Features and Trends across Interactive Documentaries
Over the past 15 years, interactive documentary practitioners have been experimenting with new ways of portraying the world and introducing innovative approaches into the documentary realm. There were no conventions, no rules, no guidebooks to follow. The creators were (and still are) free to stretch the borders and overcome the established configurations. Non-sequential stories, desktop multimedia websites and apps, documentary games, virtual reality documentaries, interactive installations, non-fiction works with augmented and mixed reality… several digital artworks have been opening up the field and challenging the documentary format. While such diversity of forms defies tradition in exciting new ways, it also brings to the table a changeful and uncertain research area.
This is the first of a two-part publication that attempts to sum up and describe an account of distinctive qualities and attributes of interactive documentary, by carefully looking at a number of paradigmatic examples. The first part is devoted to common features across documentaries, and in the second part I will explore trends that point out a direction towards the evolution of interactive documentary.
Features
The diversity of formats and interaction strategies behind non-sequential documentaries have been studied by some scholars, namely Gaudenzi, Nash, Galloway, who organized taxonomies according to different kinds of assortments or interactive mechanisms (see my last post). But despite the dissimilarity and heterogeneity across interactive works, some common features may be identified and could help to understand the development of a new language and form under development.
Agency is intrinsically connected with the interactive form regardless of the format, the interaction structure, and the story created by an interactive documentary. The concept of agency, as described by Janet Murray (1998), is the pleasure to manipulate a digital environment and granting to the audience the “power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices” (p. 126). Murray considers that the term “agency” is both the exploitation of a virtual environment and the aesthetic experience that the interactor takes from the dynamic of a responsive world.
This means that by introducing interactivity in documentaries the audience is invited to take an active role and somehow participate in the construction of the narrative, playing with the segments and creating a customized narrative on the flow. Rather than merely looking at the screen, interactive audiences also experience a “sense of doing”, which produces “a more intimate, direct and active relationship with the apparatus itself and, consequently, with the deployment of realism” (Odorico, 2011, p. 243).
But more than this straightforward concept of agency, interactive documentary aims for Dramatic Agency, a term also coined by Janet Murray which stands for a strong narrative involvement in procedural and participatory digital environments.
By creating engaging spatial representations of the world, interactive documentaries may virtually place the interactor into the virtual space, allowing her/him interacting with characters, witnessing moments, taking a decision, and an action that could change the course of events within the virtual environment. Such an ability to interacting and not only seeing as also feeling the result of our actions provides us a coherent point of view and reinforces immersion and dramatic agency.
Fragmentation is a process of breaking an object into discrete elements, the disintegration or breakdown of something into smaller pieces. The concept is commonly used in an array of fields, from biology and astronomy to sociology and computer science. In the last field mentioned, fragmentation means the storing of a file in several separate areas of memory scattered throughout a hard disk, a description that may be compared to the process of breaking down a story and host the pieces separately to create an interactive documentary.
Such feature is common to most (not to say all) interactive documentaries since the interactive narrative must be divided into segments to allow the navigation throughout the non-sequential structure, disrupting the tradition of a sequential unfolding narrative, similar to what Lev Manovich defines as the database logic (Manovich, 2001).
In a certain sense, every documentary, even in its most traditional format, faces the fragmentary nature of scenes and sequences, lining up footage and materials that would be detached otherwise. But interactive documentaries take this fragmentation to an all-new level, presenting to the audience the sequences and materials removed from a pre-determined order. From web-based non-fiction works to participative interactive documentaries (such as A Journal of Insomnia and Sandy Storyline), regardless of the delivery strategy they all present a database of contents and display the segments on-demand, as the audience triggers the events.
The World in Ten Blocks is an interactive documentary that presents a fragmented narrative of ten stories about the businesses in a multicultural neighborhood. Besides touring around and encountering the ten businesses separately, each shop contains several media segments, fragmenting the narrative into smaller bits.
Whereas such a postmodern aesthetic provides the audience with the ability to navigate through the structure and manipulate the sequence of segments, may also raise issues of “granularity” (Miles, 2014) and interfere in a cohesive meaning:
Cinema and interactive works share the common problem of being relational media that have a fragmentary deep structure. These fragments are small, understandable, parts that can be assembled into larger forms, generally considered to be the work proper. Cinema and interactive documentary therefore share the common problem: simply, how to make something whole from smaller fragmentary parts where, in both cases, these fragments are already whole. (Miles, 2014, p. 69)
Adrian Miles considers that regardless of the fragmentation of interactive documentaries, the discrete elements must nevertheless “be presented and related to each other in a way that enables the production of a new and comprehensible whole” (Miles, 2014, p. 71). This is probably the filmmaker’s best shot to engage the interactor in the story and create a cohesive approach.
Dispersion may be seen as a direct consequence of the fragmentation process in an interactive documentary. Interactive documentaries usually offer a multilinear architecture with divergent and alternative routes, encompassing an array of possible outcomes. The discrete elements that compound the work are scattered over the documentary’s structure and it’s up to the audience finding a path within the choices available. The interaction process may be compared to walking throughout a maze with several navigable branching paths and multiple possible pathways that can also be transverse. Such a metaphor is drawn upon the concept of the maze as described by the Italian author Umberto Eco (1984, pp. 80–81), as a multi-course labyrinth for a postmodern embodiment of the traditional labyrinth archetype extending the idea far beyond the walls.
The dispersion of contents is visible across several documentaries, particularly in Waterlife, one of the first interactive documentaries produced by the National Film Board of Canada. The interface of Waterlife presents a dynamic mosaic of thumbnails which is reconfigured in different shapes according to the video selected.
Adrian Belina, the designer who contributed to the interface of Waterlife, explains the concept of the project as the following:
We dispersed the content so people weren’t reading some sort of long essay-like piece. (as cited in: Anderson, 2009)
In the case of a more complex and less centralized navigation architecture, the analogy drawn can be a network or, as Deleuze and Guattari call it, a Rhizome (2000) of multiple non-hierarchical nodes with no apparent beginning or end. In a rhizomatic design, information (or contents) is always in between, as an assemblage of items instead of a causal-effect organization of episodes, resisting a chronological progression.
The more complex the navigation structure is, the more attention and effort will demand from the viewer. In rhizomatic structures, the interactor must connect the dispersed contents and create links between the segments to make sense out of the pieces and form a cohesive whole. Addressing new media formats, Henry Jenkins includes this process of making connections between dispersed media content in his concept of “convergence” (Jenkins, 2006), when the audience is encouraged to seek out new information and make connections between dispersed media content.
Intermediality refers to the combination and exchange of different media within the same screen and how they interconnect and depend on one another, both explicitly and implicitly. In a world saturated with screens, images, and sounds, all demanding our attention, intermediality plays in between the interconnectedness of various modern media of communication within the same space or, in this case, within the same interactive documentary.
As a means of expression and aesthetics, intermediality fosters the relations between two or more media, as much as represents the transgression of boundaries between them, such as film and photography, sound, illustration, text, and graphics. The interactive work becomes a combination of different types of media, merged to culminate in intermedial cinema, layering images, and sounds like a process of transfiguration of both the medium and the language. The audience is encouraged to interplaying between media as may interchange among the juxtaposition of several layers of textual and non-textual meaning which overlap during the interaction and interpretation processes.
One may name various interactive documentaries that use intermediality to enrich both the content materials and the interface. Interactive projects such as Welcome to Pine Point and the photo essays produced under the collection Legacies 150 are great examples of how intermediality combines different media formats and languages to boost both the narrative and the user’s experience.
Also, a Short History of the Highrise combines footage with still image archives, intertwine with text and graphics to highlight the story of highrise buildings across the globe.
Drawing upon Ágnes Pethő’s writings on intermediality, this feature allows the viewer to navigate in the “heterotopia” space in-between the border zone across media, as a passageway from one media towards another (2011, pp. 42–43). Although Pethő describes “heterotopia” as an impossible place, the intermediality across media may be brought to the audience’s consciousness employing self-reflexive practices, which raises the awareness for the media language itself.
In the next post, I will look at the direction where interactive documentary is going and analyze current tendencies of the realm, proposing five trends that interactive creators have been exploring over the past years.
References
Anderson, K. (2009). Jam3 brings ‘Waterlife’ to the Web, in: Real Screen. Retrieved from https://realscreen.com/2009/07/30/waterlifeweb-20090730/
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2000). Anti-Edipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: Univ. of Massachusets Press.
Eco, U. (1984). Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Manovich, L. (2001). The language of New Media. Massachussetts: The MIT Press.
Miles, A. (2014). Interactive Documentary and Affective Ecologies. In K. Nash, C. Hight, & C. Summerhayes (Eds.), New Documentary Ecologies: Emerging Platforms, Practices and Discourses, 67–82.
Murray, J. H. (1998). Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Massachussetts: MIT Press.
Odorico, S. (2011). Documentary on the web between realism and interaction. A case study: From Zero — People Rebuilding Life after the Emergency (2009). Studies in Documentary Film, 5(2/3), 235–246.
Pethő, Á. (2011). Cinema and intermediality the passion for the in-between. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars.
