This paper sets out to study how creative documentary practices deconstruct traumatic memory, and then digitalise witnessing and engagement afforded by digital technology in the award-winning online ...interactive documentary The Space We Hold. Premised on culture memory studies and documentary studies, the social function of the documentary in reshaping narratives and forging public engagement has been discussed in this research. Interactive documentary becomes the unique visual artistic medium that allows the wider public to bear witness and emotionally experience the meaning of a traumatic past. This interactive project is reviewed as one site of memory to answer the main research question: ‘How does hypermediacy in an interactive documentary enable this non-linear storytelling structure to reframe the narrative and identity of a community that struggles for social justice?’. Along with presenting direct provocation through the innovative hypernarrative, this interactive documentary focuses on victims’ current lives, familial feelings and their contribution in pursuit of justice, showing depth in reflection and density in life. By exploring how The Space We Hold acts as a bear and agent to enhance audience engagement, I contend that the documentary is restyled as a space that allows individual memory to intertwine with collective memory through the combination of authorial expressivity and interactive participatory. In this pragmatic and reflexive approach to bear traumatic witness, we sense the constant battle between stigmatised communities and their reinterpreting narratives.
El desarrollo del webdoc ha sido exponencial en lo que llevamos de siglo XXI, debido tanto al desarrollo y accesibilidad de nuevas herramientas para su ejecución como a un interés creciente por las ...narrativas interactivas. Asimismo, los estudios académicos se han ido preocupando por su definición y caracterización, aunque han dejado atrás cuestiones prácticas sobre su diseño, realización y postproducción. El presente artículo rastrea lo expuesto al respecto en varias investigaciones previas y plantea técnicas de escritura de guion, estrategias de diseño de plan de rodaje, y analiza la realización y postproducción de webdoc.
This exploratory research applies a transdisciplinary perspective between the fields of education, science communication, design, journalism and emergent technologies, exploring the interactive ...documentary (i-doc) as a proposal to open horizons for new techniques and practices that can improve education and the planning of communicative relations between people, digital objects and real life.Articulating storytelling, gaming and multimodality, one prototype is produced and its respective proof of concept is carried out in two classes: Biology and Geology students from a regular secondary school and Journalism students from the university level, being the respective teachers involved in the process. Action-research is applied within several techniques as bibliographic review, questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, participation observation and focus group, to test and evaluate the inherent proposal. The results are favorable to the usefulness and viability of the idea and it will be interesting to investigate in a more systematic way, to better understand the opportunities in the intersection between science, technology and art which stimulate the production and usefulness of hybrid learning opportunities.www.mariaparreira.comhttps://pt.linkedin.com/in/maria-jo%C3%A3o-horta-parreira
This article responds to the recent wave of experimentation with Virtual Reality (VR) as a nonfiction platform. Amidst daily announcements of new VR documentary initiatives, and at times giddy claims ...about the potential of this new medium, I consider how a media technology expected to enter the mainstream as a games platform became a magnet for nonfiction producers. VR is not a new medium, and has been the subject of a substantial body of research across arts and science. This research is also the site of claims for the pro-social potential of VR, which provide a significant context for its adoption for nonfiction. Less attention has been given to ethical risks posed by VR, which I highlight, and which I suggest require attention within documentary practice. The article concludes with a discussion of the symbiotic relationship between technology and content development in this arena. All these factors have come together at the intersection of VR and nonfiction to produce a heady mix of commercial excitement (hype) and techno-utopianism (hope) which this article highlights and analyses.
Once upon a time… there was a king in a faraway land who ordered the kingdom’s cartographers to draw a perfect map with every single topographic detail. Once upon a time… there was Web 2.0, which ...allowed human beings from all over the world to document and share every single moment of their lives. Once upon a time… there was Participative Interactive Documentary9, a work of art that presents a subjective perspective of reality and introduces an evolving open database in which the users can add their contents and include their points of view to the documentary. We may argue that all interactive documentaries comprehend a participatory approach, in the sense that once the documentary includes interaction and requires a physical action or performance from the audience the users are already participating.
This article presents In Pieces VR, a VR-based artwork and experimental documentary on political prison, and discusses its main design challenges, goals, and creative approach. This project aims at ...creating a documentary and artistic experience that departs from conventional immersive journalism by presenting to its viewers a story made out of very small narrative units, and with subjects presented in the form of virtual sculptures devoid of any specific identity. The idea is that by leaving much of the making sense left open, viewers will have to fill in the gaps. The working hypothesis is that this will help create a different emotional, intellectual and political connection with the piece than that a conventional documentary would achieve, particularly to an audience unfamiliar with, or even politically alien to its specific context. Public exhibition of the work and user evaluation showed that the piece was successful in creating such connections.
The Glowing Divide (2015) is an interactive documentary exploring the topic of social isolation in young people. Created by a group of young adults at Knowle West Media Centre in Bristol, the project ...follows three teenagers with the aim to change perceptions of social isolation. This interactive documentary was used as a resource in a Critical Media Literacy intervention which deployed the methodology of Participatory Action Research and took place in Coventry in partnership with the creative production company Imagineer. Based on the outcomes of this research, I argue towards a Pedagogy of Difference 2.0, which is a new and more nuanced approach to teaching and learning with interactive media in complex environments. This innovative pedagogy embraces the limitations of interactivity on young people’s media production and does not take young people’s familiarity with technology for granted. In this regard, Pedagogy of Difference 2.0 acknowledges the contextual nature of teaching and learning, moving beyond the often abstract discourse of Critical Pedagogy.
What counts as documentary in the twenty-first century? More importantly, is documentary studies capable of contributing to a discourse that can both define the contours of and point beyond the past ...twenty-odd years of digital experimentation? During this time, documentary has been productively disassembled and its component parts strung about the white cube and strewn across the internet; however, it would seem its cinematic self has not developed much beyond the performative and reflexive 'new documentary' of the 80s-90s. In all likelihood, twenty-first-century new media documentaries exceed the horizons of documentary studies scholarship. In response, Jihoon Kim's Documentary's Expanded Fields: New Media and the Twenty-First-Century Documentary (New York: Oxford Press, 2022) and Kate Nash's Interactive Documentary: Theory and Debate (New York: Routledge, 2022) draw together an impressive array of alternative approaches. This review will compare how both books historicize this century's documentary in relation to the last.
This text draws on the experience of developing and exhibiting two room-scale VR artworks in order to discuss the relationship between scripting, virtual space design, and interactive design with the ...audience’s movements and expected position in the VR and physical space. Different design and scripting strategies allow or impede to anticipate the specific position of the audience at every given time, and this anticipation is key to articulate the virtual elements in a way that responds to not just the gaze but also the overall movement of the person wearing the headset. Both artworks present different approaches from this point of view. In comparing them, two main design choices are shown to particularly affect this possibility of anticipation: simplicity vs. complexity of visual and interactive elements, and sequencing vs. simultaneity. While none of the design strategies is more desirable than the other per se, these conclusions shed some light on how to script and design for VR experiences in terms of deciding how much the artist wants to control, or anticipate, the body movements of their audience when experiencing their piece.
