Description:

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

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

The Waiting Room is comprised of four main components:

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

More about it:

See the Waiting Room

My comments:

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

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

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

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

Description:

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

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

Find out more:

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

Read about the project

More about the NFB of Canada

My comments:

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

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

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

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

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

Description:

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

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

Find out more:

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

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

click here to read  the project’s blog.

My comments:

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

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

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

Description:

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

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

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

Find out more:

Look at “the 44th president inauguration”

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

Watch Blaise Aguera’s Demo of Photosynth at TED talks

My comments:

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

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

Description:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Find out more:

View Diamond Road Online

Read about it as presented at Siggraph 2008.

My comments:

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

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

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

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

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

Description:

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

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

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

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

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

Find out more:

See the French website of 6 milliard d’Autres

See the English website of 6 billion Others

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

My comments:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Find out more:

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

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

My comments:

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

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

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

Is it a tour de force? But of whom?

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

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

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

Description:

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

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

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

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

Find out more:

see Graffity Archeology and play with it

My comments:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Find out more:

Watch RIP: A remix manifesto and start remixing it

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

More about the project and Brett Gaylor

Watch RIP trailer

My comments:

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

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

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

Any comments from people that have participated?

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

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

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

Find out more:

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

My comments:

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

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

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

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

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

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:

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!