‘Interactive Documentary’ course taken by Ruth Sergel at Interactive Telecommunications Program ITP part of TISCH School of Arts and NYU.
Interactive documentaries provide radical new possibilities for both community creation and active audience engagement. This class explore the history of the documentary form through photography, oral history, film/video, performance and current hybrid projects. Interactive Documentary is a production class. Weekly experiments in creating documentaries are supported by lectures, viewing of non-traditional works and learning the necessary audio/video & projection tools. Assignments focus on developing works whose creation mirrors the themes we are seeking to explore. In the past documentaries were created with an expectation of the audience operating as passive consumers. Interactive documentaries enable us to dream new possibilities with audiences actively participating in the work.
Also, this course has crossover as well ‘Interactive Screens and Cinematic Objects’ by Marina Zurkow, including a focus on multilinear narrative.
What does it mean to create cinematic works? What are the limits of the term “cinema,” and what are its possibilities? Will it be story-based, formalist, or symbolic? How does interactivity impact narrative perception, rhythm and arc? Is an interface user-driven or machine-driven? Multi-linear or singular? Screen or object based? Do we want to work for our stories? Is it possible to make profound or emotional narrative work in a multi-linear or interactive environment? The creation and evaluation of work in this class pivots on the notion of narrative perception: a viewer’s desire to actively make story out of represented moments, from Chaplin’s silent movies to US Army recruitment ads to Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. The emphasis of this class is on art practices, focusing on sculptural and screen-based installation forms rather than commercial applications. More conceptual than technical, more narrative than formal, students work on the creation of time-based projects through short and medium-length assignments. Students work in a range of media, from paper maps to multiple screens. In addition, students are expected to engage in critical dialogue through individual research and presentation of precedents, from new media art projects, readings, and experimental or mainstream film.
I made a connection with Jon Kolko’s ideas on ‘reframing’ taken from Schon’s ideas on framing. Used in Abductive Thinking and Sensemaking: The Drivers of Design Synthesis: Overview: Making Sense of Chaos’ in relation to design, I linked reframing with a practitioner making a shift in their practice. Framing a problem as part of moving that practice into new territory. Following Kolko’s discussion on the design process, he refers to Schon’s idea of framing in relation to scoping a design problem. Framing a problem he argues is set up pragmatically and intuitvely from what is known. Reframing in contrast alters the frame by introducing a different or unusual point-of-view:
Thus, reframing is a method of shifting semantic perspective in order to see things in a new way. The new frame “re-embeds” a product, system, or service in a new (and not necessarily logical) context, allowing the designer to explore associations and hidden links to and from the center of focus.
The Stony Rises Project exhibition opened on 22nd July and I finally finished off the video work ‘Purrumbete Verandah’, I made specifically for this travelling exhibition. The exhibition was reviewed in ‘The Age’ – Rock art, but not as we know it. Robert Nelson the reviewer referred to the video work ‘Purrumbete Verandah’.
Pondering the aesthetic history of the region, Seth Keen revisits the location of a painting by Eugene von Guerard. His video yields an unsettling tranquillity, where the peace can never be knitted with the glazed lights and hollows of the European tradition.
The supporting Stony Rises project website has been finalised as part of documenting the exhibition and broader research project, where you can read more about the video work ‘Purrumbete Verandah’ and the Locative Painting research project. Also, I there is an artists statement published in the accompanying book ‘Designing Place’ published in parallel with the opening exhibition.
I have been thinking lately about how I could bring writing closer to my documentary practice. Some notes I made in a forum recently on project-based research for my GRC presentation. This is in regards to writing the exegesis.
This week I attended a forum discussion on writing up project-based, research in which Peter Downton described (the exegesis) as potentially being a project. This has got me thinking about how the writing could be developed in terms of it having connections with the practice. One idea is that the themes could become categories and the paragraphs tags were the exegesis is formed in the same way I would construct a multilinear documentary. The writing is seen as being a documentary – a story of my practice and the research inquiry being made through my practice.
So this got me thinking about a few things including what tool I could use to write in a multilinear way. I have been working towards getting to know (tinderbox) lately (and I am only scratching the surface). If I see paragraphs as being like (video shots) each one could be tagged and categorised with the idea to bring the writing together later on under specific conceptual themes. In tinderbox you would use agents to cluster these paragraphs. In tinderbox I need to figure out how to bring the chunks together into a linear document. Of course the writing could be developed in tinderbox then published in a blog.
BM showed me Scrivener which really suits the film and TV writer in terms of thinking about things in shots and sequences. This is useful because the chunks can be assembled at the end into a linear document. It is also works with endnote.
The other idea I had was to go back to wordpress and produce a blog as the exegesis itself. This is interesting because the research blog could be tied into this including the previous reflective writing. Working live online means the work can be really intertextual, with loads of external links to references and other notes etc. The drawback here is assembling the chunks which is covered in Scrivener. This would have to be done manually. The blog could be used to draft the exegesis which is then edited from that draft. Another advantage is that video works could be linked to directly which bears all those tedious pdf images in mac word. Maybe the final exegesis could be a blog instead of a hardcopy pdf? Or it could be both? I need to do some tests. The other consideration is referencing – zotero works nicely online.