COME/IN/DOC Documentary Series – Episode 1 – Part 2

I personally do not believe that there is such a ‘thing’ or ‘phenomenon’ as ‘AN’ interactive documentary as this would imply that the field is homogeneous, can be clearly mapped and defined; and moreover, I am also more and more wondering whether ‘interactive’ documentary – a term which was applied to the first projects that we are interested in – is really the appropriate adjective to describe the currently emerging so much wider spectrum of documentary practices. Especially as to my first resentment against thinking of a clearly shaped corpus of ‘interactive documentary’ projects, at i-Docs Symposium 2016 I was happy to meet so many scholars, practitioners, artists and commissioners, who were coming from all kinds of disciplines and directions. This made me realize how large the ‘scientific community’ (or rather ‘family’) is – but that we sometimes maybe do not recognize our siblings. What about – for example – the potential of VR in this field? What about intersections of (not only) digital journalism and ‘interactive’ documentary such as in projects such New York Times’ often cited paradigmatic Snowfall? Or if we think of ‘interactive documentary’ as living archives? One paradigmatic project here is in my eyes Filming Revolution by Alisa Lebow. What, if we consider emerging documentary practices which tackle issues from a post-human, post-anthropocene perspective? What about projects that are certainly documentary, that are indisputably based on digital technologies but that so far have rather been considered as practices of artistic research, such as BUZZ, a project exploring ‘participative practicing’? What about the use of ‘new media’ for socio-political change by means of ‘documenting’, sharing and discussing political uprisings, creative disobedience or just (hyper-)local campaigns – explored for example in Everyday Rebellion by the Riahi brothers? What about documentary games, ambient, non-fictional storytelling, life-logging, data-mining for documentary purposes, …. a list to be certainly completed, especially as the field keeps diversifying! As to the second terminological uncertainty, I think we still have to figure out what we mean by ‘interaction’. In my opinion, this interaction does not necessarily have to be restricted to the realms of digital interaction. I’d rather suggest that we also start to pay a bit more attention to the potential ‘real-life’ interaction, taking into account new forms of materiality, and that we start considering embodiment and sensual, especially tactile experience, too. Please do not misunderstand me! I do neither plea for opening up the sphere indefinitely, which would certainly not serve the issue – it would rather end up in randomness; nor do I discard Sandra Gaudenzi’s important note on i-docs.org that the common denominator that links the projects in our field is that they are moving within “the intersection digital interactive technology and documentary practice” and that in which “audience become active agents within documentary”. And in fact, the site also discusses projects that are also described as web-docs, transmedia documentaries, serious games, cross-platform docs, locative docs, docu-games, pervasive media, and so on. However, I do have objections to pin down the ‘nature’ of THE interactive documentary’. I reject boxing myself into one train of thought. Rather, I’d like to keep constantly ‘zooming in’ and ‘zooming out’ to find as many siblings of my ‘open emerging documentary family’ and to start fruitful exchange with far-related ‘cousins’, too. This said, I am very sorry – but I cannot name ONE favourite project as this – again! – would restrict thinking of emerging documentary practices to one kind of phenomenon.