
SDF 6 {2) pp. 243-247 Intel lect limited 2on
Studies in Documentary Film
Volume 6 Number 2
2onlntellect ltd I nterview. English language. doi: 10.1386/sdf.6.2.243_y
N1LHVLW
ANN DANVLKIW
A conversation on
engagement authorshi p1
i nterstitial spaces and
documentary: Matt Adams1
twenty years of Bl ast Theory1
Q: Cn you talk about the work Blst Theor does and how those eerences cn
etend to interactive documentar?
Adams: I feel relatively faudulent talking in a documentary context because
we don't make docmentaries and don't come fom documentru back
grounds. A lot of the Issues and pertnent questions documentar makers ask
temselves are alien to me in some ways.
But Jew, Nick and I have been working together for a long tme, Blast
Theory 20 years old this year. Ou work has always had a really strong
element of interest in the real world and boundary between the art work and
the real world. And tg about how that boundary is a really porous one
and thinking about how that a work seeps out into the real world and how
the world seeps into the art work.
NB: Edited in
Studs Turkle style:
rearranged order
for continuity,
leaves out filler
words.
243
Ann Danylkiw
244
I'm reminded by a really lovely work of Martin Creed - a conceptual
artst - who says something like - I'm paraphrasing - 'the art work plus the
world equals the world'. That's a really nice element of honestyaround what
artsts do.
Sueys and polls of one kind or another have always kind of cropped up
in our work. So there are all these kinds of forms of practces that in someway
intersect with documentary- the idea ofmeasuring theworld, monitoringthe
world, recording the world and feeding that back.
So that line between pretense and realityhas always been reallyinterest
ing to me and the sense i whichin our real lives we are stagingourselves in
some way. I staged environments we are really ourselves in some way and
just to dabout how those two things penetrate.
It's changingdramatcallyas a culture in the last ten totwelve years. How
people can represent themselves culturally? How they communicate with
other people? It's much more highly mediated than it was. There's a level of
staging that's increasing increasingincreasing.
Q: How so? Do you mean the clothes we wear do you mean how we + . =
Adams: There is all of that but what's changed is online culture.
ShenTurkle is a real infuence on my thg on that in terms of how,
you know partcularly in the earlier days of the Interet you had room to
manipulate your identty-there's loads of gender switching, identtyswitch
ing you have multple names and identies on multiple diferent services.
And they're nowtring to drive that out of the intere! but it stll exsts in a
more subtle way (ttp:/l.rt.edu/-sturkle/).
Now a social network, howyou use status updates and likes and photo
tags. Those are keyagents of socal interactons. That's howa lot of people are
building and entertaining relatonships.
And mobile phones are just another layer on that: text messaging, instant
messagng, anynumber of statathat you can separate out althese diferent
ways, theirowafordances their owneconomies andbusiness models, theyall
constct the waywe talk in df erent ways. The fact that a text message is only
140 characters, semi-anonymous, phrase, it's live but tme-delayed, that it costs
youmoneyforeachmessage. Athose thingsgo, combinedalhave a dramatc
impact onhowyou use it, whoyou t to andwhat you sayto them.
On some level what I'msayingis verybanal and on another level it's deep
seeded and has fundamental implicatons for howsociety is constrcted and
what the social and political sub-tools of a society are and are really tans
formed in some ways, in ways we don't fully understand.
Q: Do you think it's important that we maintain that ability, especially as our
identities are augmented online, that we maintain that ability to be anonymous, be
another identity?

Adams: I think having that feedom of choice is really important because I

d- cities, one of the ways cites work is to gve you anonymity. I grewup
in a small, rural communityand I couldn'twait tomove toplace where I didn't
knowmy neighbours. It never bothered me the slightest bit, that I wouldn't
knowwhowouldlive next door to me. . . .
I think online as well - that sense in which you can have some flexbility
and malleabilitaround your identty can be a very powerful and interesting
thing.
A conversation on engagement, authorship, interstitial ...
I'm not someonewho is overlyconceredby the collapse of privacythat is
currently
_
taking place. I t privacy and surveillance - we're in a very fuid
moment m those things. The traditional lens through which they are usually
ted abo

t is an encroaching state and an encroaching corporate sphere and

pnvacy bemg eroded step-by-step and being bitterly resisted by the forth
nght thinking people, I fnd that an unconvincing reading ofwhat's goingon.
That's perhaps a tangential issue.
Q: Perhaps not? Your work certainly plays with the notion of identity, especially
aslng the public to bend their identity or to extend it or - I don't know - how
would you describe what you ask them to do, to participate in things like A Machine
to See With or Complicit? And the way you observe their identities in that?
Mybe there's something about surveillance in there? (http://www.youtube.com/
watch?vcD26y4ncDe4&featuremj_in_order&list=UL)
Adas: Absolutely. Absolutely. Ulrike and Eamon'Compliant', it's different in
df erent ways, in different projects (ttp:/l.youtube.com/watch?vGLrsE
6D4qTw&featurerelated)
In Ulrike and Eamon 'Compliant', we playwith identtin a very partcu
lar way. Because you are invted to choose to become either Ulrike Meinhof or
Eamon Collins and you're ten talked to i you are that person and over a
30-rutewthat'sfedontoyoumoreand moreand moreand yougo throug
a number of things that extend that complicty wth your identt (ttp://www.
youtube
:
com/watch?vSJSPFkDkVA&feature=related; http://en.wikpedia.org/
wie_Meinhot http:/len.wikipedia.org/wamon_Coilins).
There's a vibraton that comes off that process whether you adopt it or
resist it you are stll navigating that suppositon that you are now someone
else. It oes that in an entirely interior way. There's not really roll playingor
pretending to be someone. You're never invited to do anything that would
outwardlyindicate thatyou're someone different. It's an entrelyinterior proc
ess, just an auditoryprocess.
Q: Do you consider your work to be eo-creation or do you maintain authorship?This
notion (authorship) that we are fascinated by in interactive documentar.
Adams: I've only got only contadictory things to say about this subject.
I t that Jew and Nick and I have always sought to problemate the
idea of the artst as a kind of unique and special individual in society that does
things that other people don't do and brings things back for other people to
engagewith. Whichis, relativelybogus thing ( . . . ].
I would endorse Brian Eno's defniton of interactve work as unnished.
Meaning that only when the public come, does the work complete. And I
believe that very strongly. And I would say a work like Rider-Spoke is a way
that shares authorship with the public so that the public are both perform
ers, authors and audience members at the same time (ttp:l/en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Bran_eno).
Havng said p of that, I think there isn't any doubt whatsoever that
the
_
work we make doesn't have a strong sense of authorship and a very
partcular- and we talkedalreadyabout ,a very particular tone of voice.
There are certain things that are veryBlast Theory in style andyou can see
them across a twentyyear history of work. And I think that contradiction is
really great.
245
Ann Danylkiw
Q: Before, you said you think very little of what you do is documentary, and yet
there's a whole literature within the documentr feld that dispels the notion that it
could be unbiased in anyway. Every little bit of documentary is edited and orches
trated to get a response fom the audience and yet you 'don't do' documentar?
Adams: I would hope it's teasing and pulling at questons of reality and how
we understand the word and how our intersects with the world m of the
tme . ...
We're always looking to pose those questons. I some way, that's just
classical artstic digital art theatical practce.
One of the thread that I see rn g through our work is that as a member
of the public, as a partcipant, or an audience member or a spectator, as a
witness, or as a bystander, I think we've got something across all those differ
ent things that the real event is present in some way and so a real event is
then casting light on the manipulaton and fabricaton that sits around it.
Q: Why is it important to poke at those interstitial spaces between reality and our
perction?
Adams: I it's a more fluid place than it's ever been. We're in a kind of
miasma between reality and unreality all of the time.
That's the kinds of lives we lead, where we witess things before we see
them. Al of those kinds of bizarre things. I t it's important because we're
so much within that.
I 2000 when we started making work for mobile devices and mobile
phones, the idea that they were cultural spaces was quite a partcular notion,
quite arguable, quite a debatable idea because at that stage phones were stll
seen as tools that delivered a set of functonality to you.
As soon as we realized that 3G was coming and therefore your phone
would be on the Interet and therefore your phone would be a node on the
network, to me anyway, that was a real moment of 'I remember precisely
where I was when' that suddenly arrived. I was like 'Oh my God, that changes
everything!' about how you communicate and what your relatonship is to the
Interet and how the Interet is now with you wherever you go and you your
self are networked, it's not like to go to a thing that is networked, it becomes
part of you. Phones are very personal and intmate devices.
Using the city and technology and tg about the city and the tech
nology - how each reconfgure each other and how each are cultural spaces.
It's really important.
Q: You tend to deal with 'big fndamental questions about life'-why?
Adams: I don't know. It's probably a personality faw. (Laughs)
I was talking about it just recently because I r

ad a review ofMurakami's
new book 1Q84 and I cut out (fusses with wallet) a quote because I thought
it was such a nice description and it says (reading), 'some critics are unsure
what to make of Murakar . . .'.
(reads what follows from The Guardian)
Some critcs are unsure what to make of h, the prejudice being that a
witer who is so popular, partcularly among young people, cannot really
be that good, even he is now quoted at short odds each year to w the
Nobel prze fOr literature. But Murakami's success speaks to a hunger for
A conversation on engagement, authorship, interstitial ...
what he is doing that is unusual. Most characters in the modem commer
cial genre called 'literary ficton' take for granted a certain unexaed
metaphysics and worry exclusively about the higher-level complexties
of crrcumstance and relationships. Throughout Murakami's oeuvre on
the other hand, his characters never cease to express their bafeent
about the nature of tme, or change, or consciousness or moral choice
or the simple fact of fnding themselves alive, in this orld or another
'
I this sense, Murakami's heroes and heroines are all philosophers. I i
natural, then, that his work should enchant younger readers to whom
the problems of being are stll fesh, as well as others who ever grew
out of such puzzlements - that his books should seem an outstetched
hand of sympathy to anyone who feels that they too have been tossed,
Without therr permiSSIOn, into a labyrinth. (ttp:// .guardian.co.uk/
books/2011/oct/18/haruki-murakami -lq84-review)
And I just thought that that sense of the stories that have a comforting, are

n outstretehand. One othe reasons it resonated with me particularly

rs that havmg JUSt made Ulnke and Eamon: Compliant and A Machine to See
Wzth,
.
they're both quite political works and there's a certain level of anger
rg through both of them in certain ways and that's not uniformly
true over works we've made.
We have made works like Rider Spoke and we made an interactve work
for buses called Route 1236 that are about mediatng conversatons between
strangers that defnitely have a di erent register (http:// .youtube.com/
watch?v=gkAQX8cz9hc&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL).
But at this particular moment, I'm tg that I would like to make work
that acknowledges a sensitvity, a possibility of warmth because both of those
works that I just talked about are quite uncompromising.
It's partly, I think, 'to be an artst is an outageous arogance', in the frst
place. And then to be able to exist and have a career as an artist is an outa
geous privilege
:
And i you combine those two things together, I feel like you
have an obligatiOn then to take the profession very seriously and ty and make
sure you are adding to the diversity of the world - that you are doing some
thing that IS distinctive and unique. And part of that is tring to fnd a tone of
vmce, a kind

f register that is true, that can engage with people.

e ofte

JOke about
.
the fact that our work has no jokes in it whatsoever.
I don t feel like we are like that as people. There is just something about the
way we collaborate that has a certain tone of voice that recurs. Maybe we are
trapped by that. Or maybe we need to get out a bit more, I don't know.
25 November 2011
London
247
intellect books & journal s Performi ng Arts Vi sual Arts -. Cul tural & Medi a Studi es
Wt6 gI m5
New Perspecti ves on
Movi e-Goi ng, Exhi bi ti on
and Recepti on
Edited by Albert Moran and Karina Aveyard
ISBN 978-l-84lSO-S114 1 Paperback I UK fl9-9S I US S30
Whether we stream them on our laptops, enjoy them in theatres,
or slide them into DVD players, films are part of what it means to
be socially connected in the twenty-first century. Despite flms
significant role in our lives, the act of watching films remains an area
of social activity that is little studied, and thus little understood.
With a focus on the social, economic, and cultural factors that
influence how we watch and think about movies, Watchi ng Films
centres its i nvestigations on four areas of inquiry: Who watches films?
Under what circumstances? What consequences and affects follow?
And what do these acts of consumption mean?
ALBERT MO RAN is professor of media studies at Griffith
University in Brisbane.
KARINA AVEYARD is a lecturer at the University of East Anglia.
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