Description:

6 billion Others is a massive video exhibition (and a web project) done by Yann Arthus-Bertrand (he is the one that did the incredible photos in “Earth  from above” back in 1994 ).

In 2003 Yann Arthus-Bertrand had the idea of doing a ‘portrait of contemporary mankind by asking questions about universal values’.

Arthus-Bertrand and his team wrote a series of questions – on the lines of “What is happiness? What lessons can we learn from life’s difficulties? What is the meaning of life?”- and travelled the world for 5 years visiting 75 countries and interviewing 5,000 people. The massive database of answers was then used to do both an exhibition (from the 10th of January to the 12th of Febrruary 2009 at the Grand Palais in Paris) and a collaborative website where people can view the interviews but also send their own answers to the questions.

The exhibition is meant to travel the world. The interviews are organised by themes, each theme beeing in a room  (or a hut). People can browse around and be immersed in an exhibition where “real” people from all aver the world speak about their own beliefs and fears.

The website is more like a browsable fresco. An overwhelming mosaic of clickable faces allows us to follow people, topics or texts. I highly suggest to see the French part of the website (as the English one is an old version and is not as well designed).

Find out more:

See the French website of 6 milliard d’Autres

See the English website of 6 billion Others

Watch a video of how the exhibition at the Grand Palais was put together

My comments:

I believe this is a fascinating project, not only by scale but by its affective impact. I have not been to the exhibition myself, but I have friends that have spent hours transfixed by the grabs of 6 millions d’Autres. I suspect there is something magic about listening to a world of people that one will probably never meet, especially if what they say is very personal.

The interviews were cleverly shot with a standard portrait framing (by tilting the camera horizontally) which gives a photographic touch to the experience. Also, this type of shot brings a feeling of proximity and presence that is quite powerful.

The website is a stand alone project which obviously uses the same database used for the exhibition. I suspect though that the feeling is very different. The web experience is more about browsing and collaborating, while I assume the exhibition is more immersive.

Although the whole project is a little commercial and simplistic (can we really claim to do a portrait of contemporary manking by selecting 5,000 people?) I believe it is very strong. One cannot but feel whowed by it… so many faces, so many stories, so many different lifes… for one second the multiplicity of our lives seems to be graspable.

Description

Dans un quartier de Paris is an early experiment in what was then called
a “multimedia” interactive documentary. The idea was to allow French language
students to have an insider’s view of a foreign cultural world, in this instance a neighbourhood: the Marais.
The program allows the user to: meet a variety of people living in the neighbourhood (some who have lived there for forty years, some for only two years, for example); to visit a variety of places (places that all have meaning in the daily lives of the people living  in the Marais).

Made in 1996 this is an early attempt to use digital media to “tell stories differently”. The project was lead by Janet Murray (who wrote Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace) .

Find out more:

To see a description of the project and some screen grabs go to http://web.mit.edu/fll/www/projects/StGervais.shtml

My comments:

I have not had the opportunity to play with the original CD-Rom of Dans un quartier de Paris so I can hardly comment.

The information that is on the MIT website describes a project that was ambitious for 1996 and that seem to have influenced educational formats more than documentary genre.

Anyone that knows more about this project: please feel free to comment.

Description:

Done in 1996 by Golrianna Davenport’s MIT Media Lab on interactive cinema, this project is part of the “evolving documentary” genre.

Here is the description that is given in the interactive cinema website:

This hyper-portrait introduces the audience to a remarkable man whose life centered on science, government, education and issues of cultural humanism. Early in his career, Jerome Wiesner developed an audio recording laboratory at the Library of Congress and travelled extensively throughout America, capturing folk music by native performers.

He directed MIT’s Research Lab for Electronics during the Cold War, served as National Science Advisor to John F. Kennedy, and eventually became President of MIT. After the end of World War II, Wiesner became a prominent advocate of disarmament and was a key player in negotiating the first Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

In this hyper portrait (which runs on the World Wide Web), we invite viewers to explore the Twentieth Centurey through an extensible collection of stories about and recollections by the central figure. We also invite viewers who knew JBW to share a memorable story with our growing society of audience.

Find out more:

Browse through the B.Wieser project.

More about MIT Media Lab’s Interactive Cinema

More about Davenport’s latest work: Media Fabrics

My comments:

This is a very well known project, but it does not seem to work on my computer so I have never really browsed through it.

Any comments are welcomed…