This entrance was sent to me by: Blair

Download the game here

Watch the video:

Aysén Profundo is an interactive and multimedial documentary about
trades, traditions and typical life in Patagonia.

We invite you to a journey to the inside of our country.
We invite you to aysénprofundo.

Explore the project at: www.aysenprofundo.cl

artist: Pablo Ocqueteau, Philine von Düszeln, Claudio Vergara, Cristian
Saldia, Rodgers Hermosilla, Mauricio Osorio, Javier Encalada, Leonardo
Ocqueteau

Description:

Walking the Edit is an innovative system to “walk a movie” : your recorded walk will be translated into a movie through an iPhone app’.

It’s great that videos, pictures and other data can be geolocalized thus creating an ‘augmented space’. But we are left to wonder… how can we turn this abundance of information into a story? Can we build a narrative with all this geolocalized information? How can we make a visit to this augmented space a more coherent and enriching experience?

‘Walking the Edit’ enables you to ‘walk a movie’ based on the shared audiovisual pieces that are virtually existing around us. The concept is simple, you walk through a neighborhood, our iPhone app tracks your progress and translates your itinerary into a story drawing from the multitude of virtual information held in the ‘augmented space’. All this in realtime!

Once your trajectory is translated into a movie you can watch it on the website and see the movies of other people.

Find out more:

read the blog

see some of it:  Walking the Edit “Film demo” from DEDALE on Vimeo.

Description:

Welcome to Pine Point was meant to be a book… it is now becoming a cross-platform project… and an interactive documentary produced by the NFB of Canada.

This interactive documentary tells the story of a city that has been totally destroyed in the last ten years. Although the documentary is fundamentally linear (you can only press the next/previous tab and click on some photos) the quality of the narrative, and of the combination between graphics and video, is outstanding! A real piece of craft work… and maybe a good example of Lev Manovich’s “deep remixability” applied to the new media documentary world.

Here is how the project is described in its Press Release:

Toronto, January 26, 2011 – Imagine your hometown never changed. That no one ever grew old or moved on. Part book, part film, part family photo album, Welcome to Pine Point unearths a place frozen in time and discovers what happens when an entire community is erased from the map.

Welcome to Pine Point is the first online interactive documentary from internationally renowned Vancouver-based creative team The Goggles (Paul Shoebridge and Michael Simons), produced in collaboration with the NFB’s director of digital content and strategy, Rob McLaughlin. Inspired by Simons’ childhood visit to a mining town in the Northwest Territories, Welcome to Pine Point is accessible through NFB Interactive, the NFB’s online portal, which showcases an evolving collection of innovative, interactive stories exploring the world—and our place in it—from uniquely Canadian points of view.

Paul Shoebridge and Michael Simons are award-winning authors, artists and creative directors. They have spent most of their professional lives telling stories in compelling new ways, creating unique books, magazines and television spots. They are most known for their award-winning work with Adbusters Magazine.

Find out more:

Watch Pinepoint online

My comments:

For me Welcome to Pine Point is both a success, and a disappointment. The story is strong, hence one wants to watch it all, the graphics are very beautiful, it is sticky and playful. Basically: it works! This should be enough no?

Well… the only problem with it is that it is fundamentally linear… so… what does it say about interactive documentaries? Does it confirm to us that linear narrative is the best way to communicate stories, or does it just prove that linear is easier to do? I obviously think that interactive narratives are possible… so that is where my disappointment comes from: Pine Point was meant to be a book… and I think you can tell. There are elements of interactivity in it, but that is not its strength. Its strength is a grabbing story, fantastic use of graphics and animation, and a good music track… it sits on the web, but does not use its interactive possibilities at its full.

Still worth watching it though…

This entry to the archive was proposed and written by Yuki Kishino:

Description:
‘In Search of Her’ is a documentary project by Yuki Kishino, which was realised in the form of a desktop application using Processing (processing.org).
The application is available for both Mac and Windows. It takes the viewer to a story, written and photographed by the author based on his experience. The user-controlled slideshow is comprised of 52 photographs, each accompanied by text guiding the viewer through the narrative. The application also includes his theory of Human Gravity and additional notes.

View vimeo demo of In search for her

Download and play In search for her

My Comments on it:

In search for her is a desktop application (this is the first odd thing about it) that is photo based, but that tells a story, which itself explains a rather complicated “theory of human gravity”… The photos are as clean as a Japanese Haiku and the theory as incomprehensible as a piece of physics (at least to me!). To those two one has to add a story that is not a story, but that leads to a theory of encounters… As a result the feeling I had while running it on my computer was that there are three levels in this work that are apparently distinct, but that actually mix – or encounter themselves?- in a rather odd way.

I invite you to try this for your selves. In term of interactivity it is pretty basic, but it has an inner balance – and a grace- that are difficult to explain. The theory of human gravity still has some mysteries to me… but maybe one of you could elucidate me?

Description:

The Waiting Room is a unique blend of locative media, social media and traditional documentary film that reveals a community disconnected from technology, the conversation about health care reform and equal access to care. It allows people passing through the waiting rooms of California’s public hospitals to express, connect and share their experience at a moment when seismic shifts are altering the landscape of health care in America. It is based on the premise that the expression and sharing of story by the under-served is vital to our nation’s understanding of the impact of public policy that is influenced by lobbyists and special interest groups. The project is also driven by the powerfully therapeutic benefits of providing a platform for people stuck in hospital waiting rooms to share their thoughts and feelings about their health and their lives; their hopes and their fears.

The Waiting Room does so through a unique blend of locative media, the web and traditional documentary film that reveals a community disconnected from technology, the conversation about health care reform and equal access to care. The pilot project  follows patients and staff at the Alameda County Medical Center, a public hospital that serves the uninsured in the Oakland, CA area. If the pilot proves successful the plan is to expand the project to other waiting rooms in selected clinics and hospitals in California.

The Waiting Room is comprised of four main components:

A feature-length cinema verité documentary film that uses unprecedented access to go behind the doors of an American safety-net hospital fighting for survival while weathering the storm of a persistent economic downturn. Following both patients and caregivers, the film tells the story of a diverse patient population coping with a remarkable array of health problems, while caregivers struggle to treat problems that extend well beyond their patients’ health.
The Waiting Room video blog, a politically independent, hyper-local platform that serves as a dynamic theme and issue-based story archive and launch point for dialogue on the problems facing the uninsured.
A self-sustaining interactive story booth placed in the waiting room at Highland Hospital (and eventually in other waiting rooms around the country) that will capture unedited, first-person stories recorded by the patients and hospital staff themselves. The booth project will also serve to encourage the use of technology by a community that is most disenfranchised by this nation’s digital divide. The hospital, which is now renovating their waiting room, has allowed us to include the booth as a permanent installation as they complete renovations of in coming months.
Short webisodes  produced by video journalists and filmmakers that will follow patients and staff over time as they navigate the public health care system.
In keeping with the hyper-local nature of the project, our initial core audience will be those that pass through the waiting room itself: patients, caregivers and hospital administrators at Highland Hospital. The secondary audience – local community non-profits, and journalists – will be reached through strategic partnerships with organizations that are already working on behalf of patients and medical institutions that care for the under-served in the Bay Area. The core framework of the project (anchored by the interactive story booth) is replicable and relies on volunteers, citizen engagement and strategic partnerships for its sustainability. But first and foremost The Waiting Room gives the under-served a voice not just at a critical moment in their lives, but also at a moment of critical importance in the evolution of our nation’s health care system.

More about it:

See the Waiting Room

My comments:

This entry has been written and suggested by Hugo Soskin, but he has not expressed his comments on the project.

Personally I have seen the interactive version of the  Waiting Room at the Sheffield DocFest 2010 and it seemed a very interesting project – although it was a collection of videoblogs without a lot of linking between them. The existence of a full length documentary should fill the holes… Basically this is a project to follow, as it will expand and change in the years to come!

Description:

When Canadian National Film Board publicised its interactive project Highrise , in 2009, it called it “a multi-year, multi-media, collaborative documentary project about the human experience in global vertical suburbs. We will use the acclaimed interventionist and participatory approaches of the award-winning National Film Board of Canada’s Filmmaker-in-Residence (FIR) project. Our scale will be global, but rooted firmly in the FIR philosophy — putting people, process, creativity, collaboration, and innovation first.” It sounded grand…

A year down the line its director Katerina Cizek has clearly cooked an intriguing collaborative project. Highrise is an umbrella project, that has hosts several sub-projects within it. As NFB’s website says: “Under the direction of documentary-maker Katerina Cizek, the HIGHRISE team will be making lots of things. Web-documentaries, live presentations, installations, mobile projects and yes, documentary films. We will use the acclaimed interventionist and participatory approaches of the award-winning National Film Board of Canada’s Filmmaker-in-Residence (FIR) project. Our scale will be global, but rooted firmly in the FIR philosophy — putting people, process, creativity, collaboration, and innovation first.”

Well… they have delivered! for now the four main parts of the projects are: the Highrise website, the director’s blog, the Out My Window interactive documentary and an  installation in a gallery for the IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam.

Each project has its own specificities and it would be too long to cover each of them here. I propose that you follow the links below and that you explore them yourself, but Out My Window is certainly the most talked about  interactive spatial documentary of 2010.  It is one of the world’s first interactive 360º documentaries and it has just won the first DocLab Award for Digital Storytelling at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. Delivered entirely on the Web, it’s a journey around the world through the most commonly built architectural form of the last century: the concrete-slab residential tower. Meet remarkable high-rise residents in 13 cities and visit their intimate space, while listening to their stories. A virtual tower block is composed of existing flats that you can visit using your cursor. Hot spots and sound effects will tell you where to click to see more. Some times 360 degrees videos allow you to view a scene and move within it in motion…

This is a beautifully crafted piece of design and technology serving a community participative ideology.

Find out more:

To enter  Highrise click here

Read Kat Cisek’s director’s blog

Out My Window: storyspace installation

Explore Out My Window

My comments:

It is nearly impossible to resist Highrise:  its sleek design and cleverly crafted text manage to engage us even if facing a difficult topic – highly dense populated areas, poor suburbia, places that we often disregard as “not interesting” can actually be fascinating… not only, but behind those seemingly all equal windows of anonymous tower blocks live people with a past, with dreams and with sometimes fascinating life stories.

So Highrise is not for me about architecture, it is not about suburbia and it is not about social background… it is about being human and inherently “life-rich”. This I believe is the strength, and the glue, of Highrise. It is about looking outside of the window to see inside ourselves.

Highrise and Out My Window obviously have  a political agenda. Population growth, social politics, popular architecture and immigration are all part of the equation… but my feeling is that instead of giving us “one” answer, or delivering a clear political message, Highrise shows us diversity. Population growth is all around us, inequality too, but we can deal with it in different ways. Meeting the people that live in tower blocks is about giving them a face. It is about not having a them/us attitude. It is also about giving them a voice that can resonate within us. It is about dialogue more than denunciation.

I personally think that this project is incredibly powerful and well realised. Style, content, curiosity and generosity all mix together to give us a window from which life should look richer, if not better.

Description:

GDP is an attempt to react to the global economic crisis that has hit everybody in the last two years. The National Film Board of Canada has a long tradition of social documentary but this time it has launched a very ambitious project: the country’s first bilingual web documentary, a pan-Canadian project that bears witness to the far-reaching effects of the crisis in the lives and communities of Canadian people. Until September 2010 over 200 short documentaries and photo-essays, each about four minutes in length, will combine to create a mosaic of how Canadians are experiencing this crisis.  Under the direction of documentarian Hélène Choquette a team of eight field directors and eight photographers browse the country to document how Canadians cope with the crisis that is shaking convictions and lives.

Users/viewers are also encouraged to participate online with comments and photos as GDP wants to “tell the collective story of a country in transition”.

Find out more:

Browse GDP – Measuring the human side of the Canadian economic crisis

Read about the project

More about the NFB of Canada

My comments:

I think it is remarcable that the NFB embarcs in such an ambitious project. This type of docu-web is important for several reasons:

1. it shows the potential of this form: the depth and breath of docu-webs is potentially much larger than a linear documentary because it is expandable at will
2. GDP involves a big team of people and shows NFB’s financial commitment to the docu-web form
3. the collaborative side of the project (people are asked to participate) is potentially the best suited way to portray a nation… who else could do so, if not the people themselves?
4. the topic of GDP – a nation in crisis- is not only relevant but important: could this sort of project help in energising people? Can it help to regain a positive attitude?
5. social documentaries tend to take a position… while GDP is more a mosaic than anything else… what are the political and social implications of such approach?

If I am quite impress with the project itself, I have to say that I find its navigation quite confusing… One can browse by stories, maps or themes but once you start watching a video the interface is not very clear: how do you move from here? where are the stories of the same theme? How do I find my character again? How do I get out of the main map? I have been reassured though that the project is being re-designed so… hopefully those little problems will be solved soon.

My last comment is about the audience: who are the browsers of GDP and what do they get out of it? If would be very interesting to have some user feedback on this type of project because what matters here is to know how such a social topic is received and by whom… Is this just an interesting portrait of a nation or is it a social tool for involvement and change? How is it used? Does it create a debate? what is the level of involvment?

It would be great to have a comment on this by the producers of GDP….

Description:

Collapsus is a much hyped project which has been described in a variety of ways since it has been released,  in October 2010. It has been called an  interactive docu-fiction hybrid project by its producer/distributor Submarine Channel. Its director, Tommy Pallotta, explains that they “crafted a multitasking and multi-linear experience and blended genres like animation, documentary, fiction and interactivity all together in one story”. Most of the media coverage speaks about Collapsus as a cross-media project (see Power to the Pixel 2010).

So what is it all about?

Designed to accompany a TV documentary called Energy Risk, Collapsus develops the themes of Energy Risk by taking us into the near-future to explore a world of depleted resources. It all starts as an film : through the  eyes of activist vlogger Vera, and a cast of supporting characters, we discover a complex world of  geo-political maneuvering and conspiracy revolving around dwindling oil reserves. We can watch the film, that is in the centre of the interface and, at any time, we can swift to the left or right of the movie space. If we go to the left we have access to some extra information about world oil supply, and if we go to the right we can watch fictional oil reports by  Citizenergy, along with English-language clips from the Energy Risk documentary that relate directly to events in the story.

Apparently there are also some game elements (although I did not find them when I tried it). Wire Magazine says that “at key points in the narrative, optional interactive challenges also arise, with tasks ranging from playing one of the characters in a game of Snake to virtually decrypting encoded text messages and recording conversations between characters using surveillance equipment. While these interruptions to the narrative sometimes feel forced, they generally offer welcome breaks from the weighty subject matter of the video proper”.

So… bottom line: Collapsus uses a film/animation style to incorporate documentary footage into a semi-gamish narrative. This is meant to attract a young audience to heavy topics such as energy consumption and oil supply.

Find out more:

View and play Collapsus

Read about Submarine Channel & Collapsus

Read a Wired article about Collapus

My comments:

Collapsus’ Press Kit opens with this sentence: “The audience for documentary is dying. The average age of a television documentary viewer is 55 and up. Dutch broadcaster VPRO came to Submarine with the concept of making a simulation game in which the player experiences the impending world’s energy problems. The goal was to attract a different audience than traditional documentary viewers.”  Now… YES young people spend more time on their Facebook than really watching TV… and YES documentary tends to be associated with a “mature” audience… but is this always the case? The linear series that BBC has just done on the mysteries of the universe was aimed at young people and, to my knowledge, has been very popular… Documentaries such as The Age of Stupid have been extremely popular with the 20+  generation…

I agree that interactive media should be used to appeal to a born digital generation – but the fact that it is interactive is not per se a proof of success! In this case: yes Collapsus manages to  combine the three elements of documentary storytelling, game logic and animation… but does it work ? Is it a compelling experience?

Now… hands up: I am NOT in the target audience… so my point of view is probably totally irrelevant… but, personally, I found that, if the film was stylistically compelling, the plot, the interactive elements, and the game elements were absolutely not interesting to me… Once I had moved left and right with the cursor once I had no wish whatsoever to do it again. I watched the first 10 minutes of the film and then I started skipping forward trying to find something that would appeal to me. This extensive skipping activity is probably the reason for which I have not seen the game points of the narrative… but it also means that I had zero interest in the plot… quite a bad beginning if you want people to interact with your game!

Anyhow: I am probably missing the point of this acclaimed project (it has won a SXSW Interactive Award in Austin, Texas in 2011) – and it very certainly has to do with the age difference between me and the target audience – but Collapsus misses for me the opportunity to use cross-media at its best. The point is not to do something that mixes three media (film, animation and games) but to use interactivity in a way that makes those three media essential and relevant. What would the user want to interact with in a story about oil supply? Are we sure that his/her highlight is  to watch fake news? What are the mechanism of immersion that other media can teach us and that can be relevant here, in this precise plot?

To me Collapsus looks good, but its content is wishy washy… quite bland really… but… I am happy to be challenged on this one: please do comment!

Description:

Havana/Miami is the follow up (in terms of format) of Gaza/Sderot: life in spite of everything. The production team seems to be the same: Arte Television is hosting the web-documentary conceived by Upian (Alexandre Brachet). The  French producer is Serge Gordey from Alegria who is the Executive Producer and Alex Szalat from ARTE France  is the leading Commissioning Editor. The idea is similar to Gaza/Sderot: to follow a number of people leaving on two sides of a conflict (political or religeous). Those videos are broadcasted on “normal” tv (on a full lenghth documentary), but also used to populate a website  where one can browse through people, topics or timeline.

The stories of young lives in these two cities are told through short (2 minutes long) video chronicles. The individual subjects (12 in all), are filmed by a team in Havana (Cuba) and a team in Miami (USA). These episodes do follow six people from each of the two cities over three months, starting on February 22nd, 2010.

Internet users can follow these stories via an original non-linear interface. They can watch, and respond with video, photo or written comments. Users can also send videos to friends and embed them into their own blogs and social media sites.

Find out more:

Watch the web-documentary the programme:  http://havana-miami.arte.tv/

More web-projects from Upian

My comments:

I think Upian does some of the best web-documentaries around. Gaza/Sderot was a first in its genre: a way to use interactive media for what it is best at – linking. One can link people, ideas, lives… one can create that association that is just enough to leave some thinking space to the user. The hope is that while browsing between the lives of people from Miami or Havana (or Sderot and Gaza) one takes the time to reflect, to understand… and even to mature a point of view. The ability to propose information in such way that a point of view can be created is the magic of interactive media: it replaces the user in a responsible seat, a seat that demands a certain level of consciousness.

If I think that the interface of Gaza/Sderot was somehow more poetic and fluid (or was it the novelty effect?) I feel that Havana/Miami manages to integrate people’s comments in such a way that they become an integral part of the documentary. Normally comments are just on the side – they are an add-on that you do once you have finished viewing, but here the comments link back to the programme in a fluid way – so this encourage people to comment on the go and to really react to what they are seeing without fear of jumping out of the narrative.

While I was browsing I noticed that some users have send videos, and that those do sit at the same level of the “official” videos of the programme. I can only encourage this approach: slowly slowly the narrative is becoming authored but also opened and participative. This might be a clever model to keep some quality and editorial control while opening up a little the narrative itself.

Extremely well done, powerfull topic and… somehow important and meaningfull…

Description:

As part of the collaborative documentary Virtual Revolution , a 4×1hr series about  the history and consequences of the web, BBC2  has launched a “3D documentary explorer”. The idea is to allow an interactive viewing of the series content, and therefore to create a new way to browse the content creating a totally different experience than when watching the linear series.

As a viewer you can either watch the programmes on TV (or on iPlayer) OR go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/virtualrevolution/3dexplorer_start.shtml and view most of the series online but in a 3D environment where one can jump off at any time from the video content and  browse related websites. Effectively what BBC has designed is a clever visualization tool that simplifies navigation in and out of the video stream and allows you to jump in between segments of the video itself. A glorified DVD navigation with the added bonus of web links.

Find out more:

Try yourself the 3D explorer

Look at the linear documentary Virtual Revolution (or at least to some documentation about it)

My comments:

Is this an interactive documentary or a clever visualisation tool?

I have to admit that I was quite sceptical when I tried it out. The film starts with the opening shots of the first episode, but one can at any time skip to another part of the documentary or jump to websites linked to the content that one is watching. This means that one is constantly moving from video content to web content. At first I thought that the paste of the video was too different from the paste of the web browsing. When you start watching the episode you do not feel like browsing out of it. TV editing is made to keep you inside the story – and not to allow you breaks of freedom out of its narrative.  But after a while I liked the idea of having a topologiacal view of the whole content of the series.

In a way the 3D explorer is any TV producer’s dream: a way to show you all the research that has been made while doing the documentary itself and still keeping you tuned to the author’s linear documentary. Is the explorer also responding to the viewer’s dream? I do not know… probably not mine… What I am searching in new media is a way to show some of the layers that compose any reality. I like the idea of representing the multiple. Here the 3D explorer adds layers of information to the video stream… is this enough? Are we not back to what used to be called ‘enhanced interactive TV’ – where interaction was only used to give extra information, but not alternative narratives, or depth of dimensions?

Well… I suppose it is a first step. But we stay in the informational layer of “associated data”. Nothing is shown about the users that have collaborated to the documentary via the crowd sourcing process that the BBC has experimented with. Nothing is said about the multiple other ways in which the history of the web could have been depicted. There are no doubts, no other possibilities, no other paths… just some clinical extra information to support the argument of the film.

Behind a sexy visualisation tool that gives a 3D effect to the story a strangely flat view of reality emerges: a reality that is supported by objective data, a reality that gives more of the same and does not consider “the rest”, or the “possible other”. Maybe the documentary explorer is not that 3D after all… which is a shame, because something was there… somethig could have emerged…

Description:

Gome Gitmo is a docu-game  by Nonny de la  Peña and Peggy Weil designed for Second Life. This is a simulation of Guantanamo Bay where the player/user enters as a prisoner and discovers what it is like to loose his/er own civil rights. The reconstruction includes journalistic video material that the team has found – note that it is forbidden to film inside the prison!

De la Peña did a presentation at Goldsmiths in June 2009 where she explained that 3D simulations of space can be a very effective way to portray realities that are closed to the media.  De la Peña is currently exploring how non-fiction storytelling and journalism can be produced using first person immersive experiences in virtual environments.

On her website she presents Gone Gitmo in the following way:

“Virtual Guantanamo Bay prison is funded by the MacArthur Foundation, prototyped at BAVC and constructed inside Second Life. The installation brings users through a virtual detention inside the prison camp as an exploration into the loss of habeas corpus rights. Documentary footage from Unconstitutional is embedded to create spatial narrative.”

note: the project has been in development for some years now but since it is constantly changing I am filing it in the archive under the year “2010″…

Find out more:

Watch a trailer of Gone Gitmo on YouTube

More about Nonny de la Pena on her website

Read Gone Gitmo’s blog and find links to articles about the project

Go to Second Life and try it for yourself! Follow this SLurl…

My comments:

What I have seen of Gone Gitmo clearly opens a new window to new media documentaries… JFK Reloaded had already introduce the possibility of immersive factual gaming as part of the documentary sphere… but I would say that Gone Gitmo is without doubt a piece of immersive journalism. From here a lot of things can happen… and I suppose this is just the beginning of a whole new “genre” of docu-games…

My only problem is that personally I am not a gamer. Avatars do not do it for me and I have no patience to browse 3D worlds… so I suppose I am the wrong target.

Also, docu-games in general open the vast debate about the difference between simulation and mediation of reality…not to mention the problem of the first person explorer in a real-time narrative…

I suppose that if 3D wordls could become a space of debate, where avatars discuss what they are experiencing, maybe docu-games would reach a new dimension. More than a simulation space they would become a space of debate and argumentation. What is more engaging and “real” than a good real-time discussion?

Description:

What have you left behind? is a web documentary that allows the user to browse through 130 testimonials of people of all countries around the theme of loss, changes in life, moving to a new country and discovering new cultures. As Mariana Mota explained to me:” What have you left behind – a story of nomads by nomads-  is a collection of stories by people from many places in the world. 32 notebooks were sent to people in and from different parts of the world with the question “What have you left behind?”. The person was supposed to fill in a page and give the notebooks to another person. A month later 22 the notebooks returned with over 140 testimonies from people from different cultural, educational and social backgrounds. A website was made with a tactile and hand-made aesthetic using pixelation animation.”

The design of the website is making an effort to keep the textuality of the notebooks by keeping the original texts and their handwriting. The user flicks from one page to another one discovering written testimonies of people around the worlds about their experience of moving or changing their lives. In this sense I would consider it an interactive documentary – as it permits the discovery of written fragments wished by an author and arranged around a common theme. There is no narrative involved here – as each notebook contains its own narratives. The user browses through different testimonials (which makes it an hypertext documentary for me) but he/she can also leave his/er own testimy by collaborating online.

Find out more:

click here to see the project http://www.whathaveyouleftbehind.com/

click here to learn more about the author, Mariana Mota.

click here to read  the project’s blog.

My comments:

I find this project quite sweet – maybe because I can easily relate to the topic of foreigness, moving country or learning about  new cultures. The interface of the website is fresh and clean… the fact that there is a hand that hand draws a map – showing us where the author of the fragment that we are reading is coming from – gives it a human touch… and somehow makes it quite personal.

I am unclear though if this is an interactive documentary or a digital visualization of a collection of thematic writings… I suppose there is a thin line between the two. There is no video and no sound involved so the experience is very much the one of reading manuscripts via a digital screen… The added bonus of being able to collaborate via the internet -and sending a personal text- gives the project a participative flavour that could in theory open the documenting experience to a larger audience but… does it work?

I turn the question to you… does it work for you?

Description:

Capturing Reality is an incredible documentary about documentaries and film makers. Thirty world famous documentary makers were interviewed to give a flavour of a genre that is way too often unknown. The film was produced by the National Film Board of Canada and was directed by Pepita Ferrari.

But for me the cool thing is that out of this huge database of interviews and film clips the NFB has produced a website that is a very sleek web-documentary.Obviously I am only reviewing the web-documentary here, and I leave to you the joys of watching the feature film (or buy the DVD).

Find out more:

Browse the web-documentary Capturing Reality

Read about the linear documentary Capturing Reality

Buy the DVD of Capturing Reality

My comments:

The web-documentary of Capturing Reality starts with a nice mosaic interface that says straight away what the project is: a browse through interviews of well-know people. By roll-overing on the different portrait of the interviewees you discover their name and the topic of their grab. You then just need to click to select the grab you want to watch.

Once you are watching the grab, an algorithm calculates a play list for you of the other grabs that fit with the topic of the one that you have selected. I quite like the fact that by default the play list will just play, meaning that if you do not select anything the interviews will follow each other without asking you to “be active”. On the other hand you can always “do something” by moving to other topics, or by jumping to other grabs of the same character – the one on different topics.

The interface and the navigation do run very smoothly on this web-documentary – with the professional add-on of a background music that kicks in each time that you are outside of a grab. Everything is done so that you have a feeling of continuity… and the grabs are so breathtaking that it is difficult to switch off. This being said Capturing Reality has a very classic and sleek style: it is not trying to be innovative, nor trying to challenge the user. If what you want is just to concentrate on the interviews (which in this case are a great asset) then Capturing Reality makes it the best possible experience. If, on the contrary, you are looking for an experimental web-documentary about documentary film makers then… contact them and propose them another interface!!!

From my side I am interested on the repetition of the navigation options that are offered to quite a few web-documentaries (Capturing Reality, 6 billion people, Gaza/Sderot, Miami/Havana etc….): the database of interviews and videos are tagged by topic, character, place and sometime time. The user is therefore asked to choose between “do I care about this person, or about this topic”? And then – I suspect this comes as a second thought- the user has to choose between “what else happened in this place” and “what else happened in this time line”? I wonder if those choices are of the same sort… My guess is that the first choice is emotional (what attracs me) and the second one is more practical (how do I get to the next part, what else can I see). What puzzles me is: in how many other ways could we browse this archive of videos? Are there other logics, other paths, that would involve us in a different level than emotional and practical?

Description:

Photosynth is a Microsoft technology that creates 3D spaces from anyone’s 2D photos. CNN has used this technology to grab the moment of the inauguration of President Obama. Asking people that were present at the inauguration (or that were watching it on TV) to send pictures of Obama, and of themselves watching him, CNN has managed to create a photomosaic of a moment in history.

Where it gets interesting is when one selects the photos that people took in their houses, while watching TV: the Photosynth technology (you will needs install the Silerlight plug-in, but it takes few seconds) allows the viewer to browse from one house to the other, following the same picture on TV, but a completely different private setting.

The result is a sort of cultural/social mosaic of modern America, a collaborative story told in silent and by simple photo shots, but that allows us to touch the multi-layared materiality of a society and its complex diversity.

Find out more:

Look at “the 44th president inauguration”

More about Photosynth (and hundreds of thousands of synths images): photosynth.com

Watch Blaise Aguera’s Demo of Photosynth at TED talks

My comments:

I find this application of Photosynth absolutely fascinating. Most of the examples I had seen so far were based on 3D reconstruction of a physical space (Photosynth’s original Demo was about the reconstruction of Paris’ Notre Dame cathedral via the use of Flickr’s photos). But by applying Photosynth to “people” one gains a tool that allows to visually link individuals via what they have in common (in the Obama case it was the sharing of his election).

For the user, or at least for me, the feeling is of jumping between one reality and another and of stretching time to potentially infinite. This is not just a clever visualization tool, it is a spacial and time surfer that uses our collective (or not) participation.

Description:

This web documentary was made in 2008 by French production company Honkytonk Films (and more specifically by directors Samuel Bollendorff and Abel Ségrétin). Interestingly it was first First released on French news portal lemonde.fr and has then successfully toured the most renowned Documentary Film Festivals of this world…

The documentary wants to make public the very poor working conditions of Chinese coal miners and investigates on the daily death that occur in those mines – deaths that never get reported by the media.  Following a montage of stylish photos linked by an explanatory scrolling text, you are positioned in the role of an investigator that travels in the coal region and meets local people.

Your journey begins in Datong which is located just a couple hours away West from Beijing. You travel from there all around the region and visit its major coal mines, from the “best” state-owned complex to the worst private coal plants.

In and around the coal mines, you get the story first hand from the mingong, the rural migrants traveling their country looking for work.

At your own pace and will, you meet them and learn more about how they live in this valley of death and pollution, sometimes even literally bumping into them as they leave their home for their night shift, in the frozen winter of Northern China.

Ultimately, you might discover China forbidden mines in which happen most of the accidents.

Find out more:

For information and credits about the project click here

To view the documentary online  click here

My comments:

This humanistic/current affairs documentary is a very successful example of how interaction can be a tool for immersion in a factual story. If any of us did not care about what happens in remote China, it would be quite impossible to not feel concerned after meeting the people that Journey to the end of coal presents us. At first the quality and beauty of the photos acts as an incentive to see more… then after a few screens a text invites us to interview the person that is on screen. Here again, sheer human curiosity acts as an incentive to learn more… and before we know we feel part of a journey that tells us about what we did not know.

As I was browsing through the project I could not help trying to understand the interactive structure behind it. After a few instructions I found myself on a photo of a train station where a text gave me a unique option: take the train to Shanxi. I clicked. A video started with some credits, but it is on another photo with scrolling text that I was presented with my next two options:”visit the state mine complex” or “go look for coal miners”.   This ramifications of choices sounded very much like a branching narrative where even interviews with people are lead by selecting a question out of a choice of two or three.

Now… I normally dislike branching narrative (with a few exceptions, like some of Florian’s Korsakow films) because they always leave me with the feeling that in real life I would I liked a different option, and that tends to frustrate me. Why should I select between things I do not care about? While in linear movies a sort of inertia makes me watch even things that I do not care about, in interactive films the moment I loose curiosity I stop interacting – and this is the end of the film. So… why was I not irritated by Journey to the end of coal?

I suspect it is a mixture of things:

1- the photos are elaborated and grabbing

2- the informational text about China’s coal miners is interesting

3- the compulsory branching choices often give the feeling that those are the two or three question that the reported asked while he/she was filming and, although they are maybe not the one that I would have asked, they seem quite natural and legitimate questions… so they are not irritating

4- the lives of the people that one meets are so extremes, that one cannot but sympathise

5- the topic is very interesting, and I knew nothing about it

Branching narratives (that I call hypertext mode in my PhD) have the disadvantage of not allowing a creative participation of the user. All you can do is normally to choose between pre-selected choices and it is therefore a type of interaction that that is one way: you are selecting an option but you cannot change it nor affect the final project. But I am noticing that this type of interaction works quite well when one is browsing through other peoples lives. Florian Thalhofer’s Love Story Project and Journey to the end of coal are two successful applications of branching narratives… and I think that it is because they have one thing in common: they put us in front of people that we do not know, but that we are interested in. Our human curiosity works as an incentive to go ahead and our natural shyness welcomes the given choices (even if limited) that allow us to meet those strangers without having to thing about “what shall I ask”.

I would be glad if other people could give me their comments on this…

Description:

Diamond Road was a there hours documentary about the diamonds’ industry produced in Canada in 2007 . The producers, with the collaboration of Ryerson University (Canada) decided to do an online version of it in 2008.

Diamond Road Online was designed to create a  be personalised experience where the software suggests videos to the users keeping track of the videos selected by the viewers themselves . The authors call it a “community documentary”. Here is how they man by it (quote from their FQA’s website):

“Most documentary films can only be watched – you sit down at the theatre or in your living room; everything is geared to the filmmaker’s perspective. Unless you’re at a screening where the director stands up and takes questions, it’s usually one-way communication.

This is where you come in. The raw material is here: over 8 hours of documentary clips and growing. You can just watch if you want, but you can also jump in and become a contributor and editor of the documentary:

* Rate clips and discuss them in DRO’s community forums
* Sequence short stories that show your point of view on the issues
* Submit content: video responses to the material you’ve watched, a short video you’ve created about diamonds, photographs, short text articles, animation – anything you can think of.

Everything you do can become part of Diamond Road Online and anyone who comes to the site can watch it! Over time we hope that DRO develops into a site with many different contributors and many different perspectives: a community documentary.”

Find out more:

View Diamond Road Online

Read about it as presented at Siggraph 2008.

My comments:

This is a professional project: lots of videos, good graphic interface and lots of depth. It is  a perfect educational tool  that tries to cover and foresee the needs of its viewers: there is an autoplay function that links videos back to back (avoiding the constant clicking of the viewer, and allowing a certain “linear passivity”) but there is also the option of choosing the next video (giving the active user the possibility to browse as he/she wants). I also like the effort in creating a community with posts and discussion around such a sensitive topic. This gives a depth to the documentary by opening it beyond the footage and the producer’s point of view.

I got a bit annoyed by the need of registering… why should I give my name, gender and date of birth in order to comment and participate to the forums? I suspect though this is a way to make sure that only people that really care about the topic enter the site…

I also wonder who does participate. The names that I saw in the forum seemed to repeat themselves… are they members of the production team? Are they web users that got interested?

And finally I am suspicious about the option of creating one owns movie out of website’s video clips, and to send it to friends (or just to save it and share it with the online community). Is this a relevant option within the context of this project or is it just a fashionable option? I am a firm believer that interactivity needs to have a purpose and I wonder if this option is not just a fancy trendy gadget… Maybe I am a bit too hash here… but who would want to create a movie out of a movie just for the sake of it? Again… please do comment if you have used this project, there is maybe something that I am missing here…

Over all though, this is a substantial and professional project that shows where we are at (in 2008) with video sharing and educational / documentary online formats.

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.

Overheated Symphony was created by artist and film director Sarah Turner and sound designer Annabelle Pangbourn during the Birds Eye View Film Festival 2008 (www.birds-eye-view.co.uk)

They invited all women around the world to participate to their project by making a quick flick, between 40 seconds and 4 minutes long, on their mobile phone, and t osend it to them via the Internet. The theme that they selected was OVERHEATED (which developed in sub-themes such as: domestic technologies (cooking/boiling etc), sun/ light, burning/fire,’pressures of life’: routine/work/transport, etc).

Sarah Turner and Annabelle Pangbourn then finally edited live all the short films that they received during a final showing at the ICA – as part of the Birds Eye View Film Festival.

Find out more:

Watch the final cut of Overheated Symphony on YouTube, or just here below.

Read more about the project: Overheated Symphony’s blog.

My comments:

I did not go to the live mix of Overheated Symphony, so it is quite difficult for me to comment of the project (any person that did go: please do send me a comment!).

From what I read, and from the final mix that is available on YouTube, I find the project innovative, yet restricted in its interactivity. Although women did send their videos they have no control on the final use of their footage, and I wonder if they mind about this.

I can understand the challenge for experimental filmmaker Sarah Turner to mix live content that she has not produced, and I think the final film does show the multi-presence of the different filmmakers that have participated, but I wonder who is to benefit from the final film.

Is it a tour de force? But of whom?

Is it meaningful as a stand alone movie? to whom? the partecipators, Sarah Turner or us – the external viewers?

And is it a documentary? Probably yes, in the large definition of the term, yes: it is a documentation of women’s feeling of “overheating” mixed by a third person.

Something though, is still puzzling me. I cannot help thinking that it is a use of collaborative energy for the sake of a single author… and somehow this disturbs me.

Description:

Graffiti Archaeology is a project devoted to the study of graffiti-covered walls as they change over time. The core of the project is a timelapse collage, made of photos of graffiti taken at the same location by many different photographers over a span of several years. The photos were taken in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and other cities, over a timespan from the late 1990’s to the present.

Using the grafarc explorer, you can visit some classic graffiti spots, see what they looked like in the past, and explore how they have changed over the years.

Cassidy Curtis, the author, writes in the “about” section of Graffity Archeology:

The photos themselves are gathered from diverse sources, including my own collection, other photographers, and various graffiti sites on the web. As grafarc.org expands to include more cities, the web is becoming ever more important as a resource for the project. The site has attracted the attention of both graffiti artists and photographers, and a vital online community is beginning to form around it (http://flickr.com/groups/grafarc). This community has become essential for weaving together disparate threads of visual information into a nuanced, structured historical record.

Find out more:

see Graffity Archeology and play with it

My comments:

This website is not strictly speaking an interactive documentary as it has no narrative – if not the implicit narrative of the passing time and its traces on graffiti walls. A little like Photosynth (and the 44th President Inauguration project) this visualisation tool allows us to see the different levels of complexity of a single moment in time, but they work of different latitudes: Photosynth allows the visualisation of a single moment (or a single object) by showing its multiple points of views (a series of photos reconstructs an object in 3D – or allows us to jump from one point of view to the other), while grafarc explorer allows us to go back in time and see the history of an object (or place).

If Photosynth is vertical (millions of points of views of one moment), Grafarc Explorer is horizontal (millions of one moments in time).

Would it not be great to mix the two? Imagine a documentary that could both dissect the moment and explore its history… fascinating, no?

“RIP: A Remix Manifesto” is part of a vaster project: the Open source Cinema. The idea is to apply the Wiki mentality of adding and remixing to a video documentary – making it a collaborative piece.

From what I can gather Brett Gaylor has been working on his own documentary about copyright and remix culture and has “opened” it to online participation.

A participatory media experiment, from day one, Brett shares his raw footage at opensourcecinema.org, for anyone to remix. This movie-as-mash-up method allows these remixes to become an integral part of the film.

Find out more:

Watch RIP: A remix manifesto and start remixing it

Check Open source cinema’s website and start remixing your own documentaries

More about the project and Brett Gaylor

Watch RIP trailer

My comments:

What is interesting about this project is its production process. There are some other projects that are based on collaborative filming and editing (see the Echo Chamber Project) and for all of them my concern is the same: what is the experience of the viewer while watching it? How much is the content and aesthetics influenced by the production mode?

Since none of those projects are finished (actually, this is a valid question: are they even supposed to have an end or are they in constant evolution?) it is difficult for me to have a point of view.

From what I have seen on his website RIP feels very much like a quick and chaotic documentary for the viewer that has NOT participated. Maybe the feeling is completely different if one has participated in its making… I suspect there is a pleasure in a partial ownership of the whole.

Any comments from people that have participated?

Description:  (this project was proposed to the archive by João Martinho Moura – the following description comes from him)

YMYI (You Move You Interact) is an interactive installation, where one is supposed to build up a body language dialogue with an artificial system so as to effectively achieve a synchronized performance between the real user´s body and the virtual object itself. The project aims at exploring a spatial sphere,where the user/performer is invited to develop his own creative inspiration based on his own body gestures and movements.

Reflecting on the concept present in YMYI, we realized that the user expectations on our installation were twofold – narrative and image. Underlying these concepts, that relate to us as Humans, and our perception of ourselves and the surrounding environment, we truly believe that the following definitions presented by the scientist António Damásio constituted a resourceful enlightenment. According to Damásio, on the one hand “the images (mental patterns) may be conscious or unconscious (…) The unconscious images are never directly accessible. The images access is to be provided in a single first person perspective ( my images, everyone´s images). On the other hand, the neural patterns are to be provided in a third person perspective. If I considered the possibility of observing my own neural patterns resorting to advanced technology, I would be always doing it in the third person perspective.” ( DAMÁSIO, 2000:362).

Find out more:

Watch a video of the installation and read the documentation about the project here

My comments:

I have not seen this project… but I have watched the video and I had a sort of  Wow factor… This is for me what new media does best: it allows us to visualize things outside of our “natural” perception. The authors referred  to Damasio and his theories of consciousness… but I see a lot of Deleuze and Guattari’s Body Without Organs in this piece.

This project allows us to “see” how, while moving, we literally change the space around us… but also: “we” change too!! This links the project to all the concept of “co-emergence” that biologist-cybernetician Francesco Varela has described in The Embodied Mind. We are not “here” in a world that is “outside” of us… we are co-emerging, and co-defining the world and ourselves through movement in an embodied self…

Now my problem is: although I love this project, should I include it here? Is this Digital Art or Interactive Documentary?

As you have probably noticed I have entered YMYI as an installation and I tagged it as an “experiential mode” project. This means that I consider that this is an art project that sits in an art gallery… but that what it does is to construct a documentary narrative about our relation with the world. The fine line between art and documentary is impossible to define. So I take the liberal choice of seeing in YMYI an experiential narrative: a way to experience a fundamental condition of our being in the world that has been described in words (Damasio, Varela, Deleuze, Guattari & many others), that could be described by moving image (but how? by interviewing people that would speak about the philosophers that have debated the question?)… or that could be somehow “experienced”. The whole idea of an embodied mind is that, after all, it is through experience that we learn…

I understand that I am pushing the definition of interactive documentary quite far… but what interests me is not to encapsulate what is, or is not, an interactive documentary, but to think about the ways in which interactive digital technology allows us to speak/see/think/experience reality in an interactive way… and here this project is quite illuminating – at least for me… any comments on this??

Here is the description of the project (from their website):

This project reports on life as experienced by men, women and children in Gaza (Palestine) and Sderot (Israel): their lives and their survival on a daily basis. Under difficult living conditions and the threat of air attacks and bombings, people do keep on working, loving and dreaming. Life in spite of everything.

In order to document this will to live, short chronicles (2 minutes each) will be shot by both Israeli and Palestinian teams, day after day for two months. These short stories will follow six characters from Gaza and six from Sderot. In this way, we will have a new story of each character every week, and the viewer will be able to follow them intimately for 10 weeks. The stories will be aired via the Internet and users will have a personal, interactive and non-linear access to these contents on the site ARTE France which will include the videos, blogs, forums, links etc.

Gaza Sderot is an original project broadcast by Arte.tv, the official site of ARTE, the French-German cultural television station, in coproduction with an Israeli team – Alma Films/Trabelsi Productions in cooperation with The Sapir College in Sderot, a Palestinian team – Ramattan Studios, a French documentary production company – Bo Travail ! and an interactive production company Upian.com.

On Saturday, October 25th, “Gaza Sderot” won the “Prix Europa” which took place in Berlin.

Find out more:

Watch & explore http://gaza-sderot.arte.tv/

Read a Time (2009) article about the project

My comments:

This is a fascinating project!!! For me everything works well on it: the use of mixed media, the interface, the emotional impact and the political meaning if it. By shooting daily on both parts of the israelo-palestinian conflict Gaza-Sderot manages to bring us all “back to normal life”: we see “normal” people dealing with life as they can, with their ups and downs. We get time (2 months) to get attached to them, to have some sort of bond with them.

When the project was shot (in 2008) we could follow the life of those people in a weekly basis, but the site also holds its strength now, was after the shooting is finished. The existance of a blog also allows viewers to exchange opinions and to keep alife the debate that this web-documentary wants to create.

I also particularly like the fact that one can browse those stories using different approaches: time, faces, maps and topics. By doing so one can get attached to a character but also position him/her and check what other people say about the same topic. This lateral linking creates a web of associations that feels very satisfying. Somehow the designers managed to use hypertext interactivity in a fulfilling way: they got the right words and the right linking logic.

I think this project is extremely well put together… and it is very strong. Do you share my enthusiasm?

Description:

Jonathan Harris is well known for his data visualization projects (We Feel Fine and Time Capsule, 2006).

In May 2007 he decided to document his trip to Barrow (Alaska) – where he went to assist to a whale hunt done by the Inupiat Eskimos – by taking 3,214 photographs in seven days.

The photographs were taken at five-minute intervals, even while sleeping (using a chronometer), establishing a constant “photographic heartbeat”. In moments of high adrenaline, this photographic heartbeat would quicken (to a maximum rate of 37 pictures in five minutes while the first whale was being cut up), mimicking the changing pace of my own heartbeat.

This is how Jonathan Harris explains the purpose of his project:

First, to experiment with a new interface for human storytelling. The photographs are presented in a framework that tells the moment-to-moment story of the whale hunt. The full sequence of images is represented as a medical heartbeat graph along the bottom edge of the screen, its magnitude at each point indicating the photographic frequency (and thus the level of excitement) at that moment in time. A series of filters can be used to restrict this heartbeat timeline, isolating the many sub-stories occurring within the larger narrative (the story of blood, the story of the captain, the story of the arctic ocean, etc.). Each viewer will experience the whale hunt narrative differently, and not necessarily in a linear fashion, constructing his or her own understanding of the experience.

(ref: http://www.number27.org/#whalehunt).

The result is an incredible mosaic of photos that can be browsed by colour, by time, by intensity or by  keyword, in a very ludic way.

Find out more:

See the project and play with this amazing photographic interface at http://thewhalehunt.org/whalehunt.html

See Jonathan Harris’ other projects on his own website http://www.number27.org/index.html

My comments:

I find this photographic project particularly elegant and sleeck looking. The photographic mosaic is really fun to navigate, and when one gets into specific photos the default patten is that photos keep coming as ina slide show in a somehow hypnotic mode.

Jonathan says that with the whale hunt he has created experimental interface for storytelling. I certainly thing that he is stretching narrative visualisation but I wonder what sort of storytelling this is. The narrative, although photographic, is clearly linear (cronological) while our entry point can be multiple.

I had fun, and something is fascinating in this project, but what is the documentation really gaining with this type of interface? Is it just clever or it is showing something more about reality?

Description:

Continuum… is a real time net art project that uses news feeds from the BBC Internet news service and compiles them into an constantly fading image of passing news.

The author says of the artwork that “it reflects upon the evolution of our collective history through the real-time analysis of global news information networks. As no event transpires in isolation, each moment of our existence is defined by the sum of an infinite number of interconnected occurrences”.

Find out more:

See Continuum… on the internet.

More about the artist, Michael Takeo Magruder.

My comments:

Continuum… looks very simple and clean: it is just an image (with a text on the bottom) that keeps fading into another image (and text).

The interactivity that it uses is not linked to the user, but to the use of news feeds in real time. This is probably a case of generative art more than interactive art. It could be argued that by changing the news we change the artifact but… how much influence can we really have?

So if in a sense this is not strictly speaking an interactive documentary (there is no interaction with the user and no pre-defined narrative) I still think it performs a type of documentation of our mediated world.

For a short time, while watching those images never really stopping, and never really graspable, a feeling of endless media bombardment invaded me. Also, this endless piece has an hypnotic effect that I tend to link to the ever moving quality of life.

I do not know… but I find it quite powerful – and yet, too simple….

Description:

Filmmaker-in-Residence is an experiment of film activism done by documentary-maker Katerina Cizek and the National Film Board of Canada. The basic idea is to “put media into the hands of communities in need” – as she states in her film. Cizek has followed for months mental  health nurses going into peoples’ houses, she has followed a HIV team all the way to Africa… and out of hours of recordings she has composed an elegant photo/audio-documentary and several short films. All of those are accessible via her web-documentary (it has also been released as a DVD).

Find out more:

Watch Filmmaker-in-residence.

Read Filmmaker-in-residence blog.

My comments:

Filmmaker-in-residence is a very powerful project. It works well because the topics are very strong (mental illness, HIV, photo activism etc…) but also because it has a strong linear narrative. Although the video use is scarce (most of it is composed of photos and text – with some audio) the navigation is completely linear: you basically can go “next” or “previous” (with the exception of a menu that allows you to jump). The strength of the narrative is such that most people go all the way to the end of it – or at least, I did.

From the point of view of its interactive interest, the project is quite banal. But the photos are great, the text is long but compelling and the navigation is simple and clean. Interestingly enough the project is circular: it finishes where it starts. No surprises that it won the 2008 Webby Awards.

But for me Filmmaker-in-residence is more a tour de force from an ideological point of view than from a technical one. Cizek clearly believes that media needs to go back into the hands of the people that are normally neglected by our society. She sees her project as an alternative model of media-making. Following the tradition of cinema verite and participatory documentary she challenges new media to be even more useful to give back power to the people that are not heard by our society. Filming inner-city health is not about her showing us “the others”, but about giving people a way to exist and express themselves. Media here is used for change, not for voyeurism.

A very courageous project.

Description:

Artist Christian Nold worked with 50 local residents from the Greenwich area (London) to build an emotion map of the area that explores people’s relationship with their local environment.

The project was set up as a series of participatory workshops that invited people to borrow a Bio Mapping device and go for a walk. The device measures the wearer’s Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), which is an indicator of emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location.

The data collected from all the individual walks is then put together through the visualisation tool that is the map. A map, that is not just geographical any more, but that contains evidences of emotions, comments and memories of people. A map that becomes a political tool (showing the areas that resident do , or do not, like) but also a documentation of people’s feelings in conjunction with the space they inhabit.

Find out more:

More about Greenwich Emotion Map at http://www.softhook.com/emot.htm

To download the map itself: http://www.emotionmap.net/

More about the author, Christian Nold, and other projects…

My comments:

Christian’s projects are always very interesting to me because they are both participative and very tangible. I like them because I see three distinct projects/phases/layers in the Emotion Maps:

The first part is the collaborative effort to define what the map will be about and what residents of one area want to address as issues. This is the collaborative part which involves real consultation with the residents.

The second part is the private experience that residents have while they participate to the project and they walk around their city (or neighbourhood) with their Bio Mapping device on their body. Here they experience the city differently that they normally would, because of the device that they carry – but also because they have to choose their walk, their significant buildings and they can record their memories and feelings about those places. This phase is what I see as a private experience, a kind of awareness journey.

And finally, the third part of the project is what Christian then does with all the data he has collected. By choosing the map as a visualisation tool he changes the use of it and gives is a personal and political edge. He also ends up with a very physical object, something that can be exposed or printed in the “old media” way.

This is a new media project that does not only live in a database. This is a documentation of the city that can be visualised by all – digital or not digital aware- and yet that could not exist without GPS systems and computers.

I think this work is very powerful as it mixes private and social levels of our everyday life in the city. I would also definitively see it as a form of new media documentary: the documentartion of our relationship and emotions towards what structures our movements and our lives- the city.

Description:

The [LoveStoryProject] is a growing collection of stories and thoughts about love. It started in Cairo in 2003 when Florian Thalhofer and Mahmoud Hamdy asked friends to explain their definition of love.

People from very different cultural backgrounds talk about one common phenomenon: love. Without claiming universal validity, the answers provide a new perspective on your own and the other culture.

The [LoveStoryProject] is a database-driven video-archive that can be viewed in a computer-installation or over the internet. The [LoveStoryProject] is an evolving and dynamic documentary-film. A film that never is the same twice.

Find out more:

The project was edited with the Korsakow system (a software that Florian developed himself to be able to interact with video online – or on a DVD support). For more on Korsakow check: http://www.korsakow.com/ksy/

For other Korsakow movies check wiki page http://korsakow.ca/index.php?title=Korsakow_Films_Online

To see the [LoveStoryProject] go to http://www.lovestoryproject.com/

My comments:

The [LoveStoryProject] does really work for me. Although one jumps from one interview to another with a visual hyperlink logic (click on an image rather than on a text) the curiosity about the topic really makes this exploration rather natural and intuitive. One does not think “do I want to go to the right or to the left” (the type of decision that is difficult to make as a user because one does not actually care about it), on the contrary, one sees a face and wants to know more about him/her.

Probably because it is such an intimate subject – love- curiosity and interest is enough to browse through this project. I really like it.

From Katy Newton’s website…
An interactive package created for the Oakland Tribune Newspaper, designed to tell the story of a group of kids from Northern California that joined forces with students from a small village in Tanzania, Africa to rebuild a school.

Little By Little was recognized by MACROMEDIA as a “Site of The Day”, received NPPA BOP 1st place honors, and was chosen as an SND.ies finalist 2006.

View Little by Little

Description:

Love and Diane: An Interactive Timeline is an interactive TV application based on the
Jennifer Dworkin’s Love & Diane, “a frank and astonishingly intimate real-life drama of a mother and daughter desperate for love and forgiveness, but caught in a devastating cycle. During the 1980s, a crack cocaine epidemic ravaged and impoverished many inner city neighborhoods. As parents like Diane succumbed to addiction, a generation of children like Love entered the foster care system. Shot over ten years, the film centers on Love and Diane after the family is reunited and is struggling to reconnect. Now 18 and a mother herself, Love must reconcile her anger and confront the ways in which her mother’s past mistakes haunt her life. Diane, in turn, makes new choices for herself, seeking to break the treadmill of addiction and poverty.

Find out more:

Video: http://www.pov.org/loveanddiane/video/timeline/love_diane_hi.swf
Related: http://www.pbs.org/pov/loveanddiane/

Description:

Chiloe is an archipelago south of Santiago, Chile, populated by farmers, fishermen and craftsman. University of North Carolina photojournalism students captured the life and culture of this colorful island community in a series of narrated photo essays (which can be viewed as silent slideshows or with audio). Chile plans to celebrate its bicentennial in 2010 by building the longest bridge in Latin America, joining Chiloe to the mainland. Will this destroy the island’s culture and tax its natural resources, or will the bridge be the key to the island’s economic future? These photo and video essays showcase personal stories of a life that reflects long standing traditions as well as recent cultural and economic developments. They are stories about a way of life that may soon disappear, and are therefore an important record of our time. The text is offered in both English and Spanish, and the Spanish audio is similarly presented in English as well.

Find out more:

watch and browse Chiloe’ stories

My comments:

Chiloe’ Stories is a good example of clean and effective online videojournalism. The aim of this project is not to use groundbreaking interactivity, but to use digital media effectively to portray the life in some remote islands – a lifestyle  that may change very soon. In this sense I think this project is very successful: it mixes photojournalism with video journalism, it uses graphics and text for the subjects that are more historical… in other words it uses the correct type of media for each type of information. The navigation is clean and easy and the content is wide enough so that one has the feeling of learning something.

A good example of educational material, and a sweet mosaic of lifes and issues that uses multimedia efficiently.

Have a look to Gaza-Sderot: life inspite of everything for an attempt of videojournalism in Palestine and Israel (2008) – but especially have a look to Big stories small town: a very similar project to Chiloe’ Stories (but done in 2008 in Australia).

Description:

34 North, 118 West is a a historic fiction set in downtown LA. Depending on the GPS positioning of the walker, a different part of the story is  informs the participator of the historic past of downtown LA. A portable computer shows the location of the participator on a map, while the the audio content is delivered thought the headphones.

Find out more:

Read about the project 34 North, 118 West.

Watch a video of the project 34 North, 118 West.

More about the artist collective 34 North, 118 West (authors of the project) and their other locative projects..

My comments:

The only thing I have seen about this project is the video that is on their website… but it is difficult to tell what the experience of the GPS narrative was like or to judge whether this project is more a locative fictional narrative or a locative documentary narrative.

Anybody that knows more… please do comment!

Description:

7sons is a project by Florian Thalhofer. Yet again Florian has used his Korsakow software (that he has himself created and that is downloadable from the web) to create a hypertext video around the topic of a journey in the desert.

The interface of the project is the one of a main screen -that plays the video- and of three hyperlinks that branch to other video pieces. Following the words on the screen (that can be the name of the next protagonist or an indication of the next topic) one can browse through interviews and nicely edited pieces about nomadic life.

The logic of Korsakow is that the narrative (text order) can be different each time, since it depends on the selections of the viewer.

Find out more:

The project was edited with the Korsakow system (a software that Florian developed himself to be able to interact with video online – or on a DVD support). For more on Korsakow check: http://www.korsakow.com/ksy/

For other Korsakow movies check wiki page http://korsakow.ca/index.php?title=Korsakow_Films_Online

To watch and play with 7sons go to http://www.7sons.com/

My comments:

Althought 7sons is visually quite appealing (nice shots of the desert and very nice music) I am not convinced that the logic of interactivity that the Korsakow software offers is enhancing the topic of the documentary.

The database narrative that Korsakow affords is based on jumping from one interview to the other, of from one edited segment to another,…it therefore pushes the user to “browse” through a topic following curiosity.

While I think that the curiosity holds in topic such as love (see Florian’s “the LoveStoryProject”) I am not so sure that it is sufficient for a journey through a geographical space such as the desert. I found myself stopping the exploration quite quickly as I had the feeling of “not going anywhere” or not “discovering enough”.

It is also to be said thought, that this is one the Florian’s earliest projects (2003) and that his use of the Korsakow system has now really evolved.

The Making of the Balkan Wars is a linear documentary (viewable on the Net) but with a twist: it has been done in conjunction with a 3D multiplayer game – and it uses images from the game, and editing logics coming from the game.

So, in a way, as a documentary it is not interactive (you can only view it) but it uses new media logics that are not part of traditional film language.

On their website we find the following description of the narrative style:
In contradiction with the usual way of the visual representation of the narrative used by the media scene, where mythological structures of local identities have roots in the history of every region and collide with the new model of the man – image consumer, this documentary uses different visual linguistic structures of narrative.
It uses and puts in contradiction the TV form of video, the TV interviews and the cinematographic perception of the documentary with the language of digital creation and the software that compose virtual worlds, like those of the video games. The simultaneous people’s narratives and the recording of the environment alternate are continuously transformed, as they are incorporated in the 3D virtual space surpassing the limits and confinements that are usually present in perception by the use of a separate visual language. This way, the viewer can comprehend the fragmentation and the discontinuity of the mechanisms of production that construct the fantasy elements of the peninsula and get to know the complexity that composes the battle field of the spectacle and its representation in the 21st century.

Find out more

See the documentary The Making of the Balcan Wars online.

Play the game The Making of the Balkans Wars online.

Read the Balkan Wars PDF about the documentary.

My comments:

I have not played the game, but I have watched the documentary. Effectively the narrative style of the video is interesting, as it mixes virtual reality, 3D games and video footage.

The problem for me though, is that there is no interactivity while watching the video. I wander if a series of videos of people playing the game would not be more challenging in terms of interactivity. I suppose the authors wanted to include “classic” interviews with people external to the game and it would have been a challenge to incorporate them in a game logic but… this is a challenge that cold be picked up by someone else!

]]> http://www.interactivedocumentary.net/2002/03/19/the-making-of-the-balkan-wars/feed/ 2 http://www.interactivedocumentary.net/1997/04/05/the-twelve-lovveliest-things-i-know/ http://www.interactivedocumentary.net/1997/04/05/the-twelve-lovveliest-things-i-know/#comments Sat, 05 Apr 1997 21:32:29 +0000 Sandra http://www.interactivedocumentary.net/?p=352 Description:

(I have not seen this project myself, what you will find here is the description given at Multimedia The leading Edge)

Explanation: Children were interviewed and asked to describe what would be the 12 loveliest things they know, and these were gathered into themes. When reflected upon with the eyes of adulthood, this formed the basis of a personal documentary which attempts to provide emotion and thoughtful reflection.

Interaction: Things that stand out intuitively as colourful or moving or that catch the eye can be touched. Coloured images appear to an old man which represent themes collated from children: achievement, speed, success, caring, play etc. Themes are developed by intuitive clicking. It is possible to experience fairground rides, flying (and crashing) a kite, walking a dog, sledging, bicycle riding and similar events. Choosing symbols of adulthood can bring harsh reality.

Find out more:

Read an explanation of the installation

Read a paper about ‘Global art’ (interactive film) by Chris Hayles

My comments:

I have often read about this project, but I have never been able to see it. If you have seen it, please add a comment!

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…