getting our hands dirty - again

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DOI: 10.1177/1359183513492079

2013 18: 259Journal of Material CulturePaolo Favero

of images in the digital ageGetting our hands dirty (again): Interactive documentaries and the meaning

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J o u r n a l o f

MATERIAL

CULTURE

Getting our hands dirty (again):Interactive documentaries andthe meaning of images in thedigital age

Paolo FaveroUniversity of Antwerp, Belgium

AbstractThis article offers an ethnographic exploration of the world of interactive documentaries (i-docs),

suggesting how such a scrutiny opens up a new scenario for visual culture one where the study of

the visual field needs to be backed up with an increasing awareness of digital culture, interactivity

and the functioning of Web 2.0. Incorporating the languages that dominate communication on

social networks and image sharing platforms, i-docs are a window onto the changing meaning ofimages in the context of contemporary digital technologies. In such products, a variety of different

kinds of materials (such as videos, photos, sounds, texts, etc.) converge, forcing us to rethink

the very meaning of image beyond the field of vision. Fostering new forms of interpretation and

exploration of audio-visual materials, these projects also generate new connections between life

online and life offline. Informed by the principles of participation, sharing and relationality that

inform contemporary social networks, i-docs seem to invite us to engage with the physicality and

socialness of everyday life, in other words, to get our hands dirty (again).

KeywordsInteractivity, interactive documentaries, visual culture, digital culture and materiality

The recent technological advancements in the field of digital imaging are today undoubt-edly posing a threat to our conventional understanding of the meaning of images, image-making1and visual culture. Scholarly debates have addressed different facets of thisquestion. Digital images and imaging practices have been discussed, for instance, as thecause of the death of photography (Mirzoeff, 1999; Robins, 1995; McQuire, 2013, thisissue), the dissolution of material reality (Gere, 2005) and the transformation of reality

into spectacle (Debord, 1967) and simulation (Baudrillard, 1994). They have alsoCorresponding author:

Paolo Favero, Department of Communication Studies, University of Antwerp, Stadscampus, S.M.052, Sint-

Jacobsstraat 2, 2000 Antwerp, Belgium.

Email: [email protected]

MCU18310.1177/1359183513492079Journal of Material CultureFavero2013

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260 Journal of Material Culture 18(3)

been seen as responsible for the loss of a real sense of community and the rise of net-worked individualism (Wellman, 2001), which supposedly characterize life in the digi-tal age. Undoubtedly, digital imaging technologies have entailed the emergence of anew visual discourse (Mitchell, 1994), a new model of vision (Crary, 1990). As Crary

has suggested, there has recently been a transformation in the nature of visuality prob-ably more profound than the break that separates medieval imagery from Renaissance

perspective (quoted in Robins, 1995: 31). However, we still need to explore further thenature of such a change and its cultural consequences. Arising from the response to thisneed, the present article aims to address the emerging meanings and practices connectedto digital imaging by focusing on one specific arena, that of interactive documentaries(also referred to in this article as i-docs). Seemingly a contradiction in terms (I willexplain why in the next section), i-docs probably constitute one of the most vibrant fieldsof contemporary avant-garde filmmaking.2So far only marginally investigated by schol-

ars (see Galloway et al., 2007), this is, I suggest, a privileged space for addressing thechanging notions and practices regarding images and image-making in the contemporarycontext. I will approach this arena from an ethnographic perspective, partly based on myown practice and teaching experience with i-docs and other interactive imaging plat-forms, but also primarily based on fieldwork among interactive image-makers. Over thelast few years, I have explored notions, practices and visions relating to the engagementwith these new technologies among a number of image-makers, including a series ofstructured and semi-structured interviews that I will refer to in this article.

In the introduction to this article, I will attempt to show the complexities and possi-

bilities that characterize the world of i-docs, and then offer a series of critical reflectionson the extent to which i-docs force us to rethink the assumptions through which we haveconventionally addressed the field of images. In the second section of this article, adopt-ing Rancires (2008) notion of imageness, I will call for a redefinition of our ideasabout the very essence of images. The diversified character of the data that converge intosuch new projects requires an innovative set of instruments able to take us beyond thefield of vision. I will then proceed to show how i-docs foster new forms of interpretationand exploration of the disparate film clips, photographs, textual and sonic commentariesthat make up their material. Informed by Web 2.0s implicit architecture of participa-

tion (OReilly, 2005: 6) and exploiting the principles of participation, sharing and rela-tionality that inform many popular imaging softwares and applications (see Ito, 2005;Koskinen, 2004; Landow, 2006; Wesch, 2007) as well as many contemporary art experi-ments (see Bourriaud, 2002; Lapenta, 2011; MacDonald and Basu, 2007), i-docs gener-ate new, creative, non-linear forms of engagement and interaction between viewers,authors and the material itself, thus opening up the terrain for a new politics of viewingand meaning-making. Finally, I will address the extent to which such new forms ofimage-based exploration also allow viewers to create new connections with everyday lifeand its social and material texture. Requiring viewers to work with images, i-docs alsoactively engage with them in their everyday offscreen life.

Underlying the analysis here is the acknowledgement that, in order to achieve anunderstanding of contemporary digital interactive image-making practices, the researcher

brings the theoretical instruments of visual culture and film theory into dialogue withthose of digital culture, particularly the practices that characterize the use of Web 2.0.

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Favero 261

Such an acknowledgment will demonstrate the need to approach new imaging technolo-gies and their uses from within the cultural practices in which they are embedded (or

proper ways of seeing, according to Berger, 1972) and hence with careful attention totheir social and political contexts. In order to understand digital images today, we need

to move beyond a narrow definition of the field of vision and look instead at images asrelational items situated amidst the events, socialness and physicality of actors everydaylives. In other words, we have to get our hands dirty (again).

What is an interactive documentary film?

In order to provide an initial, tentative definition of i-docs, we need to combine the defi-nition of documentary with that of interactivity. By so doing, we immediately encoun-ter a series of interesting paradoxes. Let me tackle this by addressing first the meaning of

documentary film. As we all know, there is little agreement on what documentaries areactually about. From John Griersons definition of documentary film as the creativetreatment of actuality onwards, there has been considerable confusion regarding whatreally characterizes a documentary. This variety of positions is easily summed up by theopposition between Bill Nicholss (2001: 1) idea that every film is a documentary andTrinh T Minh-has (1993: 90) argument that there is no such thing as documentary.Indeed, at the core of this tension lies the question of the meaning of reality or truth ina cinematographic context. There is uncertainty regarding the extent to which documen-tary films may differ from other visual languages on the basis of their adherence to what

is conventionally referred to as profilmic reality, i.e. the reality that exists beyond andbefore the camera (see Beattie, 2008; Nichols, 2001). A quick look at the Lumire broth-ers first film may, however, immediately show us the paradoxical nature of this notion.In Workers Leaving the Lumire Factory(1895) we see a crowd of workers leaving thefactory through its main gate. None of them ever looks into the camera, they simply walk

past and disappear from the frame. Anticipating the fly on the wall trend that wouldcome to dominate documentary films in the future, the Lumire brothers are here pre-senting the camera to us as non-existent, an instrument which does not intrude upon thereality portrayed. And certainly they had shared this little secret (or perhaps we should

call it a lie?) with their workers. How else can we explain that a 19th-century factoryworker would have walked past, without even casting a glance at his employer, seeinghim standing in front of the factory gate operating a large and noisy hand-crankedmachine?3

As the example of the Lumire brothers may illustrate, a degree of fictionalization ormanipulation, or the creation of an aesthetics of objectivity, as Trinh T Minh-ha (1990:80) put it, has been at the core of documentary film from its very inception (which coin-cides with the birth of cinema). However, this notion of reality is still at the centre ofthe practices and debates that characterize the world of documentary filmmaking. In fact,documentary films can be seen to have actively kept alive the myth of photographictruth (Sturken and Cartwright, 2001), and there is a certain agreement that documentaryfilm is, after all, a distinctive form of moving image language that aims to convey a fairlyunfiltered, unmediated and near-experience vision of the actual. In other words, docu-mentaries are considered to be more tightly connected to the profilmic than any other



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form of moving image culture. Combining such notions with interactivity, however,becomes rather tricky, to say the least. As a two-way flow of information, according toits standard definition, interactivity can be seen to consist primarily of four stages: obser-vation, exploration, modification and reciprocal change (Meadows, 2003). While the

first two may still perfectly fit within a broad definition of documentary film, the thirdand fourth are indeed more problematic. Allowing modification and reciprocal change(by the hands of the viewer/user) does seem to invalidate the mission of the documentaryitself (see above). In fact, if a documentary is somehow connected to the objective

portrayal of facts, how can it then include a process of eventual modification? I will notpursue this debate here in any depth. Instead, let us for the moment simply agree uponthe fact that an interactive documentary is, to quote from Galloway et al. (2007: 330), adocumentary which uses interactivity as a core part of its delivery mechanism.

Before I proceed further, I now offer a brief insight into what interactive documenta-

ries look like by presenting one selected piece of work that I consider particularly repre-sentative of the various possibilities embedded in this visual form (more examples willfollow below). Highrise(2010) is an ongoing project directed by filmmaker KaterinaCizek and produced by the National Film Board of Canada (one of the leading actors inthe world of i-docs). Born, in Cizeks words, as an experiment in documentary cinemaand the web to explore how documentaries could unfold inside a web browser,4Highrisewas from its very inception a collaborative project engaging members of differ-ent communities in several countries. Aimed at examining, so the author declares on thehomepage, the human experience in vertical suburbs through many forms of media over

the course of several years,5

the project started with the collection and analysis of storiesshared by the participants. Over the years, it has developed into different projects, eachdisplaying a particular form and aim. Today, it is a series of short interactive documenta-ries, mobile productions, live presentations, installations and films. To describe just oneof these, the web-based documentary entitled Out of My Windownarrates life in high-riseapartments in 13 different countries. Entering the film (online),6viewers are offered achoice between different routes of exploration. They may enter by clicking on a particu-lar window of a stylized building containing some of the key characters of the documen-tary. Alternatively, they may click on a particular location on a world map or on a close-up

photo of one of the characters presented in the work. Once this selection is made, viewersare welcomed into a room that has been created through the use of 3D technology.7Withthe help of the mouse, viewers/users can move around in this photo-based virtual recon-struction of a room. Moving the cursor activates specific elements that lead viewers intothe discovery of various snippets of material. By clicking on the 360 music video linkhighlighted in Figure 1, for instance, the spectator will enter a video-clip where the leadcharacter in this section (the young woman in the picture) sings a hip hop song accom-

panied by a guitarist. Filmed in 360 technology, this video also allows viewers to movearound and explore the various angles of the space in which the filming was carried out.

Returning to the main room, viewers/visitors will find other links that may lead themto discover further personal details of the characters life story as well as reflections onthe meaning of life in high-rises, etc. Such pieces of information are conveyed througha creative combination of photography, text and sound (in general, video is quite under-represented in this work). By exploring further, viewers may select another character



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and enter a new world. Like all i-docs, Out of My Window allows/forces viewers toactively take possession of the material presented by designing a personal (non-linear)

route of discovery. The project, however, contains more than just this set of visualiza-tions. In the section entitled My Window, viewers are invited to actively participate inthe project by posting photos of their own windows, hence sharing their own under-standing of living in such urban agglomerizations. By tagging their own photographswith keywords (just like Facebook), viewers can let their own (photographically medi-ated) experiences enter into a dialogue with those of viewers located in other parts ofthe world. Today, this page constitutes a creative and truly global archive of photo-graphs representing life in high-rises, which can be explored through colours, objects orwords. Highrise has recently also developed into a web documentary, called TheThousandth Tower, to which I shall return later in this article. For the moment, I believethat the description I have offered may suffice to give a hint of the complexity of inter-active documentaries and to show the way in which such products are centred aroundnotions of non-linearity and participation.

Images beyond the visible

Having offered this brief overview of what interactive documentaries look like, let mestart reflecting upon the influence that such practices have on our contemporary under-standing of images. As I argued above, i-docs seem to ask us to rethink the conceptsthrough which we have conventionally approached images, image-work and visual cul-ture. In particular, they seem to ask us to merge the insights gathered from visual cultureand film theory with those from digital culture and the study of web-based communica-tion and interactivity. Exploring this topic in greater depth, I would like to introduce one

Figure 1.Screenshot from Out of My Window. Available at: http://interactive.nfb.ca/#/outmywindow/



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particular piece of software for the design of interactive films: Korsakow, the outcome of

merging the conventional practices of documentary film with those of photography andnew modalities of communication facilitated by Web 2.0. A popular open-source, interac-tive, rule-based and generative software for the production of interactive films, Korsakowis based on the principle that it is the viewers who are in charge of the construction of thenarrative. Similar to Out of My Window, here, too, they are meant to select a path using theoptions that are offered onscreen (usually consisting of several windows with differentvisual content). I will return to the implications of such choices in the next section. For themoment, however, I would like to explore behind the scenes of Korsakow and examinethe principles that guide its functioning. For the image-maker, the first step in the processof editing with this software is to break the material down into small narrative units(SNUs). Secondly, he or she has to tag all selected video clips with keywords (once againfollowing the principle that applies to image-based communication on Facebook,Instagram, etc.). These tags, constituting the potential entry and exit points of the clips,will be the instruments guiding viewers own potential associations and hence their con-struction of the narrative. It is through these tags that the software creates, on the basis ofuser selection, a sequence of scenes. As Figure 2 shows, through tagging, the softwareallows the author to try and guide the viewer from the clip couple to the clip naked, andso on. However, such tagging will never lead the viewer along a univocal path, given that,among the many clips available, more than one will have naked as an entry point. At that

point, the computer will randomly select a clip. As a consequence, a user may seldom beable to recreate the exact same viewing sequence again.

From the point of view of the image-makers, working with i-docs entails entering intoa new world. They have to learn to abandon control over their project and learn to

Figure 2. Screenshot of the authors computer while running the Korsakow tutorial.



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visualize their work as the result of a dialogue between two practices: the production ofa creative archive and shared authorship. In fact, they first have to create an array ofmeaningful and cleverly tagged snippets and then leave them to the dialectic between theviewers subjectivity and the generativity of the software.

Word-based tagging as the key tool for the construction of narrative, however, alsoteaches us something else. It makes us reflect upon the significance of the conventionaldistinctions between different types of media, and in particular between (still and moving)images, sounds and text in the context of web-based documentaries (and contemporaryimaging technologies at large). In the examples I have given so far, the most varied typesof data are presented to the viewer simultaneously. Images are reduced to words (whichare then translated into algorithms). Similarly, in order to be incorporated into Korsakow,sounds first have to be inserted as videos (blank videos), which are then tagged with key-words. The boundary between still and moving images also becomes blurred. Moving

images appear as frozen frames (and hence as still images) unless activated by the usermoving the cursor over them. Conversely, photographs can only be inserted through their

previous editing in the form of video. During my interviews with Florian Thalhofer, thecreator of Korsakow, I noticed how he used the terms film, video and digital storytell-ing interchangeably when explaining his software, thus testifying to the progressive lackof relevance of the distinction between them in this context. Through the convergence andmerging that take place in Korsakow, images cease to belong at least from the perspec-tive of the image-maker/producer to the visual field, entering instead into the realm ofdata. I suggest, however, that the implosion of the distinctions between different media

units can also be addressed through Rancires notion of imageness. It allows us toacknowledge the imaginative and polysemic function of all such media units, avoidingreducing them to raw data. In The Future of the Image(2008), Rancire suggests that wehave currently reached the end of images and need to think of them in terms of a regimeof relations between elements and functions relations between the sayable and the vis-ible, ways of playing with the before and the after, cause and effect (p. 6).

Despite being applied by Rancire to an analysis of Bressons cinema, the notion ofimageness seems a stimulating way to address interactive documentaries, too. It offers anopportunity for understanding the shifting and overlapping meanings of different media

units in the context of contemporary digital imaging technologies, while helping us alsoto identify the points of contact between i-docs and other contemporary digital imagingpractices. The imageness of images in Korsakow presents itself as a stimulating coun-terpart, for instance, to that of The Garden of Things.8Designed by Studio Azzurro, anItalian company experimenting since the 1990s with interactive technologies and withthe construction of sensible environments, this is a video-installation consisting of 18monitors and one long interactive pad. Introducing the notion of materiality to a digitalenvironment, a series of screens display the moving images of hands as they shape avariety of objects (see Figure 3).

Filmed in infrared technology, at first sight, the installation does not allow viewers toidentify the objects in question. What they actually see is simply hands moving around aninvisible surface. Through the work of the hands, however, heat is passed onto the objects(a pot, a sculpture, etc.) and they suddenly start to become visible to the infrared cameras.What the audience sees, however, is not the object itself but a digital visualization of the



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heat passing through it. Materiality is generated here not by the vision of the flesh of theobjects, but by what Studio Azzurros homepage calls the electronic magma. When thehands stop applying pressure, the objects change shape again, revealing, with the fadingof heat, a new set of textures and forms. In the context of this exhibition, heat therefore

becomes another coordinate in defining the imageness of the image, thus marking outthe relevance of this concept for our understanding of contemporary experiments in visualcommunication. I should mention here that the world of pop music, too, has also employedthis innovation of moving beyond vision. For the launch of their 2008 single House ofCards, the popular British band Radiohead generated a clip entirely based on 3D scanningand advanced visualization technologies.

Combining the use of different laser-based, real-time recording scanning systems,9

the video offers us images of singer Tom York (see Figure 4) alternating with a subur-ban landscape. However, these images have been produced without the use of film butrather through a scanner. As James Frost (one of the engineers behind the project) sug-gested, this is a music video without cameras. What we see, in fact, is the visualizationof data obtained through the 3D scanners and hence through the act of shooting out par-ticles and registering their reactions once they bounce against obstacles and come backto the sensor (a process called pointcloud). Once analysed, such data will allow for thecreation of a visible reconstruction of the objects in question. As in the case of StudioAzzurro, this experiment does question our notion of vision and image.

A new politics of meaning-making

Apart from questioning the meaning of images and image-making as such, the practicesunder scrutiny here also signal a change in how we envision the role of the viewer/

Figure 3. Screenshot from Studio Azzurros homepage. Available at: http://www.studioazzurro.com/opere/video_installazioni/il_giardino_delle_cose



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spectator/user. Exploiting the language of hypertext, i-docs are constructed within thelogic of what Ted Nelson (1981) called non-sequential writing, i.e. chunks of informa-tion connected by links capable of offering a series of pathways. In such a hypermediastructure (see also Landow, 2006) a narrative ceases, as I pointed out earlier, to be a lin-

ear sequence of events imposed by an author. Incorporating the notions of participationand sharing that lie at the heart of Web 2.0 (see Goggin, 2009; Leadbeater, 2009; OReilly,2005; Quiggin, 2006; Shirky, 2008), i-docs instead actively interpellate viewers as co-creators of meaning. Asked to assert autonomy over the temporal direction of the narra-tive (Brown et al., 2003: 314), viewers exercise their agency in an engaged dialecticwith the work (and indirectly also with its producer). In this context, therefore, author-ship appears as a collaborative endeavour and viewers as empowered, creative andemancipated spectator[s] (Rancire, 2009) who actively produce meaning and under-standing as they continue their exploration.

In order to better understand the construction of narrative (and hence the dialecticbetween viewer and author) in the setting of i-docs, I would like to refer to a film madein Korsakow. Traverse (2010) is a small interactive piece of work made by BharathHaridas, a graduate student in visual communication from the Srishti School of Art,Design and Technology in Bangalore, India.

In this piece, Bharat wanted to share his experience as an NRI (a non resident Indian,i.e. an Indian living abroad) returning to his country of birth and witnessing the manychanges that had taken place during his absence (which coincided roughly with the boomof globalization that started with the 1991 economic reforms). Conceptually maximizing

the use of Korsakow, this film employs multiple screens in order to generate a series ofoverlappings and disjunctures between space and time. Traverse, in fact, invites us toexplore Bharaths memories, his travel back to India as well as his visions of the future ina continuous movement between video clips, photographs, sounds and texts. As Figure 5may serve to illustrate, one single frame could include a blank video (hence containing

Figure 4. Screenshot from Radioheads video House of Cards. Available at: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nTFjVm9sTQ&feature=player_embedded



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only sound), a video clip (made up of moving images) and a video made up of photo-graphs. Sometimes, there are also text pop-ups, offering complementary information.When I interviewed him, Bharath told me that what had attracted him to Korsakow were

really the narrative possibilities the software offered. Korsakow allowed him to generatewhat he considers to be a near-experience retelling of reality. In his words: After all, wedo experience things as fragments, we think like that, we tend to jump from one thing toanother linear storytelling only creates an illusion. Non-linearity for him was of fun-damental importance for conveying his experience of life as a young man in a diaspora, alife characterized by the fragmentation of experiences and memories, by phone calls andSkype conversations, email exchanges and image sharing, social networking, etc.According to Bharath, therefore, the non-linear path made possible by Korsakow not onlyadds an experimental aura to the works but is also the expression of a particular world-

view, a (more immersive) way of portraying reality that is closer to the experiences ofeveryday life of many individuals today, particularly to those young men and women whohave been raised in the age of digital technologies. As with most other image-makersdiscussed in this article, for Bharath, the choice of language arose from a dialectic engage-ment with the choice of content, thus bringing into dialogue two terms that are conven-tionally treated as separate analytical units (Favero, forthcoming).

The use of Korsakow marks a shift away from earlier ways of relating to image-making. Bringing back to life Radz ineras project of an interactive cinema (seeKinoautomatof 1967),10all such forms of interactive imaging pose a fundamental chal-lenge to the principle of narrative coherence, which is at the core of traditional documen-tary (Whitelaw, 2002: 1). Creating tendencies that have also been present in participatoryvideo and image-making, such practices also show many commonalities with experi-ments taking place in the world of contemporary digital arts and gaming. To mention butone example, an extreme form of viewer activation is at the core of the works by

Figure 5.Screenshot from Traverse. Available at: http:// bh.mrinal.net/#/?snu=56



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Molleindustria, an Italian arts collective that defines their mission as the creation ofradical games against the tyranny of entertainment.11

In their Free Culture Game (Figure 6), the collective comments upon the strugglebetween free culture and copyright by forcing viewers (transformed for the occasion intogamers) to act. With the help of the cursor (represented by the blue dot), they mustattempt to liberate passive consumers (the grey dummies stuck in the outer circle, thespace of the market). By feeding into their heads ideas and knowledge (represented bythe yellow lightbulbs) they may help to bring the dummies back to the inner circle, thespace of the common, where ideas and knowledge are cooperatively shared. Ratherthan offering an explanation of the tension between copyright and free culture, this gameasks viewers to engage in a fight against the vectorialist (the black dot) that tries tocommodify knowledge by sucking up ideas and copyrighting them. Molleindustria is

just one among many examples where ideas resulting from a critical reading of contem-porary society are translated visually with the help of playful relational stratagems.

Pulling out of the screen

Apart from experimenting with different modalities of content exploration, many interac-tive image-makers today are also extensively engaging with such technologies for the pur-

pose of addressing social issues, of strengthening community work and creating momentumfor social change. Interactive image-makers are attempting to address life beyond thescreen, as it were, entering the hybrid space between life offline and online (see Kabisch,2008; De Souza e Silva, 2006). In a way, they seem to approach i-docs simultaneously as

Figure 6. Screenshot from the Free Culture Game by La Molleindustria. Available at: http://www.molleindustria.org/en/freeculturegame/ Copyright: Molleindustria, 2008.



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Figure 7.Screenshot from 18 Days in Egypt. Available at: http://beta.18daysinegypt.com/#/about

an instrument of augmented reality and empowerment. Through their work, stories, visionsand desires are literally pulled out of the screen (as Bharath Haridas put it) and brought to

bear upon the material exigencies of everyday life.I would like to substantiate these notions through one last example; 18 Days in Egypt

(hereafter 18 Days) is an interactive, crowd-sourced documentary created by the docu-mentary film-maker and journalist Jigar Mehta and the interaction designer YasminElayat. In response to the absence of cohesive reporting of the events talking place inTahrir Square, Mehta started playing with the idea of making a shared documentary ena-

bling participants from all over the world to chronicle the Egyptian Revolution throughtheir own footage, photos, tweets and Facebook status updates. I wanted to make a filmon all the clips coming in I wanted people to send in footage quickly and then wewould have taken it from there, he said during a conversation with me. Over time, the

sheer quantity and poor quality of the material coming in overwhelmed him, and Mehtadecided to liaise with computer expert Elayat. Through their collaboration, the projectdeveloped into an open, free-floating, interactive and participatory structure. In Mehtaswords, the project morphed to match user behaviour and away from documentary pro-duction. Similar to the other i-docs presented in this article, 18 Days, too, was thusshaped on the basis of content rather than by strictly following an idea of form or genre:The subject chose the interactive film as a form. And, like the other i-docs discussed sofar, 18 Daysended up deploying a variety of different types of media. Among the varioussites and pages that are hosting the project, I would like to mention the Popcornjs chan-

nel.12Popcornjs is an hmtl5 technology designed for integrating the web into video pro-duction. Of fundamental relevance to the nature of Mehta and Elayats work, thissoftware facilitates the connection of specific pieces of information available on the netto a video clip. Watching a clip (such as the speech by Mubarak, see Figure 7), viewersmay be offered a series of parallel links (see the menu on the left in Figure 7). If they



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choose to explore these links, the video will pause, only to start again once viewersdecide to close the window and go back to the main media.

Through this technology, 18 Days manages to integrate an unlimited quantity ofupdated information on the events described in each short film. Viewing a clip about a

particular demonstration in Tahrir Square, the viewers can, in this way, immediatelygeolocate the place in question, learn more about the history of the square, or explore asimilar demonstration taking place elsewhere, etc.

18 Daystherefore actively functions as a transnational platform for sharing views andcreating new forms of community and alliances across borders.13The project has man-aged (or, more correctly, is still managing) to channel the revolutionary moods that areswirling across Egypt and to bring them into contact with similar events taking place inother parts of the Mediterranean and elsewhere. During our interview, Mehta told mehow this is really what he wanted. He hoped that the project would be politically useful

and function as an instrument for empowering young people, raising their awarenessabout events that the media were reporting exclusively from a mainstream, institutional-ized point of view. Such a participatory and empowering approach indeed informs a largenumber of i-docs. The Thousandth Tower, the latest stage of development of CizeksHighriseproject, for instance, is a participatory documentary. Here, film-makers, archi-tects, animation designers and the inhabitants of a particular neighbourhood in Torontohave all come together in an attempt to visually materialize the communitys wishes forthe future of the neighbourhood (see Figure 8).

In this documentary, the use of animation transforms forgotten areas and dumping

grounds into skate parks and gardens. The project did indeed help the local communityto organize itself and claim its rights. Coming together for the making of the film, andforced to reflect upon the destiny of their neighbourhood, the residents eventuallyclaimed access to the gardens and parks surrounding their space. One year after the docu-mentary was finished, and as a result of this dialectic, a first playground was built.

Figure 8.Screenshot from One Millionth Tower. Available at: http://highrise.nfb.ca/onemillionthtower/1mt_open_tech.php



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Highriseand 18 Daysthus testify to the recent growth in popularity of methods ofshared creativity. Here, social actors are invited to engage with new forms of participa-tion and collaboration that did not previously exist. Through the incorporation of prac-tices and possibilities provided by Web 2.0, these kinds of projects seem to bring about

different types of connections. They connect social actors in different locations; throughthe shared used of digital images, they turn scattered individuals into a community or amovement. However, they also connect individuals to the events and situations sur-rounding them, thus allowing them a deeper immersion in their everyday (offline) lives.Rather than representing a form of detachment from material reality or of autonomousindividualism (as mentioned earlier), these i-docs function as generators of new socialrelations and new forms of participation in the material, physical and social exigenciesof everyday life.

These last reflections, and the case of 18 Days in Egyptin particular, seem to invite

us also to reflect upon a wider set of topics. Such imaging practices, in fact, appear tooffer a valuable window onto the social and political transformations that are affect-ing many contemporary capitalist societies. The growing belief in the act of sharing,collaboration and cooperation that characterizes contemporary digital culture14seemsto run in parallel with the growing sensibility for the common good (as epitomized inMolleindustrias game above) and the many experiments in creating new, less central-ized and supposedly more egalitarian forms of community life, characteristics ofmany of the protest movements we have recently witnessed. I am referring here to thetransnational movement of the indignadosor to the various protests across the Arab

world mentioned earlier; to the occupation of the Maruti Suzuki factories in Manesar,Gurgaon, just outside Delhi, or the ongoing protests against the construction of thetunnel for the pan-European high-speed freight line passing though the Susa Valley innorthern Italy (the so-called NoTav movement). These various experiences have incommon an attempt to create a new political language and structure capable of mov-ing away from older, conventional vertical hierarchies and ways of doing politics.15What is relevant for the point that I am trying to make here is that the practices thatcharacterize these movements resonate ideologically with those of the artistic andfilmic environments I have been addressing so far, with their accent on relationality

and participation, with their decentralization of authorship, etc. They resonate alsowith the increasing popularity of alternative funding systems, such as crowdsourc-ing and crowdfunding, which, particularly during the recent time of crisis, have

become vital forms for financing films and artworks. This path was, for example,followed by 18 Days in Egypt, which started out with a first budget from Kickstarter.com, one of the largest fund-it-yourself sites in the world. And they resonate, too,with the views held by Delhi-based RAQS Media Collective. A group that started itscareer trajectory with a sharp critique of the hegemonic nature of documentary film-making in the South-Asian context, the members of RAQS suggest that the task ofimage-makers, documentarists or artists today is no longer that of showing what was

previously unseen (owing to the spread of new imaging technologies, this can be doneby anyone). Rather, their duty is to create and curate a space in which viewers canshare their own experiences and reflections around topics shaping their everyday life.All these experiences thus seem to mark a shift towards horizontal and decentralized



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ways of funding, producing and authoring works, with crowdsourcing and curatingbeing the new emblems of the epoch. So, in parallel with protest movements withouta centralized voice, we also have artworks without an author or producer. Apart fromconstituting interesting artistic and political experiments, all the examples that I have

presented so far perhaps also signal the formation of a new political subject, one thatin order to be grasped requires that we shift away from conventional political catego-ries. The concepts behind the social movements and artistic experiences that I justmentioned seem to fit into Hardt and Negris (2005) notion of the multitude,16forexample. An inherently antagonistic and political subject made up of singularities, themultitude is pure potentiality, a singularity that tends towards shared, common pro-

jects, hence marking a departure from conventional notions of community and iden-tity (see also Negri, 2006). Indeed, I am only hinting at such a perspective here. Muchmore work ought to be conducted in order to better explore the extent to which new

media practices are not only signifiers of wider social and political transformations,but possibly also agents of change.

Conclusions

An ethnographic scrutiny of i-docs would seem to open up a new scenario for visualculture, one where the study of the visual field needs to be backed up with an increas-ing awareness of digital culture, interactivity and the functioning in particular of Web2.0-based technologies. As this article has attempted to demonstrate, interactive docu-

mentaries incorporate the languages that dominate communication on social networksand image-sharing platforms, showing interesting points of contact also with socialnetworking, gaming and the relational practices that define many experiments in theworld of contemporary arts. As I have suggested in this article, a variety of differentkinds of information converge in such projects, forcing us to rethink the very termsthrough which we address images. I have also suggested how digital images embeddedin interactive technologies ask viewers to engage with the physicality and socialness ofeveryday life, to immerse themselves in the offline, in other words, to get their handsdirty (again).

In conclusion, I would like to shift, however slightly, the angle of my discussion andoffer a couple of reflections on the implications of such new practices for the world ofdocumentary film. While seemingly appearing as a movement away from the principlesof documentary film-making, i-docs perhaps do signal a return to its very principles.Such practices permit, in fact, an innovative and thorough exploration of the objects/subjects of our works. This concept is neatly expressed by Thalhofer (the creator ofKorsakow); during an interview, he suggested how, through his software, viewers wereactually allowed to explore the object more, to see more. In his view, the use of inter-activity pulls viewers closer to the reality that film-makers intend to portray, at the sametime respecting their agency and individuality through the modalities of exploration. Thenew ways for exploring visual content online, which allow viewers to enact search strate-gies by exploring, decomposing and recomposing a wide array of videos, photographs,sounds and texts, seem to progressively redirect our attention to the things out there, theraw material, the profilmic object in other words, as we have seen in the first section of



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this article, to the privileged subject of documentary films. I-docs appear therefore para-doxically not only as the future venue for documentary film and for cinema at large, butalso as a tribute to documentary films own past and origins. They offer an example, forinstance, of Deleuzes (2005) notion of cinematographic narrative as the episodic recom-

position of emergent events within the affective, sensory and cultural memory of thebeholder, materializing at the same time Rancires (2006) idea that films should repre-sent life, and that life

is not about stories, about actions oriented towards an end, but about situations open in everydirection. Life has nothing to do with dramatic progression, but is instead a long and continuousmovement made up of an infinity of micromovements (p. 2).

Acknowledgement

Thank you Graeme Were for the precious comments on this text.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, ornot-for-profit sectors.

Notes

1. In this article, I use the term image-making (and image-makers) in order to include movingand still images in one single concept and thus to encompass all the hybrid spaces that have

been made possible by contemporary digital technologies. It is interesting to point out hownew image-making practices also pose a threat to our conventional terminology for address-ing this field, forcing us to reflect upon the terms we use for describing such practices.

2. Let me point out here that this article does not deal with how documentaries have changedthrough their introduction into the web as a space for the hosting and marketing of films (seeBirchall, 2008; Juhasz, 2008; Vicente, 2008).

3. In a later film called The Disembarkment of the Congress of Photographers in Lyonwe see adifferent event taking place. The photographers leaving the halls look into the camera, greet-ing their respected colleague, Lumire, behind it.

4. http://highrise.nfb.ca/onemillionthtower/1mt_open_tech.php

5. http://highrise.nfb.ca/onemillionthtower/directors_statement.php 6. Once again, let me draw the readers attention to the terminological difficulty in describing

such works. Should I use the term watch, as is commonly done in the realm of film, orenter, as in web language? Generally in this article, to make sense of this complexity, I haveopted to alternate between terms conventionally adopted in visual culture and film theory, andterms belonging to digital culture.

7. Realized by using the open-source technologies of Popcorn.js, Html5, three.js and WebGL. 8. http:/ /www.studioazzurro.com/index.php?com_works=&view=detail&work_

id=14&option=com_works&Itemid=22&lang=en 9. The video was produced by using the Geometric Informatics system and two different types

of 360 Lidar scanners.10. http://www.kinoautomat.cz11. http://www.molleindustria.org12. http://code.chirls.com/18days/13. http://beta.18daysinegypt.com/#/



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14. You are what you share is, according to Shirky (2008), the motto of our days.15. I must point out that, as this article is being reviewed, the M5S, a party led by Italian come-

dian Beppe Grillo and founded on the principle of operating exclusively through the web (andhence strategically refusing the use of main institutionalized media), has won more than 25

per cent of votes in the 2013 Italian national elections. During a BBC interview Grillo said,the internet is not just a language, it changes the relations, it changes your view of the world.16. The concept of the multitude builds upon Negris writings dating back to the 1970s.

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Author biography

Paolo Favero is Associate Professor in Film Studies and Visual Culture at the Department ofCommunication Studies, University of Antwerp. With a PhD in Social Anthropology fromStockholm University, Paolo has devoted the core of his career to the study of visual culture in

India and Italy. His current research concerns contemporary documentary image-making practicesin India. Paolo has also created various visual projects aiming at translating social theory in lan-guages available to wider audiences. He is the author of India Dreams: Cultural Identity amongYoung Middle Class Men in NewDelhi (Stockholm University Press, 2005) and director of the film

Flyoverdelhi(screened by Swedish and Italian national broadcasters).

getting our hands dirty - again

Documents