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.

Patient Zero, Parasite, Epidemic Agent: The Player’s Role in Watch Dogs Legion.

 

Presenters: Riccardo Retez and Luca Miranda
Registration Number: 028
Institution: IULM University, Milan, Italy
Abstract: This research investigates the figure of the player as a pathogen agent able to impose a propagating form of homologation within the video game Watch Dogs: Legion (Ubisoft 2020). The study involves the analysis of the role of the player in Watch Dogs: Legion, according to a multiple configuration: as patient zero, parasite, and epidemic agent. Therefore, the role of the player is potentially expressed through his being a starting point of contagion, a parasite that raids and bends the bodies of NPCs (non-player characters) and an epidemic agent—a potentially uncontrolled transmission medium. Rafizadeh, Manavirad and Liberati (2020) state that in video games, players are able to move and progress in the interactive world of the game while watching the avatar from an external point of view. The relation between virtual worlds and players can be highlighted as a form of social and political agency. As Daniel Muriel and Garry Crawford (2018) asserted, video games can provide perspectives on political actions, as well as on the hallmarks of the contemporary. By choosing a specific role, the player expresses political, social, and anthropological attitudes, useful to frame cultural configurations and visual representations through relational models—amidst instances in contemporary texts. Watch Dogs: Legion is set in a totalitarian London of a hypothetical future. Johnson Craig and Tulloch Rowan (2017) stated that the video game landscape is permeated by dystopian settings, where social collapse and totalitarian frames are amongst the favourite scenarios depicted. As stated by Jacob Aron (2020), in the game there is not one or more narratively relevant avatars: the player can impersonate any NPC in the game world. Since this contagion is the fundamental mechanic of the experience, this paper shows how it is not the NPC to represent and be subject to an idea of homologation—a standardized concept in the video game industry—but how it is the player himself who imposes a propagating form of homologation— with his tastes, choices, and political, social and anthropological behaviours. Regarding the game narrative framework, it is possible to state that the totalitarian form implemented in the game design—through narrative and gameplay dynamics—is addressed by the player across an epidemic process and expression. Compared to the video game’s trend to homologate the player to ideologies, constructs, and mechanics of the product, the analysed text proposes an inverse process. The paper argues that as an epidemic agent, the player both generates and fights (as a network) a process of homologation, creating kindred avatars and tackling totalitarianism.

Bio: Riccardo Retez
Riccardo Retez is a PhD student in Visual and Media studies at IULM University, Milan. His research project investigates the behaviour and attitude of the game live streaming spectator through phenomena of social, economic and sexual consumption. He received a Master's Degree in Television, Cinema and New Media at IULM University in 2019 and a Bachelor’s Arts Degree in Graphic Design and Multimedia at the LABA of Florence in 2017. He recently published his first academic book, Machinima vernacolare (Concrete Press 2020) and has also contributed to academic publications in journals (Ludica 2020; Eracle Journal 2021) and volumes (Machinima, The State of Art 2021).

Bio: Luca Miranda
Luca Miranda is an independent researcher and artist that lives and works in Italy. His research is focused on game and visual studies, the relationship between reality and simulation, and the aesthetic potential of the avatar. He experiments with game photography, machinima and visual investigations. In 2020, he received a Master’s Degree in TV, Cinema and New Media at IULM University in Milan and in 2016 a Bachelor’s Degree in Media and Art at the University of Bologna. In 2018, he co-founded Eremo, a Milanese artistic collective, and since 2020 he collaborates as a curator with the Milan Machinima Festival. His first book, Giocare a camminare, will be published in 2021.