Jonathan Harris at Pace/MacGill Gallery – Social Media Exhibition from Pace/MacGill Gallery on Vimeo.

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!

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

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?

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…

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:

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.