From Critical Distance to Critical Intimacy: Interactive Documentary and Relational Media

This chapter wonders about interactive documentary as a relational media, and how this relationality is less about telling a story than it is about describing and performing the world critically. Stories struggle to account for, describe, or perform the entangled complexity of the world because of their inherent need to be linear and sequential. The author examines how the concepts and methods offered by recent materialist and post-humanist philosophy such as Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT) invite reconsideration of the role and agency of story for interactive documentary, and how ANT pays close attention to agency and relationality in the formation of complex assemblages. The chapter offers an alternative to the critical distance that characterizes traditional efforts to conduct theory and proposes its inverse: to perform critical intimacies recognizing the agency of all the parts that make up any assemblage that we participate within as interactive documentary makers.

Miles, A.; Lessard, B.; Brasier, H. ; Weidle, F. (2018) “From Critical Distance to Critical Intimacy: Interactive Documentary and Relational Media”. In: In Cammaer, G., Fitzpatrick, B., & Lessard, B. (eds) Critical Distance in Documentary Media Pp. 301—319, London, Palgrave MacMillan ISBN 978-3-319-96767-7

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