New Documentary Ecologies

A revolution, captured on mobile phones, shared via Facebook, Twitter and Flickr and collaboratively edited by volunteers.² On the social network site Facebook, aging hippies gather to reminisce, share memories and in the process ‘make a documentary’ about their experiences on the beaches of Goa.³ Inspired by a collection of stories collected in high-rise buildings, people from around the world send in their own images and stories to add to an Internet documentary.⁴ The documentary impulse has a long history; practitioners are, it seems, still driven to preserve, show, report, explain, persuade and advocate. But it is also an impulse that is constantly seeking new avenues, new ways of capturing the social-historical, or ‘treating’ actuality⁵ and new ways of connecting with an audience.

In this chapter I take the book’s title at face value and examine emergent documentary practices within the ecosystems of the digital media landscape. Thinking ecologically suggests we look at big pictures, at the whole assemblage of agents that constitute documentary ecosystems. This attempt immediately becomes a daunting task. The sheer profusion of what we might identify as documentary materials is overwhelming. Documentation and recording of our everyday lives is the superabundant fruit that seeds and sustains the Internet: it is overwhelming. These fragments of actuality and glimpses into other people’s lives are everywhere, but they don’t make much sense in a happenstance browser flow determined by invisible search logics. While we might derive a powerful sense of affective attachment from our own friends and followers, few of the posts we encounter on a daily basis add up to much of a narrative, much less an argument, position or analysis. Yet the content of the blogosphere, of Facebook, Twitter or Flickr is factual, journalistic, expressive, everyday — the precise ground of documentary materials and research. These shards of demotic chatter as public mediation are permanently reconfiguring our memory of media form. Wisps of twentieth century media ‘DNA’ curl through the system conjoining and mutating into forms of expression that have the memory of film or music or news or a novel but in reality demand very new forms of practice in public address, in political economy and in ethics.

I have been making and writing about activist documentary since my graduate work in the 1980s as scholar and maker¹ of AIDS activist video (Juhasz 1995).¹ My work moved to the Internet when it became readily available and makes the most of this technology (Juhasz 2009, 2011, 2012). Digital technologies allow me and the communities with which I work, levels of access unprecedented but often imagined, to large-scale production and dissemination of our messages. Yossarian, an Indymedia activist describes his activities on Facebook: ‘It’s like holding all of your political meetings at McDonalds and ensuring that the police come and film while you do so’ (in Askanius 2012, p. 116). So here, I will look back — and forward — by considering today’s readily available, transparent forms and forums, such as Facebook as seen through my earlier and on-going encounters with traditional, activist linear documentaries. As corporations have granted us inexpensive access to media expression our demands adapt. In the epoch of Facebook, the art of the activist documentary becomes less a matter of speaking and being heard through technologies of representation and more of an artful practice of speaking-and-seceding, voicing-and-silencing, thereby better managing how to get on-and-off of media by knowing when to both seed and cede the digital.

Click here to start your journey, React! Add your comment, Upload a photo, add your story, explore the 360-degree simulation, what will you do? While we think of film and television documentary audiences as engaged in the act of watching and interpreting documentary texts, emerging forms of documentary created for computers, tablets, phones and iTV seem to engage the audience in profoundly different ways. No longer merely spectators, audiences are invited (compelled?) to engage in a range of practices, from choosing content, navigating an environment or posting a comment, to becoming part of a community engaged in collaborative forms of production. These diverse actions are collectively described as forms of interaction, a concept that is becoming increasingly significant for documentary scholarship. Interactivity is often identified as the characteristic that distinguishes emerging forms of documentary from film and television, changing not only modes of engagement, but the form of the text itself. But what is interactivity and what are the implications of interacting with documentary as opposed to other media forms?

There has been significant interest in the relation of digital media and the Internet for emerging modes of documentary engagement for audiences and makers. This chapter considers the relation of digital media and the Internet as a problem of ‘uncertainty’ and uses Deleuze’s concept of the affect image as a productive heuristic to understand interactive documentary.

In Sherry Turkle’s (2006, p. 220) words: ‘We are witnessing a new form of sociality in which the isolation of our physical bodies does not indicate our state of connectedness but may be its precondition.’ In this sense, the human rights site ‘Crisis in Darfur’, brought to you by Google Earth (GE) and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) documents an earth haunted by real people, both viewers and the viewed. States of embodiment involved in our actual cognitive and physical manipulations of personal computer technologies usually, in Turkle’s sense, also involve our physical isolation from those we connect with via these technologies. This chapter investigates ways in which we nevertheless make connections with the people represented on our Human Computer Interfaces (HCIs) despite this physical isolation via our connections with the websites in which these representations are found together with our subsequent connections to those who create these websites and the potential links between them. In the broader context of documentary discourse, I am investigating and speculating here on some of the ways in which web documentaries might be situated within the web itself.

With the rise of social networks¹ in the past 10 years, and the general acceptance of Web 2.0’s collaborative logic,² online documentary producers have been tempted to invite their audiences into what was previously considered their very own walled garden: the production of the documentary itself. One way to transform what was previously called an audience to what has been called prosumers in the world of collaborative media is to allow User Generated Content (UGC)³ to populate the content of the documentary. Prosumers ‘treat the world as a place for creation, not for consumption’ (Tapscott and Williams 2008, p. 127); They don’t just browse, they want to collaborate.

3W Doc, Djehouti, Klynt, Korsakow, Storyplanet, Zeega. These are just some of the tools, many of them free and open source, currently available for creating non-linear and/or interactive narratives for and/or on the web. Each has been used to create web-based documentaries. All claim to be easy to use, with drag-and-drop interfaces, and no programming required. This expanding range of accessible ‘new media’ authoring tools¹ falls into a category Manovich has termed ‘media software’: ‘programs that are used to create and interact with media objects and environments’ (2013, p. 38).

It is undeniable that there is a greater awareness now of animated documentaries than there was twenty years ago. Hybridised forms of animation and documentary were made prior to the 1990s, and some may argue that animated documentaries have been around since the earliest days of cinema, but it is only over the past two decades that animated documentary has claimed a place, albeit a relatively low profile one, in the documentary canon. While most animated documentaries continue to be made in the short-film format, and screened either at festivals or occasionally on television, this increased visibility has been aided by mainstream cinematic feature film releases such as Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman 2008) and Chicago 10 (Brett Morgen 2007) and the trailblazing use of digital animation in the BBC’s 1999 prehistoric natural history series Walking with Dinosaurs.

While studying at the University of the Arts, Berlin in the 1990s Florian Thalhofer began exploring computerised storytelling. Approaching documentary computationally, he developed a structure that would allow the computer to become part of the storytelling process. The result was Korsakow a program for arranging video fragments into an interactive experience (the name references ‘Korsakoff’s Syndrome’ a condition associated with extreme alcoholism characterised by memory loss and compulsive storytelling). Since 2000, Thalhofer and others have created around 200 Korsakow films, many of which are web-documentaries. Links to many of these projects can be found at: http://​korsakow.​org/​

The hatching and diffusion of conspiracy theories is a permanent and sometimes disturbing fact of contemporary culture. Norwegians became painfully aware of this in the summer of 2011 with the bomb explosion in Oslo and the mass killings at a Labour Party Youth camp at Ut0ya where 77 lives were lost. The perpetrator Anders Behring Breivik’s rambling ‘manifesto’ is a chilling reminder of the connection between theory and action in this case, as in numerous other cases. Breivik’s defense for his actions was, as he stated in his ‘manifesto’, that Europe was the victim of the Eurabia agreement, a sinister plot to ‘Arabise’ the continent. The centerpiece of Breivik’s ‘manifesto’is an essay written by his countryman Fjordman (alias for Peder Jensen) titled EU’s Eurabia Project (The Eurabia Code) — Documenting EU’s deliberate strategy to Islamise Europe. This essay is a presentation and discussion of the ideas presented by the French author Bat Ye’or (pseudonym for Gisèle Litman), who maintains that following a meeting between European Union (EU) officials and representatives of Arab states in the wake of the oil crisis in 1974 an agreement was made allowing for greater Arab and Muslim influence in Europe (Ye’or 2005). This agreement has again resulted in a profound demographic change in the European countries, resulting in what has also been called ‘Islamisation’. For Breivik, taking this as a cue, European culture was under attack from Islamists and their unwitting allies, the ‘cultural marxists and mulitculturalists’, and he claimed his actions were justifiable as pre-emptive attacks in a civil war.

The focus of this chapter is on the proliferation of software editing tools designed for novice video practitioners: l ow-budget, freeware and open source applications available across various platforms (downloadable to desktop/laptop machines, bundled with camcorders, as apps for smart phones, or as cloud-based applications). These form the core of an array of hardware and software tools embedded within everyday practices of documentation, employed by ‘practitioners’ — in the widest sense of the term — to capture moving and still images of their lives and their social and political realities. There is a need to map the emergence and development of such tools, as they serve, shape and constrain the development of those forms of cultural production that are commonly labelled user-generated content (UGC).

At the dawn of digital documentary, three technical approaches to the possibility of the form are emerging: web documentary, transmedia and interactive documentary (O’Flynn 2012). (All of them are sometimes referred to at film festivals as transmedia at this early stage of development; ‘immersive documentary’ is another all-purpose catch-phrase.) There are web documentaries, such as the series Black Folk Don’t¹ that use the web as a distribution platform for typically static material, from which the viewer can select. Transmedia projects are construed across various platforms, as in the Exit Zero Project,² which occurs across a book, a film and a web database, and Reinvention Stories³ featuring short films, a tour with audio and video stops, and a site for contributed knowledge. (Transmedia projects may also involve performances and geolocated games such as scavenger hunts.) While some of these applications may be interactive, some transmedia projects allow only for the selection of material rather than contributions. Finally, interactive documentaries have user participation built into their action, and typically feature databases as integral to their actions.