Campus Reboot

 

Presenter: Susan Cardillo

Registration Number: 001
Institution: University of Hartford, Connecticut, USA

Abstract: Campus Reboot is a crowd-sourced, interactive and collaborative web-based documentary project and course. The project will be a living document of the historical times of college during the Covid19 pandemic and its aftermath. Working with 15 colleges around the world, students created videos, based on prompts, to share their feelings about college during Covid. Campus Reboot allows students to not only create works that speak to the voice of their generation, in the midst of a historical pandemic, but it also allows students to work with the footage from other schools, around the world, to create a broader story of our times. According to Nichols (2001), documentary projects are about telling stories concerning our shared world and how we want it to be. This generation grew in participatory art, video and community to begin the discovery that documentary could be about making purposeful stories with people rather than just about them (Rose, n.d.). This project uses crowd-sourced documentary to tell important stories and create a rich learning environment. Collaborative, crowd-sourced and interactive sites are all examples of Participatory Media. Participatory sites such as Youtube have changed the landscape of digital video storytelling. It can also be argued that social media sites are the new breeding ground for both collaborative and crowd-sourced video work. Campus Reboot uses Youtube as a cloud-based participatory site for video uploads and currently Wix as its cloud-based website placeholder and Klynt interactive software to create the home base. Collaborative documentary allows the scope of the documentary to expand with the addition of user-generated content. User-generated content can be remixed, reworked, and built upon to enrich the story (Bhimani, 2012). According to the MIT Open Documentary Lab, collaborative or co-created documentaries interpret the world, and seek to change it, through a lens of equity and justice (Clark & Cizek, 2019). Enabling students to learn and create in this international environment affords them new ways to interpret, understand and engage in the world through the experiences and insights of their peers. With interactive documentary the viewer is invited to become a creative partner in the story. It also enables a global access at any time through many entrances, including social networks (Uricchio, 2019). All of these documentary styles come together in unison to help both students and instructors work in new and collaborative ways to tell important stories in Campus Reboot.

Bio: Dr. Susan Cardillo has a Doctorate of Computer Science in Emerging Media concentrating on Interactive Documentary (digital storytelling) for Social Change. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Journalism at the University of Hartford. Dr. Cardillo was recently awarded the Innovations in Teaching award, as well as the Women’s Initiative Fellowship at the University of Hartford. Her area of research is Interactive and Micro-Documentary for Social Awareness and Change. Campus Reboot is her latest work, in progress.

Interactive Documentary as Form of Public Narrative in Digital Age: Migration Crises in Borderland and Roxham.

Presenter: Weikun Fan
Registration Number: 061
Institution: Communication University of China/ Utrecht University, the Netherlands
Abstract: This paper will examine how migration crises in North America are represented in two award-winning interactive documentary projects—Borderland launched by National Public Radio (NPR) and Roxham presented by National Film Board of Canada (NFB). Though Borderland focused on the US-Mexico boundary and Roxham is centered on asylum seekers around the US-Canada unofficial border, they both portray detailed stories and imply critical point of views through various combinations of images, texts, video, surface designs, and visual presentation. Drawing on a range of previous literature around major aspects, concepts for interactive documentary and digital narratives, such as shared authorship (Nash, 2012) and user’s active role (Aston & Gaudenzi, 2012), this study probes the terrain of unique features of interactive documentary. Based on reflection on interactivity, hypertextuality, and multimediality that are afforded by digital technology, this project is guided by the main research question: how do features of interactive documentary enable this non-linear storytelling structure to be a new form of public narrative? With the analysis of Borderland and Roxham as case studies, remixes of multimedia visual elements, narrative structures, contributions from users and variation in user’s narrative routes are also discussed within sub-questions: how does the story of individual (figures in projects and producers) open emotional dialogue in those two projects? In what way users can experience the shared values through emotion that may lead to moral choice? Public narrative aims to use personal values to galvanize others into action through storytelling (Ganz, 2010 & 2011). A concept in the leadership of practice notwithstanding, this framework that Ganz embarked upon provides an alternative viewpoint when we tap into the interlocking plots and the power of narrative—story of self, us, and now. Two projects will be analyzed by Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) to evaluate the structure of stories and interactivity constructed by moving images, perspectives and storytelling. MCDA is deployed, especially within the visual intertextuality and interdiscursivity (Wang, 2014), to scrutinize in addition to the interplay between texts, voiceover, visual elements, and editing methods. As a conclusion for the aforementioned paper, I will argue that interactive documentary forms a unique public narrative when tackling social issues, allowing self-experience to intertwine with collective experience, and let individuals meet in this temporal public sphere through authorial expressivity, narrative routes, and interactive participatory engagement.

Bio: Weikun Fan is a second-year PhD student in media studies at Communication University of China examining documentary, audio-visual content distribution and cultural industries. Currently, she is a visiting scholar at Utrecht University, where she conducts research on the shifting landscape of European Documentary funded by the China Scholarship Council. Weikun obtained her BA in Drama, Film and Television Literature with a minor degree in Journalism at Communication University of China, and her MSc in Management (Cultural and Creative Industries) at the University of Sheffield. She worked at Phoenix TV and Cheil Worldwide in media and marketing before starting PhD programme in 2019.

EXPOSED: Documenting COVID-19 in the Criminal Punishment System.

Presenter: Sharon Daniel
Registration Number: 037
Institution: University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
Abstract: In the 15th century, Venetians invented the Quarantine as a protection against the plague. In the Mid-20th century, Americans invented a criminal punishment system based on the model of quarantine in which the disproportionately poor, black or brown "offender” is treated like a pathogen to be isolated and contained. In the 21st century, COVID-19, an actual pathogen, has both exposed and intensified the brutality of that system—prisoners have been stranded in quarantine without adequate food or medication, abandoned and unseen. In the US, over 2 million people are confined in overcrowded, unsanitary, and unsafe environments. Prisoners cannot practice social distancing or use hand sanitizer and are regularly subjected to medical malpractice and neglect. California suspended prison visits on March 11. The Federal Bureau of Prisons and state prison systems across the country rapidly followed suit. The first confirmed case of COVID-19 infection among prisoners in the US was reported on March 21. As coronavirus lockdowns ended visits by lawyers and family members, it became increasingly difficult to know what is going on inside. In late April 2020, a prisoner at Marion Correctional Institution in Ohio—which, at that time, was the largest coronavirus hotspot in the US—wrote the following:
The social category of prisoner qualifies one as undeserving of a decent civilized life. Herein lies the cause of the profound spread of the virus throughout the institution: the collective sense of the undeservingness of prisoners. A vaccination would be nice. Proper P.P.E. would help. But the real cure for our woes is an affirmation of the inalienable entitlement to life for people in prisons and jails.
This hybrid paper/artist presentation will focus on the interactive documentary EXPOSED [https://unjustlyexposed.com], conceived in a state of "emergency," to provide a cumulative public record and evolving history of the coronavirus pandemic’s impact on incarcerated people. EXPOSED, documents the spread of COVID-19, over time, inside prisons, jails, and detention centers across the US, from the perspective of prisoners and their families. Original interviews, combined with quotes, audio clips and statistics collected from a comprehensive array of online publications and broadcasts, are assembled into an interactive timeline that, on each day, offers abundant testimony to the risk and trauma prisoners experience under coronavirus quarantine. EXPOSED launched on October 30, 2020 and will continue to be updated on a weekly basis until the pandemic crisis in carceral spaces across the US is resolved. The scale of the project is intended to reflect the scale of the crisis. For July 8th alone, the timeline includes over 100 statements made by prisoners afflicted with the virus or enduring anxiety, distress, and neglect. The monochrome, image-less, headline-styled interface, which allows viewers to step through thousands of prisoners’ statements, is designed to visualize their collective suffering, signal that the injustices they endure are structural, and demonstrate that the criminal punishment system in the US, itself, constitutes a public health crisis.

Bio: Sharon Daniel is a media artist who creates interactive and participatory documentary artworks addressing issues of social, racial and environmental injustice, focusing principally on mass incarceration and the criminal legal system. Daniel develops innovative online interfaces and multi-media installations that visualize and materialize the testimonies of incarcerated people and marginalized communities. Her work has been exhibited in museums and festivals internationally—most recently: at CPH:DOX, Copenhagen (April-May 2021), in Electronic Literature Organization’s COVID E-Lit exhibition, Bergen, Norway (April 2021), in Barring Freedom, San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA (Oct – May 2021), in the Museum of Capitalism, Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Parsons School of Design, NYC, NY (Oct – Dec 2019) in a solo exhibition Secret Injustices, at the Schmidt Center (US, FL, 2017), as an official selection in the Alternate Realities exhibition at Sheffield Doc|Fest (UK, 2016), and in a solo exhibition titled Convictions at STUK Kunstencentrum, (Belgium, 2013). Daniel’s works have also been shown in museums and festivals such as WRO media art biennial 2011 (Poland), Artefact 2010 (Belgium), Transmediale 08 (Germany), the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival DEAF03 (Netherlands), Ars Electronica (Austria), the Lincoln Center Festival (NY/USA), the Corcoran Biennial (Washington DC) and the University of Paris I (France). Her essays have been published in books, including Female Authorship and the Documentary Image (Oxford University Press, in press), Context Providers (Intellect Press 2011), Database Aesthetics (Minnesota University Press 2007) and the Sarai Reader05, as well as in professional journals such as Cinema Journal, Leonardo, Studies in Documentary Film and Springerin. Her writings and projects have also been published in online journals such as Stretch, Thresholds, and Vectors. Daniel was honored by the Webby Awards in 2008 and the Rockefeller/Tribeca Film Festival New Media Fellowship in 2009. In 2015-16, she was named in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts “YBCA 100”—a list of “the creative minds, makers, and pioneers that are asking the questions and making the provocations that will shape the future of American culture.” She was a 2017 Fulbright Scholar at Ulster University in Art, Design and the Built Environment. Documentation of exhibitions and links to projects can be found at http://sharondaniel.net.

Pin Up! The Interactive Documentary: A Shared Authority.

Presenter: Kathleen Ryan

Registration Number: 007
Institution: University of Colorado Boulder, USA
Abstract: Interactive documentary (i-doc) provides a space for renewal and transformation of filmic conventions. Instead of a linear three-act structure (beginning, middle and end), the i-doc encourages user agency, deconstructs narrative, and erodes directorial authority. Pin Up! The Interactive Documentary offers dozens of potential story paths in its exploration of the intersectional feminist legacy of the pin up. Through clickable on-screen elements, this film excerpt demonstrates one approach to i-doc’s transformational potential.
Pin Up! The Interactive Documentary uses oral history to explore this international subculture. In it, women and men adopt vintage style and advocate for social and political change. Specifically, they use the subculture to advocate for anti-racists practices, to call for body positivity, and to lobby for full equity and acceptance of GLBTQI subcultural members. These advocates do this against a background of historical racism and sexism, which is sometimes echoed in the contemporary subculture.
The i-doc both accepts and attempts to represent the intersectionality present within subculture, and the push-back that some subcultural members feel for their progressive stances. Thus, embedded in the project is the notion of “shared authority.” Within the i-doc itself, as well as in its associated social media projects, the project engages with its subcultural narrators to cede authority from the director to the people who know the subculture best, asking them to tell and interpret their stories within their own terms.
Specifically, the subculture’s experts have been invited to take over the project’s social media feed, at times offering a pointed critique of some of the choices we’ve made in sharing posts. They’ve also been asked to offer feedback on edits of their individual stories before the i-doc went live, and their comments and insights have been incorporated into the project, ranging from doing a minor revision of an edited story to include better b-roll to re-editing a story to reflect a White pin up’s growing recognition of the problematic choices she had made in the past.
This i-doc intentionally uses non-professional storytelling tactics (vertical video, online video recordings, strait to camera interviews) as a way to transform notions of a proper “aesthetic” within the documentary genre. This paper argues that actively approaching the i-doc as a shared authority demonstrates how emerging formats, gamification of storytelling, and non-narrative structures can result in a sense of subcultural authenticity on film—a way to use the documentary format as a way to provide agency to both members of the subculture featured in the project as well as to audience members.

Bio: Kathleen M. Ryan is a documentary filmmaker and oral historian. Her works focus on transformations in storytelling due to shifting media technologies. Her hybrid projects deal with issues of gender, self-identity, visuality and user/participant agency. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her books include Pin Up! the Subculture (Peter Lang, 2020) and her films include Pin Up! The Movie (2015) and Homefront Heroines: The WAVES of World War II (2013). She released an interactive documentary on pin up subculture in 2021 and has an edited collection under contract with Routledge on decolonizing practices in interactive documentary.

Interacting with Gender Violence: Interactive Documentary as a Means of Social Engagement and Affective Mobilization.

 

Presenters: Patricia Nogueira and Inês Amaral
Registration Number: 049
Institution: ISMAI—University of Maia and University of Coimbra, Portugal
Abstract: Interactive documentary presents a fertile opportunity to explore social engagement and intervention for social change since such format provides the audience with the freedom of exploring a variety of contents and delving into the perspective of the story that interests them the most (Aston & Gaudenzi, 2012; Galloway et al., 2007; Nogueira, 2020). Beyond the classic inference that documentary is a representation of reality (Bruzzi, 2000; Grierson, 1934; Nichols, 2001), its interactive form grants a chance of reshaping the narrative and playing an active role in negotiating with reality (Gaudenzi, 2013; Whitelaw, 2002). Regarding interactive environments, several authors (Yaros, 2009; Wiehl, 2009, 2020; Miller & Allor, 2014) argue that interactivity enhances the audience’s emotional engagement and social mobilization. However, there is little or no literature focusing specifically on interactive documentaries and social change. Therefore, the main question is to understand if interactive documentary may effectively engage audiences towards social change, namely, to address gender violence. This paper explores social engagement and affective mobilization through the analysis of two interactive documentaries focused on the representation of women’s violence: Mujeres en Venta (2014), an interactive project denouncing women’s trafficking for sexual exploitation in South America; and The Quipu Project (2014), a collaborative interactive documentary focused on testimonies of women victims of unconsented sterilizations in 1990’s Peru. The complexity and multimodality of web pages present an additional research challenge and presuppose a comprehensive methodological approach (Herring, 2004). As such, we will employ an articulation of methodologies that combines content analysis and discourse analysis (Neuendorf, 2004), drawing a three-dimensional exploration: 1) discourse analysis of the testimonies; 2) the type of media format available in each documentary; 3) the navigation structure designed from the available links. Whereas discourse analysis follows Roman Jakobson’s linguistic meta-functions (1960), to include the various media elements such as still and moving images, graphics, and the navigation interface, we will also conduct a multimodal analysis based on Kress and van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar (2006). An in-depth analysis of the two case studies has concluded that while each interactive documentary presents a different format, as well as distinct strategies of collaboration and engagement, both work as a structuring device for denouncing gender issues and provide to the audience a multifaceted affective encounter with a variety of powerful testimonies and rich materials. Such findings allow us to understand that interactive documentary adopts a diversity of approaches and emerging social engagement practices to address gender violence. Also, preliminary results lead us to consider that interactive documentary is particularly persuasive when blurs the boundaries between representation, advocacy, and social activism, while enhancing the audience’s social engagement and affective mobilization.

Bio: Patrícia Nogueira

Patrícia Nogueira is an Assistant Professor at ISMAI—University of Maia and an invited Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra. She holds a PhD in Digital Media under the University of Texas at Austin - Portugal international program, with a master's degree in Documentary Film and Photography. She is also a documentary filmmaker. Nogueira is a researcher at ICNOVA—iNOVA Media Lab and co-leads the European research group CCVA—Cinema and Contemporary Visual Arts, under NECS. During 2015, Patrícia was in residence at the National Film Board of Canada and in 2016 she was a visiting researcher at the University of Texas at Austin.

Bio: Inês Amaral
Inês Amaral is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra. With a PhD in Communication Sciences from the University of Minho, Inês is a researcher at the Centre for Studies in Communication and Society. She is the PI of project Mediated Young Adults’ Practices: Advancing Gender Justice in and Across Mobile Apps, and a member of the projects teams (De)Coding Masculinities: Towards an Enhanced Understanding of Media’s Role in Shaping Perceptions of Masculinities in Portugal and Deconstructing Risk and Otherness: Hegemonic Scripts and Counter-Narratives on Migrants/Refugees and "Internal Others" in Portuguese and European Mediascapes.

"Walk in your own shoes!" Dismantling the Promise of VR Non-Fiction and Fathoming the Potential of Dis-immersion as Critical Intervention.

Presenter: Anna Wiehl
Registration Number: 060
Institution: University of Bayreuth, Germany
Abstract: This presentation focuses on "new narratives" dealing with the global issue of migration, which, however, stands only as a paradigm of other forms of systemic injustice and discrimination. Taking paradigmatic projects—among others Clouds over Sidra (2015) and This Room (2017)—I will set off to look behind the promise of interactive, immersive narratives to let users “walk in someone else’s shoes.”
I will explore in how far the specific affordances through which the documentary experience is enabled affect the engagement with content and the potential transformative impact the producers are aiming at. Are we dealing with an exploitive gaze, a form of narcissistic spectatorship, are we drawn into a “human rights spectacle,” or do new forms of narrative enable response-able witnessing? And which role do empathy, immersion, presence, and co-presence play in this context?
The theoretical framework of the contribution brings together
- recent theories of VR non-fiction (among others Rose 2018; 2019, Nash 2018, Sutherland 2015, Bailenson 2018) which draw on the tradition of documentary theory and approaches to interactive storytelling,
- findings in neurosciences and social psychology (e.g. Bertrand et al. 2018, Schutte & Stilinović 2017, Farmer 2019), especially as to concepts of immersion, empathy and presence in VR environments,
- and sets them into relation with media-ethical considerations coming from critical theory and critical whiteness studies. The background of the presentation is the early hype around VR non-fiction as "the ultimate empathy machine" (Milk 2015). As such, it was only consistent that NGOs embrace the technology to raise awareness for their causes. However, more recent discourses question the power of VR to achieve social change—not only as the depiction of marginalized groups remains stuck in stereotypes, but especially as the regimes of gaze are accompanied by moral risks—mainly “improper distance” (Nash 2018). Through the uncritical transportation of the “I”/“eye” of the spectator, VR brings forth problematic socio-cultural, socio-political as well as media-ethical constellations: first of all, it runs the risk of dehistoricizing and depoliticizing complex issues, such as migration and race issues; also, the regimes of gaze realized in many configurations potentially reinscribing hegemonic, colonial points-of-view; foremost, however, uncritical exploitation of the affordances of VR invites the spectators to impose their truth over the actual experiences of “others,” colonizing their feelings.
These challenges in view, I suggest a form of critical estrangement and to the opportunity of new narratives to induce not primarily immersion but to oscillate between immersion and dis-immersion, blurring documentary factuality and artistic fictionality, arguing that the potential of new narratives does not consist in its amplification of visual illusion and immediate affective response but rather in its ability to model a different concept of subjectivity and inter-subjectivity altogether, questioning established regimes of gaze and perspective on the “self” in relation to others.

Bio: Anna Wiehl has been a research fellow with i-docs at the Digital Cultures Research Centre, Bristol, UK and a lecturer and research assistant at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. Her transdisciplinary research focuses on digital media cultures, documentary practices and interactive storytelling. Apart from her academic career, she has worked among others for the transmedia broadcasters ARTE and Bayerischer Rundfunk. From 2017 to 2019, Anna directed a research project on interactive documentary and finished her habilitation project The “New” Documentary Nexus. Networked|Networking in interactive assemblages. Currently, she is leading a BMBF research network on The Documentary and the Digital.