A year down the line its director Katerina Cizek is clearly cooking an intreaguing collaborative project using 360 degrees images.  Her team first announced that they were  prototyping an art installation in physical space (to re-translate digital space into physical one) and now they are asking for collaboration from all of us who live in a tower block (sending our highrise views to a Flickr account). How are they going to assemble them is a mystery… but from what I understand both a website and an exhibition should come out of it…

Although 360 technology is sexy, the point here is to know how it will be used. In her last project for NFB, Filmmaker-in-Residence, Katerina Cizek took very seriously the meaning of “collaborative” media.  During 5 years she worked with the medical staff, and with the patients, of an inner-city hospital… and it is only through deep rooting into their universe that she emerged with the version of the interactive documentary that is available online – and on DVDs. I am really curious to know what type of collaboration she is experimenting with in her new project, Highrise. After having directly engaged with a selected group of tower residents in Toronto (see their descriptions of their space and the presentation that has been organized with the major here),   they are now asking anybody to send photos to Flickr… is this a contradiction or a cleverly balanced dose of crowd sourcing and intimate collaboration?

And also… is 360 degrees technology an aesthetic landscaped choice or does it experiment with new type of digital interaction?

I am afraid that for now they are the only one to have the answers… maybe they want to share some information with us?

I suggest that you have a look to it as the online project makes use of Google Maps and Google Street View to incorporate images of the viewer’s home town into the video. It also opens different windows at specific times and allows you to draw a postcard and send it back into the video itself. The use of google maps to personalize (customize?) a video is new to my knowledge… and it really works!! While you are looking at the video you cannot unglue your eyes from a setting that you really know well (since you lived there!).

This type of personalization could also be used in interactive documentaries…. imagine a topic like bulling, or education, where you are fed images of your own school as opposed to the institutionalised image of “a school” (in the UK Victorian schools seem to be the chosen as representational image).

Also, the use of windows – as opposed to picture into picture editing- is really working well. Image juxtapose themselves adding meaning to the other one – as opposed of composing a new “unique” image.

Even just for the inspiration and breath of fresh air… have a look to http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com

I read a mixture of books on complexity, interactivity, consciousness and Spinoza… strangely enough they were all related in one way or another… and it all seemed very clear to me when I was in the Italian Alps looking at the complexity of a cloudy sky and at the reflexive calmness of a glacier’s lake… Could it be that simple?

The good news is that now that I am back to London it is all muddy again in my mind… is this symptomatic about the fact that here I have too many jobs to fulfil?

I need to do some extra research before entering it into the archive. If you have any comments or extra  information please shout now!

Obviously non of this is new to critical analysis. But what is new for me is that I am now strongly aware of it. Although interviewing people made me feel secure, I was also aware of the role I was performing, of the production rules that I was embodying and re-proposing.

I hope that the interactive documentary that we want to make with this content will allow me to break out of the conventions that both tranquillize and irritate me… This is ultimately the aim of a PhD: to bring out new directions of enquiry and to push oneselves outside of the confort zone…

Have a look to  http://linterview.fr/new-reporter/le-moteur-de-recherche-du-web-documentaire/ and type any topic or location… and a list of web project will come up (photo-journalism, interactive news, web-docs etc…). It does work for English projects too but it is less effective (if you search for a topic you need to do it in French!).

LINTERVIEW web site is really worth checking. They do interviews, they follow what is happening as we speak. I am not too sure who is behind it (I shall enquire) but it is a useful resource…

If you subscribe to their newsletter they also inform you about interesting stuff. Today I received a link to a 40 minute piece on the web documentary format (http://linterview.fr/new-reporter/les-webdocumentaires-revolution-ou-effet-de-mode/) and to an interview to David Dufresne about Prison Valley : http://linterview.fr/new-reporter/les-coulisses-de-prison-valley-par-david-dufresne/.

Have a look… !

check it out at http://globallives.org/

read about it at http://globallives.org/ybca/media_information_sheet_GLP.pdf

The production team of GDP has also opened to the public their delicious page. Over time they have collected  a great list of docu-webs! This is a great research resource for anybody interested in interactive documentaries… have a look to http://delicious.com/gdpib and discover more photo essays and docu-journalism pieces than you can ever imagine. Well done to GDP’s team to open so generously to all of us such a great archive!

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….

Have a look to their trailer. If you are interested in this project you can also subscribe to their newsletter.

This is how they describe the project on their website: “HIGHRISE, 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.”

Worth following…

7.00 am, alarm clock. 7.30, get the kids ready. 7.45, breakfast. 8.00 kids to school. 8.30, I do my jogging. 9.00 shower. 9.30, cappuccino plus start writing till the kids are back from school. It is not exactly a 9 till 5 job, but nearly… I have to say that there is a nice feeling to this kind of monastic rythm. The days pass by one after the other. I have blocked this time for writing so I am not taking anything else on… suddenly the days seem easier, smooth, with no attached complications. My moods go from total frustration to total excitment. Illuminations and flat stagnation rythm my days. The fact is that I am slow. I am such a slow writer… how could I ever had decided to do a PhD? It takes me forever to decide what to write, and how to formulate it… I suppose I have to put my head down and just persevere…

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…

Have a look to arte.tv/afrique. I think this is a nice attempt to speak about the 50 years of African independence by doing a series of web-documentaries. Each African country is represented by an interesting guide (normally someone hip and young) that shows you around during a day. Really well done for a young public!

France 5’s project is safer, but still quite brave: it picks on issues of the  “New World”  (ecology, immigration, capitalism etc…) and covers the topic trhough 3/4 webdosumentaries. You can have a look to their portraits on China france5.fr/PNM.

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…

BBC is currently broadcasting its series about the history and consequences of the web. The original title “Digital Revolution” – which was opened to crowd sourcing – has finally become “Virtual Revolution” (the crowds were not very inspired, after all). It is currently downloadable on  BBC iPlayer – or broadcast  on Saturdays on BBC2. For those who have been following this blog, you might recall that BBC has called it an “open source documentary”… and this has been the source of several blog entries since I personally think that it is not open sourced at all – although it allowed some input from the viewers during the production phase.

But the reason of today’s entry is that – honouring what they had announced 6 months ago-  BBC has launched a “3D documentary explorer” to allow an interactive viewing of the series content. This effectively means that 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 it online in a 3D environment that allows you to 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.

But what sort of experience does this browsing create?

I have to admit that I was quite sceptical when I tried it out. 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 topologiacl 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?

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…

http://www.bbc.co.uk/virtualrevolution/3dexplorer.shtml

Tobias Hülswitt:

In my opinion, the Aristotelian way of storytelling, i.e. storytelling that’s

based on Aristotle’s Poetics, which was brought to perfection in Hollywood,

is a metaphysical system. First because the storyline functions as the

literal metaphysics above the characters and the action, since everything in

the narration has to obey the storyline. Secondly because the storyline

represents the superior order, in which everything, even the death of the

character, makes sense, since it supports the dramaturgy. Thirdly because

Aristotelian storytelling contains the assumption that there is a true self, an

inner core, to the story – if you take away all the scenes, there is still the

inner strong idea, the true self of the story, it’s just not embodied anymore,

it became an animus, a specter or ghost. People are stories too. People

who are told stories in the Aristotelian way tend to believe they have a true

self. The same goes for nations. The true inner self is another

metaphysical concept. Many problems arouse from these concepts. (For

example a general life panic.) – Now if you look at youtube as a narration,

that’s different. There’s no true inner self, if you take away all the ’scenes’

or narrative units, there’s nothing left. Everything can be replaced. Is that

the narrative of the future?

RAY KURZWEIL:

If you look at phenomena like youtube or blogs, they are tapping into a

wisdom of crowds, which is not directed as an Aristotelian concept of a

story. It is self-organizing instead, but it ends up having a lot of wisdom. So

any one blog might be just series of flames, but the whole blogosphere is

very powerful in uncovering the truth of a situation. And Google doesn’t

have its library to decide what link is going to come up when you search an

elephant – it’s a self-organizing system that is based on the decisions of

millions of people. It’s really tapping into the wisdom of crowds. So these

new technologies are actually allowing us to create a supermind from all of

our minds, which can outperform the most brilliant mind. There’s not that

much difference between different people, but if you can actually tap

thousands of millions of people it leads to insights that would be impossibly

any other way. There are limitations to storytelling, I mean, Hollywood for

example, there’s a certain Hollywood paradigm, like love wins in the end,

and certain rules, and you can pick out the story that will come out in the

end based on those overriding concepts. Real life tends to be messier than

that. But people have some idea of the narrative of their own lives, they

tend to overlook some of the real complexity of their lives based on the

narrative that they tell themselves. And I think we can come to deeper

insights by looking at the messy reality of the world. There is a content that

goes beyond just the videos on youtube and the content of blogs, it’s

interacting with each other and it’s self-organizing, and it does come to

some deep insights.

Extract taken from an interview with RAY KURZWEIL (Boston, January 10, 2008) done by Tobias Hülswitt  (full interview available at http://institut.korsakow.com/_texte/RAY-KURZWEIL-INTERVIEW.pdf )

This is an incredible networked journey through interviews of scientists, artists and creators that allows you to effectively create your own documentary out of a database of interviews. Since the theme is that “everything is connected” the interface allows you to link – and see your path- between ideas, concepts, topics and people…

Really worth browsing- great topic and great design!

So for me the big news is that even documentary makers are now puzzled by the options that new media might offer to their craft… For me, after 10 years researching this field and saying that new media is not a threat but an opportunity… this is quite refreshing!!!
Of course classic documentary makers are still sceptical. They wonder what the difference between a cut and a link might be, they fear that interactivity creates new problems of ethics, they question how the lack of a unique ending could ever create a strong narrative…. They basically resist this form as much as they can (and stay very critical about it)…. but – and here is the change- this year they massively turned up at the interactive sessions.  They even staid till the end of the conference to listen to Florian Thalhofer presentation! Not only:  the questions were so many that I really sensed a change of attitude towards digital documentary. This was obviously also due to Florian’s great presentation.  And, yes: Florian got invited as a Key Note speaker!!! Is this not a sign that interactive documentary  is becoming more main stream?

This was a great conference. For once I found people that spoke my language and were interested by my same topics and (most impressive of all) that knew all about my blog – and even read my phd writing!!! This was sooooo exciting… I often get disapointed because people do not commemt on my website, and I too often think that I am writing a monologue with little purpose – while my original aim was to create a community of people interested in my same topics…. But then I discover that some people do read the blog, even if they do not participate.   I suspect commenting on someone’s else blog is intimidating but, common, if you see it as a way to create a community of interactive documentary makers …  does that not make you feel better? I take this occasion to encourage you to debate more on my blog,  to find a voice and to help creating a community…

Anyhow, back to Documentary Now! : not only the atmosphere is nice and informal, not only “big” names as Brian Winston, John Dovey and Florian Thalhofer and many others do participate – but also interactivity is seen as a serious strend so… watch out! Once again thanks to the organizators Alisa Lebow, Michael Chanan and Holly Giesman for putting together such an interesting event!

The several posts of this blog, and following discussions with  BBC and Brett Gaylor, lead me to write an article.

My question is: what does it really mean to open source a documentary? How can the ideology of free software and open collaboration in code influence a new style of documentary making?

I would like to open the  discussion on this. Please feel free read the article, comment and feed-back. I am not an expert on free software so I might have missed some points… but also I am wondering where to place this article. Is it useful for film makers? Is it mainly academic stuff?

Please do let me know…

here is the PDF: open-source-documentary_sg_60110

A little more information is available here. They do not do a lot of advertising, but I went last year and it was a very interesting event. Highly recommended.

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?

So here I am: cappuccino in my hand: where next?

There is always a moment of blues in this… all is possible, but all is to be started again… it is half joy and half an effort… is is about starting motion…

Last trimester was great! I had a great time going at conferences and meeting up people. Now I know I am back into reading and writing. I also have to finish marking my students’ essays…

OK: Phd: I am back!

I did not go there because Doc Fest is UK’s most well known documentary festival, but because they are opening up to a vision of documentary that is much wider than linear documentary.  Among all the seminars and sessions that run on the side of the film screening a large number were dedicated to cross-platform projects, to the merging of games and documentaries and to new forms of business models to finance projects. All of this, to my view is the result of a television audience that is turning more and more to the internet for entertainment.

Now that around 70% of the UK has access to the internet where should broadcasters spend their production budgets? This is not only valid for TVs, the press is also heavily pushing their internet presence and some big educational establishements, such as the Open University too, not to mention the UK government that pours money to push forward it vision of “digital Britain”…

So what is happening now is that the model of TV as the main financer for documentaries is starting to shake hard and several new models are starting to appear.

Jane Mote, commissioner from UK TV, said during a session something that made me think: “linear TV is now just not enough”.

But if we step aside from financial considerations only, digital media is also bringing along a new generations of content creators: the photographic journalists that are used to the digital format, the game designers that know how to immerse audiences in their stories, the web editors that are used to curate content and digital activists that know how to use online social media… all those people are starting to have an impact on documentary making, as they create factual content using digital platforms and they are therefore creating new genres of documentaries.

This is what I found really interesting during those 4 days at Sheffield: new media – and specially the web- are changing the rules of documentary making. It is sometimes affecting the production process, sometimes the financial model, sometimes the narrative structure and sometimes just the distribution logic; but no documentary maker can today ignore the impact of new media in factual narrative.

From what I heard at Sheffield -and I only followed the new media strand, although most of the festival is dedicated to standard linear documentaries – the following are the shifts that I have observed and that I see as caused by the introduction of new media in all the stages of documentary production:

1. 1. cross-platform pitches are now becoming the norm for all broadcasters
2. 2. the funding for interactive documentaries is still scarce but the players are starting to change
3. 3.independent finance and crowd-funding can work, for linear and non linear projects, especially when linked to activist topics
4. 4. docu-games are emerging as a recognised form of documentary
5. 5. web-documentaries are also being recognised and have now a presence at festivals such as Doc Fest

1. cross-platform pitches

The logic here is quite straightforward: broadcasters all have a web presence. Each programme has its website and its content needs to be as sexy as possible. Web advertising is also raising (while TV advertising is decreasing) so web editors are starting to have a little bit more budget to spend. The solution is therefore simple: a TV idea now has to have more than one life. Commissioning editors are looking for ideas that can produce a linear documentary but also a non linear experience that will bring people to their website. Social media, content participation, educational games, and online competitions can all have a long life and keep attracting people, while a documentary is only broadcasted once.

As a result broadcasters are welcoming cross-platform ideas. Local Food Hero was presented by UKTV Director of Lifestyle, Factual and New Media Jane Mote, as the ideal cross platform idea: it is a cooking TV series, an website that collects audiences recipes and a cooking book. Three products for nearly the price of one.

Channel 4 has a dedicated cross-platform commissioning editor, Adam Gee. Have a look to Embarassing bodies to see Ch4 efforts to link broadcast interest to social media logics. This is a project that starts as a strong documentary idea but that has a social forum life on the web that keeps it attractive to the youth audience. Channel 4 has also created 4ip to promote collaborative ideas online that do not have to be linked to linear documentary. If you want to see the sort of projects that 4ip has financed have a look to Mapumental , Help me investigate and Patient option. Those are projects that start as web ideas, and might never become a linear documentary. Tom Loosemore, head of 4ip, said “I do not want to tell stories, I want to facilitate people telling their own stories”.

2. funding: the players are changing

Of course broadcasters are still dominating the scene. Speaking to Arnaud Dressen, the French web-documentary producer that presented both Journey to the Coal and L’Obesite est-elle une fatalite , I was told that televisions are still the most likely to finance an interactive documentary. But new players are emerging: newspapers can be interested on investigative online documentaries to boost up their online presence. Although with a very small budget, French newspaper Le Monde did finance part of Journey to the Coal. Tom Happold, head of multimedia at Guardian News & Media, also seemed to predict a growing presence of interactive dossiers on the Guardian’s website.

The usual European Media programme is still active in the background, but other international players, such as the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), are particularly active in the field. Not only the NFB organizes in Sheffield a Cross Platform Pitching Competition, where the happy winner receives £5,000 of developing fund, but back home it does finance very innovative projects, check them out http://www.nfb.ca/ .

Finally, the players are changing because more and more success stories of self-financed projects seem to indicate  that money does not always have to come from the professionals…

3. independent financing models

The big hype about independent financing comes from the recent success story of The Age of Stupid, an environmentalist documentary that was entirely financed via donations and private investment. Super motivated director Franny Amstrong managed to raise the entire £500,000 budget of her film by selling “shares” of her movie before even having started it. She coined the word ‘crowd-funding’ to illustrate her financing model. People were told that they could make a profit if investing in the film, but no guarantee was given, they could also never finish the film. Eventually they did finish it, and it became a big hit, but Amstrong had very cleverly sold the theatrical rights worldwide but kept all the other rights for herself, so that she now self-manages, and entirely profits, from the DVD sales, the non-theatrical releases and the broadcasting sales. This model not only allowed her to raise much more that what a broadcaster would have granted her, but it also assured her full editorial control of her content.

If self-funding is maybe not a very quick route, it took Armstrong 4 years to finish her movie, it has also been used more radically by other people that decided to open source their content in exchange of free donations. Nina Paley went this route with Sita Sings the Blues . Although this project is an animated film, and not a documentary, it shows a new possible model: people seem to be ready to pay for free content if they think it is worth it. Sita Sings the Blues is freely downloadable from the web in all the possible definition formats (including HD for theatrical release) but Paley accepts donations and people seem happy to do so. She has managed to cover the production costs of her project and even to do a small profit. The problem with this model is that, not only there is no guarantee of a return of investment, but also the money only arrives after the project is finished… It therefore only works for small projects where the director can put the money upfront.

Finally collaborative forms of documentaries have used the web to look for help during the production process. This does obviously not cover all the costs but it can minimize them. A good example is the open source documentary RIP: an Open Source Manifesto where Brett Gaylor has asked his online audience to collaborate in specific tasks: shoot some footage, remix video or find music mixes. If collaboration is not a form of financing it is still a way to keep the costs low, as the people that participate do it for free.

4. the emergence of docu-games

Interactive games are not new, web games either, but what is starting to emerge is a critical mass of people who are creating digital games inspired by factual stories and that are researched as documentaries in order to create an experience of reality.

At least five sessions where dedicated at Sheffield to this cross-breed between documentaries and  games. You will find in delicious a list of examples that Matt Adams, from Blast theory, and Margaret Robertson, from Lookspring, have kindly prepared for their session. (see  http://delicious.com/tag/docfest09games?setcount=25)

The “classic” examples of docu-games that everybody were referring to were:

> JFK reloaded, an edutainment first-person shooter video game recreating the John F. Kennedy assassination.

> Darfur is Dying , a game about trying to survive in a refugee camp, mainly aimed to a young audience.

> Global conflicts , an educational game where you play as a journalist exploring worldwide conflicts, including Israel/Palestine.

Some new projects got also presented during the festival. Of particular interest I found Blast Theory’s latest Ulrike and Deamon compliant, a locative game which was produced for this year’s Venice art biennale. In this game the player is walking through the streets of Venice while listening to phone messages leading to a personal decision about the use of violence and terrorism. For Matt Adams, the game author, locative games are “situated narratives and powerful subjective experiences”. This is really what makes them a challenging forms of new media documentaries: they pose the problem of subjectivity in the creation of reality.

To those examples I would like to add Gone Gitmo , by Nonny de la Pena, a 3D reconstruction of Guantanamo Bay’s prison in Second Life, where people can explore a space reconstructed through thorough journalistic research and experience the frustration of being locked in such a place. Here again, the aim is to use game design as a way to illustrate an environment closed to the cameras, but also to add subjectivity to a user that is active in experiencing a specific situation.

5. the recognition of web-documentaries

This year four web-documentaries were shown at Sheffield. Those were:

> The Big Issue by Honkytonk Films

> Journey to the End of the Coal, also by the French dynamic Honkytonk Films

> Big Stories, Small Town by Australian Jeni lee and Sieh Mchawla

> Gaza Sderot, Life in Spite of Everything by Khalil al Muzayyen and Robby Elmaliah and produced by Arte television

Since those are interactive films, and they are freely available on the net, they did not have a scheduled theatrical viewing, and no Q&A with the authors, but they were accessible via four dedicated computers placed in one of the galleries of the festival.

Now, 4 web-documentaries out of 150 linear documentaries is not that much… but it is a start! Especially what is a start is that the BFN Cross-Platform Pitching competition aims at encouraging new media ideas and that Sheffield’s Innovation Award mixes new media entries with particularly arty documentaries. One can wonder if a special “new media documentary award” should be created, but it is somehow interesting to put in the same “innovation” category  linear and non linear projects… underlying that the novelty might not be in the platform, but in the style and the ideas…

So… over all this has been a very interesting festival for me. What it made me realise is that digital documentary is slowly gaining presence in the documentary industry. Under the different names of docu-games, web-documentaries, social documentary websites or simply cross-platform documentaries what is happening is that the digital format is opening doors to new types of factual content… and this is getting clear even for broadcasters and renowned festivals.

The project is a collaboration between researchers and filmmakers at the Infoscape Research Lab at Ryerson University and the Department of Communication, Florida State University.

So far only 10 people are participating – of which three are the initators of the project: Brett Gaylor (the initiator of the Open Source Cinema project & website) plus Andy Opel and Greg Elmer (the co-author of the book Preempting Dissent, who is also an associate professor in the Department of Communication at Florida State University, and who I suspect is the initiator of this specific Open Source project). To be frank at the moment there is not very much going on…

Of course I could have started uploading videos on surveillance cameras (the topic of the project) – which I will do soon- but since this was my first visit to the website I was mainly trying to understand how does the whole project work. Since the project itself is quite empty for now I turned to a project that is nearly finished, and that should work with the same Open Source Cinema logic, RIP: a remix manifesto.

I had seen video clips of  RIP in the past, since the documentary is divided in chapters that are downloadable from the web, but this time I was really trying to understand the process of user’s collaboration… how can I participate… and interestingly enough a lot of questions have risen.

How does Open Source Cinema projects’ work?

- you go to www.opensourcecinema.org

- you fill in a profile and log in

- you then choose and join one or several    projects

- once you have selected a project you can upload your content and start remixing

…but then?

I suppose you upload your remixed video

… but where are the remixes that others have uploaded? I could not find them on the RIP screen? This is the screen you get: an invitation to remix plus a blog of people’s comments on the project… but where are the remixes?

The idea of Open Source Cinema is to do to films what Wikipedia has done to encyclopaedias.  In his website Brett Gaylor, the creator of the site, writes “think of remixes as “wiki-films” – they’re produced through continual revision and collaboration” (http://www.opensourcecinema.org/about-open-source-cinema).

But is it really the case? When I add content to a wiki article I can see the layers of participations of other people (by clicking onto the “history” tag) and I work on an open canvas that stays open forever (in the sense that at any moment anybody can change/ add to what I have written). Can I do this in RIP: an open source manifesto?

The way RIP is organised is that it is already edited in chapters, and each chapter has a specific call to participate. If you view a chapter you will see that at the end of it Brett asks people to collaborate on precise tasks (add music mixes on the film trailer, checking if something is missing in chapter 3, add to the voice over of chapter 7 etc…)… so in a way the collaboration is “directed” by Brett – contrary to Wikipedia where you are your own judge on how you want to collaborate.

Once you have decided to add something to the chapter I suspect you upload it, but I am not clear about the following step: do you remix and upload it for everyone else to add on to, or do you send it to Brett – and then he decides if it is a good addition, so that he stays in control of the paste and narrative arch of the film?

This again is an important point if we want to compare it to Wikipedia, since the editorial role is collaborative in it, while it is not clear in Open Source Cinema. If the remix culture is all against copyright and ownership… how transparent is the relation between web collaborators and Brett?

The last point that is unclear to me is the lifespan of the project. A Wikipedia entry is potentially always open to changes. Its life is on the web and, until people will feel interested on it, it will keep breathing. What is the final form of an Open Source Cinema documentary? The version that is on the web is potentially always open, but Brett does show the documentary at festivals… and I suppose he keep choosing “temporarily finished versions”, each of which, though, is presented as a “normal” documentary to its audience – a film that has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

If I am right, this would mean that an Open Source Cinema documentary has different bodies: a fluctuating one, that lives on the web, and takes the shape of the last remix uploaded by Brett (or by the web remixers? I am not clear on this) – and a “finished” one, that takes the shape of the last acceptable remix (acceptable for whom? Once again, is it Brett that decides which version he presents to film festivals?).

Since I do not have the answers to those questions I will, as always in my blog, turn them to the people that are might have the answers: Brett Gaylor, Greg Elmer  and Andy Opel.

Their answer is important because I think that the term Open Source documentary is starting to spread, and therefore there is a need now to be clear about its meaning. For wikipedia “Open source is an approach to the design, development, and distribution of software, offering practical accessibility to a software’s source code.” but, when applied to media and video content, “Open Source Filmmaking refers to a form of filmmaking that takes a method of idea formation from open source software, but in this case the ’source’ for a film maker is raw unedited footage rather than programming code. It can also refer to a method of filmmaking where the process of creation is ‘open’ i.e. a disparate group of contributors, at different times contribute to the final piece.”

Which are the possible logics of production and ownership behind Open Source documentaries? Now that the BBC is flagging that they are also creating an Open Source film (obviously not via opensourcecinema.org, but in their own website and with their own rules – see my blog about BBC’s Digital Revolution and BBC’s answer to my questions!) it becomes essential to understand how far an open source logic can go once applied to video footage.

Can a documentary retain narrative interest if completely open sourced? What is the border, the limit, between author and participators in an open sourced film? Is an open sourced documentary really equally “owned” by its participators? And finally… how “open” can an open source documentary be?

Here is an opportunity for us all to get hands on and to be part of an interactive documentary!!

PREEMPTING DISSENT: OPEN SOURCING SECRECY

An Open Source Documentary Film Project
Call for Videos, Testimonials, Photographs, and other Audio Visual Materials

This project examines new forms of social control including the proliferation of Tasers and the rise of “no-fly” and watch-lists. We are seeking contributions to this project in the form of video, still images, and testimonials. This content will be made available for others to mix and remix into their own documentaries.

HOW TO CONTRIBUTE:

We are seeking video content from those of you who have experienced and/or captured on video new forms of surveillance and social control. Have you been Tasered by police, security guards, or other citizens? Did you witness someone being Tasered and record it on video? Has your name been placed on a “no-fly” list – or similar exclusionary watch-list? If so, we invite you to submit your video footage, personal video testimonials, audio testimonials, photographs, news footage, cell phone videos, mash-ups, and any other audio-visual medium which will convey your story.

To participate in this project, please go to http://www.opensourcecinema.org/project/preempting-dissent

BACKGROUND:

Greg Elmer of Ryerson University and Andy Opel of Florida State University are working with Open Source Cinema, to create a collaborative, open-source documentary film based on Elmer and Opel’s book, Preempting Dissent. Using the Open Source Cinema platform – a collaborative website which serves as a repository for user-generated content – the audience will be encouraged to submit their own media as well as to remix media uploaded by the filmmakers and other users. By publishing a “road map” of production, this project will encourage participation through all stages of production. The project will produce a feature length documentary, as well as enable a non-linear open source cinematic database that will evolve over time through the collaborative contributions of users. The documentary, the producer’s video clips, and user-generated contributions will all be available for remixing.

PREEMPTING DISSENT:
This project is based on the 2008 book Preempting Dissent that critically examines new forms of surveillance and social control. This new logic encourages the suppression of public dissent and mobilizes both “fear” of the unknown and “faith” in government leadership. Elmer and Opel show that this new logic stretches well beyond the realm of airport security and international relations into everyday police techniques, including the use of Tasers, the deployment of “stealth” crowd control, the zoning of protestors and the suppression of public dissent. Drawing on social theories and media analyses, this book reveals the underlying”logic of preemption“whereby threats must be eliminated before they materialize. By addressing the implications of this new logic, Elmer and Opel lay the groundwork for more effective resistance.

Well… they call it an ‘open source documentary’: “It is our ambition to open up the production process as much as possible; to share as much of our thinking as possible, as the production team strive to create a cohesive, accurate and relevant documentary about the World Wide Web. We’ll be blogging as we go; we’ll share our theories; we’ll be putting up rushes from the filming; we’ll be asking for advice and stories from you as we go along.” (quote from the programme’s blog).

From what I understand during pre-production the BBC is in constant communication mode with “us” (blogging, twittering, youtubing, deliciousing… you name it)  and in exchange we can come back with ideas, comments, interviews… but more importantly STORIES (“tell us the stories you think we should be covering”, they say in their website). So… in a way: we help them while they inform us. This is up to a point an interactive process: we are in contact, but is it really an open source dynamic? Our stories suggestions do not directly change the programme (we are not  adding a layer of code to a software) and more importantly we do not know how our suggestion will be used (contrary to what happens to an open source software where any change has been designed by its author to do a precise task). What is happening here is that the control stays in the hand of the BBC: what we suggest is considered by a producer that has the power to do what he/she likes with it. I might be over critical here… but more than an open source documentary this resembles to a partially freely researched documentary!

Obviously the fact that BBC is involving “web people” while documenting the web is laudable… for such a big corporate it is a courageous decision… but the risks are still very much under control, to the point that I wonder how much this open source documentary is a marketing trick more than a real shift of thinking. Brett Gaylor, the creator of opensourcecinema.org, has been experimenting for years now on ways for people to collaborate online towards the common production of a documentary. RIP: a remix manifesto is the result of people sharing footage, remixing other people’s rushes and re-editing material over the web.  Brett’s idea is to open up the entire process of the film production… and not only to ask its potential audience for good ideas…

The BBC too promises to make their rushes available online… but where are they? I have been looking for the rushes of programme one, the first been produced that, following the published schedule, should start its editing on the 28th of September. Now… it is today the 17th of September… I can’t find them… either I am thick, or they are well hidden, or maybe they will be published at the last minute… but if they do not publish them before editing the final programme… how are we supposed to deeply “influence” or “collaborate” in the production process?

Maybe the BBC has some hidden ideas that will make its project a little bit more open sourced – and a little less free sourced…

To be honest though, there is one line on the programme’s blog that seems to suggest that there will also be a parallel interactive documentary:  ” your input, your comments, and your links will be read by the production team and will shape the direction the story takes. And everything will be part of our online interactive documentary that launches alongside programme transmission” (quote from the programme’s blog). What will be the shape, form and intention of such online project is quite mysterious… and definitively unclear (but definitively exciting, don’t get me wrong!).

I am really curious to see how this BBC project will evolve and, since I already have too many questions about it, I think I will address them directly to the production team. Actually, if they could use the web tools, and comment directly on my blog’s entry, it would be a great clin d’oeil to the topic of their programme!

Stay posted, you will maybe have some answers soon…

Those of you that know Florian Thalhofer’s work will be glad to know that other people have used his software and that there is now a page linking to all the projects that have been done using the Korsakow software. Here it is.

Those who do not know about Florian can have a look to his website: you will find his online films but also information about him and his current projects.

So… what is a Korsakow film? I’ll take Florian’s words on this: “Korsakow-Films are films with a twist: They are interactive – the viewer has influence on the K-Film. They are rule-based – the author decides on the rules by which the scenes relate to each other, but s/he does not create fixed paths. K-Films are generative – the order of the scenes is calculated while viewing. Korsakow is not a religion.” (from http://korsakow.org/tiki-index.php).

The thing with having kids is that they are constantly on holidays!!! Believe it or not I find it very hard to swing from holiday mood  to working mood every 6 weeks (which is on average how often the kids have a break from school). One side of me believes it is incredibly civilised to have so many breaks and to remember that there are others things in life than work, school runs and house organisation… but the other side of me finds it very painful to switch between completely different lives all the time.

I suppose that working from home does not help. When the kids are on hols they are there: right in front of me waiting for me to take the lead.  Shall we go to the park? Shall we paint? Can we have a play-date? I might be limited but I find it impossible to do my PhD work while my kids are painting in the kitchen and probably messing up all the walls of the house… call me a control freak, but I am either with them or at my desk working… I can’t do both together… The good news is that when they will grow up they will NOT want me to organise their day… but we have time for that…

So here I am: kids are back at school and I have 6 weeks in front of me to try to remember what my PhD was about. Probably by the time I will have remembered the kids will be on holiday again!

For those interested in interactive documentaries though, it might be valuable to point out that they are also running a  5 days Lab/seminar on new media/participatory forms of documentary, wich is called the Crossover Docs. The Labs is “obvioulsy” not open to the public (what a shame!!!) and you need  to subscribe to it  in advance by presenting a cross-platform project.

The Crossover labs have been run by Unexpected Media since 1996 in  for a range of organizations including the BBC, Channel 4, Microsoft, Just B, Sagasnet, the Rotterdam Film Festival, X Media Lab, Reed Midem, Ogilvy and NESTA. From what I understand they are a sort of incubator for new media projects. These week-long events assemble producers and executives from different media (TV, web, games) to work together developing cross-platform projects. But the labs are very focussed on individual productions and there’s also a need to think about how companies — whether they’re  established broadcast producers or games-focussed start-ups — can prepare themselves for developing effective cross-platform projects

I have applied to the Crossover Docs Lab and – if I get accepted – I will keep you posted on my learnings… finger crossed!

Manchester International’s website describes the event like this: “It Felt Like a Kiss tells the story of America’s rise to power in the golden age of pop, and the unforeseen  consequences it had on the world and in our minds. Beginning in 1959, the show spotlights the dreams and desires that America inspired during the ’60s, when the world began to embrace the country and its culture as never before. But as this daring production unfolds across five floors, blending music with documentary and the disorientating whirl of a fairground ghost train, the audience is forced to face the dark forces that were veiled by the American dream – a dream that ultimately returns to haunt us all.”

As in all Punchdrunk’s production a certain mystery was created around the project: what is really going on when one walks around the warehouse? I have tried all my best to see the show but it was completely sold out and the press office was highly unco-operative (and definitively not interested in academic publications)… so I unfortunately cannot reveal the mystery for you…

All I know is what I have read in the reviews. Here are some selected paragraphs:

1) Mark Billington, from the Guardian 3.07.09:

“How to describe the experience? Well, like Caesar’s Gaul, it is divided into three parts. First we assemble in small groups in the lobby of a derelict office building and are warned that what follows may not be suitable for pregnant women or the highly nervous.

Not fitting into either category, I join a party that ascends to the sixth floor. Stumbling through the dark we suddenly find ourselves in a meticulous recreation of period suburban America. This is Norman Rockwell country: manicured lawns, toys in the attic, bakelite radios pouring out pop music. But there is a hint of something more sinister as we edge into a television studio, find dressing rooms decorated with horror-movie posters and hear news of the assassination of JFK.

So far this is all very Punchdrunk: a mixture of art-installation and immersive theatre, on the lines of The Masque of the Red Death, except that here there are no actors. But we come to the main bill of fare, and the real justification for the evening, when we enter an air-conditioned room and watch a 35-minute Adam Curtis documentary” (…)

“But the film, which I sat through twice, is jazzy, stimulating, nerve-pricking. I can only report, with dismay, that the last third of the evening is a total let-down. Coming out of the film, we find ourselves wandering through debris-filled rooms, entering desolate cells, even being pursued down darkened corridors by a masked man clutching a chain-saw.

I guess the aim is to show how the American dream turned into a nightmare. But to do it through these fairground shock-tactics is an insult to our intelligence.”

2) Dominic Cavendish, from the Telegraph 6.07.09

“For It Felt Like a Kiss you enter – in small groups of nine – a quasi “haunted house”. Over two hours or so, in a disorientating atmosphere of darkness and dread, assisted by the enervating strings of Albarn’s compositions and period footage edited to violent, perturbing effect by Curtis, you’re asked to turn sleuth and nose around eerie interiors.

These range from forlorn suburban dwellings to battered CIA offices and vacated film sets, many presided over by creepy mannequins. By the time you get down to the basement, where some very nasty surprises lurk, whatever spurious empowerment you might have felt has evaporated – a perfect fit between the show’s thesis and the spectator’s experience.”

3) Paul Vallely, from the Independent 3.07.09

“It Felt Like a Kiss moves from the 1950s to the present telling the story of America’s shift from the confidence of post-war Fifties Hollywood through the political and cultural turmoil of the Sixties and the social and economic revolutions of the decades that followed: the Cold War, the Space Race, the assassination of JFK, Vietnam, the Black Panthers, the legalisation of homosexuality, and the credit boom.

The audience moves through rooms decked out like a film set of each period, inhabited by creepy mannequins. In each room screens relay evocative archive footage of the nodal moments in history against a sinister atmospheric background score by Damon Albarn so you feel you are a character in some weird movie. It mixes pop, politics, fashion and sex along with shots of chimps sent into space and in the jungles where the HIV virus transferred from ape to man.

It is a powerful journey, through rooms and gardens deserted with the cherry pie half eaten as in some domestic US Marie Celeste. There is a poignant tableau of a father looking silently at his sleeping child as the world waits to be blown to smithereens as the Bay of Pigs crisis unfolds. And director Adam Curtis has done an extraordinary archive trawl to find historical curios like an architect condemning the World Trade Centre twin towers as “satanic” even as they were being built – or archive film of Osama bin Laden’s father building Saudi Arabia’s first modern highway to Mecca.

But there is paranoia among the poignancy. By the time you get to the centre of the piece – a 35 minute film on the implosion of the American Dream – you know too well what you’re in for.”

So… is this an interactive documentary?

To start with this is definitively not a DIGITAL interactive documentary. No sensors, no computers, no digital stuff is involved. But the idea is still to create an immersive experience using the viewer’s interaction with the space and the media content (mainly Curtis’ documentary).

What interests me is the fact that the linear documentary that Curtis has producedhas been taken away from the familiar cinematic (or home) context and it has been placed in a staged context. How much is the fact that viewers are moving in space, feeling anxious because of the setting, and feeling fragile (because they are physicallly involved)… how much is this transforming the video experience to a different type of experience?

Since I have not been to the show I can only guess. In this kind of production the user does not change the plot, and does not influence the content of the performance. But the audience is free to discover the narrative in its own personal order. In a way it is like the digital interactive hypertext mode (an interactive mode where the user clicks on the screen to browse through a narrative which is used in websites and CD-ROMs) but where there is no computer and the viewer becomes the mouse, and the clicking mechanism: while wondering into the warehouse the viewer/audience physically browses the potential narrative. The viewer is the hyperlink of the real space.

Is enough to make the link between It felt like a Kiss and a digital hypertext documentary? Probably no, as It felt like a Kiss is a physical experience and therefore what counts is the layers of emotions that are generated by this physical browsing, and that create what then becomes the “personal experience”.

Can anybody help here? Has anybody participated to the show?

Jokes apart, I now have a collection of notes of “nice to add/change” but I have decided to take a break till September before facing them. At the moment I have kids on summer holidays and student dissertations to read so… the PhD will have to wait – this is the advantage of doing it part-time.

Still, I am going to publish the first three chapters of my PhD (the very drafted versions that I presented to my panel in June) and I hope you will want to comment on them… any input helps!! Thanks!!!

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?

So there we are again, once more we are confronted with the big fantasy of playing and conversing with the computer (television/console) as if it was a human… our “dream” of “natural interaction” is becoming closer and closer, it seems… But let’s have a look to what project NATAL really does:

Have a look to the promotional video on Microsoft’s Xbox’s website: a happy family plays football using natural body movements (but funnily enough without a ball!), a teenager boy scans his skateboard and sees himself on screen, a teenager girl does shopping online visualizing how a dress will fit her (the examples are just a tiny gender restricted!)… and finally a happy family plays quizzes together (using voice and movement recognition)… The novelty is NOT the activity but the fact that there is no physical interface (no joystick, no remote) and that the image on the screen reacts to the players’ body and voice interaction by speaking back and animating characters as if they were speaking to the user. Natal actually works using a camera to track the user’s movements via full skeletal mapping. It also recognizes voices and vocal commands.

This is definitively quite impressive… it seems to come straight from a sci-fi move… to the point that one questions how much the demo is fake (or at least cleverly rehearsed and programmed). But even if Natal is a few years away, the question still remains for me… how are we going to deal with physical and oral interaction when it comes to narrative?

In early June 2009, at the E3 video conference, Project Natal (or Xbox LIVE) was presented to the world showing  games but also presenting possible narrative structures – where the user/player directly speaks with a fictional character. In its Lionhead Demo, a fictional boy has an intelligent and sensible chat with with the user/player…  now what is the potential of such technology when applied to fictional stories? And to me, more importantly, could this be applied to interactive documentary? When simulation becomes very accurate, and when fiction verges towards edutainment… do we get a type of interactive documentary? If games such as America’s Army can be stretched to be considered documentaries – in the sense that they simulate real army life and that they are populated by existing characters – why could a Natal character not become a virtual representation of a real person?

Without entering in the discussion of whether true dialogue can happen between a human and a machine (therefore disregarding the Turing test)… my question is: even if satisfactory dialogue was possible with our television screen… what would we do with it?  Simulation used to be a way to grasp and learn things that we could not do in our daily life (i.e. flying a plane or killing aliens in a video game) but what purpose does it serve when it simulates our ordinary life?

When I kick a virtual football (that does only live in a TV screen) with a real movement of my body and I see a virtual me (avatar) doing my own movement on a screen… what am I doing? Do I simulate beeing myself? Do I visualize what use to be the feeling of beeing me in movement?

I cannot help to struggle with this concept… I find it surreal. And yet… if I simulate myself in the context of a Natal narrative… am I documenting myself?

I am a bit frustrated not to work on my website at the moment, but I have no choice. The writing process is taking every single free moment that I have. I must be a very slow writer… it takes me for ever to write: I  concentrate on the precise word, on the reference, on the logical link between one sentence and the next one… Sometimes it is extremely frustrating, other times something emerges from the paper (actually, the computer screen) and it suddenly “makes sense”. My head seems to be like a huge pot that contains loads of ideas and intuitions. The praxis of writing is like a filter that orders the confusion that is in my mind. There were so many possibilities, yet one has to be chosen. Why is it so satisfying to have order?

The process of writing is for me a long layering process. Each reading reveals things to be changed and each writiting reveals new ideas, but also new incongruences… Like waves that layer rocks, the hours of writining and proof-reading smooth the nature of my discourse… and slowly, a shape emerges.

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?

I truely believe this is a fascinating project (you should check the details by reading the entry in the archive) because it uses database narrative in a very powerful way.

To start with it is not trying to “tell” a story. The 5,000 people that have been interviewed throughout the world are speaking about their believes, their notion of love, of religion… and the meaning of life. Those are universal topics that are very easy to follow without a specific need of guidance: it is not disturbing to jump from one grab to another, nor from one person to another, since we are just following a sort of stream of thoughts…

For me database narrative really works when it allows us to jump between people and feelings- rather than between narratives. For example Florian Thalhofer’s [The Love Story Project] really works for me for the same reasons: it allows us to jump between people that speak about their experience of love… this feels quite natural… While Manovich’s database narrative (see Softcinema) looses me completely because it is attempting to be a narrative and there it confuses, and looses, me.

I suspect this is also the big difference between interactive documentary and interactive narrative: the documentary has a grip on reality that serves as a motivation for the user (if you are interested in a topic you will have a good motivation from the start), while the narrative only works if the “story” is interesting (and this is not guarantee when interactivity steps in).

A part from the various bugs and missing links, most people seem to be commenting on the PhD Blog/Diary.

“Why are you doing this?” seems to be the most common reaction… Why exposing your moods and personal thoughts, about the process of doing a PhD, if this is not the core point of your PhD.

This is a fair point. After all I am doing a PhD in New Media and Cultural Studies – and not in psychology or ethnography…

Bizarrely enough I had not thought about this in this way. I had not thought about how I would use this section in my PhD. All I wanted to do was to create a space where both my academic self and my “rest-of-self” could co-exist. I wanted to express my conviction that a PhD is much more than what is presented to the Viva, since it is a process that involves self- search and this touches different levels of emotions. All I wanted to do was to document those levels. For me it was a matter of integrity: once I had discovered a reason of frustration, I had to address it. I did not particularly think of the consequences of my acts…

This is where feed-back has already proven to be useful. The observers observing my observations have noticed what I had not seen:

Point 1: I could hurt people. By writing in emotional states that are typical of PhD mood swings (frustration, fear, exaltation etc…) I’ll might write in an impartial or exaggerate way and hurt people. This is not what I want.

Point 2: writing about academics and  institutions could bring me enemies within my own university, which is not very helpful if I am trying to finish my PhD…

Point 3: if people start commenting back on my PhD blog I could end up being hurt myself.

Point 4: managing a blog that will not directly feel into my PhD is a waste of time that I do not need.

Point 5: blogging about moods is all very good but it is self-referential and does not help anybody.

Point 6: if I want to speak about PhD issues and emotional swings I should open it up to other PhD students and make it a platform for potential change and dialogue with the institution. This would be a positive attitude, rather than a moaning one.

Point 7: if I am researching digital interactivity a blog is just not interactive enough, I need to push it further.

Point 8: a personal diary next to a research archive is a strange mix. The diary could diminish the credibility of the archive or vice versa.

Well, well… this is a boomerang more than a feed-back!!!

I have been pondering for the last four days what to do with it… and I find it very difficult.

I do not want to step back for fear of the institution… I honestly think that a debate would be beneficial… students go through so many frustrations while doing a PhD and a lot of it has to do with a system that does not have enough founding to give the appropriate time and resources to its students. University teachers are overworked… shall we hide this evidence? Student often get lost in their journey… a few make it, a lot give it up… why not addressing this issue?

I do not want to delete my PhD Blog/diary  because it takes me time… at the moment I feel it has a space, it is a way for me to know where I am in my process. Obviously I could keep it private and not publish it on the web. This is an option, I am not ruling it out. But for now it is also a way to make a statement: it is OK to speak about the nitty gritty, the less glamorous side of things, it is OK to expose the emotional side of a PhD… actually, this is what makes it a whole…

I take on board the fact that a personal diary is maybe not the best way to achieve my aim… it is just the best I could do so far. I keep my options open; this is after all an experiment… I am happy to transform this diary into something else when I will find the right platform or the right idea.  For now I am searching… and if I see in a few months time that this is really not going anywhere, then I will re-design my website and maybe drop the diary all together.

For now I take a few months to experiment, to see if and what people are commenting, to see if this takes me too much time and, in general, to see where this is leading me.

The last point to address is the fact that I am hurting people with my writing. This is actually a sore point for me.

If I post an entry after a tutorial the chances are that I am so much into it that I do not have the appropriate detachment to ponder my words. If in one way what I write is a documentation of real feelings it is also true that I am partial and that I put the emphasis on what seems relevant to me in that moment, ignoring how this might be interpreted by the person that reads it.

I have already done this mistake a long time ago.

When I passed my Baccalaureate I was asked to write an article for our student paper. I paired with a school mate of mine and we thought it would be funny to write a series of poems comparing each of our teachers to an animal. Our intent was to be goliardic and to use some nice illustrations that I had found in an animal book of the 19^th century. We had a lot of fun writing those poems, but we obviously went too far. We ended up publishing a text that was not representative of what we really thought…but it was funny.

We soon realized that the joke was not funny for everybody and a couple teachers took it extremely badly, to the point that they did not ever wanted to speak to us anymore.

I had hurt people that I actually cared about… I was mortified. I had absolutely not realized that once words are written they are open to interpretations and that those escape the intentions of the authors.

I swore then that I had learned my lesson. But apparently I have not.

So… what can I do now?

I am taking the decision to keep in my blog only the entries that speak about me, and that involve people in my private sphere, for which I can take responsibility.

It is my choice to speak about me, but I will try to limit the consequences on others…

So for now, this PhD Blog/Diary will continue for a few months under these new rules… and I will then reassess the whole experiment around September.Let’s give it some digestive time…

Also: thanks to those who helped in this feed-back process… thanks to you things are moving…

It has been a three months project to put together this website and I was getting used to the idea that it was all in my hands – in my private sphere – and not in a public sphere. I have now to readjust with the idea that this could actually be read!!!

Huuuuum… exciting, but also, quite scary… Do I really want people that I know to read my PhD Blog? Do I really want my tutors to check my moods online? Will I ever have the time to populate it with fresh content? Have I really considered the repercussions and possible implications of all this?

Probably not. And that, I suspect,  is the whole point: not knowing what is coming next. What sort of experiment is a straight line with a clear view? None.

Ok then, let’s get ready for the “web effect”: a sort of labyrinth with no clear outcome and a few dangers attached… but maybe a huge treasure at the end of it! Is this not the mythic structure of any journey? hummm,… exciting!

This is really the “world wide web effect”: a voice in a multi-dimensional space… will there be an echo?

As I went to the reception of the ICA I was given a HP pocket PC with headphones and I was told to follow the indications that were on the screen. Effectively what I had to do was to go to the nearby St James park and choose a music track from the options given to me by the pocket PC. Once chosen my music I could browse for one hour while my movements were tracked by a GPS system. From what I understand some video clips, done by the author, where linked to specific locations in the park and by walking through those locations I was “collecting” them. ObviouslyI was not aware of what I was collecting.

At any point I could stop and check the videos that I had collected on my pocket PC – and view them as a movie that would have my selected music as a soundtrack.

I choose to walk for 40 minutes without checking the videos and I recorded on video my own experience while I was walking in the park.

By clicking e-merge you can view here the video of my very own experience.

I am not sure I can call e-merge an interactive documentary… what is it documenting? A walk in the park? Not really actually as one just enhance the experience with music and gets the “bonus” of viewing a movie by the end of it.

But the problem for me is that the movie was done by the artist, Jane Harrowood, and that I could not link with the movie I “collected” on my pocket PC. In a way while I was walking in the park I was not interested in the movie – but just concentrating on the music and my own perception of the park – and then once I stopped walking and looked at the video clips I was not interested anymore on the walk itself – and I was just curious about the movie.

Somehow the two experiences did not jell for me, and I cannot say that I got anything from it…

When I came back to the ICA and gave my kit back to the artist I had a brief chat with her. I did ask her about the feed-back that other people gave her and she said that she had all sort of feed-back. Some people thought her videos enhanced their experience of walking, some others saw them as their own memories, and others found it playful.

I obviously do not fit in any of those categories… I thought it was an interesting use of technology but without a clear purpose, or a clear proposition.

I am also told that my very own version of Jackie’s videos is published on a website alongside all the videos of the other participators. I cannot imagine anything less interesting than to go and watch videos that people did not do (they just “collected” them without selecting them) about an experience that was not theirs…

But there again, maybe I am missing the point…

You will find some more positive feed-back on the E-merge blog page.

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.

Jackie Calderwood’s “e-merge” project is described as a film-making media-scape. What does this mean?

Basically e-merge is an interactive exploration of landscape through walking, music, artist’s moving image and mobile technology. From what I understand one can take a hand-held i-paq (a hand help computer) at the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Art in London) and walk around the nearby St James park. One can select music from the computer while walking in the park and recording images… the rest is not very clear to me.

I propose to test it myself on Friday and to post some of my experiences in this blog.

To be continued…

I went to ARTHUR ELSENAAR’s presentation on “Fundamentals of the Computer-controlled Human Face as a Medium for Kinetic Art” (this was part of Golsdmith’s Thursday Club seminars).

Elsenaar has been experimenting for years  now with wiring his own face to a computer and letting a software control his expressions.

The result is really weard indeed. What happens is that you see a face clearly expressing itself through movement, but those expressions do not make any “sense” at all. The lack of “sense” is due from the fact that the computer creates new expressions – movements that are physically possible through our muscles but that our brain has not learned to create because they are not part pf our body language (and cultural references).

Moving through a software logic, the face ceases to be the interface of the saul… This is probably what interested me most in Elsenaar’s artistic practice:  the distortion of what what is normally our most transparent link to emotions into a choreography of miningless motions.

On the other hand one could interpret his work differently: the computer is not destroying a cultural code but enhancing our body potential. By creating new face movement the computer goes beyond our cultural coherences and pushes us to visualize our potential.

But in his work there is no real interactivity. The body just follows the electrical impulses and cannot add, nor reply, with any movement…

I can imagine an interactive documentary on bodily presence using this type of technology but pushing it further… A group of people playing with balancing their “learned” body with their “potential” body could be quite a powerful experience!

Food for thoughts…

The doctor obviously gave me the standard antihistamine that does not do anything… she said that I just had to wait a week and it would calm down by itself. When I insisted in having an idea of the cause she said that “we do not know, it could be anything”… very reassuring!

I hated this doctor for the vagueness she left me with, I hated her for making me feel vulnerable, open to a violent allergic skin reaction without knowing what to do to avoid it next time. After irritation and mild hate, fear kicked in: and what about if this urticaria happened again in the middle of a trip in a remote country? If I do not know what provokes it… it could happen anywhere and at anytime…

The fear of not controlling really freaked me out. I needed to understand and find the cause, if not I was in danger.

I am back home now, sipping my cappuccino and thinking about the whole episode… No surprises I am interested in Cybernetics! Was it not called the “science of control”? I am probably a total control freak. Worst: I am resisting it. Although control would make me feel better (if I knew the cause of urticaria I could prevent it next time) it is actually the part of cybernetics that is not about control that interests me.

Andrew Pickering’s “ontology of the unknowable”, Francisco Varela’s ‘enactment’, Gordon Pask’s Musicolor… all the aspects of cybernetics that open the view of life as an unpredictable, multilayered world of possibilities… basically everything BUT controllable…

Is this not ironic? What am I searching in this PhD? Am I trying to escape from my own patterns of inner control?

I somewhere desperately need to get out of the feeling of control, I somewhere know that control is not the answer for the life I want to have… and yet, this is where I am: stuck between the fear of not controlling my own life and the need of freedom and lightness.

I kind of see a pattern of fear here: fear of not being able to cope (with the urticaria, with the PhD, with the building work in the house…). Somehow I would like to be reassured that I will be fine, that I will work it out… why?

Maybe I have not learned as a kid that “I will be OK”.

When I had repetitive cases of ear infection in my teens I was scared, scared of not recovering, scared of being different from the others, scared of pain.

I could see on my mother’s eyes that she was preoccupied too, and this did not reassure me whatsoever. She would deal with the situation on a practical level: taking the appointment with the doctor, handling “what to do about it”, but she did not reassure my emotion of fragility, actually she probably re-enforced it. My father, on the other hand, was disregarding the issue. For him “everything was OK” I would grow out of ear infections just as he did grow out of chest infections at the same age… this seemed to me, at the time, reassuring. By minimizing the problem he made me feel better… things were all right after all. What I did not realize then was that by minimizing the problem he was also disregarding my emotions. Instead of learning that it was ok to feel scared, instead of being hold in his arms to calm my panic, I learned that it was not OK to be scared. I also, as a consequence, did not learn how to cope with it.

The double message was: you should not be scared (but I was) and you should learn to deal with it from a practical point of view (taking an appointment with the doctor). What was completely left out was “me”, me the scared kid that just wanted to be reassured. Understanding my frustration, allowing me to feel lost, and cocooning me in a comforting adult embrace would have probably made the trick. But that was not the style of my parents. Although they truly loved us (me and my brother) they would not expressed it like this. My mum, being French, was loving but not very physical, and my father, although Italian, was escaping from his own emotions, therefore was completely unable to provide any emotional support or attachment to others. I am not blaming them… they had their own past, their own issues, and they did what they could with what they were…

But here I am… more than thirty years later and still fragile and somehow scared…

If as an adult I now realize that controlling and dealing with the practical side of things is not enough for me, but I am struggling to find in me the confidence that “I will be all right”… maybe because I have not experience it as a kid. I just do not know how to do this.

No wonders than that the key words of my PhD are “experience”, “emotion”, “unknowability”, “co-arizing”, “multiple”, “interaction”… all words that point out to a vision of life as fluid, as not controllable, as dependent from interactivity with the others, with out environment… all words that bring me away from a vision of control that did not work for me, as it always addressed only my rational side, leaving my emotional needs on the side.

I am sure it has to do more with me than with the PhD… after all don’t we all find our topics and our methodology following a personal path that means something for us from another place than the intellect?

I think it is my guts that are interested in the position with the observer… I think it comes from far… from somewhere in my childhood where I felt I was observed, and maybe judged, but “the others”… I presume the “others” were mainly my father. His way to listen to our intellectual side, but never to our emotional side. For him that was a danger zone, he was probably just defending himself, but for us –the kids, the people around him- it meant that he was always an outsider, an observer positioned outside of the dialogue, always in a safe zone, where nothing could reach him and were he would use his intellect to assess the situation.

What did I learn from those early feelings? I learned that feelings, emotions that are not verbalized are not appropriate. I learned that what was OK was to “speak” of stuff, to formalize it, to control it. I also learned to protect myself from something that was obviously dangerous: vulnerability.

For me Cybernetics is probably a theory that allows me to speak about my own revolt to this family communication system. It is a way to claim that the observed is always part of the system and that he his influenced –and he does influence as well- the environment. Cybernetic is my way to claim back the injustice that I felt on my father’s so called objectivity. It is about claiming back my voice. It is about accusing him of not been so right, after all. It is about giving him the responsibilities that he never took –on an emotional level. It is about trying to accept that it is all right to be vulnerable, it is all right to “not know”.

Ironically I am doing a PhD. I have supervisors that observe me, judge me, but that I feel are not on my side. Or maybe not. Maybe it is just my projections on them. Maybe they are trying to help me by just saying: come out of your comfort zone, have fun, get out of theory, come up with your own way of thinking…

I have a sort of “déjà vu” feeling. Walls from my childhood coming back again and again in the process of this PhD.

Cheep psychoanalysis? Maybe.

Easy projections? Maybe.

But there is something there. We do not choose a PhD topic for nothing. It is a process of learning. And I think it is more about learning about ourselves than about learning about a topic. This is why I think this diary is important. Because what I end up writing on my final PhD will be only a fraction of what this process is. The “official text” will be the one of mastering a process of research, but the “real text”, the “felt text”, the experience of doing a PhD is a complete other thing: it is about being lost and discovering one’s barriers. It is about fear and passion mixed in a survival quest. It is about experiencing the multiple levels of our personality, the cohabitation of body and mind in what, after all, is our very own life.

On the way back I was driving. It took about one hour. What is bizarre is that I got into a half conscious thinking mode about my PhD. I was thinking about it but I was also driving… so I was in a sort of semi-lucid state.

Things suddenly got much clearer. I had to follow what was exiting me: first do a website about my PhD. This had to be half about documenting my process of doing the PhD and half about the research itself on interactive documentary. Also, I was not going to give up my classification about modes of interaction. No I was to apply it to practical project. I was to find an example of what I believe might be positive about each of those modes and then I was to build the examples. This would lead me into a practical PhD more than a theoretical one. Also, I was to write a book about interactive documentary. If my supervisors are not interested in my categories about interactive documentary there might be another public that it might interest. I personally would value a book that could set the field with examples and trying to define what is interesting about each of those genres… so why not doing it?

There you go. It all seems clearer today. No, what seems clearer is what I want to do. This does obviously not fit with what my supervisors seem to like or want. Maybe I should change supervisors? Maybe I should move department? University? Or maybe just write the book and forget the PhD (that is what Lev Manovich told me one year ago when I had a tutorial with him).

Food for thoughts….

My presentation went pretty well as well. I had lots of questions and feed-back. I was quite happy and I made a lot of contacts.

When I came back home and I described the day to Marc, my husband, he said “well, for once I can tell that your are really speaking from you heart. You are really alive today!”.

Gosh… this made me think. Was it so obvious that I am bored to death about theory and I want to go back to some sort of production? Maybe I should follow my heart more…

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.

The vicious point in a PhD is this constant need for an argument: in order to argue you need to know what you want to defend. In order to defend you need to know who are your opponents and why they are wrong (or not right enough). So you are always “defending” yourself by asserting your position as true.

To start with: this is not me. I rarely feel that I am the only one to be true. I search for options…

The argument methodology also assumes that you know what you want to defend. This is quite tricky, as most of my life as a PhD student is spent in learning and making connections between things… but not really knowing where I want to go.

Trap n.2: I think I need to know in order to have an argument. “Knowing” is a limitless activity: you never get to the feeling of knowing. But in order to write for the PhD I need to know what I want to defend… so I am back to square one.

This leads me to the question: can I admit that I do not know? Can I admit that I am more interested in the process itself than in the result?

I am a bee stuck into a glass with a book on top. I see what is outside but cannot go there. To be frank I am convinced that if I knew where I wanted to go the glass would disappear by itself. My frustration does not come from the fact that I am a prisoner, but from the fact that I am not sure of where I should (would/could?) go if the glass was not there. My strategy is to keep looking outside and try to imagine how I could get there and ponder if it is worth it.

The frustration is increasing: since I do not decide anything I stay trapped, and now I am panicking because I realise that I’ll might not go anywhere.

I step back for a moment: how can I decide where I would like to go if I do not try it? How can I decide on theoretical ground, without experiencing it?

I realize I trap myself by not engaging with the process, but trying to control where I will go before going: this is mission impossible.

I am doing the same with my PhD: before writing the 20,000 words I need to produce for in a month time I would like to know what I am going to say and why. I need to know before I start. But then I realize I do not know, I never have the feeling of “knowing enough”… so I freeze and go back to the safe position of “I should read more to be clearer”. Back to square one: I read more but things get more complicated instead of being easier…

I need to engage with the process. Go for something that “feels right” and then discover things around it more than trying to “know that it is right” before starting – because this will never happen.

The holiday in Rome was way too good: I felt free, loved and warm… the return to my studio in London and my writing is pretty hash…

What makes me panic is the absence of boundaries in a PhD. Everything is possible, it makes me spend more time thinking about the possibilities than about what I want to do.

I suspect I need to be contained. Whether it is by someone, or by a limited scale that allows me to see where I am going… but this endless freedom of the PhD freezes me and sends me back to my deepest fears… how to deal with freedom? How to know what I really want? How not to fear other people’s judgment? How to know if I am going into the right direction? And what is right anyway???

I need to accept my fears and stay in my anxiety… can I learn to know that I do not know? Can I accept to be unclear?

If I don’t I’ll spend my time banging my head on the wall and whishing that I were different…

I think it is a question of survival: learn to be lost.

To start with: this is not me. I rarely feel that I am the only one to be true. I search for options…

The argument methodology also assumes that you know what you want to defend. This is quite tricky, as most of my life as a PhD student is spent in learning and making connections between things… but not really knowing where I want to go.

Trap n.2: I think I need to know in order to have an argument. “Knowing” is a limitless activity: you never get to the feeling of knowing. But in order to write for the PhD I need to know what I want to defend… so I am back to square one.

This leads me to the question: can I admit that I do not know? Can I admit that I am more interested in the process itself than in the result?

I am writing, painfully, but surely.

I am the bee now. I do not fly with ease. I am still scared of taking the wrong direction. I would like to know where I want to end up to be able to decide the best itinerary from the start. That would make me feel secure. The reality is that I do not know where I want to end, so I do not know how to get there either. Each flower is a starting point that leads me to the next. This temporal exploration mode petrifies me because I fear not arriving in time. I have a deadline for end of May!

I am a bee that flies with half wings and is not enjoying the flowers it encounters because I am too occupied looking at my next possible flower.

Something will have to change.

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.

The PhD is putting me in a box. A theoretical box. A box full of ideas and books but far from me. I do not fit in or, let’ s rephrase it: most of me is outside of the box, and only a marginal little part of my being –mainly the rational and abstract part- can fit in. This is highly frustrating: I spend most of my time reading books in libraries or in temples of silence… My body does not move: only my eyes seem to be authorised to have a life in this process. Great! Now I have a soar neck and a lot of negative energy trapped into my body. Can I continue to ignore “life” outside of the books?

Of course I could run, yes I could fit into my daily scheddule some healthy sport… but I have already too many things that I have to fit in those few hours of my day that do not have to be spend in “monacal reclusion”… To start with I have my kids to look after! And I want to do so, I enjoy so. Then I have to work and prepare my lessons for LCC. Then I have a house that does not seem to turn if I am not there. Definitively my house is not autopoietic: no self-organisation, no self-making. I have to be there for the online shopping, birthday parties, appointments with the electrician… etc).

So… how many things am I supposed to fit into those miserable 24 hrs!

Ah, and, yes, I also need to sleep… it is a shame but if not I feel a wreck.

Did I forget my husband in this schedule? Well, yes, I want him to fit in too.

So: either I want too much, or I need to change my approach to my PhD.

Mind me it is interesting that I think so… normally –when I am on the side of the viewer/user- I do not give a damn about other’s people comments… Who cares to what other thought about a video… But now that the video is mine my position has changed… now I am into an ego-trip…

I think her e-mail is quite funny and typical of her:

“Hi,

I think it’s harmless – I’m like a little pussycat so no damage…

and it’s a great piece.

good luck superwomen!

Iris”

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?

I realize myself that I feel strange about uploading my own privacy. I am aware of sharing with the rest of the world by inner thoughts, the privacy of my house and the face of my kids… I do not feel comfortable with it. Why? Fear? Of what? Maybe I am not a very performative person at heart…

The website gives me three options: upload on youtube (meaning: everybody can see me), uploading on GoogleVideo and just sending the link to the Flying website (meaning: only people that have the link –so nobody- can see me) or uploading directly on the Flying website (meaning: all the women that are engaging with Jennifer’s film can see me). My first instinct is to keep safe and stay as hidden as possible (so via Google video). My second thoughts are: common you should play the game… if this is an experiment, a way for you to get involved… then you have to plunge and go public. What is the sense of participating if you do not allow other women/watchers to see you?

I am still pondering between rationality and guts…

I filmed a mini documentary using Jennifer Fox’s ‘passing the camera’ technique.

I am feeling very excited about loosing the boring books for a second and going back to “praxis”. Seeing the Flying documentary inspired me to try something myself. What is all this theory about if I do not get my hand dirty? Shall I plunge and take the risk? Shall I participate myself to the passing the camera experiment?

I have decided to try and I feel very invigorated about that.

I have invited Iris and Anat yesterday night and filmed our conversation. It was so much fun!!! A bit intimidating at the start but… we got quite good after a while.

Is the fact of passing the camera to the other people while you are speaking really making things more spontaneous? Obviously not completely. We are always aware that this is being recorded… we are still performing… but what is different is that we are all on the same level. No director anymore. No camerawoman that scrutinises us… everybody gets to participate and to share the burden and experiment of being a performer and a voyeur of other people’s performances!

“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??

This is why I am starting this diary: to help me to see where I am know, more than where I would like to be.

If I make the process part of my experience, then I will maybe feel more “real”, and less trapped in theory.

I am thinking of creating a webpage where all the little moments that constitute my PhD will have a space. The final manuscript is for me just one aspect of my experience of the PhD. Like in documentary making the final film is just the distilled version that the author creates for the viewers. The experience of reality is very different from the mediated representation of reality.

If I want to document my PhD, if I want to give credit to the PhD as a process rather than an objective truth (in which I do not believe anyway), then I need to find a space to give to this process. This space could be a webpage where other people can participate and share my process.

I see the written manuscript as an exercise of style: proving (to whom?) that I can organise reality and theory in a linear logic. This is fine. It is a useful skill to have. But this cannot be it! Can the skill of faking objectivity be the maximum we need to lean from academic life? This cannot be it… this is just a partial view of what an individual is and can be… I am not one, I am multiple. If I want to achieve this PhD I cannot fake to be only one. I need to find a way to include the other parts of me. Making a diary, engaging with the process of making the PhD, the little ideas that come in the tube, the people I meet that I learn from, the kids that make me laugh and give me an intuition… all this need to find a place. Could the web diary be a solution? Can I find a methodology that allows me to mix more than one aspect of my personality?

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.

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…