Interactive essays on nonlinear storytelling
Database/Narrative/Archive, Seven interactive essays on digital nonlinear storytelling
edited by Matt Soar & Monika Gagnon
Database|Narrative|Archive is a collection of seven ‘essays’ by leading thinkers and makers in the emergent medium of nonlinear digital storytelling. Each contribution has been conceived and written for Scalar, an interactive, multimedia, scholarly publishing platform in development at the University of Southern California, under the direction of the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture. All of the contributors have been concerned with investigating and addressing critical, conceptual, and creative questions at the heart of contemporary nonlinear storytelling in this formative era of the Web, while underlining connectivity and historical resonances with earlier media forms and texts.
Data Documentary
At the Digital Documentary Audience symposium I was inspired by Mitchell Whitelaw‘s presentation amongst others. Somewhere in the mix of discussion the idea of a data documentary was raised.
From Mitchell’s talk which looked at “data as a material for practice” – I saw a data documentary as being designed in a similar manner to the way Mitchell was working with archives of visual material online using ‘data visualisation’ techniques. (I note on the idfaDOCLAB / MIT open documentary lab ‘Moments of Innovation’ website a section on data visualisation)
Other quotes and notes from Mitchell’s talk:
“Agency and literacy of doing things with data…”
“If culture = data”
“Data representations are made, not given” (here the idea is to provide representations of data that re read in different ways from different perspectives)
“Nonfiction practice of data visualisation”
How is the representation of data designed to be “revealing, complex, generative, and open-ended’?
The was also a focus on organising data beyond “hiding it behind a search box” – although there were also examples of combining indexing with searching.
The design has to consider how it will invite users to explore the content.
The notion of making senses or “sense making’ of the what is created is left to the imagination of the user. The user weaves the complexity together themselves – “work out how to entice people outwards into exploration…”
There was tendency to work from a “one screen interface” to maintain context.
“Intensify and densify the interface…”
References:
http://visiblearchive.blogspot.com.au/ one of Mitchell’s projects.
Trove National Library of Australia online archive.
‘Mountains out of Molehill’ David McCandless
The documentary enterprise
I really enjoyed Jeni Thornley’s energetic and illuminating presentation at the At Visible Evidence XIX international documentary conference at ANU, Canberra.
Notes:
How the history of documentary intersects with other fields in relation to theorising documentary.
Thornley described the Internet as a “huge porous documentary text”.
Collabdocs
Docshift – Toronto
idfa doclab
‘Audiovisual thinking’ as a future forecast for the digital humanities
Jean Rouch Project
Book – Life After New Media By Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska
John Corner – postdocumentary
Labyrinth project online
Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses – Thomas Elsaesser, Malte Hagener
Gallery of ‘Lost Art’ – Tate
Jeni’s abstract and references:
Documentary, the database and the global archive of the internet: implications for teaching documentary film history
In this paper I explore some challenges that converging digital and online media provoke in teaching documentary film history. How do we contextualize such rapidly evolving media within the field of documentary? To what extent do we draw from other disciplines – art practice, new media theory and critical internet culture (Lovink 2017) to sustain a lively tradition of documentary studies. In this participatory, database era how do we re-figure the notion of ‘spectatorship’? [Rizzo 2008; Kinder 20ll; Pedulla 2072). What scholarship might assist teachers and students to think inter-textually, collaboratively and inter-culturally? (Ginsburg 2008; Deger 2006; Davis & Morton zA11) How do affect, embodiment and ethics play out? (Marks 1999; Renov 2009; Rutherford 2017). What is the relationship between the ‘body’(my body) and the database?
Rather than seek answers through specific case studies I navigate tracks through the internet, this vast documentary database, and experiment with relevant insights from earlier documentary film scholarship; and I keep an eye on my own subjectivity along the way. Renov(1993) proposed a poetics of documentary -’to submit aesthetic forms to rigorous investigation as to their composition, function, and effect’. Where, then, might a ‘poetics of the database’ and internet take us? Does Nichols’ (1988) ‘discourse of delirium’ [19?F) also offer a method, along with his essay on cybernetics and culture? This paper considers critical thinking that might contribute to the development of companion texts to MacDougall’s (1986) Film Teaching and Documentary and Renov’s Teaching Documentary Q077) in this era of the global archive of the internet.
References
Davis, T. & Morton, R. [2011), ‘Working in communities, connecting with culture’: Reflecting on U-matic to YouTube”, Screening the Past,31.
Deger, J. (2006) Shimmering Screens: making media in an Aboriginal community, Uni of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.
Ginsburg, F. (2008) “Rethinking the Digital Age”, in The Media and Social Theory, NY, Routledge.
Kinder. M. [2011) ‘Re-orchestrating History, TransformingThe Danube Exodus into a Database
Documentary’, Cinema’s Alchemist: the Films of Pdter Forgcics, [ed) by B Nichols & M. Renov’ Uni
of Minnesota Press.
Lovink G. (2011) Networks Without a Cause: A Critique of Social Media, Cambridge, Polity.
MacDougall, D. [1998) “Film Teaching and Documentary”in Transcultural cinema’ Princeton UP’
NJ.
Marks, L. (1999) The skin of the Film: Intercultural cinema, Embodiment, and the senses’ ts Duke
UP.
Nichols, B. [1994) Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meani’ng in contemporary culture’ lndiana
UP.
Nichols, B. (1988) “The work of culture in the Age of cybernetic Systems”‘ screen 21:1′
Pedull), Gabriele (IOLZ) In Broad Daylight: Movies and Spectators After the Cinema’ NY’ Verso’
Renov, M. (1993) “Towards a Poetics of Documentary’,Theorizing Documentary’ NY’ Routledge’
Renov,M.t2008)’what’satstakeforthedocumentaryenterprise?,Docon-line’No’4:166-179′
Renov, M. [2011) “Teaching documentary: toward a goal-centered pedagogy of the
documentary film”, Signifcacao, 35.
”
Rizzo,T. [2008) “YouTube, The New cinema of Attractions” , scan: Journal of Media Arts Culture’
5:1.
Rutherford, A. (2011) What Makes o Film Tick? Cinematic Affect, Materiality and Mimetic
Innervation, Bern, Peter Lang.
idfaDOCLAB Moments of Innovation
idfaDOCLAB / MIT open documentary lab – Moments of Innovation
Defining documentary has never been easy, all the more because of different cultural traditions. The English-speaking world often looks back to the British documentarian John Grierson’s definition of the form as ‘the creative treatment of actuality’ — a useful phrase that he first used to describe Robert Flaherty’s Moana, but one that inadvertently wedded the documentary project to the linear narrative.
Other cultures have used other descriptors, embracing radically different types of filmmaking in their understanding of the documentary. Today’s interactive documentaries compel us to revisit our assumptions.
We take an expansive view of documentary, and are above all interested in the pas de deux between representation and technology, and the resulting capacity to see the world with new eyes.
We are interested in history, in connecting the dots between our latest endeavors and those conceptual pioneers and technological prototypes that came before them. We consider innovation both in the creative application of new technologies and in the creative impulse that lead documentarians to invent new technologies.
We are interested in continuities and disruptions, in tracking down origins and inspirations. Although our theme is evolutionary, we do not assume that recent instances are better than earlier ones – they are different, and our goal is to recall those earlier instances, to learn from and to celebrate them.
For these reasons, MIT’s Open Documentary Lab and IDFA’s DocLab have joined together to put the long story of documentary innovation into perspective, and to speculate about its future.
Collabdocs
Mandy Roses’ collabdocs research project. About
My research looks at the intersection between documentary and the Social, Semantic and Open Web. I’m investigating the role of the producer as context provider, catalyst, curator in documentary projects. I’m interested in the social, political and creative potential of participatory and collaborative forms. I’m drawing inspiration and ideas for methodology from documentary and beyond.
Digital Documentary Audience
It has been a busy summer moving house so just getting to the Digital Documentary Audience symposium I presented at in late December. The symposium was organised by Craig Hight and here is an excerpt from the overview:
The aim of this one-day symposium is to generate new research strategies and objectives prompted by intersections between the fields of audience research,documentary theory and digital theory.
Examples of discussion points could include:
• What are the implications for the documentary genre of a mediascape
dominated by corporations such as Google, Facebook and Apple, and the
increasing availability of online applications and other software?
• How can we define online documentary culture? What are its characteristics?
• How do specific digital platforms shape emerging ‘documentary’ practices?
• What tropes of existing documentary culture do online ‘practitioners’ choose
to appropriate and reproduce for their own creations, and how are their
political and aesthetic choices shaped by the tools they have access to?
• How do populations of online users search and filter, and assess and make
sense of media texts which generate, appropriate, and play with the
presentation of factual evidence?
• What kinds of research strategies are available to explore this proliferation of
online audio-video material?
• What research tools are most appropriate to investigating the factors shaping
user-generated content, and its reception and use? How do we reconfigure the
notion of ‘audience’?
• What are the possibilities for research approaches informed by both the
humanities and computer science?
List Poetry
At Visible Evidence XIX, Bettina Frankham’s presentation provided some inspiration around the use of ‘lists’ in documentary practice.
Frankham’s References:
Ardenne, P., Beausse, P. & Goumarre, L. L999, Contemporary practices : art as experience, Editions Dis Voir, Paris.
Belknap, R.E. 2004, The list: the uses and pleasures of cataloguing, Yale University Press, New Haven.
Bos, S., Grenville, B., Drathen, D.v. & Tan, F. 2009, Disorient, Essays and documentation from the installations by Fiona Tan at the 53rd Venice Biennale, Kehrer Verlag, Amsterdam, The
Netherlands.
Bourriaud, N. 2002, Relational aesthetics / translated by Simon Pleasance & Fronza Woods with the participation of Mathieu Copelan4 trans. S. Pleasance, F. Woods & M. Copeland, Les
presses du reel, France.
Bruzzi, S. 2006, New documentary,2nd edn, Routledge, London; New York. Child, A. 2005, Ihts rs called moving: a critical poetics of ftlm, University of Alabama Press,
Cubitt, S. 1998, Digital aesthetics, SAGE, Thousand Oaks, California.
de Jong, W. & Austin, T. 2008, Rethinking documentary new perspectives and practices, Open University,
Eco, U. 2OO9,The infinity of lists,trans. A. McEwen, Rizzoli International Publications,lnc., New
York.
Eitzen, D. 1995, ‘When Is a Documentary?: Documentary as a Mode of Reception’, Cinemo
Journal, vol.35, no. 1, pp.81-102.
New aesthetics of documentary as contemporary art
-
Sternberg Press – Maria Lind and Hito Steyerl (Eds.)
"Documentary practices make up one of the most significant and complex tendencies within art during the last two decades. Traditional documentary photography and film have been reinvented and reinvigorated by merging with traditions such as video, performance, and conceptual art. Such recent documentary works attest to a new diversity and complexity of forms, ranging from conceptual mockumentaries to reflexive photo essays, from split-screen slide shows to found-footage video reportage, from installations without any lens-based medium to printed matter. Many of them are about searching for suitable forms and methods for discussing social content, whether historical material or effects of recent political and economic upheaval."
Open Source Documentary
Following up on Florian Schneider’s concept of an open source mode of documentary as I begin to close my exegesis draft.
FLORIAN SCHNEIDER (NL): An Open Source Mode Of The Documentary? from network cultures on Vimeo.
SESSION 1: ONLINE VIDEO AESTHETICS
In a review of his Video Vortex 6# presentation ‘Online Video Aesthetics: Florian Schneider Talks about the Open Source Documentary’ Catalina writes:
He is calling for a reinvention of the documentary under network conditions, keeping in mind that the network logs, captures, records and stores interactions between subject and object.
But, also in this review Catalina points out Schneider’s aversion to documentary storytelling being subjected to indexing that is based on similarity rather than difference:
He then expressed a series of concerns about how film is made in the networked environment. In this context, there is a tension between legible and illegible, with a strong tendency for making things readable and decipherable in order to be searched, found, categorised, indexed tagged and subjected to an algorithmic process. Schneider controversially claims that text-to-image hybrids (i.e. subtitles), which can be indexed, represent death to film since they make everything calculable. This anti-computationalist perspective continues with his recommendation of an algorithm that produces difference rather than sameness, multiplicity instead of identity, since online aesthetics are all about weaving items into a mesh of similarities instead of discontinuities.
The points made here provide a counterpoint to the work I have been doing with indexing in an inquiry that aims to design a framework for making web documentaries.
After listening to the presentation, other relative points are the notion of documentary-making being in the network, even if the computer that is being used is not plugged into an intranet or hooked to wireless. Also, Schneider suggests that in relation to interactivity, fiction film translates easily into computer games. In contrast, he states with documentary ‘interactivity as an option for the user is impossible’.
5 points as ideas towards the re-invention of documentary (my notes on what Schneider presented):
1. Utlilising the shift to HTML5 video and open source ‘codecs and container formats’.
2. Resist making everything legible (making images readable) – look for illegible relationships.’Look for the unreadable’ – ‘develop creative relationships between text and images that are not descriptive ones…’
3. The reinvention will occur outside the frame – within the network material not necessarily recorded as part of the documentary may be included. The borders of the frame will be indiscernable. There will be no option to consume the browser with full-screen mode.
4. Asynchronization – for exmaple, a disjuncture between sound and image.
5. Discontinuity – The aim is to create rupture, difference, multiplicity rather than similarity. Even the design of the navigation and interface should aim to achieve difference.
Live A/V in Australia – online documentary
Grayson’s k-film/online documentary ‘Live Audio-Visual performance in Australia‘.