Interactive Documentary: Theory and Debate 2021001594, 2021001595, 9781138631465, 9781138631472, 9781315208862

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INTERACTIVE DOCUMENTARY

Tracing continuities in digital and documentary practices, this book is a study of interactive documentary from the perspective of documentary culture. Exploring the dizzying array of new documentary forms that have emerged in the past ten years, the book is grounded in the analysis of multiple recent examples of digital documentary work, drawing out the key issues that the work raises. These issues provide a starting point for theoretical reflection, with each chapter developing concepts and frameworks to facilitate thinking with and through interactive documentary. The book explores questions of polyvocality, participation, and political voice, as well as the sociality and performativity of digital documentary practice. By thinking deeply and critically about interactive documentary practice, the book charts the many and various ways in which interactive documentaries claim the real – contingently, partially, or, in some cases, collectively. Each chapter draws on a range of examples – from digital games to data visualisations, database documentaries to virtual reality – demonstrating how we might engage with these ‘unstable’ digital texts. The book will be particularly valuable for students and researchers keen to make connections between documentary and digital media scholarship. Kate Nash is Associate Professor in the School of Media and Communication, University of Leeds. Her research explores the intersections of documentary practice and digital media culture. She has published widely in leading journals and is co-editor (with Craig Hight) of Studies in Documentary Film.

INTERACTIVE DOCUMENTARY Theory and Debate

Kate Nash

First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Kate Nash The right of Kate Nash to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Nash, Kate (College teacher), author. Title: Interactive documentary : theory and debate / Kate Nash. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021001594 (print) | LCCN 2021001595 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138631465 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138631472 (paperback) | ISBN 9781315208862 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Documentary films. | Motion picture audiences. | Interactive multimedia. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.D6 N265 2021 (print) | LCC PN1995.9.D6 (ebook) | DDC 070.1/8--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021001594 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021001595 ISBN: 978-1-138-63146-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-63147-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-20886-2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781315208862 Typeset in Bembo by Taylor & Francis Books

For Andrew, Jamie, and Lexie

CONTENTS

List of figures Acknowledgements

x xi

Introduction: Interactive documentary: theory and debate

1

Interactive documentary as (hybrid) documentary 3 Dimensions of interactivity 7 Engaging realities, shifting regimes of truth 11 Interactive Documentary: outline and approach 12 1

Documentary databases: on (not) telling stories in the possibility space Documentary database desires 18 Structuring the possibility space: the braided voice of the database documentary 23 Narrative databases 27 The database as narrative plus archive 27 Forking path narratives 29 Parallel narratives 30 Modular narrative 31 Non-narrative database documentaries 32 Categorical databases 33 The mosaic database 34 The poetic database 36

17

viii Contents

2

Participatory intensities: exploring interactive documentary practice

39

Participation: a response to the problem of power in documentary making 40 Interactive documentary: a participatory continuum 44 Framing a microanalysis of interactive documentary participation 48 Interactive documentary participation: exploring participatory intensities 50 Participatory intensities and documentary practices 58 3

Interactive documentary and the political: civic cultures and convening publics

61

Nurturing citizens: interactive documentary and civic cultures 62 4

Reality effects: simulation as interactive documentary practice

82

Simulation: imitating and approximating realities 84 Revealing realities: documentary practice as touchstone 87 Simulation and the documentary ambition of digital games 93 Conclusions 100 5

Stepping into the story for good: virtual reality (VR) and empathy in the context of first-person media

102

Immersion and presence: VR as first-person media 103 Being there or being them: exploring first-person positioning in VR experiences 107 Being there: tourist, encounter, witness 107 VR for good: the pro-social VR agenda and the empathy debate 112 Stepping into the story for good: possibilities and further questions 119 6

The petabyte (anti)sublime: big data, knowledge, and interactive documentary Documentary and ‘big data’: two pre-digital ideas 122 Big data: the myth of epistemic revolution 126 The sublime and anti-sublime: data visualisation and knowledge 128 Exploring digital oralities: interactive documentary and data 130 Beyond visualisation: gesturing toward a broader research agenda 137

121

Contents ix

Conclusion: from ‘mass extinction’ to renewal?

140

A mass extinction? 140 From algorithms to explainable AI? 143 Understanding ‘users’/‘participants’ (in context) 145 Questions of ethics 146 Bibliography Index

148 163

FIGURES

1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4

Filming Revolution screenshot Racing Home screenshot Public Secrets screenshot A Polish Journey screenshot After 6/4 screenshot Cronulla Riots screenshot Fibonacci 2 screenshot 18 Days in Egypt screenshot Man With a Movie Camera: Global Remake screenshot One Millionth Tower screenshot Big Stories Small Towns screenshot The Whiteness Project screenshot I See Change screenshot Question Bridge screenshot Lunch, Love, Community screenshot 51 Sprints screenshot This War of Mine screenshot 1979 Revolution screenshot Walden: map of the game space Poppy Field screenshot Out of Sight screenshot Wind Map screenshot On Broadway screenshot

21 23 25 28 30 34 36 45 51 53 55 67 72 75 78 90 95 97 99 131 133 134 135

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am very grateful to friends and colleagues at the School of Media and Communication, University of Leeds, for the very many lively discussions that have shaped the ideas presented here. I would particularly like to thank all those, at Leeds and elsewhere, who read and commented on various works in progress: John Corner, Craig Hight, Mandy Rose, Stephen Coleman, Chris Anderson, and Paul Cooke. The ideas presented here owe much to your input and encouragement. And special thanks to my family for their patience, love, and support.

INTRODUCTION Interactive documentary: theory and debate

Documentarians must embrace the new technologies. We can take what we know about traditional documentary and fuse it to what’s great about new media, next media and now media. For Generation D (as in Digital), living in the Digi-age, the documentary is being reincarnated as the digital Document. One which may embody elements of fiction, reality, animation, graphics, cyber-text languages, audio, TV or games design. Content for all platforms and delivery systems. In our new world, definitions dissolve, new forms emerge. They are about blend, mash, transboundaries, transgressions and trans-genres. They expand the language of acceptable cinema. Screen culture can bring reality and poetics to the public, interface to interface. It provides absolutely essential information needed to sustain the future. (Wintonick 2013)1

Documentarians are embracing new technologies. They have revealed themselves not only as ‘technological opportunists’ keen to take up those technologies that best achieve their goals (Ellis 2012: 34), but also as ‘technological explorers’, keen to experiment with emerging technologies with a view to discovering their uses for documentary practice. The result has been an expansion of documentary languages, forms and practices that are reimagining the ‘rich, generically ambitious idea of “documentary”’ (Corner 2002b: 146). Interactive documentary represents one key, albeit fragile and highly experimental, field that seeks to explore the documentary idea in light of digital technologies and cultures. The proliferation of neologisms – idocs, docmedia, web-docs, docu-games, transmedia, and immersive docs – give some indication of the momentum within this nascent field. However, it would be premature to claim a revolution in documentary practice. The significance of interactive documentary can’t easily be demonstrated in terms of audience engagement, industry commitment or project budgets. Interactive documentary, as Dovey (2017) has argued, remains a relatively niche field of media production. However, it is an important niche for understanding (among other things): new DOI: 10.4324/9781315208862-1

2 Introduction

formal possibilities that invite new modes of storytelling (or, indeed, tools for resisting narrative closure); the ways in which a desire for immediacy and first-hand knowledge are prompting an exploration of immersive technologies; new modes of political activity and the possibility of linking documentary media more directly to forms of political action; and the ways in which the potentials of big data might shape what it means to know reality through documentary media. Interactive documentary is, in Dovey’s terms (2017: 273) a ‘seedbed for future innovation’, that invites reflection on the very idea of documentary. For documentary scholars, not to mention researchers from other fields, interactive documentary represents a rich intellectual domain. The sometimes complicated relationship between interactivity – with its promises of responsiveness, agency, and indeterminacy – seems to cut across all that we know about documentary – as rhetorical, as communicative, and as ‘sober’. As Hudson and Zimmerman (2015) argue, based on their analysis of more than 130 art and documentary projects, digital media destabilise ‘analogue theories of media’ challenging notions of representation, genre, textuality, and authorship. While documentary has arguably long been a multi-media tradition existing in textual, photographic, and audio forms, as well as film and television, it is with the last two media that it is most closely associated. As a result, the way in which we think about and study documentary, as Hight (2008) has argued, centres on a cannon of film and (to a lesser extent) television texts. Digital media complicate this picture, asking us to consider algorithms, software, and shifting relationships between realities, audiences (reimagined as ‘users’), technologies, documentarians, and discourses. There is a sense of profound change, of new possibilities, and traditions overturned. But is it a question of rupture as Hudson and Zimmerman (and others) suggest? Or are the changes we are witnessing more ‘evolutionary than revolutionary’ (Winston et al 2017: 9)? To what extent are digital technologies really challenging established documentary practices and cultures? Are their potentials not, to a large degree, being tamed by the preferences of audiences, the demands of broadcasters and the economics of platforms? Such debates have been at the heart of the emerging field of interactive documentary studies and it is my aim to engage them throughout this book. However, as I hope to demonstrate, interactive documentary is both evolutionary and revolutionary. The idea of documentary has never been static, decided or defined. Consequently, as documentary makers look to explore the possibilities of digital technologies and the cultures that surround them, they look both back to established documentary practice and forward to what documentary might become. Digital technologies and cultures are shaping documentary practice, but in many instances the ways in which documentary makers are engaging with new possibilities can only be understood as a ‘dialogue between past and future’ (Uricchio 2014). Interactive Documentary: Theory and Debate is a study of this highly experimental field of media production that seeks to chart the ongoing evolution of the documentary idea and contribute to theoretical development at the intersection of documentary studies and digital media. It does so by engaging key debates in the

Introduction 3

field and, in particular, exploring shifting ideas about truth and knowledge as well as questions of social impact. Across their range interactive documentaries explore what it means to make claims about reality, taking up digital technologies in contexts where truth, and the idea of making truth claims in the media, has become vulnerable. The idea of documentary, as I will explore in more detail below, is wrapped up with the idea(l) of truth and its complexities. It draws attention to questions about the many relationships between images and reality, the nature of rhetoric and discourse, and the ethics of representing reality. Interactive documentary calls for a re-examination of these questions, asking us to consider how forms of interactivity might shape our ambition to document realities. What, then, of the theoretical ambition of the book? There has been a general sense amongst documentary scholars that the transformations wrought by digital technologies require a reappraisal (if not radical reworking) of documentary theory. Rather than throwing the theoretical baby out with the conceptual bathwater, my aim in exploring debates in the field has been to draw on and interrogate existing concepts and extend them by making connections with other fields of study. It is a book that seeks to highlight patterns across the range of interactive documentary work with a view to developing general, albeit necessarily partial, concepts that might inform future research. By way of framing the chapters ahead, I will clear some conceptual ground by exploring interactive documentary. My aim is not definitional as such, although I do aim to give some justification for the necessary limits of the work that has informed this study.

Interactive documentary as (hybrid) documentary I want to begin by considering what it might mean to approach interactive documentary as documentary. Inherent in the very description of the field is a claim to some kind of continuity with the idea of documentary. However, for many interactive documentary scholars, digital media have brought about a profound discontinuity with audio-visual practice, such that documentary as a frame of reference becomes tenuous. Sandra Gaudenzi (2013: 73) has argued, for instance, that interactive documentary is not the extension of linear documentary in the digital domain, but rather ‘something else’ that is distinct by virtue of its materiality, responsiveness, and spatial extension (see also Hight 2008). More than once in the writing of this book I have found myself questioning why it makes sense to think of particular digital objects as documentary. Is it the case, as some critics have suggested (Almeida and Alvelos 2010) that generic claims have been made too loosely to work that no longer looks and feels like documentary? Does documentary merely serve as a useful category for creators, ‘audiences’ or funders? In some cases, a degree of formal, aesthetic or functional continuity is evident. Audio-visual databases and 360-degree video works, for example, might be seen to align fairly unproblematically with documentary as an audio-visual (cinematic) tradition. And yet, when it comes to other projects that to varying degrees position themselves as ‘interactive documentaries’, family resemblances are certainly stretched: Artificial: Room One 2, created by Dutch theatre group Ontroerend Goed

4 Introduction

invites the user to participate in a ‘conversation’ with an artificial intelligence with a view to exploring questions of humanity; The Listen Tree 3 can be described as an ‘audio haptic display’ that introduces sound and vibration into trees producing the ‘almost magical’ sense that sound is coming from a tree (Dublon and Portocarrerro 2014)4; Or finally, The Sheep Project 5, a data visualisation of 10,000 hand drawn sheep that draws attention to the value of individual difference. Each of these projects is included in the MIT Open Documentary Docubase6 ‘an interactive curated database of people, projects, and technologies transforming documentary in the digital age’. While these projects might stretch our preconceptions about documentary, there are several ways in which the idea of documentary might usefully focus critical engagement. I do not wish to ‘define’ interactive documentary per se. As Corner (2008) has argued, scholarship will never ‘resolve’ the issue of definitions and borderlines, these will actually become more uncertain and ‘thin’ as audio-visual culture becomes more intergenerically fluid. However, approaching documentary as a description of socially oriented media practices and also as an intellectual tradition highlights the value of foregrounding continuity in spite of obvious differences. A concern with practices of documenting has been central to attempts to define interactive documentary. One of the most widely cited definitions has been offered by Sandra Gaudenzi (2013: 31–2) who states simply that ‘any project that starts with an intention to document the “real” and does so by using digital interactive technology will be considered an interactive documentary’. The tremendous inclusiveness of this definition has obvious value in the face of the diversity of the projects described above. Taken broadly, a focus on doing provides a useful starting point for engaging with digital media as inviting forms of action, play, navigation, dialogue, and their significance as a means by which to engage reality. However, I would argue that conceptualising documenting as practice requires further nuance. Any number of digital sources of information – from real estate and shopping sites, to news and weather apps – can be said to ‘document the real’, although they are not typically seen as interactive documentary. What is missing is a sense of documentary practices as claiming the real, as oriented toward ‘making sense’ of materials that carry the ‘ethical charge of the real’ (Hight and Harindranath 2014). Across their complexity documentaries ‘aim at the historical world directly’, asking the audience to consider that what they see and hear (and increasingly do) as relevant, to some extent, beyond the documentary itself (Nichols 1991: 111). Documentaries mediate an engagement with reality, selecting and arranging elements with a view to interpreting, explaining, persuading. They offer a point-of-view, ‘a distinct way of seeing our shared world’ (Nichols 2016: 74). Interactive documentaries have similarly been understood as seeking to fashion a ‘coherent and meaningful’ experience through the strategic organisation of dynamic content (O’Flynn 2012: 144). A focus on practice, on documenting, highlights not only a diversity of action, but also the ways in which those actions are understood to comment on or connect with (however indirectly) reality.

Introduction 5

Following from this orientation toward reality is a concern with the social functions of documentary. Corner (2002a: 258) has argued that the social functions of documentary are key to understanding documentary as a media tradition. While Corner was concerned to chart the emergence of a post-documentary televisual culture that prioritised entertainment over ‘traditional’ documentary functions – the civic, the journalistic, and what he described broadly as ‘alternative perspective’ – his functions serve to highlight a certain continuity with much interactive documentary. Similarly, Renov’s (1993) fundamental documentary desires – to record, preserve and reveal, to persuade and promote, to analyse and interrogate and to express (Renov 1993) – provide a useful frame for thinking about the purposes of interactivity. In contrast to Corner’s analysis of a post-documentary televisual culture, the projects that will be considered across the chapters ahead suggest an explicit engagement with and revival/ expansion of documentary’s social orientation that warrant consideration within a documentary frame. While it is important not to dismiss the entertainment value of interactive documentary, I aim to highlight the ways in which digital technologies and cultures align with, and in many cases expand and/or re-imagine documentary as a social project. Interactive documentary can also be located within the ‘domain of documentary’ (Nichols 1991) at the level of practitioner communities, institutions, and as a field of inquiry. Interactive documentary has, over the past 15 or so years, become an established field of practice, albeit one that, as I have noted above, remains relatively precarious and marginal (see Dovey 2017). It is possible to point to an industry–academic base in the form of international conferences such as Sheffield Doc-Fest’s interactive programmes and IDFA’s Doc Lab7 which have developed into key showcases of interactive documentary work. Broadcasters like the Canadian National Film Board, Al Jazeera and ARTE have been significant producers of interactive documentary as have independent production companies like Upian8 and the Dutch Submarine Channel9 which combine interactive documentary making with audio-visual documentary production. While there is a clear relationship between interactive documentary and the documentary industry, there are also new intersections – museums and galleries, the publishing sector and journalism being particularly significant. On the academic side, I-docs10, a biennial conference on interactive (and now immersive) documentary which began in 2011, has now developed into an active research network. MIT’s Docubase11 serves as a repository of nearly 400 works that, more or less explicitly, signal a documentary intent but which are also linked to research activity at the MIT Open documentary lab. Scholarly explorations of interactive documentary come from a range of disciplinary perspectives – media and communication studies, digital media studies, computer communication, design and geography – although the most sustained work explicitly engages with the field of documentary studies (the journal Studies in Documentary Film being a particularly important repository of interactive documentary scholarship). While often seeking to move beyond a narrow focus on questions of representation, textuality, and political-economy, interactive documentary scholarship is bound up

6 Introduction

with understanding the ways in which interactive documentaries provide access to, and shape, our understanding of the world. There is a fundamental concern with questions of power, and the potential reconfiguration of power relations. A concern with the politics and ethics of representation has been extended as scholars have sought to understand documentary practices as networked relationships – between technologies, individuals and discourses. There is also a concern to understand how digital technologies and cultures, contextualised within shifting regimes of truth, shape how we experience the ‘charge of the real’ in the contemporary media landscape. To approach interactive documentary as documentary it is also necessary to acknowledge its hybridity. Hybridity in media studies describes various forms of melding at the level of texts and representations, culture, and the operation of media systems (amongst other things). The hybridity of digital media is suggested by the concept of remediation, practices of borrowing and refashioning ‘old’ media within the digital realm (Bolter and Grusin 2000). It is also reflected in the idea of convergence, the amalgamation of technologies and functions. For documentary scholars, hybridity has been used to describe the melding of modes or styles of representation (animated documentary), generic hybridity (docu-drama or mockumentary), and the imbrication of fact and fictional elements across a range of styles. In the case of interactivity many of these forms of hybridity remain relevant. There is certainly much representational hybridity, including digitally generated imagery of various kinds, but also the use of text, immersive imagery, data visualisation and so on. It is also possible to consider formal and generic hybridity, as in the case of documentary games, and database documentaries. Two other forms of hybridity will be explored in the course of the chapters ahead: real–virtual hybridity, the ways in which interactive documentaries might layer (quite literally in the case of mixed reality projects) or blend the real and the virtual; and hybrid media logics, the ways in which interactive documentary might blend representation and action. What then is interactive documentary? In the chapters ahead I will explore projects that seek to ‘make sense’ of and/or make claims about reality, engaging them from a particular perspective, and offering a (more or less) coherent experience. Many, although not all, of the projects that I will focus on describe themselves (or have been categorised by others) as having some degree of documentary ambition. In many cases, there is a degree of continuity in terms of look and feel – a certain formal or aesthetic connection with documentary as an audio-visual practice, although as noted above it is a field characterised by much hybridity. The social functions of interactive documentary are, as I hope to demonstrate, an important point of continuity. A study such as this cannot help but define its object in the process of seeking to describe it. The initial outline I have sketched here gives some indication of the choices and logic underpinning this project. There are, of course, blind spots. There is a not insignificant body of interactive documentary work produced at the intersection of documentary theatre and live performance as well as work that might be described as documentary installation, designed to be experienced within the gallery (see Aston 2017 and Hudson and Zimmerman 2015 for a more specific treatment of such work). While

Introduction 7

this work is significant, it is, on the whole, relatively inaccessible. I have sought to focus on works that are generally accessible to those with internet access.

Dimensions of interactivity If a focus on documentary suggests continuity, interactivity points toward digital media as fluid, indeterminate, and relational. Interactivity is a term that, much like documentary, seems intuitively comprehensible but which, on closer inspection seems to resist precise explication. This reflects, at least in part, the diverse disciplinary contexts in which interactivity has become a focus of study, as well as the very different phenomena that might be described as interactive. Even limiting our focus to documentary, interactivity might be invoked to describe: the ability of a user to choose content from a database of documentary content; the ability of a documentary project to respond to the behaviour of a user with or without her knowledge; the potential for interaction between users that is facilitated through a documentary project or perhaps more participatory engagements with documentary projects such as the ability to comment on content. As this far from exhaustive list suggests, interactivity could describe user-to-user, user-to-system or user-to-document relationships (McMillan 2002). In looking closely at the significance of interactivity from the perspective of documentary practice, I have previously (Nash 2014a) pointed to various dimensions of interactivity. I will build on that work here, ultimately drawing on concepts of performance to bring the various dimensions into dialogue. Intuitively, interactivity describes forms of responsiveness, exchange, and adaptation. In relation to digital media, it points toward a key characteristic of computers, namely their ability to respond to the actions and/or inputs of ‘users’12. In contrast to fixed/analogue media that are characterised by a logic of transmission, computational media offer opportunities for ‘two-way’ flows of information, from the simple act of choosing content to more complex forms of communicative exchange. On one level documentary interactivity might be understood as the sum of those ways in which users are able to have influence over documentary content/experience (to varying degrees). This draws attention to the process of interaction, what the user does in response to documentary. However, we might equally understand responsiveness in relational terms, conceptualising user actions and their consequences as fundamental to interactive documentary, conceived of as a socio-technical assemblage. In developing her concept of the living documentary, for example, Sandra Gaudenzi (2013) takes inspiration from second order cybernetic thinking to conceptualise interactivity not as a matter of control or the two-way flow of information, but as a process that involves users, technologies and documentary makers. Thinking about documentary as an autopoietic assemblage, interactivity becomes a process of involvement that links user, system, and content. Rendering meaning potentially indeterminate, it draws attention to relationality, process, and meaning as a field of possibility. Interactivity might also be understood, from the perspective of the user, as experiential. This shifts the focus to the experience of action – touching, moving,

8 Introduction

clicking, typing, and so on – and the potential to produce knowledge or understanding through embodied experience. While there has been a tendency to foreground physicality as distinguishing interaction from interpretation, sharp distinctions between mind and body, interpretation and action, actually work to obscure precisely what is most interesting about documentary interactivity, namely the opportunities it affords for forms of embodied and affective engagement and knowledge that emerge through connections that interactive documentary makes between thought and action. Miles’ (2014a) appeal to the Deleuzian movement image as a heuristic goes some way in its conceptualisation of interactivity as a relationship between perception, affect, and action. Noticing, deciding, and doing describe the various stages of interaction as a cognitive/affective and physical process. What matters in interactive documentary, Miles suggests, is the interval between noticing and doing, the moment of decision which brings a subjective and experiential dimension to the fore. The responses that interactive documentaries invite and the forms of experiential knowing that are produced will be a recurring focus across the chapters ahead. Finally, I want to draw attention to the relationship between interactivity and documentary discourse. If, as I have suggested above, documentary is conceptualised as a mode of communication that seeks to produce ‘a distinct way of seeing our shared world’, it matters greatly what role the user is offered in the process of shaping this vision and the significance of her actions in terms of this vision of reality. To approach interactivity from the perspective of discourse is to ask how meanings emerge in the networked relations between users, technologies, documentarians. It draws attention to the ways in which documentaries confer value on their subjects, frame practices of documenting, and enable or constrain opportunities for action. Within documentary studies the concept of voice (Nichols 1983) has done much to draw attention to the documentary maker’s control of documentary discourse. Interactive documentary practice and scholarship has been shaped by a sense that digital technologies and cultures inherently challenge documentarians’ singular point of view, ushering in forms of polyvocality and the possibility of radically reconfigured ‘representations’ of reality. The malleability of the documentary text and the agency of the user have been celebrated as opening up meaning for debate, challenging positivist epistemology, and making space for different ways of knowing (Hudson and Zimmerman 2015: 101). While there are significant opportunities for shifting power in the relationships between audiences/users, documentary makers, technologies, and subjects in the digital domain, a concern with the discursive dimension of interactivity draws attention to the need for critical engagement with the ways in which actions, contributions and/or experiences are rendered meaningful in the context of interactive documentary. Before drawing together these lines of thinking, I want to briefly state what I think interactivity is not (or at least, is not always, or necessarily). There has been a tendency to conceptualise interactivity as marking a shift on the part of the audience from passive to active. On many levels this is not surprising. Interacting with a documentary does seem to give the user some kind of role in the creation of the documentary ‘text’ itself; the physicality that interactivity demands suggests action above and beyond that

Introduction 9

which is required to interpret audio-visual documentary; and it does seem natural to suppose that the need to make decisions marks a significant shift in the quality of engagement with documentary. While these may turn out to be true statements about the experiences produced/enabled by some interactive documentaries in some contexts, as I am to show in the chapters ahead there is much variation in what interactivity entails, how it is rendered meaningful (or not) and the extent to which it corresponds with forms of social agency. The distinction between active and passive ultimately, I suggest, obscures the very different ways in which interactivity shapes documentary experience. I now want to bring these several ideas together, to make the case for conceptualising interactivity from the perspective of performance. As I have noted, interactivity points in several directions: toward textual fluidity, responsiveness and indeterminacy, to the subjective dimension of user experience and to the domain of discourse, and the ways in which our actions take on meaning (or not). As interactive documentary scholars have demonstrated, interactivity invites a consideration of relationality, process, involvement, experience, discourse, interpretation, and action. Performance provides a theoretical framework that connects action, process, affect, and involvement. It is a key term in documentary scholarship, although as with interactivity one that points in several apparently discrete directions – describing the actions of those who appear before the camera, the performative as descriptive of specific practices of documenting, or as a way of engaging with documentary practice. Approaching interactivity as performative, I want to draw out two ideas: performance as a negotiation between various agents within the context of a creative process and performance as an opportunity for (self) presentation. These are two perspectives (as opposed to two different functions or types of interactivity) that allow for a rich and critical exploration of the values of interactivity. Bruzzi (2000) approaches documentary as a performative process, drawing on the speech act theory of L.J. Austin. Taking aim at simplistic claims about the transparency of the documentary image, she makes the case for thinking about documentary practice as a performative utterance, an act of communication ‘that simultaneously both describe[s] and perform[s] an action’. Documentary less a representation of reality, but rather a creative act grounded in the ‘multi-layered, performative exchange between subjects, film-makers/apparatus and spectators’ (2000: 10); it is a series of actions that produce subjectivities, bodies, relationships, and discourses. There are parallels between this performative account of documentary and a sense of interactivity as creating ‘living’ autopoietic and generative documentary systems (Gaudenzi 2013). A sense of the performative here makes space for the agencies of computation and software (see also Hight 2017), foregrounding indeterminacy, fluidity, and relationality. Performance also provides a metaphor for engaging the ways in which documentary as a socio-technical assemblage is structured, with implications for interactivity. Interactive documentaries may be indeterminate, offering various opportunities for action (and in some cases agency) but this does not imply the absence of structuring elements. Kinder (2002) develops a performative account of

10 Introduction

interaction as a form of interpretation. For Kinder, digital interactivity is a performance that engages the user like ‘an actor interpreting a role, or a musician interpreting a score, or a dancer performing traditional moves, contributing her own idiosyncratic inflections and absorbing the experience into her personal archive of memories’. Interaction invites creativity and collaboration; it offers freedom, but it does so within a field of possibilities that is structured – socially, technologically, and discursively. In performing the documentary through interaction, the user acts and is compelled to act, shaping and being shaped by her involvement in documentary in ways that she may, or may not, be able to appreciate. This performative view of interactivity will be developed in the chapters ahead. Approaching interactivity and questions of agency through a performative lens calls into consideration the relationships between technological formations, documentary practices, and discourses. A second strand of analysis focuses more explicitly on spaces that interactive documentaries create for (self) expression. As with those forms of audio-visual performance that create spaces for individuals to perform explicitly for the camera, interactive documentaries can invite the contribution of personal stories, images, comments etc, a form of performance that parallels (to some degree) the contributions of ‘social actors’ to audio-visual documentary. Such contributions may foreground a sense of transparency, contributing to the production of reality effects. Other invitations to perform may produce a more explicitly ‘performative’ (Nichols 1994: 92–106) process of documenting in which realism is ‘deferred, dispersed, interrupted, and postponed’ and other possibilities for engaging and revealing realities are explored. Performance here draws attention to affect and emotion, to the body and forms of ‘somatic evidence’ (Walker 2013). It invites a consideration of the ways in which interactive media invite embodied performance (such as augmented and virtual reality documentary and some forms of game play). In such cases the invitation to perform serves as a means by which to evoke a sense of reality. To view performance from this perspective is to explore its potential as a means by which to reveal reality through a focus on experience. Taken together these two dimensions of performance bring a focus to explorations of interactivity in a documentary context. They highlight sociotechnical encounter and bring to the fore questions of agency and embodiment. Critically, they invite a consideration of documenting as practice. They challenge ‘analogue theories’ of documentary grounded in notions of representation, genre, textuality and authorship (Hudson and Zimmerman 2015). Although as I hope to show in the challenges ahead, these analogue theories remain relevant to interactive documentary since they create the conditions for performativity. The implications of the relationality of documentary media in the digital domain have been, and continue to be, the subject of much debate. Connecting interactivity to notions of documentary performance draws out points of continuity – highlighting, for example, similarities between users’ performances and those of ‘social actors’ or the ways in which we might come to know reality differently through enactment.

Introduction 11

Engaging realities, shifting regimes of truth As I have previously noted, questions of truth and knowledge are a particular focus across the chapters of this book. Truth and the ability of factual media – whether journalistic or documentary – to communicate truths is at the forefront of scholarship and popular media. If the news, not to mention social media, is ‘fake’ and if seeing is no longer believing (a point emphasised by Channel 4’s recent broadcast in the UK of an ‘alternative’ Queen’s Christmas speech) what are the implications for documentary culture and practice? A key strand of documentary scholarship has been concerned to trace the relationships between shifting ‘regimes of truth’ and documentary representation. To understand documentary as a living tradition is to understand how it aligns with broader ‘struggles for power and authority within the historical arena itself’ (Nichols 1991: 33). What is documentary becoming in a context where facts are questioned, expertise challenged, and data is proliferating but what it means is no longer the point? These shifting regimes of truth shape contemporary documentary practice. They inform documentary makers’ experiments with digital technologies and they form the background to our experience of interactive documentary, and our willingness (or not) to take up that experience as relevant to reality. As documentary, interactive documentaries seek to produce various ‘reality effects’, encouraging acceptance of their truth claims. Technologies can play a key role, as Ellis (2012: 34–5) has argued, shaping our expectations as to what counts as realistic. New technologies are almost always associated with a degree of ‘hype’ about their ability to provide ever more realistic experiences. Consequently, documentary history can read a little like a ‘patent-office log’ of ever newer machinery, from ‘35mm, 16mm, Bolex, Nagra, Moviola’ to ‘Avid, digital camcorder, Final Cut Pro, 24p camera, DH’ (Rich 2006). Today we might add HTML 5, any number of software packages (Klynt, Korsakow), Unity, volumetric video, virtual, augmented and mixed reality, computer learning, and so on. A desire for immediacy, a sense of transparent access to reality or the seamless integration of the real and the virtual, remains critical to the reality appeal of some technologies, particularly those that seek to produce various forms of ‘immersion’. However, the ways in which technologies are taken up (or not) by (interactive) documentary makers are wrapped up in broader social, cultural, and epistemic shifts. So how do we locate interactive documentary within contemporary struggles for power and authority? A number of themes will be explored in the chapters ahead, highlighting the ways in which the digital opens out ways of exploring truths (partial and provisional) in the context of a culture sceptical of evidence and expertise. The popularity of documentary media suggests a desire for images that reveal realities, in spite of (or perhaps because of) a sense that we inhabit a ‘post-truth’ culture. We desire media that seeks to make sense of the complex and contentious challenges of contemporary societies, in spite of our scepticism. While totalising visions of reality grounded in the evidentiary status of the image have long been untenable, the ironic attitude of postmodernism seems

12 Introduction

inappropriate to the scale of the challenges ahead. Interactive documentary, as I hope to show, takes up digital technologies with a view to fostering new ways of engaging with realities that rise to the challenge of engaging contemporary social issues and the complexities of truth. The experiential nature of interactive documentary is a key theme in the chapters ahead. While the image remains very much central to interactive documentary practice, there are opportunities for expanded modes of engagement with documentary media. The result has been an exploration of more explicitly experiential engagements with reality. A desire for mediated experiences of the real is not limited to interactive media, of course. As Nichols (2017: xvi) suggests a key trend in documentary practice has been to prioritise the subjective and experiential, offering ‘an awareness of what it feels like to live in the world in a particular way’. However, digital media offer new ways to conceptualise experiential documentary practice. From the potentials of immersive digital media – whether virtual reality, or forms of mixed reality – to games that invite an imaginative engagement with others’ experiences, it is possible to trace a concern with experience, sensation, and embodied knowing. As I argue most explicitly in Chapter five (in the context of virtual reality) there is a continuity here with forms of first-person media (Dovey 2000). We come to know realities not on the basis of bearing witness to the testimonies of others, but on the basis of our own, simulated, ‘first-person’ experience. In a context where expertise and ‘official’ knowledge has been rendered suspect, the ability of documentary to offer the illusion of seeing or experiencing for oneself takes on particular significance. Another theme that will be developed across the chapters ahead is the significance of digital media as a route to revealing and engaging complexities. It is appealing to think that digital forms like the database are somehow more truthful by virtue of the fact that they don’t need to be corralled into a singular (narrative) structure. It is equally appealing to think that participatory digital methods allow documentaries to include a multitude of voices. These are powerful and compelling ideals that have guided many interactive documentarians. However, as has been argued often by interactive documentary scholars, there is a need to examine such claims critically, highlighting the ways in which ideas of truth and voice intersect. Data is similarly shaping a sense of what it means to know and the ways in which we might know through documentary practices. In an ever datafied and archived world it seems possible to know so much more, to reveal the world anew through multiple, circulating ‘actualities’. However, as will become clear, interactive documentarians very often foreground the limits of knowing and the potential of the digital to overwhelm.

Interactive Documentary: outline and approach Scholars of interactive documentary draw on concepts and approaches from multiple disciplines: documentary and film studies, cultural studies, media and communication, digital media studies, digital art, cybernetics, psychology, software studies, and human–computer interaction. Interactive Documentary is similarly interdisciplinary in its orientation, drawing on a range of ideas in order to make

Introduction 13

sense of its object. As previously noted, the aim of Interactive Documentary is to explore the ways in which new forms of documentary practice shape our understanding of and engagement with realities. Each chapter is focused around a key concept or debate in the field, providing an overview of research to date and making a contribution toward theorising interactive documentary. Any exploration of such a vast and diverse body of work will inevitably be selective. My approach to the selection of work has been pragmatic, focusing on work that is, for the most part, generally available (although questions of technological obsolescence are a constant challenge when working in such an experimental field – a point to which we will return in the closing chapter). Methodologically I have sought to engage with interactive documentary as an interactor-analyst. Inspired by notions of the playeras-analyst (Aarseth 2003) in computer game studies, I have sought to engage with documentary as simultaneously product (‘text’) and performance (process) as a way of exploring the complexities of meaning making. It may be objected, particularly given my focus on interactivity as performative, that references to the textuality of interactive documentary represent something of a retrograde step. After all, many scholars have been keen to build post-representational or post-textual theories of interactive documentary. Materialist perspectives, including those informed by cybernetic and Actor-Network Theory have been particularly influential. While I recognise the fluidity of digital documentary, the role of various ‘agents’ in the realisation of individual works (indeed this is a concern across a number of chapters of this book), I am not inclined to ignore questions of representation entirely. Indeed, the very many studies of interactive documentary that proceed on the basis of textual analysis, suggest that others (regardless of their theoretical allegiances) do not either. My aim is to approach interactive documentary as relational, but to include within my understanding of relationality a concern with questions of representation and mediation. As I hope will become clear in the chapters ahead, representational elements in interactive documentary – images, sounds, diagrams, graphs, texts – cannot so easily be untangled from process and action. Clearly, as Ryan (2007) has argued there are different digital textualities – different forms, structures, modes of interaction, and discursive frames. As users interact with (perform) interactive documentaries they take part in the realisation of a particular symbolic product that takes on particular meaning in light of the experience of performing the documentary. Conceptualising interactive documentary in these terms is intended to draw links between a concern with action and with matters of interpretation. The notion of text employed here also acknowledges the ‘hidden texts’ that structure computational media – the algorithms and code that shape our experiences. However, as is often the case for scholars of digital media the nature and significance of these hidden texts remains a matter of conjecture. In focusing on the experiential and performative, I have sought to highlight the relational and affective dimensions of interactive documentary projects. In some cases, it has been possible to draw in traces of others’ interactions or to draw on some of the relatively few audience studies conducted in the field. For the most part, however, it has been my own reflection on interacting with these projects that forms the basis of my argument.

14 Introduction

The first three chapters are focused on questions of voice, drawing attention to the intersections between authorship and its dispersal, and the political ambitions of interactive documentary projects. I will begin with a reconsideration of the database documentary, both because many of the earliest forms of documentary explored notions of the database and because it remains an important interactive documentary form. Notions of the database are also central to many of the most significant debates about the representational significance of digital media, including the claim that interactivity challenges narrative dominance and opens up a space in which meaning is destabilised. The possibility of achieving forms of polyvocality through the formal structures of the database has motivated interactive documentarians and academics alike. In addition to exploring these key debates, the chapter aims to highlight the formal diversity of database documentaries. It aims to get beyond the binary – narrative/non-narrative – to draw attention to the different ways in which collections of documentary elements are made meaningful through the choices of users. Chapter two will consider the re-invigoration of documentary’s participatory ambitions in digital media environments. While there has been a tendency to celebrate digital media as ushering in radically new forms of shared authorship, a more critical look at the very many participatory interactive documentaries highlight very different participatory intensities. The chapter will begin by considering participation as a response to the epistemic and political problem of power in documentary making, tracing key historical examples and drawing out their implications for digital practice. It then explores some of the ways in which participation is reshaped as documentarians seek to create digital and hybrid spaces that foster forms of power sharing. Drawing on these foundations the chapter presents a framework for a microanalysis of power in interactive documentary projects and deploys this to consider the various intensities of participatory projects. Chapter three shifts focus to consider voice from a political perspective. While forms of power sharing in the context of documentary making are often assumed to constitute an offer to speak publicly through documentary, I will argue that this cannot be taken for granted. Taking a broad view of the political ambitions of interactive documentary I consider the various ways in interactive documentary might nurture civic cultures and/or convene publics, in some cases creating the conditions under which audiences might become publics. Drawing on a number of case studies the chapter charts variation in the political ambition of interactive documentary, highlighting the importance of practices of dialogue and documenting as ways in which to foster a collective engagement with issues and/or communities. In Chapter four I consider a key modality of computational communication, simulation, and explore the tensions surrounding simulation as documentary practice. Simulation has most often been cast as documentary’s ‘other’. As imitations, it is argued, simulations necessarily lack sufficient correspondence to reality to ‘document’ reality. And yet, many forms of interactive documentary practice engage realities through forms of simulation – virtual reality, games, and digital models. I will pick up this debate, taking digital games as a focus. Building on a small but important literature on the documentary ambition of digital games, I will

Introduction 15

consider the ways in which proximity and distance to reality are navigated, arguing that digital games produce reality effects that encourage players to approach play as, to some degree, factual. Simulations are significant for any consideration of the ways in which our engagements with reality are mediated: simulations can reveal aspects of reality that resist audio-visual representation; they are, to varying degrees, experiential and shaped by the subjectivity of the player/user; and they are reflective of shifting regimes of knowledge in which contingencies and uncertainties are given emphasis alongside forms of first-person understanding. Documentary practice provides a valuable touchstone for engaging with the factual ambition of digital simulation and the chapter will make connections with re-enactment, staging and conditional documentary highlighting the ways in which audio-visual texts have navigated forms of proximity and distance to reality. In setting out a model for thinking about simulation, the chapter argues that theorising simulation is critical to interactive documentary scholarship. Chapter five takes up the debate about factual virtual reality and empathy, and particularly the possibility that VR technologies constitute some kind of ‘empathy machine’. Recognising the importance of pro-social ambition in the creation of factual VR experiences, the chapter aims to go beyond a consideration of technology to explore the different ways in which we might enter into VR – as ourselves or, imaginatively, as others – and what this might mean in terms of moral orientation and attitude. Empathy, as a number of scholars have shown, is both appealing and problematic – appealing because it holds out the promise of somehow coming to know the other (and their experience) more deeply, and problematic because there is always a risk of erasing the alterity of the other in our focus on our own mediated experience. While we might be tempted to do away with the concept of empathy – and many have – in this chapter I aim to explore it as a way of conceptualising the production of VR experiences. In other words: what kinds of relationships (and moral orientations) do VR experiences aim to foster? In attempts to produce forms of fellow feeling how might proximity and distance be managed so as to preserve the alterity of the other? These questions will be explored with reference to a number of virtual reality works. Chapter six engages the concept of ‘big data’ and, in particular, strategies of data visualisation as documentary practice. Making connections with early British documentary practice the chapter explores different ideas about big data and the documentary idea. The chapter considers the concept of the sublime as a way to think about documentary engagements with big data. While there are many examples of projects that employ data to gesture toward the ineffable, prompting aesthetic reflection on the limits of knowing, we must also be conscious of the ongoing significance of ‘scientism’ and in particular the ways in which this might be recast in line with contemporary myths of big data. Finally, I will explore emerging debates and make some suggestions for future study, considering computational creativity, audience research and questions of ethics.

16 Introduction

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

http://povmagazine.com/articles/view/doc-the-world https://www.idfa.nl/en/film/20b2753d-19b7-40e7-a66f-c548582914c3/artificial-room-one https://listentree.media.mit.edu/ Dublon, Gershon, and Edwina Portocarrerro (2014) ‘ListenTree: Audio-haptic display in the natural environment’, 20th International Conference on Auditory Display https:// listentree.media.mit.edu/docs/ListenTree_ICAD2014.pdf https://docubase.mit.edu/project/the-sheep-market/ https://docubase.mit.edu/ https://www.idfa.nl/en/info/about-idfa-doclab https://www.upian.com/en https://submarinechannel.com/ http://i-docs.org/ https://docubase.mit.edu/ There are many terms in circulation in interactive documentary scholarship that describe those previously known as viewers or audiences. Recognising that the term ‘user’ is limited (and often inappropriate) as a description of the relationship between individuals and documentary content/experience I nevertheless use it at times to give some emphasis to audience actions. In some contexts, such as VR or data visualisation I revert to the term viewer and in other contexts participant seems more fitting.

1 DOCUMENTARY DATABASES On (not) telling stories in the possibility space

The database, as Lev Manovich (2001: 81) has provocatively declared, is the quintessential cultural form of the twenty-first century. In an era shaped by a scepticism toward the grand narratives of the Enlightenment, the database, with its complexities, disjunctions, and contingencies, seems uniquely placed to represent contemporary experience. The potential of computational media to open up new modes of communication, ways of organising information and, consequently, new ways of perceiving and engaging with the world has been a constant theme in interactive documentary making and scholarship. Many of the earliest explorations of what documentary might become in a digital media environment were, more or less explicitly, grounded in an exploration of database logic. Projects such as The Labyrinth Project, led by Marsha Kinder at the University of Southern California focused on the narrative potential of the database, with DVD-ROM docufiction hybrids, for example Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles (1920–1986)1 inviting users to explore a rich collection of images (historical and re-photographed), newspaper clippings, maps, and interviews. Although it may seem slightly retrograde to return to questions of form, and the database more particularly, when interactive documentaries seem to be ever more fluid and technically ambitious, as I hope to show in this chapter, the database remains relevant to one of the key debates in the field. This chapter will explore the database as a cultural form as it has been taken up by interactive documentarians. It will trace two key database desires – the desire to escape narrative as a dominant mode of organisation for documentary and, flowing from this, a desire to foster polyvocality, producing a space in which multiple voices might speak. Both of these desires have deep roots in documentary history and practice, and both have been shaped by a sense of the possibilities of the database as a digital media form. The ability to accumulate large amounts of information, the combinatory possibilities of user actions and computational processes, and the many ways in which information might be structured, characterise the database. As a DOI: 10.4324/9781315208862-2

18 Documentary databases

cultural form, the database suggests the possibility of being able to organise our experience of the world anew, drawing out multiple and contingent connections and different perspectives, challenging the very idea of singularity, coherence and totality, and fostering forms of defamiliarization. While an exploration of database documentaries in their diversity reveals that most are structured to manage complexity and reproduce documentary conventions, these two database desires provide a useful touchstone for engaging critically with the database as a cultural idea. I will begin by re-examining the database as a cultural form and its implications for documentary practice. Engaging the debate about the relationship/opposition between the database and narrative as communicative logics, I will draw on Hayles’ (2005a) notion of the database as a possibility space that works to structure attention, and action, around a field of possibilities. Drawing on a number of examples I will consider the ways in which the possibility space might be shaped by a desire for non-narrative and polyvocality. But while these desires shape some database works, they fail to capture the breadth of database practice. Drawing links between the notion of the possibility space and documentary voice I will then consider the interface and informational structures as key sites of database documentary expression. Finally, I will explore a range of database documentaries, in some cases drawing connections with audio- visual documentary practice, in order to build a picture of the diverse ways in which the database might be structured and the implications of this for perception, action, and understanding.

Documentary database desires To approach databases as a cultural form is to ask how they communicate, and what the consequences of this form of communication might be. For both scholars and documentary makers there has been a general sense – as Manovich’s provocative claims suggests – that the database offers ways of representing and engaging realities that align with contemporary experience. Key to this view are the ways in which the database resists or eschews narrative. In place of linear, cause-and-effect driven sequences of events and actions, the database treats data as something to be stored, ordered, filtered, arranged, structured, searched, and so on. As a structured collection of data, the database shares an informational logic with the library and archive, emphasising relationality over sequence and manifesting an encyclopaedic desire (Paul 2007). Manovich (2001: 225) has influentially argued that the database represents reality as a list of items that it refuses to order. In contrast to narrative media, which prioritises both temporal coherence and cause–effect relations, the database need not have a beginning or end, thematic development or any other means by which elements might be obviously connected into a sequence (Manovich 2001: 219). Our experience of engaging the database as a collection is, Manovich suggests, fundamentally distinct from that of watching a film or reading a story (Manovich 1999). Where narrative suggests inevitability, completeness, singularity, the database draws attention to contingencies, alternatives, and the process of construction.

Documentary databases 19

The extent to which the database might be deployed in the production of narratives has been a subject of significant debate and certainly, as will become clear in the remainder of this chapter, most interactive documentarians have sought in one way or another to ‘coax narrative meaning out of an interactive database’ (Ryan 2004: 332). But insofar as databases do tell stories, they do so in ways that call attention to the nature and limits of narrative. Of particular significance for interactive documentary is Marsha Kinder’s exploration of database narrative. For Kinder, and many others, avant-garde documentary practice provides an explicit touchstone for thinking about the relationship between the narrative and database as communicative logics. Making connections with the work of Luis Buñuel, and a number of other documentary makers, Kinder (2002: 6) defines database narratives as ‘narratives whose structure exposes or thematizes the dual process of selection and combination that lie at the heart of stories and that are crucial to language’. Avant-garde documentary highlights the possibilities that emerge from reconceptualising plot as a field of narrative possibilities ‘where randomness, repetition, and interruptions are rampant, and where search engines are motored by desire’ (Kinder 2002: 8). In revealing the elements from which narratives are constructed, database narratives prompt an awareness of the contingency of all narrative and the pervasiveness of narrative conventions. The radical potential of the database is its ability to draw attention not just to the ideological workings of narrative, but also, by virtue of an inherent reflexivity, to its own ideological operation (Kinder 2008). A useful way of conceptualising database documentary is offered by Hayles’ (2005a) concept of the possibility space. Databases, Hayles argues, are not unstructured collections, but rather collections that are ordered in particular ways to focus user attention and choice. They create a field of possibilities (that may be more or less explicit), within which specific actions become possible (or impossible) and meanings emerge. The possibility space cannot be reduced to those objects accessed, or paths taken. Even where elements within the database are not selected, they nevertheless contribute to understanding and shape action. Hayles points also to the generative potential of computational processes as a factor shaping the possibility space. An understanding of the ways in which database narratives might foster new ways of perceiving and engaging realities will therefore need to take into account the nature of the elements contained within the database (including the scale of the collection), their organisation, and the ways in which this might foster or resist users’ inclination to make connections, the extent to which the database is visible to the user and so on. I will pick up these points below in my consideration of the interface as a form of documentary argument. The database as a computational cultural form has, as I hope to show, had a significant impact on interactive documentarians. While database documentaries take many different forms, there is a value in tracing two interrelated ideals – desires – that have been particularly associated with the database idea: non-narrative and polyvocality. Storytelling is so fundamental to the documentary tradition that Brian Winston (1995: 119) has declared that ‘[n]arrative is never absent in documentary films’. On the whole, this statement also holds true of interactive

20 Documentary databases

documentary. Yet, I suggest that the database as an idea has played an important role as a catalyst for the exploration of non-narrative documentary form. The database, its malleability, its non-linearity, and its aleatoric potential, has been explored (to varying degrees) as an informational form that resists forms of narrative closure and totality. Following from this, and particularly from the ways in which the database disperses authorship (through the actions of users and computers), the database has been seen as an informational form that is well suited to polyvocal engagements with reality. Hudson and Zimmerman (2015: 101) give voice to this desire for the database as a communicative logic that, in challenging the dominance of narrative, reshapes documentary epistemology. The malleability of the database, they argue, the potential for information to be ‘rendered into a theoretically infinite number of discreet sequences via user acts and algorithmic operations’ results in a destabilisation of meaning. The result is that ‘meaning is not fixed as it is on celluloid; rather, meaning is malleable, destabilizing the certainties of positivist constructions of knowledge and opening meaning for ongoing debate’. One way to trace these desires is through contemporary database documentary practices. Alisa Lebow’s Filming Revolution2, is an interactive database documentary that seeks to explore the multiple and ongoing impacts of the Egyptian Revolution for the creative practices of independent documentarians, activists, artists, and archivists (Lebow 2016). For Lebow and her interviewees, notions of story felt inadequate, ‘too simple, closed, finished and complete’ to capture a sense of revolution as ongoing, unfinished, and speculative (Miles 2016). The database, conceptualised as a ‘constellation’, a complex arrangement of themes, people, and projects, offers a way of presenting the revolution not as an historic event, but as a field of relations in which new connections are continually being made. For Lebow the non-linearity of the database is political, a refusal to fix the meaning of events and a commitment to ongoing exploration. The user is invited to ‘browse’ the database, although this doesn’t quite capture the deep and focused engagement that the site demands. Drilling down into the information reveals multiple, overlapping ‘clusters’ of elements – audio-visual fragments, interviews, documents – that form links between people and ideas. In exploring the database, I am struck by its informational excess, always threatening to overwhelm, which actively resists attempts at categorisation and which, consequently, gestures powerfully toward the impossibility of completely grasping the significance of events. Filming Revolution also exemplifies interactive documentarians’ desire to produce forms of polyphony through database practice. Polyphonic new media strategies, Zimmerman (2018) argues, ‘reject the singular author, the unique voice, the final interpretation’. Rather, they offer spaces for the exploration of complexity through collaboration and exchange. For Zimmerman, polyphony reflects a poststructuralist and postcolonialist desire to challenge hegemonic power by exploring different perspectives and unravelling complex issues. Aston and Odorico (2018) draw on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin to conceptualise polyphonic documentary practice as dialogic, a view that resonates with Lebow’s ambitions in Filming Revolution. Defining polyvocality as a commitment to facilitating multiple (independent,

Documentary databases 21

FIGURE 1.1

Filming Revolution screenshot

equal) voices to ‘utter’ together they highlight several techniques that might be deployed: resisting dramatization and simplistic categorisations, embracing complexity and foregrounding ways of moving between different perspectives. Filming Revolution exemplifies the polyvocal ambition of database form, creating a possibility space that reveals multiple perspectives and engages the user in a dialogue with the documentary material. Sharon Daniel is another interactive documentarian whose database work is grounded in a sense of the political value of polyvocal non-narrative. Her projects Public Secrets3 (which will be explored in more detail below) and Blood Sugar4 explore the database as a means by which to foster a dialogue between the user and those whose voices are typically excluded from public discourse. Approaching her subjects – mass incarceration and addiction – as sites or fields, Daniel conceptualises interactivity as a process of inquiry that mirrors her journey as a documentarian. Engaging stories told from the margins frustrate our desire for coherence, accumulating as fragments of testimony that demand a practice of listening that moves beyond ‘the logic of cause and effect and into the realm of affect’ (Daniel 2013). For Daniel, the political significance of the database is tied to its resistance to narrative, its expansiveness, and the relationships that it creates between users and documentary (Daniel, Aston, and Odorico 2018: 95). It can – although it need not, as we shall see – create opportunities for political speech by enabling polyvocality, facilitating ‘a plenitude of voices speaking directly from a multitude of contexts about their own circumstances’ (Daniel, Aston, and Odorico 2018: 95). But for Daniel, like Lebow, politics demands something more than stories. A desire to explore non-narrative and polyvocality in documentary practice have also inspired explorations of the database as generative. For a community of documentarians and scholars working with Korsakow5, a software application for ‘authoring generative, associative, and processual films’, autopoietic systems that

22 Documentary databases

facilitate ‘patterns of relation to emerge for author and users’ (Miles 2014b: 209), the idea of the database as a field of possibilities has provided the impetus for a ‘philosophical intervention into the politics of “story”’ (Soar 2014: 168). It might be described less as a documentary making ‘technology’ than a documentary ‘method’, a ‘tool for thought’ made possible by the ‘undisciplined’ database (Wiehl 2018). Korsakow works with audio-visual fragments (which may be more or less narratively organised), creating multiple and fluid relationships through practices of keywording coupled with algorithmic processes. Korsakow has been conceptualised as a ‘combinatory engine’ (Miles 2008: 4) producing multiple, more or less likely, configurations of documentary elements. For many of the practitioners and academics working with Korsakow, it is the dispersal of authorial agency that is of significance. Approaching documentary as a sociotechnical system there has been a particular focus on computational agency and the ways in which this might counter story as a primary mode of engaging with realities. Korsakow reshapes documentary practice, incorporating practices such as listing and promoting new ways of ‘noticing’ realities beyond a concern with their narrative value (Brasier 2014). In surrendering control over the connection between documentary elements, inviting aleatory processes, documentary makers working with Korsakow are motivated not only by the desire to engage realities as complex, but also to perceive realities anew through unanticipated relations between documentary elements. Korsakow documentaries tend to divide audiences, with some frustrated by a lack of obvious development (Soar 2014). For others, what they offer are experiences that are fluid (to varying degrees), often poetic and which challenge the user to make sense of the relationship between documentary elements. In Fibonacci 26 (Matt Soar), for example, database elements are grouped to mimic a composite golden (or logarithmic) spiral. The 68 vine videos of everyday objects are brought into relation through a creative examination of form. Shot in varying degrees of close up, the effect is defamiliarizing, with attention to texture, colour and the combination of forms taking priority over a concern with what the object might ultimately be. Sunny, Rainy, Foggy7 (Hannah Brasier) takes Joris Ivens’ Rain as inspiration. Exploring Korsakow’s resistance to narrative, the work seeks to produce an atmospheric experience (Brasier 2015). Racing Home8, makes use of Korsakow to create entanglements between the voices of Canadian filmmaker Marian McMahon (whose unfinished film/archive reflecting on identity and belonging forms one strand of the work) and her partner Phil Hoffman, whose explorations of the archive are intertwined with his reflections on grief and loss. The dialogue between these voices is facilitated by Korsakow as a generative system that works against narrative coherence (see Wiehl 2018 for a fuller analysis of Racing Home). In all these works there is an attempt to get beyond a tendency to see and engage the world through story. What then can be said about the significance of the database as a cultural form within the context of documentary practice? Databases offer ways of storing, retrieving, and manipulating information that have implications for the way in which we communicate. For interactive documentarians, databases bring a range of documentary

Documentary databases 23

FIGURE 1.2

Racing Home screenshot

elements into relation, creating a possibility space within which user actions (search, selection, recombination) and computational processes foster fluid relations between the database elements. The user performs the database, engaging in a relationship with the database and the subject of the documentary. She engages not just with the specific content chosen, but equally with the paths not chosen which nevertheless constitute the discursive field. The database is not an unstructured collection of data, but rather a range of informational structures and computational processes that provide the context for user actions, perceptions, and understandings. For documentary makers the promise of the database has been bound up, at least in some contexts, with its potential to reveal realities anew, challenging the dominance of narrative and embracing a range of voices and perspectives. These are both fragile desires, and it might be objected that neither is often realised in practice. We might argue, as do Winston et al (2017: 70), that navigating the database is inherently a process of narrativisation, that story is so fundamental to the way in which we make sense of reality that documentary can be nothing other than life narrativised. It is certainly the case, as I will demonstrate below, that forms of narrative engagement are very often prioritised in the creation of database documentaries. And yet, we must take account of the ways in which documentary makers are using database forms to resist our narrative urges, challenging us to look at and think differently. What are needed are ways of engaging with the structures of the possibility space.

Structuring the possibility space: the braided voice of the database documentary How might we conceptualise the various ways in which the possibility spaces of database documentaries are organised? And the implications of this for documentary as

24 Documentary databases

a mode of communication? One way of engaging these questions is to consider the voice of the database documentary. In a now seminal article in documentary studies Nichols introduces the concept of documentary voice thus: By ‘voice’ I mean something narrower than style: that which conveys to us a sense of a text’s social point of view, of how it is speaking to us and how it is organizing the materials it is presenting to us. Voice is perhaps akin to that intangible, moiré-like pattern formed by the unique interaction of all a film’s codes. When we watch a documentary, we encounter the voice of the text (not the voice of history) and it is this textual ‘voice’ that communicates its social point-of-view. Nichols (1983) How database documentaries communicate a particular point of view, how they confer value on different perspectives, and the ways in which they foster modes of engagement, constitute the voice of the database documentary. The extent to which the political ambitions of the database are achieved turns on matters of voice. In contrast to the audio-visual voice of the documentary, the database voice does not emerge from the singular arrangement of documentary elements, but rather from the organisation of the possibility space. Drawing on interactive documentarians’ reflections on authoring the database, I will expand on the idea of the database voice by considering both the interface and informational structures. The interface is the most visible dimension of database voice. Mediating relations between users and the database, the interface works to frame engagement, provide the tools for action and (to varying degrees) promote aesthetic experience (Pold 2005). It may make the structure of the possibility space explicit by making the database elements visible, or it may, alternatively, conceal (or selectively reveal) the database elements, engaging users in processes of deduction, inference, or aesthetic appreciation. Interfaces might provide interpretive paths, highlight themes, provide a visual rendering of the relationships between elements, facilitate moves between macro and micro engagements with the database, and establish a documentary style. Key here is the way in which the interface establishes spatial, as well as temporal, relations between documentary elements. Manovich’s notion of ‘spatial montage’ (2001: 322) is relevant here, pointing to the communicative importance of simultaneously present elements. While Nichols’ concept of voice is effectively temporal, the database documentary requires that we also account for spatial relations, which may in some cases dominate the temporal. The interface is critical to establishing coherence between the elements in a database documentary. It has been compared to ‘narration’ in film or television documentary (Davenport 1997), documentary ‘argument’ (Daniel 2012: 218), and practices of narrative ‘plotting’ (Luers 2013). Interface analysis is necessarily multi-dimensional. At the level of representation, interfaces frame understanding through the deployment of images, sounds, texts. Most database documentaries have a defined starting point, often introducing the user to the database through an audio-visual sequence or text that provides an

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interpretive context to promote practices of sense-making. Forms of narration may be deployed, to anchor the meaning of the database and/or its elements. Formally, the interface raises questions about the temporal and spatial arrangements of elements. Use of metaphors, timelines, or maps, may promote particular ways of conceptualising the connections between elements. Similarly, menus, lists, charts, tables, categories, networks, family trees, and so on communicate something about the database’s informational structure. A mosaic interface, for example, suggests a large collection of data organised non-hierarchically, that in some way adds up to a whole. Organising elements by theme or category, on the other hand, provides a conceptual framework that suggests relationships between elements; or a series of nested menus might promote engagement with informational hierarchies. The interface also has a functional level that shapes not only what a user can do but what it makes sense to do in terms of accessing and manipulating the documentary elements. Introductory, informational screens often spell this out directly giving the user instructions for navigating, searching, organising etc. Sharon Daniel’s Public Secrets9 usefully illustrates the various levels at which the interface creates meaning. Entry to the documentary is via an instruction screen that explains that the database consists of audio testimonies and related texts organised around three aporias that construct the prison-industrial complex as a public secret. The user is instructed to ‘browse’ the site, clicking on quotes to read or listen to various statements. On entering the site, a voiceover further frames the user’s engagement, presenting the prison as a complex site shaped by these aporias. Daniel (2012) has described Public Secrets’ interface and data structures as seeking to ‘stage equality’ by bringing the statements made by incarcerated women into dialogue with social and political theorists. Space is fundamental to this dialogic intent. Using treemap visualisation, the voices of interviewees and ‘experts’, rendered as

FIGURE 1.3

Public Secrets screenshot

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quotes, are distributed randomly within the space of the screen, shifting with every view. Each screen becomes a mini statement, revealing reality through the random arrangement of hundreds of quotes. As a metaphor treemapping was used to reinforce a sense of the relationship between the individual and the state, the need to ‘fit’ the system or be contained by it (Loyer n.d.). The interdependence of inside and outside is reinforced visually through the division of the screen into two zones, black and white, that bleed into and change position with each other. Functionally, the interface promotes browsing, suggesting a kind of wandering and encounter in the space of the prison (this is reinforced by the site’s use of a sound effect that suggests the locking/unlocking of prison doors). On completing a clip, the option to explore ‘more’ or ‘view connections’ may be offered, suggesting possible routes through the database. Public Secrets also points to the importance of informational structures and computational processes for database voice. Public Secrets is organised non-hierarchically, facilitating dialogue between inmate and expert voices. If the database is a structured collection of elements, then it matters whether they are structured hierarchically, as a network, or relationally. Each informational structure will have implications for what it is possible to do with the database. Informational structures while fundamental, may not be visible, inviting (to varying degrees) inferences about how the database might be reflective of reality. It matters, further, whether databases are open to future contributions, or closed and available for navigation. Also critical to Public Secrets is the deployment of aleatory processes, which work to counter dominant power relations at the level of the interface by assigning random values within the treemap. The effect is that the relative size of the nested rectangles and the relationships between them is random, changing on each visit so as to bring different voices together in unpredictable ways. Computational processes, as Uricchio (2011: 33) has suggested, are ‘processual intermediaries’ that increasingly determine ‘what we see, and even how we see it’. Public Secrets provides but one example of the ways in which these processes of intermediation can be used politically within documentary practice. Computational processes and informational structures are often not visible to the user. This opacity may, as is often the case with Korsakow documentaries, invite audiences to try to infer how the database ‘works’ and/or to make their own connections between elements. Keywords and other forms of digital ‘tagging’ are aspects of database voice that may be, or may not be, visible to the user. These ‘hidden’ aspects of database voice are nevertheless significant in structuring the possibility space. The voice of the database is structured by computational processes, informational structures and the design of the interface. Also relevant is the way in which each user performs in relation to the database, realising a specific relationship between documentary elements. The database voice is inherently ‘braided’ (FitzSimons 2009), shaped by different agents, albeit in reference to the database documentarian’s structuring of the possibility space. Database voices are multiple, as I will illustrate in the rest of this chapter. As a result, I argue that there can be no singular assessment of the implications of the database for

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perception and understanding. The dimensions of database documentary voice provide a way of engaging critically with the ways in which works might reveal complexities, embrace multiple perspectives, challenge hierarchies and disavow notions of totality. However, it is also possible to see the database as an archive that is wrapped up in a sense of documentary as the articulation of a linear historiography shaped by a desire to fix reality symbolically and materially. In the remainder of this chapter I will sketch what I see as a number of common modes of database organisation. It is important to emphasise that the various ‘categories’ of database suggested below are not intended to serve a taxonomic purpose. Most database documentaries blend a number of modes of organisation as I aim to demonstrate through the examples considered below.

Narrative databases For all the non-narrative potential of the database, narrative in various forms continues to be a powerful touchstone in the production of database documentaries. While interactivity represents a challenge to crafting a dramatic storyline, networked databases in particular are capable of linking elements in ways that produce a narrative script in the mind of the audience (Ryan 2004: 9). In exploring narrative databases, I want to draw out three broad logics. Firstly, a logic of accumulation that serves to extend to some extent the user’s engagement with the story world. Additional information and/or objects enrich the storytelling, in some cases playing an evidential role with respect to the database’s documentary claims. Secondly, I will point to database documentaries that are characterised by forms of narrative proliferation. Proliferating narratives may highlight contingencies and alternative possibilities, but they might equally present a number of stories that invite comparison or develop into a collective statement. Finally, I will consider modular narratives which engage the user in the task of constructing a narrative order through interaction. The effect is typically to draw attention to the fragility of narrative and its limits as a means through which to understand experience.

The database as narrative plus archive I will begin then with database documentaries in which narrative remains dominant and the database serves as a way of reinforcing narrative through a logic of accumulation. A Polish Journey10 is an interactive ‘road trip’ in which Julian Konczak travels through Central Europe to try and make sense of his father’s forced recruitment into the German army, his ultimate migration to the UK and the legacies of this for his own identity and his relationship with his now adult son. The narrative unfolds over seven ‘acts’ arranged chronologically, documenting the journey through practices of image making. Accompanying this seven-act video narrative is a networked database of materials that is both evidentiary and evocative. From links to Wikepedia articles on Polish culture to images and soundscapes and his father’s German ‘soldbuch’ (Soldier’s book), the collection of elements adds depth to the central narrative. The database

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FIGURE 1.4

A Polish Journey screenshot

literally surrounds the central narrative, inviting the viewer to scroll up or down in order to understand more of the historical context or to engage with elements that seek to evoke place. Konczak describes this as a multilevel narrative structure, in which each fragment is self-contained while contributing to an overall narrative arc (cited in Wiehl 2016). A ‘flow map’ allows the user to see this multilevel narrative – the connections between each act and the contextual, historical, geographical, and visual information that accompanies it. The ability to accumulate documentary elements around the narrative allows the user to explore the story world more deeply, making connections to place, history, and identities, following their interests. Where narrative shifts toward the expositional, an associated database might be mobilised in an evidentiary role. Clouds over Cuba11 explores the Cuban Missile Crisis by linking a central expository ‘film’ with a voice-over narration guiding viewers’ engagements with archival footage and interviews. Accompanying the film is a database of some two hundred items that includes historical documents, audio recordings, ‘expert commentary’, archival film and images which serve as a repository of evidence that supports and extends the historical narrative. The relationship between database and historical narrative is established by requiring that users ‘unlock’ database elements as they watch the ‘film’. In choosing to leave the film and explore the database, the user engages a particular historiography, enacting a process of historical enquiry. A ‘dossier’ serves as an interface to the database elements (locked and unlocked) and the interface facilitates movement between ‘the film’ and ‘the dossier’. As the film plays, the user is made aware not only that she has unlocked database elements, but of the connection between the historical

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narrative and the database object. Like A Polish Journey, the database serves here as a repository for material that is not easily contained within a singular audio-visual narrative. While it is possible that a user’s engagement with the database might challenge the singularity of the documentary’s vision, a reflexive engagement with the limits of narrative is not foregrounded. Rather, the database serves to extend the story world by providing users with a web of material that carries affective, rhetorical, or narrative significance.

Forking path narratives A common database narrative form is the ‘forking path’. Drawing inspiration from Borges’s The Garden of Forking Paths and the potential of radically labyrinthine storytelling; forking path narratives provide one or more decision points which expand the narrative to create one or more parallel stories. For all the appeal of dizzying narrative webs, in most film, and I would add most database documentary, the ‘exfoliating tendrils of Borges’s potential futures are trimmed back to cognitively manageable dimensions’ (Bordwell 2002: 91). The live documentary performance, based on the popular children’s book series ‘Choose your own Adventure’, Choose your own Documentary12 can be conceptualised as a live, collective navigation of a documentary database narrative. The story centres on documentary maker Nathan Penlington’s quest to find a man who, as a teenager, had left four pages of his diary in a ‘Choose your own Adventure’ book. The narrative unfolds according to the collective choices of the live audience who choose from a database of narrative elements using a remote voting system. According to the project’s publicity there are 1,500 possible paths through the documentary database. At each decision point the paths not chosen proliferate, drawing attention to alternative possibilities and hypothetical parallel narratives. In many respects the project remediates 1960s interactive cinema (the Czech film Kinoautomat having a similar logic and mechanism, see Hayles 2005b). The effect is to draw attention to the field of possibilities from which narrative emerges. An early form of the forking path database documentary placed the user at the centre of the unfolding narrative. Thanatorama13, for example, begins by declaring you the ‘dead hero of this story’. It goes on to explain, ‘you died this morning. Are you interested in what comes next?’. Having established ‘your’ death as the disruptive event that frames the narrative sequence of cause and effect actions, the user is invited to make choices and shape their post-death future. Several binary choices – funeral plan or no funeral plan? Church or crematorium? – shape the narrative about ‘your’ personal post-death journey. While points of decision result in narrative forks, highlighting some of the factors that shape the ‘experience’ of death in important ways, points of narrative convergence (all paths involve a funeral parlour and cemetery, for example) limit narrative complexity, highlighting commonalities. Forking path narratives like The Challenge14 or Journey to the End of Coal15 take ‘your’ investigation of an issue – either obesity or Chinese coal mining – as the frame for engagement with the database. While each user’s ‘investigation’ will vary in length and in the documentary

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elements it includes, narrative coherence emerges through the appeal to investigation as a process. In both documentaries, the choices made shape the user’s investigative trajectory. The effect is to invite a degree of reflection on the contingencies of the investigative process and the inherent difficulties of producing journalistic knowledge.

Parallel narratives Database documentaries may also be structured as parallel narratives in which two or more stories are presented alongside each other. Parallel narratives may be similar in their logic to some non-narrative database forms, particularly the mosaic (see below). However, the attention given to spatio-temporal or causal connection and/or the development of character tends to reinforce narrative expectations. Parallel narratives gesture toward the desire for polyvocality and are often, as in some of the examples below, used to draw attention to contrasting perspectives. However, parallel narratives may be structured in a number of ways and in some cases, narratives may work collectively to reinforce a singular documentary argument. The extent to which the narratives are subordinated to and contained by the documentary’s point-of-view remains key to assessing claims of polyvocality. Burn Out/Le Grande Incendie16 makes use of parallel narrative to draw attention to competing discourses around self-immolations in French workplaces. The database consists of two narrative ‘tracks’, represented as two intersecting waveforms. One narrative tells the stories of the families and colleagues of those who took their lives, while the other presents an official ‘company’ discourse. Interacting by moving between the two perspectives becomes a process of comparison that serves to highlight the incommensurability of the two perspectives, and thereby revealing the challenge inherent in producing change. Parallel narratives may also invite comparison so as to reveal similarity. After 6/417 constructs parallel narratives to compare perspectives on the Tiananmen Square massacre. A timeline plots key

FIGURE 1.5

After 6/4 screenshot

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events, inviting the user to consider them from different perspectives. Moving between two perspectives, through news reports and government statements, the user is prompted to reflect on the contingency of her understanding of the events. Gaza/Sderot: Life in Spite of Everything18, similarly invites comparison through a database of 80 short videos shot in the neighbouring towns of Gaza (Palestine) and Sderot (Israel). The documentary’s interface, a simple black screen divided by a white line, with one side representing Gaza and the other Sderot serves to establish the two parallel narratives, with the user having a number of ways to engage the database – by date, character, theme – through narrative. The ‘other’ place and the other story is always visually present as a constant reminder that life goes on – both similar and different – just across the border. As well as contrasts, parallel narratives can be designed to foreground commonalities. Belongings19, is a database installation which explores the refugee experience through the stories of six individuals whose life-sized images are arranged around a gallery space and which the user accesses using a mobile phone. The documentary plays on the double meaning of belonging with each person speaking about an item that has special significance to their refugee journey and their struggle to belong in a new country. In spite of their differences, the stories work collectively to humanise the refugee experience and foreground a common humanity. Similarly, Echoes of IS20 presents twelve narratives of people whose lives have been touched in different ways by Islamic State. As with Belongings, the narratives are visually in parallel. While there is tremendous diversity in the narratives, which by itself counters a dominant ‘terrorist discourse’, there is as with many documentaries an attempt to highlight common themes and experiences across the interviews. The subtitle of the documentary ‘We Share the Scars’ draws attention to the shared emotional toll. Regardless of how a viewer might navigate the various narratives, presenting the images in parallel invites a search for this common experience.

Modular narrative Modular narrative is characterised by the introduction of a disjunction between the temporality of narrative events and the order of their presentation. Drawing explicitly on Marsha Kinder’s work on database narrative, Cameron (2006: 65) defines modular narratives as those that offer ‘a series of disarticulated narrative pieces, often arranged in radically achronological ways’. By breaking the narrative into small units that can be reconfigured in different orders, modular narratives invite close reflection on the temporal relations between elements and the possibility of their resolution into a singular series of events. Elsaesser (2009) has argued that modular narratives are distinctive in the relationships that are established between temporality, consciousness, and identity. They have frequently been used in interactive documentary to explore the fragilities of memory. The Shoebox21 by Janet Marles is an interactive documentary that is structured to foster random acts of navigation that gradually reveal fragments of the journey taken by the author’s mother to uncover her family history. While navigation is

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likely to be essentially random, inviting the viewer to try and make sense of the relationship between narrative fragments, once pieces of the story are uncovered they fall into a timeline that structures and makes visible a biographical narrative. Marles (2015) describes the documentary as having a memoradic narrative that mimics and draws attention to the fragmentary nature of memory and the ongoing work required to piece together coherent histories. Debra Beattie (2008) has similarly engaged with questions of memory – as both actively produced and as potentially unreliable – in the documentary The Wrong Crowd. The early database documentary presents historical events through a series of ‘Proustian memory moments’, that are both fragmentary and ephemeral. While the modular narrative emerging from the database facilitates an exploration of the complexities of collective memory and its fragile connection to individual memories, Beattie (2008: 67) is also concerned to support the emergence of a ‘particular historical argument’ and therefore to ‘prefigure’ the audience’s ordering of the database elements. By inviting the audience to piece together the relationship between the story elements as they work through the database, what both these modular narratives emphasise is not so much the contingency of events (in fact in both cases a singular connection between the story events ultimately emerges) but the fragility and contingency of memory. Exploring the many ways in which narrative might be ‘coaxed’ from the database documentary highlights a range of implications for perception and engagement with the realities depicted. Database documentaries, particularly those created to meet the needs of institutions, are frequently oriented around a strong central narrative. The database serves to expand the story world, appealing to a desire to know more deeply through exploration and/or investigation. The database may play an evidentiary role, reinforcing a dominant historiography grounded in ‘expert’ interpretation of primary sources. It may play an evocative role, providing different modes of engagement with the story. But it is the story that brings coherence to the database as a collection, providing a discursive frame in which the elements are made meaningful. Forking path narratives foreground possibility and contingency. They have tremendous potential in a documentary context to draw attention to the ways in which experiences are shaped by the available options and the structure of choice. Parallel narratives may invite comparison or provide collective illustration or evidence. There is a potential for a more polyvocal engagement here, but as with subjects recruited to audio-visual documentary, the relationship between the voices of participants and the voice of the documentary are critical. Finally, modular narratives most clearly draw attention to the fragilities and inadequacies of narrative as a way of engaging realities. In challenging users to make narrative sense of the elements of the database they open up a space for reflection on the dominance (importance?) of narrative for sense-making, history, and memory.

Non-narrative database documentaries What, then, of the non-narrative desire in database documentary? I will outline several different forms of database organisation that work against narrativisation as a dominant mode of engagement, in each case considering the implications for

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perceiving and engaging realities. While some forms of database organisation reprise documentary’s project of presenting reality as a knowable totality, in other cases the database resists easy comprehension, giving priority to complexity and epistemic uncertainty.

Categorical databases As their name suggests, categorical databases seek to organise elements into a range of ‘categories’. Plantinga (1997: 104) points toward a categorical form of documentary which is characterised by a synchronic rather than diachronic representation. While categorical films may include ‘micro-narratives’, their overall organisation is ‘topical rather than narrative’. The database lends itself to categorical organisation. A simple categorical structure may be built around a list of elements, or themes, although there may be a more explicit classificatory structure. In foregrounding categories, a focus on the schematic and structural is prioritised over a vivid portrayal of events. Through practices of discursive management, the categorical database suggests order and, in some cases, totality. Seven Digital Deadly Sins22 makes an appeal to the idea of the seven deadly sins as a way of categorising the myriad of challenges presented by digital technologies. Various digital practices are aligned with a category of ‘sin’ (‘Instagramming’ food is taken to exemplify gluttony; and online bullying, wrath for example). There is a definitional effect here that is ideological in that it reinforces a view of the issues surrounding digital media as individual ‘failings’ that are deserving of condemnation within the context of an implied moral code. In many database documentaries, categories tend to be thematic, often overlapping with other approaches to textual organisation, particularly parallel narratives. In such cases categories become a way of guiding the user through the database by highlighting and/or framing relationships between the contributions of participants. The Worry Box23 project is a database documentary that combines categorisation with a mosaic intent (see below). The project is participatory, inviting contributions that express the generally invisible worries that attend pregnancy, birth, and motherhood. As worries are submitted, they are transcribed by hand onto a small scroll of paper and included within a physical, collective ‘worry box’. The database remains open to future contributions and it is possible to explore the box over time and see the accumulation of worries. There is an archival and classificatory ambition to the project (it is subtitled ‘An Archive of Maternal Worries’). Accessing the database via a virtual tape measure, the user is able to explore worries by ‘category’ – work, sex, guilt, monstrous mothers, illness, and death etc – each opens the user to a collection of worries. The effect of displaying the archive in this way is to highlight patterns in women’s fears, creating a polyvocal articulation that links the personal and the communal (Lusztig 2013). The categories constitute a ‘taxonomy’ of maternal anxiety, giving voice to the commonality in women’s experiences. At the same time the categories serve to construct the experience of maternal anxiety, rendering individual experiences meaningful through their relationship to others’ experiences.

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FIGURE 1.6

Cronulla Riots screenshot

Cronulla Riots: The Day that Shocked the Nation24 takes a categorical approach, in combination with modes of narrative engagement, to draw attention to various factors that sparked race riots in the Sydney suburb of Cronulla in 2005. The database invites multiple modes of engagement. Exploring a map and timeline of police reports invites a modular engagement with the events as narrative, challenging the user to connect events to produce a story of ‘what happened’. A series of documentary videos provides a linear mode of engagement that can be described as expository. However, also significant is the way in which the database uses categories to invite a thematic exploration of the complexities of national identity and racial tensions. Categories shaping exploration of the database include identity, media, Cronulla and The Shire, Punchbowl and Lakemba, language, symbols, racism, police and the law, and the media. Across the categories, the user encounters interview excerpts, photographs, and media content. Each category opens up into a collection of elements revealing multiple factors and issues in a way that hints toward the mosaic (see below). However, the categories ultimately work to shape understanding and to reinforce an argument about the riots and their significance. A short textual paragraph ‘frames’ each category and the contents of the database reinforce this dominant framing. The content collected under the category of racism, for example, is primarily academic or official and it collectively works to present race as a significant and underacknowledged social problem. There is an expository effect that is reinforced by the categorical structuring of the database.

The mosaic database In describing a database as ‘mosaic’ in its intent, my aim is to draw parallels with audio-visual practice, particularly Nichols’ (1978) notion of the documentary mosaic. Nichols approaches the documentaries of Fred Wiseman as collections of sequences (facets) that, while having different degrees of narrative organisation

Documentary databases 35

themselves, are not organised according to an overarching narrative logic. The effect, Nichols argues, is to represent reality as a web of interconnected elements, influences, and patterns and to draw attention to the complexities of social issues. In pointing to the mosaic form in database documentary my intention is to highlight those databases that are made up of multiple elements (which may take a more or less narrative form in themselves), linked with various degrees of tightness to an overall conceptual framework. Waterlife25 is a database documentary about the Great Lakes, the ‘last great supply of fresh drinking water on earth’. The collection of elements (text, images, animations, and weblinks) are presented via an interface that foregrounds its mosaic ambition with multiple thumbnails forming and reforming an outline of the Lakes. The phrase ‘water is …’ and a series of keywords – everything, fishing, change, bottled, shipping, healing, history, musical – provide a very loose frame for engagement and way of connecting elements. While there is a suggestion of categorisation here, the number of keywords and the multiple connections that each word creates works against any sense of obvious order or totality. Navigating the database inevitably reveals different perspectives, ideas, issues, and understandings. In a similar vein The Next Day26 explores the issue of suicide through the stories of four survivors. Working against a narrative mode of engagement, the stories of the four survivors are highly fragmented and linked to a series of words that produce a mosaic effect as the user becomes aware of their multitude: family, divorce, layers, diagnosed, roof, bullying, molested, love, work, scared, stupid, teachers, hate, and so on. The words don’t function as categories; they don’t explain the audio fragment or add up to a collective account of attempted suicide. Rather, they are more associative, pointing towards the many different ways in which individuals may end up attempting suicide. Engagement with the database is timed, such that the user becomes aware that she can only scratch its surface. The mosaic structure of the work challenges efforts to make connections, to come to conclusions. As with Waterlife, the effect is to foreground complexities and contradictions and the impossibility of definitive understanding. A similar mosaic effect is achieved by documentary databases that take the form of complex networks. Filming Revolution (discussed above), which constructs the possibility space as a constellation of multiple interconnected elements is exemplary, highlighting the radical possibilities of resisting notions of causality. Lebow (2016) appeals to the metaphor of the rhizome as a way of conceptualising the project epistemologically and politically. Eschewing hierarchical structures, a sense of telos or singularity, and pre-established paths the rhizome foregrounds omnidirectional connections that are formed and reformed. As a touchstone the rhizome suggests the possibility of limitless connection in which any element of the database must connect with any other to produce a collective assemblage of enunciation (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). A desire for polyvocality is expressed in the priority accorded to multiplicity and collective understanding, the disavowal of top-down organisation and in the invitation to explore.

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The poetic database Database documentaries also lend themselves to formal and aesthetic exploration that can be described as ‘poetic’ in its effect. The notion of the poetic documentary, as developed by Nichols (2010: 162) is closely aligned with the modernist avant-garde, with priority given to fragmentation, juxtaposition, and the exploration of visual rhythm, mood, tone and affect, over representational realism. More broadly a poetic approach has been taken to indicate a foregrounding of documentary’s ‘expressive’ tendency (Renov 1993) such that the pleasures of ‘looking at’ are given priority (Corner 2005). Challenging a tendency to contrast the poetic with other modes of documentary knowing, Frankham (2013) approaches the poetic as an approach to documentary form which prioritises sensory and experiential modes of understanding, a felt engagement with reality. Where digital media ‘de-form’ story, challenging familiar connections and prioritising alternatives, a poetic mode of engagement is encouraged (2013: 137). For Miles (2014a) the database documentary extends the documentary project of affective knowing, a sense of wonderment that can be produced through poetic treatment. For many interactive documentarians working with Korsakow (see above) the aleatory potential of computation and the disavowal of narrative is tied to a poetic impulse. In many works, there is an evident move towards what Wiehl (2016) has described as minimalist documentary and the production of ‘poetic miniatures’ that zoom into the ‘small details of everyday life in a contemplative way’. The Korsakow interface, which prioritises a small number of co-present images, tends to produce forms of aesthetic engagement with everyday objects. I have noted above,

FIGURE 1.7

Fibonacci 227 screenshot

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Hannah Brasier’s Sunny Rainy Foggy which takes Iven’s Rain as a point of departure for an exploration of atmospheric textures. Similarly, her work Grey Skies/Blue Skies28 makes use of Korsakow to produce an essayistic voice, a subjective and experiential engagement with the experience of noticing. A field of possible relations between short visual fragments is created through a focus on mood, stillness, and movement, with an ‘elusive’ voice over made up of diary entries fostering an awareness of the author’s subjective experience of place (Brasier 2017). An affective engagement with the documentary database may also have a tactile dimension, drawing attention to interaction as a way of knowing. Sharon Daniel’s Blood Sugar29 engages with complex problems of drug addiction and the invisibility of the drug addict through a series of 20 audio interviews. Each addict is represented by an audio waveform that Daniel describes as an ‘audio body’. The audio bodies provide access to the entire interview (suggesting an intersection in the work between the poetic and parallel narratives) but they also work to encourage a form of ‘zooming’ that, as Daniel suggests, serves as a metaphor for the importance of moving closer, not looking away. The interface prompts a poetic engagement with quotes floating in an abstract ‘cellular-like’ space, prompting a kind of mesmeric interaction in the form of moving between people and ideas. In zooming closer connections between the individual stories become apparent in floating key words – virus, damage, anger. In enacting a turning toward the addict, in delving beneath their imagined skin in a move that parallels the piercing of the needle, the experience of interaction produces a kinaesthetic ethics (Frosh 2016) that is grounded in the affective experience of reaching out.

Engaging documentary databases In this chapter I have sought to highlight not only the ongoing significance of the database, but also the diversity of database documentary practice. Databases shape our perceptual experiences, knowledge and engagement with realities in a range of ways. While a desire for non-narrative and polyvocality underpins many explorations of the database, challenging documentary practices that prioritise hierarchical, taxonomic and totalising understanding, these desires are often more aspirational than is generally acknowledged. Databases are neither inherently narrative, nor non-narrative: they can be made to tell stories, drawing more or less attention to the contingencies and limits of narrative as a way of engaging reality; they can be organised as archives that reprise a documentary desire to capture and categorise evidence in the service of a singular vision; they provide ways of revealing complexities and calling knowledge into question; and they foster affective, aesthetic reflections, and experiential paths to knowing. These are the many ways in which the possibility space of the database documentary might be structured so as to facilitate our performances (search, arrangement, selection, and recombination) and our interpretive engagements. Just as the database idea is not singular, it is also not static. As it continues to evolve, reflecting shifts in our sense of what it takes to represent the world through computational media, it is important to think critically about the implications for understanding and engagement.

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In drawing attention to the braided voice of the documentary – the role of informational structures, interface design, computational processes and user actions – my aim has been to emphasise the multiple layers of the database ‘point-of-view’. While aspects of the database voice are opaque and the actions of users undetermined, I hope to have demonstrated that it is nevertheless possible to say something about key formal patterns. The field of documentary studies, with its close attention to questions of form is thus well suited to an exploration of the database in all its richness. In this chapter I have focused primarily on the database as a closed navigable documentary form. In the next chapter I will consider what happens when interactive documentarians seek to foster forms of participatory involvement.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

https://vimeo.com/109082263 https://filmingrevolution.supdigital.org http://vectors.usc.edu/issues/4/publicsecrets/index.php http://www.sharondaniel.net/#bloodsugar While many Korsakow films are documentaries, it can be used to create different kinds of interactive database driven stories, see http://korsakow.com/ http://www.mattsoar.com/fib/index.html#/?snu=1683 http://projects.hannahbrasier.com/sunny-rainy-foggy/ https://philiphoffman.ca/filmography/racing-home/ http://vectors.usc.edu/issues/4/publicsecrets/nodetect.html http://www.apolishjourney.zerok.tv/desktop/#THE_JOURNEY http://cloudsovercuba.com http://www.cyod.co.uk/8orp1mbn9iyb9jwkoszk81x5dsbe41 http://www.thanatorama.com http://www.honkytonk.fr/index.php/thebigissue/ http://www.honkytonk.fr/index.php/webdoc/ http://le-grand-incendie.nouvelles-ecritures.francetv.fr http://after64.sbs.com.au/ http://gaza-sderot.arte.tv https://migration.history.sa.gov.au/events/belongings/ https://echoesofis.submarinechannel.com http://www.memoradicnarrative.com http://sins.nfb.ca/#/Grid http://komsomolfilms.com/the-worry-box-project/ http://www.sbs.com.au/cronullariots/ http://waterlife.nfb.ca http://thenextday.nfb.ca/#/thenextday http://www.mattsoar.com/fib/index.html#/?snu=1683 http://projects.hannahbrasier.com/grey-skies/ http://vectorsjournal.org/issues/6/bloodsugar/BloodSugar.html#

2 PARTICIPATORY INTENSITIES Exploring interactive documentary practice

There has been much excitement about the participatory potentials of digital media and their impacts on documentary practice. From projects like 18 Days in Egypt1 which described itself as a participatory ‘crowdsourced’ documentary about the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, to collaborative journalism projects like The Counted2 which gathered data about the use of deadly force by US police or communitybased projects like Hollow3, that explores the challenges faced by small-town America, it is possible to point to a participatory agenda across much interactive documentary practice. These projects and the others that will be discussed in this chapter seek to challenge the traditional relationships between documentarians, audiences, and ‘subjects’ and to explore the potentials of digital media and cultures for fostering distributed, interdisciplinary forms of documentary making. While I will frame my discussion in this chapter around the concept of participation there are many terms in use that aim to capture an ‘opening up’ of documentary making: co-creation, collaboration, crowdsourcing, and so on. What all these terms share is the focus they bring to the relationality of documentary making as well as questioning the power relations that underpin documentary relationships. While many have suggested a radical redistribution of power could be brought about by digital technologies, it is important to resist technologically determinist accounts and focus on the complexities of participatory documentary practice in digital media environments. Documentarians have long sought to foster participation and many of the projects that will be considered in this chapter explicitly connect with historic practice. It is therefore necessary to place our modern participatory moment with respect to this history approaching it less as something radically new, but rather as a ‘re-energising’ of documentary’s participatory ambition in the digital domain (Dovey and Rose 2013: 366). As with non-interactive documentary practice there is much variation in the way that participation is imagined and structured. This chapter aims to explore this variation, drawing out the complexities of participation across interactive DOI: 10.4324/9781315208862-3

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documentary practice. Like many concepts, participation has different meanings, more or less explicitly articulated, across a range of disciplines. I employ it here, following Carpentier (2011: 68), to interrogate the potential for non-professionals to be involved in decision making in relation to media production (content-related participation), to assume a role in relation to decision making within a media organisation or, as is often the case in interactive documentary, decision making in relation to a documentary project (structural participation). In taking a political and normative approach to participation I am positioning my analysis within a history of documentary practice and scholarship in which participation constitutes a response to the problem of power inequality in the documentary process. But while participation is an ethical commitment rather than a technical achievement (Potter 2017: 119) it is also the case that digital media are reshaping participatory media practices in complex and very variable ways. It is this complexity that I aim to engage with over the course of this chapter. It is not always straightforward to separate participation in documentary making from questions about the political ambitions and value of such participation. After all, participants typically involve themselves in documentary projects with a view to expressing their views publicly on matters of shared concern. Being heard within the documentary making process, being able to express oneself, is therefore fundamental to the political value and ambition of the documentary project. Having said that, my aim in this chapter is to focus specifically on documentary making as a series of practices that are oriented towards forms of documenting. I will build on my analysis of participation in Chapter three when questions of listening and the political ambition of interactive documentary will be taken up. I will begin with a brief exploration of the history of participatory documentary practice, engaging with participation as a practical response to the epistemic and ethical problems of power in documentary making. I will then go on to consider some of the implications of digital technologies and cultures for participatory documentary. Drawing attention to the questions of participatory architecture and discourse I will consider the potential for forms of ‘mass’ participation and collective authority as well as varying ‘strategies of participation’ (Gaudenzi 2014). I will then present a framework for a microanalysis of interactive documentary participation that provides a foundation for a critical engagement with the participatory ambitions of interactive documentary. In exploring the participatory intensities of a number of interactive documentaries my aim is to highlight the complexities, fluidities, continuities, and ambiguities of participation in the field.

Participation: a response to the problem of power in documentary making To approach documentary as relational is to acknowledge the epistemic and ethical problem of power. Documentary making establishes relationships between those with the authority and resources to make documentary (often, but of course not always, media professionals) and those who appear in and/or consume documentary media. These relationships are, for the most part, unequal and as a consequence they

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raise questions about the politics and ethics of documentary representation: Who has the right to represent another? For what purpose and to whose benefit? To what extent do documentaries reflect the views of those with social, economic, and political power? The history of documentary is in large part the story of the subject’s exploitation. Throughout its history documentary makers have come to rely on the exposure (if not exploitation) of a steady stream of ‘victims’ who stand silent, revealed and devoid of the potential to represent themselves (Nichols 1991: 91). Representing reality from the perspective of elites, mainstream documentary has been regularly criticised for its reproduction of dominant ideologies, couched in an appeal to the objectivity of observation and positivist epistemology. In response to the problem of power in documentary making documentarians have, at various times and in various ways, sought ways to ‘speak with’ rather than ‘about’ others (Ruby 1992). In doing so they have looked for ways in which to cede control over aspects of the image making process, sharing authority and rethinking authorship in terms of facilitation. Exploring this history provides a way of revealing the complexities of power in the documentary making process. Historic touchstones for contemporary participatory documentary are many, as interactive documentary scholars have shown (Dovey and Rose 2013; Zimmerman and De Michiel 2018). Ruby (2000) provides a useful framework for engaging with attempts at power sharing in documentary practice, highlighting historic attempts at consultation, cooperation, and collaboration. It is useful not least because it chimes with contemporary claims of a continuum of participatory ambition in interactive documentary work. But it is useful, also, for what it reveals about the complex ways in which power structures the documentary making process. At a minimum, a commitment to power sharing may describe practices of ‘speaking with’ film subjects by giving participants some degree of control over their own performance, as may be the case in observational modes. In all other respects, however, decision making rests with the documentarian. Cooperative cinema describes the first steps towards what might be regarded as a more genuinely participatory mode of documentary production. Robert Flaherty’s collaboration with the Inuit community in the making of Nanook of the North, serves as an early and influential touchstone. As Ruby suggests (2000: 86–90), what Flaherty sought was a way to represent the Inuit from their own perspective, recognising that to do so would require new methods of filmmaking. He had planned to collaborate with the Inuit from the outset, securing funding for the ‘renumeration of natives’ from Revillon Freres. He involved the Inuit in the making of Nanook as technicians, as performers, as consultants (he was keen to elicit their feedback on his cultural understanding) and as editorial collaborators who suggested key scenes and contributed to reviewing the footage. However, there can be little doubt that in spite of attempts to involve the Inuit in the making of Nanook it is Flaherty’s vision that is realised. The film romantically (re)creates an idealised story of Inuit life and reinforces a cultural hierarchy in which Western perspectives dominate (Keith Beattie 2008a: 49). Inspired by Flaherty, Jean Rouch’s ambition to realise a ‘shared anthropology’ through a commitment to reflexivity and a willingness to reveal collaborative processes of

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knowledge creation (exemplified in Chronicle of a Summer (1961)) has also had a lasting impact on participatory practice. Cooperation has also been a feature of radical media making traditions reflecting a commitment to making films with and for (rather than about) those engaged in political struggle (Waugh 1984). Joris Ivens’ and Henri Storck’s Misere au Borinage (1934), for example, included a number of scenes in which the ‘filmmakers’ were essentially reduced to the role of providing technical support to the community ‘since the idea, the dramatization and the performances all come from local initiative’ (Waugh 2016: 187). Cooperation turns into collaboration, Ruby suggests (2000: 208), when documentarians and ‘subjects’ work together at all stages of the production to determine both the content and form of the documentary. The National Film Board of Canada’s Challenge for Change/Société Nouvelle Program has been particularly influential as a model of this more extensive participatory ambition. Key to the project was an ambition to ‘engage the people on the screen as partners in the filmmaking process’ (Hénault, cited Marchessault 1995: 135) and to reconceptualise documentary as a ‘public platform for the people’ (Marchessault 1995: 135). Developed during the production of the Fogo Island documentaries (The Newfoundland Project 1964–7) the ‘Fogo process’, outlines key principles for participatory filmmaking including: focusing on process over product; prioritising community concerns, perspectives, and ambitions; minimising editorial intervention and involving the community within the filmmaking process – from making decisions on content to giving a rite of ‘veto’; and focusing on relationship building and trust (Newhook 2009). Emerging video technologies allowed for ‘subject generated’ projects such as VTR: St Jacques (1969) and You Are on Indian Land (1974). Challenge was a significant and highly influential experiment in community filmmaking, an approach to media making grounded in the voices and political ambitions of collaborators. And yet, it is important to recognise the participatory complexity of the project and the limits of power sharing. As Marchessault (1995) has argued, Challenge was ultimately a top-down initiative that reinforced a middle-class vision of film as a means by which to foster community ‘improvement’ and reinforce the status quo (see also Druick 2007). The logical end point for collaborative documentary making might seem to be doing away with professional intermediation entirely by putting cameras directly into the hands of individuals. Visions of subject-generated documentary media have a long history. John Grierson, who is perhaps best known for his willingness to put the ‘aggie’ before all else, argued that the evolution of documentary ought to be towards ‘local film people making films to state their case politically or otherwise, to express themselves whether it’s in journalistic or other terms (Grierson cited Ruby 2000: 200). In a similar vein, George Stoney who is well known for championing participatory methods at the National Film Board of Canada, argued often that ‘[p] eople should do their own filming, or at least feel they can control the content’ (cited Winston 2014: 38). The BBC’s Video Nation project (1993–2011) represents an experiment in subject-created media, albeit one in which forms of professional management remained significant. Video Nation was a project to facilitate the production of video diaries by ‘ordinary’ Britons for television (and later online)

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broadcast. Produced by the BBC’s Community and Disability Programme Unit, Video Nation has been described as exemplifying ‘the most devolved power structure that TV institutions can offer’ (Dovey 2000: 126). Participants were given access to technology (as well as training and support) and had the freedom to decide what to film. They also had some involvement in the editing process (typically a right of veto). While there is an appearance of non-mediation, Rose (2017) describes the production process as involving layers of professional support, selecting and briefing participants, training them, watching their tapes and finally, editing their footage. The result was, a ‘professionally managed’ participatory process that resulted in a subjective, ‘confessional’ style of address and a tendency toward the intimate and revelatory (Matthews 2007) that aimed to create ‘good’ and ‘watchable’ content ‘deemed proper by the mainstream media sphere’ (Carpentier 2011: 244). To find examples of more devolved decision making it is necessary to look beyond the media mainstream. Carolyn Strachan and Alessandro Cavadini’s method of ‘total community participation’ developed in the creation of Two Laws/Kanymarda Yuwa (1981) offers one useful example from the field of anthropology. The film was made at the invitation of the Borroloola Aboriginal community who were keen to make use of film in the context of their struggle for land rights (Beattie 2008b). Strachan and Cavadini put their filmmaking skills at the service of the community, taking time to understand their ambitions for the film and to come to know the community and their place in it (MacBean 1983). They came to appreciate the significance of collective decision making to Borroloola law and this became a key feature of the production process. All decisions relating to the filming, from what to film and how, camera positions and even the choice of lens, were made collectively. The result, as Ginsberg (2008) has argued, is a paradigm shift in storytelling, a ‘community authored’ film in which the Borroloola Community collectively speaks of their experience and history on their own terms and in their own visual language. Two Laws exemplifies documentarians’ willingness to see their role in terms of facilitation rather than authorship. Subject-initiated and controlled production marks a shift in power relations such that the ‘participant’ comes to dominate the decision making. What might we draw from this very brief survey of the history of participatory ambition in documentary making? I have sought to understand participation as a response to the ethical and epistemological challenge of power inequality in documentary practice through forms of power sharing. Histories of participatory documentary largely prioritise documentarians’ intentions, presenting participation as a ‘gift’ in the production process. A growing body of empirical research with documentary participants points to the complexities of power in the documentary making process, in line with a view of participation as an ongoing site of material and discursive struggle (a point that will be developed in more detail below). Exploring participatory documentary methods reveals that documentarians’ intentions (important though they may be) tell only part of the story. Organisational agendas, the need to produce sufficiently ‘professional’ outputs, the choices and uses of technology, differences in knowledge and skill all shape the participatory offer. It matters who is invited to participate and the extent to which documentarians

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are willing to open up key decisions to the input of others, but it is also important to consider how documentary projects are initiated, for what purpose and to whose benefit. While equality between documentarians and participants can play a normative role for documentarians and scholars interested in the politics of documentary practice, the history of documentary points more to a continuum of power sharing in which forms of inequality often persist. The participatory history of documentary, as I have noted, has often served as an explicit reference point for those seeking to invite participation in interactive documentary projects. Particularly well known in this regard is the National Film Board of Canada’s Filmmaker in Residence (2004–9) project which was inspired by the legacy of Challenge, but fuelled by the digital revolution4. Filmmaker sought to engage the extended community of medical practitioners and patients of an inner-city Toronto hospital in an exploration of health, illness, inequality, and justice through a series of participatory opportunities. The project’s manifesto5 echo’s Challenge’s commitment to working with communities, prioritising their goals and ideas. It also reflects a commitment to engaging ethically with participants and to prioritising documentary making as a process. As with Challenge there was an emphasis on democratising the means of production, with digital technologies providing new opportunities for creating and sharing content. In many respects Filmmaker in Residence gestures towards documentary’s participatory present. While it raises questions about what participation might look like in a digitally mediated environment, it also reprises concerns with identities, contexts, organisational agendas, and audience expectations. The most important lesson that we must take from documentary’s participatory history is the need to go beyond the documentary ‘text’ itself in order to understand the participatory offer.

Interactive documentary: a participatory continuum If participatory methods could be described as ‘marginal’ within an analogue media environment, a reassessment is clearly warranted in light of the impacts of digital technologies and cultures on documentary practice. Ours is a media culture shaped by an ‘ideology of participation’ (Lewis 2012: 848), a suspicion of professionalization and celebration of ‘DIY’ culture, combined with a sense of the value of collective intelligence and the democratic importance of inclusion and engagement. When and how individuals might shift from being ‘consumers’ of documentary to engaging creatively in forms of ‘production and distribution’ of content has, therefore, been a particular focus of research. On the one hand it is important to highlight the value of interactive documentary as a field of production that has often sought to counter digital ‘participation gaps’, seeking effective ways to work with participants in order to overcome various barriers (knowledge, expertise, confidence, cultural difference) that have arguably made participation in digital environments so uneven, and looking to facilitate contributions by marginalised people on their own terms (Rose 2017; 2014). At the same time, critical assessments of digital documentary participation have drawn attention to strategic forms of participation designed to attract and extract value from audiences in an era of attention scarcity. As Dovey (2014) has

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argued, digital media technologies and cultures have brought a collaborative dynamic to contemporary documentary practice, but projects have equally been shaped by the digital media ecology’s logic of extraction, motivated by a search for attention (and attendant opportunities for value extraction) as much as a desire to reflect diverse perspectives. It is important to bear in mind, he reminds us, that the ability to contribute does not indicate that the relationships surrounding an interactive documentary are ‘lateral, horizontal, or equal’ (21) or that the project offers any meaningful dispersal of editorial control. In navigating the participatory possibilities of interactive documentary, scholars have focused critically on participatory architectures and discourses, considering the interplay between technological affordances, social structures, and documentary frames. They have drawn attention to questions of place and community as well as shifts toward forms of collaborative verification. Taken together, these questions point to a number of considerations for a critical engagement with the participatory ambitions of documentary projects. Perhaps most obviously, digital technologies suggest new ways of approaching documentary making, potentially allowing for an opening up of the production process. Forms of ‘mass’ participation, exemplified by projects like 18 Days in Egypt6, a collective history of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution that now includes more than 1,000 first-hand accounts, offer ‘unvarnished, unsupervised, unedited amateur footage from eyewitnesses to global events’ (Harindranath 2014: 181), or Man with a Movie Camera: Global Remake (2007–14)7 which will be considered in more detail below, suggest a new scale for documentary participation. There is also the potential to distribute production globally, engaging communities of documentarians as exemplified by The Grandmas Project8 which invited ‘professional filmmakers’ and ‘film students’ to contribute a documentary about their grandmother using a recipe as the basis for exploring family relationships and cultural heritage. It is also possible to point, as Cizek, Uricchio et al (2019) note, to a trend towards forms of interdisciplinary collaboration facilitated by digital tools and networks.

FIGURE 2.1

18 Days in Egypt screenshot

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Across this diverse body of work, scholars have sought to interrogate the participatory offer. Gaudenzi (2014) draws attention, for example, to a range of ‘participatory strategies’ highlighting the significance of ‘who, what and when’ for participants’ agency with respect to documentary projects. She highlights different kinds of participation: commenting; getting involved in debates, the contribution of forms of user-generated content as well as forms of data gathering (as is the case in many ‘locative’ documentary projects). There are also different kinds of participants: ‘crowds’, subject-participants, expert participants, and so on. There is no singular form of participatory interactive documentary and interactive documentary makers have actively sought to provide would-be participants with different levels of involvement, and consequently, agency. Gaudenzi argues that there is a distinction to be drawn between projects that invite a more structural involvement in documentary making practice and the more casual open calls for participation that are necessarily more limited in their participatory offer. Dovey and Rose (2013), with reference to the work of Clay Shirky, call for consideration of interactive documentary’s ‘promise, tool, bargain’. Why has someone been asked to participate? What do they have at their disposal to do so, and what can you expect (or to put it another way, what can be expected of you?). The participatory bargain also involves the management of consent and control over content, raising questions about the ways in which participants are asked to be involved and the possibilities that might remain open to them to retain control over anything they contribute. To the extent that this is made transparent to would-be participants, Dovey and Rose suggest that it constitutes a response to the problem of power in interactive documentary participation. In focusing on the relationality of documentary making in digital, and hybrid (digital/non-digital) environments, interactive documentary scholars have paid particular attention to community. Many documentarians have reflected on the challenges of fostering participatory communities in networked environments. In reflecting on the importance of community, Jigar Mehta, creator of 18 Days in Egypt (cited Nash 2014b: 150), notes that open invitations to participate online often fail to engage would-be participants. Communities, he argues, need to be built in order to sustain participatory projects. In Mehta’s words, ‘participation still takes community; it takes management, it takes somebody to be driving the conversation’ (149). Interactive documentarians and scholars have paid particular attention to the creation of space through practices of documentary convening. The concept of space and the possibility of open spaces for documentary practice has been a particular theme in the work (both practice and scholarship) of Patricia Zimmerman and Helen De Michiel (2018; 2013). Space points to the significance of place, social relations, and discourse for documentary practice (Zimmerman and De Michiel 2018: 80). Envisaging documentary making as an encounter, the concept of ‘open space’ documentary captures a desire to create spaces that challenge traditional hierarchies and produce more horizontal power structures. What is needed, Zimmerman and De Michiel suggest, is a politics of convening that draws attention to ‘strategies’ of community formation and to their implications for participatory agency (a point that will be developed further in Chapter three).

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The discursive dimension of space is brought to the fore in Rose’s (2017) analysis of Question Bridge, a participatory project on Black male identities (which will be considered in more detail in Chapter three). Rose considers how facilitation might function to address gaps in interactive documentary participation. In relation to Question Bridge she highlights the project’s frame and the way that it foregrounds the category of ‘Black male’ as the basis for participation. Black male serves as both a common identity, but one that defies easy definition. Proposing a dialogue between Black men, the project invites participants to ask, or answer, a question. This simple participatory structure requires no specific knowledge, it does not demand technical access or proficiency and, further, it seeks to foster inclusivity. As Rose (2017: 56) suggests, as a participatory structure the invitation to pose a question is non-intimidatory and accessible but it is significant also in the way it frames the category ‘Black male’ as a site of dialogue. The way in which contributions are included and knowledge created in interactive documentary is also relevant to the creation of space. Returning to 18 Days in Egypt it is possible to see that the offer of participation goes further than the provision of a space for sharing content (as important as this is for visibility and the public dimension of documentary). The documentary frame – you witnessed it, you recorded it – links a collaborative understanding of history to the accumulation of different perspectives. Significantly, this collective historiography is grounded in processes of ‘collaborative verification’ (Hermida 2012). As Harindranath (2014) has argued, 18 Days poses a challenge to a Western epistemology grounded in professional intermediation by inviting forms of digital verification – ‘liking’, ‘sharing’, ‘streaming’, and commenting on content. Many scholars engaging with participation in interactive documentary projects point to power sharing as a continuum. Cizek and Uricchio et al (2019), for example, describe a continuum of collaboration that spans the gulf between author-driven or auteur documentary on the one hand and sponsored or subject-driven projects on the other. They locate co-creation at the centre of the continuum, reflecting the ambition to approach documentary making as an ‘equal, shared, discovery process’. Conceptualising documentary making as a process of creating participatory spaces and convening relationships, interactive documentary scholars have begun the task of working through the complexities of power across digital (and hybrid) media projects. New technologies, networks, and cultures may foster participation, lowering barriers and inviting forms of collective knowledge creation. But of course, they may just as easily exclude by virtue of lack of access, but also by virtue of differences in identity, knowledge, skill and/or confidence. Looking at who can do what and when, at questions of epistemic agency with respect to documentary knowledge and at transparency in the documentary ‘bargain’, provides a starting point for a critical engagement with interactive documentary’s participatory offer. The challenge for interactive documentary scholars is to better understand the participatory continuum, to bring reflections on interactive documentary participation into conversation with what we know about participation in audio-visual contexts with a view to revealing the multiple layers of decision making that shape documentary media. It is to this task that I will now turn.

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Framing a microanalysis of interactive documentary participation Building on Carpentier’s (2011) critical engagement with media participation, while also extending it to accommodate interactive documentary as a particular sphere of activity, I will propose a multi-dimensional framework for a ‘microanalytics’ of power (Jenkins and Carpentier 2013) relevant to interactive documentary making. Drawing attention to the social, material, and discursive operations of power my aim is to reveal a range of ‘participatory intensities’ from minimalist to maximalist as power is shared in the documentary making process (Carpentier 2011: 68–9). Minimalist participation in interactive documentary, as with forms of consultation and cooperation described by Ruby (see above) is primarily documentarian driven and media-centred, typically one way and largely divorced from meaningful sites of social and political activity. Minimalist participatory intensities are characterised by some opening out of the production process, often facilitating documentarians’ collection of content, but they tend to reinforce the status quo with respect to the relationships between the documentarian and subject/audience. Participation tends to be content focused rather than structural, focusing on contributions of content, but without inviting involvement in shaping the overall aims and direction of a project. More maximal participatory intensities are characterised by moves toward greater equality in decision making in relation to all aspects of the documentary project. Power inequalities in media making can be challenged by the documentarian looking actively for ways to enhance the agency of others. This may involve looking for ways to challenge power inequalities that exist outside of the documentary project, but which nevertheless structure the participatory offer. Carpentier (2011) draws attention to four key structuring elements that can play either an enabling or disabling role with respect to participation. Firstly, he points to the significance of identity and its role in establishing and/or reinforcing relations of power. Documentaries might engage participants as experts, as community members and/or as ‘ordinary’ people. Thumim (2012: 21–3) draws attention to the many ways in which ‘ordinary people’ are constructed by media projects, from the banal to the celebratory. Interactive documentary projects like Mapping Main Street9, appeal to participants as ‘ordinary citizens’. The invitation to draw attention to the diversity of America’s 10,466 ‘Main streets’ is bound up with a vision of participatory politics and individual agency. But appeals to participants as ‘ordinary’ can also subsume difference and agency as Dovey and Rose (2013) have shown in relation to participatory projects like Life in a Day and 6 Billion Others. In both of these projects mass participation facilitated by digital networked technologies implies inclusion and diversity (often given visual emphasis in the use of vibrant ‘mosaic’ interfaces). In effect, however, a simplistic ‘one world’ humanism works to counter the agency of the participant, reducing her to just one more smiling, celebratory, face in the crowd. Identity is also a factor in the creation of community, as a number of the projects considered below highlight. While engaging ‘communities’ has been a key tactic for documentarians working in participatory modes, it is important to recognise that

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communities are, to varying degrees, created in the process of collaborative media making (Thumim 2012) and that this process is shaped by identities and relations of power. A focus on the organisational contexts of documentary participation highlights the ways in which formal structures and institutional cultures shape power sharing. Media organisations’ relationships with their publics, the ways in which they are organised, as well as regulatory, financial, and political environments all play a role in the participatory offer. Returning to the example of Video Nation, for example, it is possible to make sense of the participatory offer in terms of the organisation’s role as a public media organisation charged with reflecting and engaging diverse audiences. While power sharing was central to the project concept – as a means to diversify representation and establish an ethical practice – and the context in which the project was created tended to support a more maximal participatory involvement, the power imbalance between professional and amateur was little challenged (Carpentier 2011: 247). Some interactive documentaries have been made by established media organisations, both public service and commercial, often with an explicit remit to experiment with the participatory potentials of emerging technologies. The experimental nature of these projects can tend to favour technological complexity and/or seek to attract ‘tech-savvy’ audiences. However, many participatory interactive documentaries are created outside of mainstream media organisations. It is interesting to note that many projects seeking to foster more maximal forms of participation are envisaged as research projects, undertaken within academic settings. While academic and alternative media contexts often facilitate organisational structures that are more horizontal, characterised by more devolved decision-making processes and/or favouring process over product, this cannot be taken for granted. As many interactive documentary scholars have noted, technology plays a key role in shaping participation. Where professional technologies tend to require specialist skills and knowledge, reinforcing professional/non-professional identities, the use of readily available, familiar and ‘domestic’ technologies can counter the professional–amateur hierarchy. A particularly striking example of the significance of technological accessibility for participation is found in the Quipu Project10. The documentary aims to preserve and collectively acknowledge ‘the memories and testimonies of those affected by unconsented sterilisation in Peru’ in the 1990s (Brown and Tucker 2017: 1193). While the project will be discussed in more in Chapter three, it is important to note here the project’s use of a ‘freephone’ VoIP phone line as a simple and accessible means by which to allow people to record testimonies and to listen and share testimonies with others. Where projects seek to experiment with emerging technologies professional intermediation becomes necessary. While this need not preclude a more maximal participatory intensity, as I will suggest in relation to the NFB’s One Millionth Tower (discussed below), professional intermediation introduces an inequality into the production process. Where commercial platforms or technologies are used, it is necessary to consider the extent to which participation might be driven by commercial imperatives (Dovey 2014).

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These structuring elements – the role of identities, organisations, and technologies – together with expectations of quality (in particular the extent to which participatory processes are oriented towards the production of ‘professional’ media products) draw our attention to the many factors that shape interactive documentary participation. Adding to this framework a concern with documentary practice and the construction of space and knowledge allows us to consider a number of the ways in which power relations structure participatory documentary making: from consent and the terms of the bargain to the particular ways in which knowledges are validated (or not). For all that the digital media environment promises to transform participatory approaches to documentary making, many of the questions and challenges that scholars and documentarians are engaging with reprise earlier debates. In the remainder of this chapter my aim is to explore a number of participatory documentary projects in terms of questions of power. My aim is not to suggest that some projects are ‘better’ than others – more minimal participatory intensities still facilitate very enjoyable and valuable documentary experiences – but rather to highlight the varying ways in which documentarians are exploring power sharing through digital media documentary making.

Interactive documentary participation: exploring participatory intensities As I have already suggested, interactive documentary should be a significant field for scholars of digital media participation. Many of the projects that will be considered here tend toward a maximal participatory intensity and, further, there are a number that have been conceptualised as practice-led investigations into the nature and complexity of power in media production. They therefore help to highlight the importance of practice as a means by which to approach participation in media production (as well as through media production, a point that will be picked up in Chapter three). It is also worth noting at the outset that many, if not most, participatory interactive documentaries blend digital and interpersonal methods. Indeed, as I have already suggested (and which will become clearer as I explore examples of documentary work) while digital technologies and networks allow for forms of ‘mass’ participation, these tend not to challenge traditional power dynamics in the relationship between documentarians, subjects, and audiences. While my analysis seeks to reveal a continuum of participatory intensity across different projects, it is important to note that individual projects are rarely easy to ‘categorise’ with respect to participation. Participatory intensity may vary over the lifetime of the project, it may shift within a project and it may vary depending on perspective. Participation is difficult to research and to analyse, but interactive documentary provides a fascinating site for exploration. An obvious place to start in terms of capturing what is most distinctive about documentary participation in a digital media environment is the possibility for forms of ‘mass’ participation such as ‘crowdsourcing’ documentary content. Crowdsourcing describes approaches to problem solving, information gathering

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and/or the creation of ideas and products by harnessing the effort and collective intelligence of distributed ‘crowds’ of individuals (Brabham 2013). It is a process driven by the needs of the initiating ‘organisation’ which makes an essentially ‘open’ appeal to would-be participants. However, it is a process in which the initiating organisation shares control over the project with the ‘crowd’ (to some degree) in order to realise its collective intelligence/creativity. For documentary makers crowdsourcing has mostly been deployed as a way of gathering information and fostering ways of engaging creatively with documentary material, opening up the documentary making process (McIntosh 2016). Man with a Movie Camera: Global Remake (2007–14)11 is exemplary of this logic, highlighting the interplay between the artist’s agenda and the creative responses of participants and technologies. A digital ‘remake’ of Vertov’s 1929 film, the project invited participants to contribute a video image that corresponds in some way to a shot in the original film. Participants have the freedom to choose which shot they want to match and the nature of the match that they want to make (it may be a reproduction of the original, a modern take or an aesthetic response, etc). The project’s platform/interface works to structure participation both by providing participants with a ‘template’ of original shots (categorised by subject and scene) and by continually compiling the ‘remake’ as new contributions are received. As a ‘crowdsourced’ project Man with a Movie Camera: Global Remake is driven by an authorial agenda (which is to produce, among other things, a product suitable for collective viewing on a large public screen) in its invitation to participate. The project’s interface serves as a template to guide contributions and the software underpinning the project collates them into many remakes. Contributors have agency, but only within the parameters of the project as a generative system. As Feldman (2010) has argued, what author Parry Bard has created is a system that ‘lets the process itself manufacture the work in question’. The participant, for her part, has the choice to become a part of the global, distributed remake (or not) as well as some freedom to choose the form of her contribution.

FIGURE 2.2

Man With a Movie Camera: Global Remake screenshot

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In the case of more journalistic projects, crowdsourcing provides a way for journalists to extend their reach beyond their own ‘knowledge neighbourhood’ by drawing on the knowledge and expertise of others. However, professional journalists shape the openness of participatory projects, determining ‘when and how the public is invited to join a journalistic process’ (Aitamurto 2016). The Guardian is a news organisation that has been at the forefront of experiments in ‘open’ journalism (Daniel and Flew 2010), looking to re-imagine journalism less as a product delivered to the audience and more ‘a process that was open, transparent and confident enough to welcome the involvement of others’ (Rusbridger 2018: 203). The Counted is a Guardian investigation that aims to facilitate a ‘thorough public accounting for deadly use of force’ by generating a comprehensive dataset of fatalities involving police in 2015 and 2016. In the wake of the killing of teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson Missouri, the lack of an official programme of data collection emerged as an issue to which The Counted sought to respond (The Guardian)12. The Counted invited contributions of information about police killings between 2015 and 2016. According to the project team 30,000 people (The Guardian)13, including the families and friends of those killed, have provided information about known fatalities, correcting misinformation and bringing to light previously unreported deaths. In order to facilitate the provision of ‘first-hand’ information, the project’s ‘community maintenance and moderation’ team sought to link the project to communities who cared about the issue and who had information to contribute (Hamilton 2015). However, in contrast to 18 Days in Egypt (discussed above), The Counted did not engage participants in practices of collaborative verification, but rather made much of the project’s professional data verification. As such, participants were assigned to the very familiar role of ‘source’ within the journalistic process, with journalistic legitimacy linked to the iterative production of reliable data through professional fact-verification (Tong 2018). However, it must also be acknowledged that professional verification is bound up with the ambition of The Counted to serve as a ‘critical forensis’, a counter-forensic practice that seeks to reveal state injustice (Gates 2019). The National Film Board of Canada’s Highrise (2009–15) series consists of several interactive documentaries that, taken together, constitute a sustained exploration of participatory digital methods. As previously noted, the NFB as an organisation has earned a reputation for its commitment to participatory modes of media making, with Challenge for Change still referenced internationally as a touchstone for statesupported radical filmmaking (Druick 2007: 131). The NFB’s embrace of digital technology is bound up with this participatory past, but also with the ongoing need to demonstrate its relevance to Canadians in a political climate increasingly hostile to the arts. Focusing on digital innovation has been strategic, but it has sometimes cut across the organisation’s traditional remit (Gauthier 2016). Three projects in particular highlight this organisational exploration of participation in the digital media environment. Out my Window is an exploration of highrise living around the world. Challenging assumptions about highrise communities, a series of

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thirteen stories reveals the creativity and community that is often hidden behind grey exteriors. The project is significant both for its use of digital networks to allow for collaborative filmmaking and for its exploration of ‘crowdsourcing’ via social media platforms. One Millionth Tower explores possible futures, engaging one Toronto highrise community in a collective reimagining of their physical environment. Here the collaboration is interdisciplinary with residents working with architects, documentarians, and animators to realise their shared vision. The Universe Within builds on the interdisciplinarity of the One Millionth Tower, combining documentary making with community involvement in documenting the digital lives of highrise residents. Taken together the projects reflect an exploration of documentary participation that is bound up with an exploration of cutting-edge technology, a shift toward ‘interdisciplinary’ participation and a desire to support both process and product. Out my Window invited both ‘mass’ and distributed participation. With regards to the former, the project’s ‘participate’ initiative can be seen as an exploration of documentary crowdsourcing with social media (specifically Flikr) used to gather and display participants’ images of highrise living. Reflecting a need to produce material suitable for inclusion in the project, contributions to the project were professionally managed – participants were instructed how to take their photo (ideally, taken out of a window at five stories or above) and encouraged to add a ‘personal touch’ by reflecting on the feelings, memories, and thoughts associated with the view14. Of course, the ‘crowd’ also had a degree of individual agency in their response to the brief, reflecting the mix of bottom-up and top-down power structures that characterises crowdsourced initiatives. While the participatory intensity of the ‘participate’ initiative might be described as more minimal, the project was also significant for its use of digital networks to create a community of

FIGURE 2.3

One Millionth Tower screenshot

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‘subject producers’ located across 13 cities. Again, production was tightly managed with the NFB team providing detailed instructions on how to gather information for the project: ‘equipment to use, minimum resolution for photos, how to send the material to us. Even more importantly, we gave information on how to develop the stories and on looking for objects that could serve as trigger points for the stories’ (Cizek, cited Hancox 2017: 57). And yet, while the project frame and aesthetic were set by the project team, participants were able to find and tell stories without the direct involvement of a documentarian or facilitator (Hancox 2017). Further, entering into a longer-term relationship with the production team suggests the potential for negotiation and power sharing, although the emphasis given to professional standards of production is likely to counter this to some degree. One Millionth Tower points toward an emerging trend in participatory documentary: an exploration of collaborative practices beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries. Cizek and Uricchio et al (2019) identify a range of works that eschew traditional notions of disciplinarity, imagining creative, ‘third’ spaces in which creative technologists, designers, scientists, documentarians and, in this case, highrise residents, might come together around a shared project. The project sought to re-imagine and render visible a possible future for one Toronto tower block. The project involved architects, urban planners, animators, coders, documentary makers, and residents. The project was significant, not least for its technological innovation. Describing itself as a ‘technological first’ the project’s ‘about the tech15’ description gives a long list of technologies and assets as well as the complex processes that allowed them to come together in an apparently seamless 3D interactive environment. The project was ‘hyper-local’ and involved two years of collaboration with the residents of one Toronto tower block, but there can be little question that professional– amateur hierarchy and technological intermediation structured the participatory offer. Further, it might be argued that although process and product were both valued within the project, the development of a highly professional, technologically innovative interactive 3D environment marks a prioritising of the organisation’s digital agenda. Finally, The Universe Within16 extends professional collaboration into the academic domain, exploring the digital lives of highrise residents by drawing on the expertise of a geographer, a social-work scholar and a network of 14 researcher/residents. The researcher/residents undertook a participatory-action survey to collect data from their neighbours about their digital lives which was used, among other things, to highlight priorities for social intervention. The resident/researchers were trained and paid for their time, reflecting their status as part of the project team and their expertise (not least their command of the community’s many languages) as researchers (Cizek and Uricchio et al 2019). Like One Millionth Tower, The Universe Within offers ways to participate in documentary other than through the creation of media content, although in the case of the latter the participatory bargain (particularly the time commitment made by the researcher/residents) makes it a relatively inaccessible proposition. But the emphasis given in the project to collaboration as interdisciplinary is interesting on a number of levels. Firstly, there is a reprising here of

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documentary’s ‘sober’ associations with social science practices which were a dominant feature of the NFB’s early history (Druick 2007). Like a number of participatory interactive documentaries, the project benefitted from access to funding from research agencies (in this case the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada), reflecting a sense of documentary practice as (part of) a research methodology. But significantly, professional collaborations differ from participation in their relations of power. What separates power-sharing with professional colleagues from the participatory opportunities offered to documentary subjects (and even, in this case, ‘resident/researchers’) are the broader relations of power within which they must be located. I want to turn now to consider place and community more specifically as factors shaping the participatory offer. Big Stories Small Towns17 is a participatory documentary project that sought to reimagine Challenge for Change in light of the possibilities of digital media, albeit with a particular focus on processes of community organisation (Potter 2014; 2017). Big Stories is a collection of auto/biographical narratives produced in small towns in Australia, Cambodia, Indonesia, West Papua and Malaysia which aimed to ‘describe multi-layered communities and explore complex relations between people, social backgrounds, technology and place’ (Potter 2017: 123). The project has a ‘hyper-local’ focus, taking place as key factor in structuring participation with documentarians living in the various small towns for a period of time (three weeks to three months), engaging in facilitated media making with locals. Big Stories sought to explore the ‘high connectivity’ of community and the ways in which this might link to identity and storytelling. The project sought to foster maximal participatory intensity, making use of existing social structures and working with community organisations and various ‘intermediary personnel’ (workers in arts organisations, local government, NGOs, and other local organisations). A programme of screenings, feedback sessions and a ‘tiered system of community approval’ sought to distribute authorship. The project team also identified and trained ‘local content

FIGURE 2.4

Big Stories Small Towns screenshot

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producers’ in each location who took a leadership and advocacy role in relation to the project. The intersections between the project team and local communities were too complex to do justice to here, however what is worth noting is while local groups have been important for facilitating participation in a number of documentary projects, working with communities necessarily also produces decision making that is partial, reflecting intra-community disagreements and established social hierarchies (Potter 2014: 155). Hollow18 is similarly a ‘hyper-local’ participatory project that sought to create a space within which the community of McDowell County West Virginia might come together to achieve two objectives: engage in community self-representation as a response to negative representations of McDowell county in the mainstream media and to create the conditions for the community to collaborate to address social, economic, and environmental problems. These goals are interlinked with storytelling seen as a way in which to build social capital, form relationships, and challenge dominant media representations of the region. Initiated by documentarian Elaine McMillion Sheldon the project took a ‘hybrid’ approach to filmmaking, integrating professional and community contributed material. However, she also sought to give the community ownership over the project and to foster participation using a number of participatory methods: a community advisory board (five people) was established to ‘ensure that the community story is being told’ (McMillion Sheldon 2013: 18); community storytelling workshops allowed the community to see and provide feedback on the content being produced by the professional and community media makers, come to understand more about storytelling and representation, and learn more about how they could get involved in the project; and the documentary team provided individual and group training as well as cameras to allow community members to produce their own media. This process was often scaffolded by the production team via a series of questions that prompted reflection on the county, its representation and its future; participatory opportunities were diverse and tied to community events and groups, e.g. a community balloon mapping exercise. The project team spent much time building relationships and trust within the community (indeed, many were originally from the region) and connecting with community groups in order to facilitate participation. In devising the project, McMillion Sheldon had initially conceived of engaging residents as citizen journalists. However, as with many participatory projects, there were a number of barriers – structural and cultural. But the community’s sense of its relationship to the media seems also to have been a factor. As McMillion notes: ‘When I wanted them to participate and tell their own story, many of them just wanted to be interviewed’. While there were people who she anticipated would be keen to tell their own stories, they really just wanted to play the ‘subject’ role in relation to documentary making (cited Nash 2017: 18). This speaks to the significance of identity for media participation. But while the community were somewhat reluctant to take on a citizen journalist role, they did contribute to the documentary by sharing story ideas, personal memories and images and challenging dominant media representations of McDowell county on the project’s Facebook page. The documentary team were

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active on Facebook during production, often posting images of ‘work in progress’. The team’s posts served as a catalyst for people to contribute memories and comments which became part of the overall project of fostering alternative representations of the region. A number of posts suggested content (interviews, locations) or shared content (primarily images) and several shared alternative media representations of the region. Facebook also provided a means by which people became linked to the project (through tagging) and promoted the project (see Nash 2017 for a fuller analysis). The use of Facebook as a platform within the broader Hollow project speaks to the importance of accessible, familiar spaces for engaging documentary practice. In contrast to the complex and unfamiliar cameras that were provided to the community, Facebook offered a space and communicative tools and practices with which community members were familiar. Of course, Facebook’s tools and practices shape participation toward commercial and promotional objectives. It was interesting to note the extent to which the platform encouraged a more promotional and instrumental mode of engagement from the documentary team. Nevertheless, the project’s Facebook page remains a space in which dominant representations of McDowell county are challenged, both by the ‘professional’ contributions of the documentary team and by the comments, memories, and reactions of the McDowell community. I want to finish by considering Red Tales19 a participatory project that reveals the complexities associated with fostering structural participation and creating spaces that are welcoming to those with different perspectives. The project addresses the topic of red squirrel conservation in the UK and was created in collaboration with a diverse community of interest. Like a number of participatory interactive documentaries Red Tales was produced in the context of academic research. Its primary purpose was to bring together insights from documentary studies and human–computer interaction to create socio-technical infrastructures to facilitate participation with diverse groups (Green et al 2017). The project team was particularly concerned with questions of structural participation, providing participants with the opportunity to feed into the aesthetic and conceptual design of the project rather than limiting participation to ‘executory’ participation (contributing in various forms to a pre-established project). The community of interest collaborating on the project was diverse. Geographically, the community was distributed over much of the north of England. It included individuals, but also smaller community and interest groups each embedded in their own social/organisational networks and each with different aims and values (Green et al 2017). Technologies were chosen and used with the aim of fostering involvement and facilitating collective decision making. Cutting edge participatory platforms were eschewed in favour of the simpler, and more accessible, Wordpress platform. A participation ‘hub’ was used to allow the community to input into the design of the project via online polls. Offline events, particularly workshops, provided further opportunities for collaborative involvement in the design of the project. Unlike many participatory interactive documentaries, the content of Red Tales is entirely community generated with the community contributing photos, videos, songs, news articles and a book chapter. As a platform it sought to develop into a hub for ongoing community creativity and engagement20.

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As a research project Red Tales sought to explore the experiences of those who participate in documentary projects and as such it provides important insights into the complexities of participatory media projects. Significantly, while participatory documentary projects are inclined to emphasise an ambition to be inclusive, Red Tales usefully highlights the difficulty of collaborating on the structure of documentary projects where participants hold very different views. While the community of interest could be described as united in its interest in red squirrel conservation, a number of issues, particularly the culling of grey squirrels, was divisive. There were also different views about the purpose of the project, specifically a tension between those who wanted to create a dialogic space, reflective of the range of views, and others who felt that the project should be oriented toward advocacy and activism. Further, while the collaboration with one group in particular (Red Squirrels Northern England) was critical to building community around the project, this partnership also shaped participation toward the group’s agenda and had the effect of alienating some in the community who had a different perspective. The project highlights the complexity of sharing power in relation to documentary point of view. In attempting to navigate different perspectives the project adopted a neutral and inclusive frame which led some participants to feel frustrated by a lack of clear agenda. Perhaps most surprisingly, in spite of the attention paid to fostering maximal participation and providing accessible and variable opportunities for engagement, responses indicated some degree of frustration at the difficulty of participation and suggested a lack of ownership. Red Tales offers rare insight into participation from the perspective of the participant. It challenges simple claims of the participatory potentials of digital technologies and highlights the complexities of documentary making as a relational practice.

Participatory intensities and documentary practices In this chapter it has been my aim to draw attention to the participatory ambitions of many interactive documentaries, to highlight their diverse practices and goals and to provide a critical framework for thinking about what it might mean to participate in these digital and/or hybrid projects. It is quite evident that the digital environment has fostered a renewed exploration of participatory methods and that documentarians remain motivated by a desire to share power with those who are typically most marginalised within the documentary making process. However, as many interactive documentary scholars have suggested, participation is complex and rarely attributable to the affordances of digital technologies. Documentary making has always been deeply relational and while digital spaces provide new opportunities for engaging with others and becoming involved in documentary practice the problems with which documentarians are wrestling are in a very real sense familiar to documentary makers and scholars. How do we accord power and respect to those who appear in our films? Can we engage realities from non-dominant perspectives? And how do we highlight the extent and limits of documentary’s participatory offer?

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What is clear is that digital and hybrid spaces are complex and that we need to go further in our analysis of power relations and the experiences of participants. Red Tales (and the research surrounding the project) is significant for the rare chance that it affords to peek behind the participatory curtain. In many cases, interactive documentarians do not have the luxury of reflecting so frankly on the interpersonal complexities of participation. There is a need for further research in this tradition as documentary makers explore new tools, practices, and modes of relationality. The framework that I have presented here is intended to flesh out multiple dimensions of interactive documentary participation and create a dialogue with documentary history. Since many of the challenges documentarians face in fostering maximal participation in documentary projects are not fundamentally new, it makes sense to draw on what we know – from documentary scholars, anthropologists, and community media practitioners – about the complexities of participation. Work with ‘communities’, which may be virtual, pre-existing or neither, is an area in which further critical reflection would be welcome. However, the digital media environment does shape documentary’s participatory offer in a number of ways, and I have sought here to capture some of the most significant. The possibilities of mass participation and distributed production, the extension of documentary projects across platforms and hybrid spaces, and the potential for forms of collective verification and structural participation are all important developments. I have sought to map participatory intensities, not with a view to suggesting that the more maximal the better, but rather to draw attention to the ways in which power plays out across digitally mediated production practices. As I have already suggested, many very successful projects have done little to reshape power relations. Not only that, but as the makers of Hollow and many other participatory projects have found, people don’t always jump at the chance to get involved in acts of documenting. The concept of participatory intensity is also helpful in opening up a consideration of the political and civic ambitions of interactive documentary. It is often assumed that the ability to have an input into documentary making translates into the ability to speak in the public sphere; that convening communities around documentary projects constitutes the creation of counter publics whose voices are magnified within the digital public sphere. These are significant assumptions, to which I will now turn.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

http://beta.18daysinegypt.com/ https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/series/counted-us-police-killings http://hollowdocumentary.com/ http://filmmakerinresidence.nfb.ca/ https://www.nfb.ca/film/manifesto_animation_bonus_material/ http://beta.18daysinegypt.com/ http://www.perrybard.net/man-with-a-movie-camera/ http://grandmasproject.org/

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9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

https://docubase.mit.edu/project/mapping-main-street/ http://blog.quipu-project.com/home/ http://www.perrybard.net/man-with-a-movie-camera/ https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/a bout-the-counted https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2016/apr/11/the-counted-police-killingsguardian-us-video https://www.flickr.com/groups/nfboutmywindow/ http://highrise.nfb.ca/onemillionthtower/1mt_webgl.php http://universewithin.nfb.ca/desktop.html#girl_q1 http://www.bigstories.com.au/ http://hollowdocumentary.com/ https://old.openlab.ncl.ac.uk/things/demos-things/red-tales-a-participatory-interactivedocumentary/ https://www.ncl.ac.uk/press/articles/archive/2015/jun/tellingtales.html

3 INTERACTIVE DOCUMENTARY AND THE POLITICAL Civic cultures and convening publics

‘The aim of the project [Sandy Storyline] is to amplify the voices of community members during this historic moment … This is a moment so big that it requires a new kind of documentary storytelling: a project designed to foster civic dialogue so communities can decide, from the ground up, their own futures’1

We have so far considered voice in relation to documentary as text and practice. How might databases be structured so as to facilitate engagement with multiple perspectives? What opportunities do interactive documentaries offer for power sharing within the process of documentary authorship? What is often most important in relation to both of these questions is a related, but nevertheless distinct, question: How might interactive documentary allow different perspectives to be heard in the public sphere? In outlining the aims for the participatory documentary Sandy Storyline it is the political that is the point – fostering civic dialogue, providing a space for collective decision making, and amplifying the voices of community members. Just as digital technologies have been celebrated for their potential to foster new forms of involvement in documentary making, they have likewise been seen as significant for their potential to transform political action and communication. If the analogue media sphere offered one-directional communication, controlled by elite voices, the digital media ecology promises seemingly limitless possibilities to speak and, flowing from this, to act collectively. Of course, a substantial and growing body of research attests to the fact that the digital rarely lives up to its revolutionary potential, highlighting the need for critical reflection. Nevertheless, many interactive documentarians have been keen to reimagine documentary practice in line with an ambition to nurture political identities, orientations and actions. This chapter explores this impulse and its significance for the relationship between documentary practice and the domain of the political. The political ambitions of interactive documentaries are diverse. While a project DOI: 10.4324/9781315208862-4

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such as Sandy Storyline seeks to challenge dominant voices and narratives and amplify those of communities most impacted by Hurricane Sandy, some of the projects that will be considered in the course of the chapter, such as Quipu, are oriented toward legal and political action. Still others, like Fort McMoney, arguably simulate democratic processes by creating a space for people to come together to discuss issues. While there are many ways that we might approach this diversity of political ambition, in this chapter I will do so through the lens of citizenship and the public sphere. As with participation (see Chapter two) interactive documentary provides an important site for engaging debates about the political significance of digital media. As the projects mentioned above (and many of those explored in the previous chapter) demonstrate, it is a field of media practice characterised by many experiments in speaking through the media, grounded in thinking about the relationship between documentary and democracy. I will begin the chapter with an examination of citizenship, drawing on both documentary and digital media scholarship. Historically, the relationship between documentary and citizenship has been bound up with notions of transmission – initially transmission of promotional content in the service of the state and later the communication and amplification of alternative voices within the public sphere. While the latter formulation, in particular, remains important for understanding interactive documentary, I will start by considering the foundations of citizenship. How might interactivity foster civic identities and build civic skills? How might it help foster a sense of agency that might motivate political and/or civic involvement? Drawing on digital media scholarship, particularly Peter Dahlgren’s civic cultures framework (2009), I will suggest that at least some interactive documentary evidences a broader civic ambition. I will then explore the claim that interactive documentary making can be understood as a process of convening publics. In thinking about documentary and politics, particularly in its more radical forms, the idea of publics (from ‘counter’ publics to the broader visibility of ‘the’ public sphere) has been central, if often implicit. I will explore interactive documentary publics by considering varying strategies of visibility and whether (or not) they create spaces and contexts within which participatory voices might be heard in the crowded digital public sphere.

Nurturing citizens: interactive documentary and civic cultures Documentary’s significance for citizenship has been a key theme in scholarly research. Two arguments are frequently advanced. Firstly, that documentary serves as a means by which citizens might, individually or collectively, come to have access to the information necessary to support their participation in democratic processes. John Grierson’s vision of documentary as a tool of public education offers one early articulation of this position. In envisaging film as a means by which to inform citizens, Grierson was responding to a general sense of democratic ‘crisis’. Influenced by thinkers such as Walter Lippman, Grierson promoted documentary as a means by which to ‘manage’ public opinion in what he felt was an increasingly

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complex society (L’Etang 2009: 33). It was a vision of documentary as an ‘instrument of domestic social engineering’ (Winston 1995: 35), ‘propagandist in the cause of democracy’ (Corner 1995: 82) and one very much centred on supporting the established state. Television documentary, in many countries, took up the Griersonian project of public education, albeit with a shift in focus toward the provision of information in the public interest, rather than the interests of established power (Scannell 1989). Addressing the audience as citizen and often assuming notions of broadcasting as a public sphere (a point that will be picked up in more detail below), documentary becomes significant for its ability to interrogate official discourse, engage issues of shared concern, promote alternative perspectives and/or marginalised voices. While a focus on documentary’s role in providing information in the service of citizenship is important, I want to start with a slightly more expansive consideration of citizenship and consider the ways in which documentary may contribute to citizenship as a socio-cultural achievement (Dahlgren 2009). In giving emphasis to documentary as a source of information, we inevitably take the citizen for granted, reducing citizenship to a limited set of formal practices. The citizen, it is assumed, exists fully formed, able to take up the information that documentaries provide in the context of her political projects. However, thinking about the complexities of social agency, scholars have drawn attention to the role of media in relation to questions of identity, inclusion, and creativity (Hermes 2005; Dahlgren 2006; Couldry 2006). In doing so they have drawn attention to the imbrications of public and private and the importance of ‘civic’ spaces within which people might develop socially, come to see themselves as social agents and citizens, cultivate democratically important values, and learn to express their views and negotiate with others (Dahlgren 2009: 69; see also Livingstone 2005). In taking this more expansive view of documentary citizenship it is necessary to go beyond questions of textuality and representation and to consider the range of practices that (interactive) documentaries foster. Dahlgren’s (2009) concept of civic cultures provides a useful framework within which to interrogate interactive documentary as a collection of spaces and practices that might nurture civic agency. Linking political communication and cultural theory, civic cultures seeks to draw out the significance of mediated socio-cultural engagements for political action, considering how they might nurture individuals’ engagements with public debate and political action. In contrast to state-based notions of citizenship (citizenship as ‘received) it proposes that citizenship is a form of political agency that must be ‘achieved’ by individuals. Civic cultures can be approached analytically by focusing on six interdependent conditions that serve, or not, to promote civic engagement and agency. It is possible to flesh out each of the six dimensions of Dahlgren’s framework, highlighting the various ways in which interactive documentary might nurture citizens. Dahlgren’s dimensions are knowledge, values, trust, space, practices, and identities. I will briefly consider each, drawing out connections to (interactive) documentary scholarship and practice.

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Knowledge most directly evokes established arguments about the significance of documentary for citizenship. However, in the appeal to knowledge (rather than information) an expanded field of analysis is opened up, highlighting practice and relationality. Information, Dahlgren argues (2009: 109) must be translated into knowledge, making it meaningful for individuals through connection to personal ‘frames of reference’. Echoing thinking about documentary as a ‘sense-making’ practice (Hight and Harindranath 2014), knowledge foregrounds process and sociality. A number of hypotheses might be advanced about the significance of interactive documentary for civic knowledge. Firstly, interactive documentary has the potential to promote strategies of knowledge acquisition, through practices such as search, exploration, debate, and evaluation. Projects like Filming Revolution (see Chapter one), for example, engage the audience in actively linking different ideas as they ‘make sense’ of the database. As we have explored in Chapter one, interactive documentaries are capable of fostering an engagement with complexities and different perspectives, demanding acknowledgement of plurality and the importance of evaluation. There are also new opportunities for embodied and performative understanding that tie knowing and identity in potentially compelling ways. While knowledge is a significant democratic foundation, equally important is a commitment to key values such as equality, justice, responsibility, tolerance, respect, and so on. Democracy demands commitment to mutual respect and compromise; it depends on those with the passion to work collectively on the basis of a commitment to shared values (Dahlgren 2009: 112). Polyvocality as a documentary desire may promote, as it does in projects like After 6/4 (see Chapter one), values of recognition and respect by encouraging users to acknowledge the contingency of their own perspective and seek to understand events from an alternative point of view. In creating spaces that foreground practices of listening and acknowledging others, even where this remains an essentially private activity, interactive documentaries can be seen to promote particular democratic values, suggesting their significance in increasingly hyper-partisan societies. Trust describes a quality (or qualities) of the relationships on which democracy and human flourishing depend. While democratic theory typically prioritises the trust (or lack thereof) between citizens and democratic institutions/ processes, focusing on documentary practices shifts our focus, I suggest, to questions of truth and the possibility of trust in the relationships that surround documentary as a process. Documentary, as Eitzen (1995) has suggested, is an enterprise defined by relations of trust. While we are inclined to see documentaries as true, our experience of documentary also includes the possibility that it might be lying. Trust is also critical in the relationship between documentarian and participant (Nash 2010). It is established through relationship building – moving from thinner relations of trust to the kinds of thicker relations that characterise interpersonal relations and enable collective political action (Dahlgren 2009: 112). Extending this thinking to interactive documentary highlights the varied ways in which projects encourage us to place trust and the extent to which this might suggest collective involvement. In the previous chapter I highlighted the significance of space for participatory documentary practice. In engaging further with the relationship between

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interactive documentary practice and the domain of the political, space takes on added significance both as a prerequisite for communication and as providing the context for political action. Interactive documentary practice reconfigures public and private space, providing opportunities for encounter – physical and/or virtual – that accommodate various participatory and political intensities. Thinking about interactive documentary spaces from the perspective of civic cultures invites reflection on whether the spaces created by interactive documentary are experientially proximate and the extent to which citizens feel that they are available for civic use. Further, it calls attention to the ways in which documentary practice might support citizens to find, use and generate spaces for collective action. Space is also deeply connected to practice and civic cultures draws our attention to the importance of space (as physical/virtual, relational and discursive) for the development of the skills required for political participation – from building confidence with digital technologies and expressing opinions to undertaking research or forming networks. As I will demonstrate below, interactive documentary has the potential to mobilise familiar media practices and orient them towards civic ends. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, questions of identity (both individual and collective) are central to the achievement of political agency. Identity describes those ways in which individuals come to see themselves, as citizens, agents, and/or members of (political) communities. Documentary practices, as both textual and as relational, have played a key role in the formation of collective identities, providing both discursive resources for building a sense of ‘we-ness’ and in providing the impetus for forms of collective involvement. As Aguayo (2019) demonstrates, through screenings and public engagement practices (in both online and offline spaces) documentarians play a key rhetorical role in creating the forms of collective identities and commitments necessary to sustain social change. As I hope to show through my analysis of interactive documentaries and their political ambitions, an explicit desire to build collective identities and spaces of political encounter defines many projects, which are often oriented towards social change. Understanding when and how digital spaces produce forms of affinity and engagement with others and joint political projects has been a particular focus of scholarly attention. Thinking about this question from the perspective of civic cultures highlights the significance of interactive documentary’s offer of experiences of agency, as well as forms of emotional involvement and identification with others and social issues. Civic cultures describe the features of those spaces that nurture the emergence of the political. Their various dimensions draw attention, as Dahlgren argues, to the importance of our private experiences for public involvements. Significantly, they provide an expanded frame of reference for our thinking about interactivity and the realm of the political. While many interactive documentaries seek to convene publics (a claim that will be interrogated in more detail below), many do not. These projects, as I hope to show, may nevertheless be important for helping to nurture the knowledge, values, skills, and identities on which citizenship and political action depend. One way in which interactive documentaries might be

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understood as supporting civic cultures is by promoting democratic values and practices of listening across difference. Radio Right Left2, for example, prompts reflection on the state of American democracy. An audio-based interactive documentary, it engages political polarisation as a democratic threat, promoting dialogue and listening in response. On entering the documentary, the visitor is asked to reflect on the question: ‘How do you feel about the future of America and your place in it?’. A civic orientation is inherent in the question and the invitation to contribute: As a citizen ‘you’ have a stake in America’s future and your feelings about that future are worthy of inclusion. The project is dialogic (see below) with speaking and listening explicitly promoted as democratic values as the ‘about’ section indicates: ‘Please note that no respectful contributions to Radio Right Left will be removed or censored, and all recordings will immediately become active in the project for others to hear. As a result, you will hear things you don’t agree with and that might even offend you. But please don’t give up; this is the point! Listen with an open mind and heart and give to others the same respect you desire from them’. Radio Right Left creates an audio space for civically meaningful practice with the anonymity of contributions blurring public and private to provide an opportunity for political expression and the development of a civic identity. The documentary game Fort McMoney3 can also be appreciated for its ambition to foster civic cultures. The project owes much to a Habermassian-inspired ideal of the public sphere as a space of discourse and a ‘dutiful’ notion of citizenship understood as information seeking and active engagement in debate and decision making. Addressing the social, economic, and environmental impacts of Canada’s oil sands industry as it impacts on the town of Fort McMurray and the surrounding region, storytelling and interaction foster a playful performance of deliberative citizenship grounded in communication. The game integrates a traditional ‘informational’ documentary role (providing audio-visual content) with a deliberative platform that seeks to foster informed debate (weekly forums) and produce something akin to ‘public opinion’. To play the game is to enact the role of citizen: seeking and evaluating information; expressing an opinion engaging in dialogue; and finally, voting as an exercise of political agency. Play also requires some commitment to consensus, and ‘collective’ decision making, fostering democratic values – equality, respect, and compromise – creating a space for communicative engagement that foregrounds awareness of civic agency. However, it is also important to note that in imagining citizenship along Habermassian lines the game privileges a certain style of political communication – rational, persuasive, individual – that is often not inclusive (see Fraser 1990). Further, in fostering a vision of politics as polarised and competitive (as captured in the invitation to ‘make your worldview triumph’) it is somewhat ambiguous with respect to its alignment with democratic values. Interactive documentaries arguably also foster civic cultures through attempts to reimagine documentary journalism as a ‘site of engagement’ (MIT Open Documentary Lab: 34). NSA Files Decoded: What the revelations mean for you?4, for example, combines reportage with an invitation to explore what mass surveillance might ‘mean for me’. Providing access to a number of primary

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documents – court orders, other legal documents, and NSA reports – as well as interactive infographics, the project positions the user as investigator whose task is to examine the evidence and engage in her own analysis. In a similar vein journalistic projects such as Pirate Fishing: An Interactive Investigation5 and Journey to the End of Coal6 call on the player/citizen to enact a Fourth Estate role, promoting a sense of agency (and investment in challenging formal power structures), through practices of information gathering and evaluation as well as a commitment to the democratic importance of challenging power. (The idea of games providing a context in which to ‘do’ documentary/journalism will be considered in more depth in Chapter four.) The Whiteness Project7 seeks to ‘inspire reflection and foster discussions that ultimately lead to improved communication around issues of race and identity’. At the heart of the project is a series of interviews in which ‘ordinary’ Americans talk about their ‘relationship to, and their understanding of, their own whiteness’. The interviews serve to open up a dialogue about race in the project’s ‘let’s talk’ space, which has attracted some 1700 comments at the time of writing. While it would be difficult to describe the project as fostering dialogue, I would argue from the perspective of civic cultures that in creating a semi-public space for engaging with questions of identity through respectful exchange the project reinforces democratic values and practices. It is also important to take into account the ways in which interactive documentarians are re-imagining distribution, focusing in some cases on ‘niche’ audiences and providing a broader context for their political project. The Shore Line8, reimagines the Griersonian project of documentary education, building civic cultures in classrooms by working in collaboration with educators. Describing itself as a ‘storybook for a sustainable future’ and visually referencing a children’s picture book, The Shore Line is an interactive (database) documentary that tells the stories of 43 people working to respond to climate challenge along the coasts of nine countries. The project seeks to foster resilience by empowering young people to

FIGURE 3.1

The Whiteness Project screenshot

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see themselves as agents capable of working with their coastal communities to find solutions to the challenges of climate change. The short videos that constitute the backbone of the project are designed to be motivating, prompting students to reflect on their own agency and the value of their own local knowledge. The project was created in collaboration with, and designed for, educators and it builds civic cultures not just through the content contained within the interactive documentary itself, but through educators whose use of the resources provided facilitates students’ engagement with their coastal communities. Creator of the project, Liz Miller, conceptualises the classroom as an immersive space in which students can interact with media over a number of weeks (Miller 2018). Involving teachers as partners in the creation of the documentary the project incorporates ‘strategy toolkits’ with suggestions for reading, questions for discussion, links to further resources and curated questions. ‘Workshop cards’ give suggestions for deeper involvement. The Youth Leadership workshop suggests, for example, using the stories of youth leadership in the documentary to think and talk about leadership – the challenges it poses and the resources available to young people. Then it proposes that students engage with projects in their local area that are being led by young people. Educators act as intermediaries to foster civic cultures through documentary media, helping students to build their knowledge and skills, reflect on their identity and agency, and to see themselves as part of a community. Approaching interactive documentary from the perspective of civic cultures opens up a broad frame for engaging with questions of political ambition. It asks us to recognise the many and varied ways in which interactive practice might build the knowledge, skills, identities, and values that are foundational for civic and political involvement and collective action. The projects that I have described here are located, for the most part, in the realm of the private. They reimagine everyday digital media practices – commenting, playing, interacting – from the perspective of citizenship and political agency. Doing so, they provide a starting point for engaging the political. Some of the projects I have explored above, most notably Fort McMoney, The Whiteness Project and The Shore Line offer modes of engagement that are semi-public, hinting at the ways in which a focus on strengthening civic cultures can nurture the emergence of publics. Such projects, including many that will be considered below, offer an opportunity to consider how documentary practice might nurture forms of public involvement. This is the question that I will now take up by considering what it might mean to convene political documentary publics.

Convening publics: documenting and dialogue as catalysts The notion of publicness is key to debates about the importance of the media for democracy. Publicness, publics, and counter-publics and notions of the public sphere, frame questions about the ways in which the media might orient individuals with respect to each other and shared issues, as well as concerns about the audibility of voices in collective discourse. The claim that some politically oriented interactive documentaries convene publics is therefore central to an assessment of their political

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ambition. If, as I have suggested above, it is reasonable to assume that at least some interactive documentaries foster civic cultures, we might also assume that they are capable of providing contexts in which audiences might coalesce into publics, transitioning from private spaces of media consumption to the realm of public involvement through an engagement with shared issues and others (Dahlgren 2009: 74). It is the possibility of this transition that I will explore in the remainder of this chapter. Beginning with an exploration of publics and counter-publics, I highlight the importance of collective orientation and visibility, both potentially (although by no means certainly) transformed in the digital media environment. I will then consider convening as a documentary practice, highlighting the importance of documenting and dialogue as catalysts. What does it mean to suggest that interactive documentary ‘users’ have the potential to become a documentary public? Notions of the public sphere serve as a touchstone for addressing this question, drawing attention to the importance of the media as spaces of encounter, communication, and visibility. While theories of the public sphere have given way to accounts of an agonistic field of ‘multiple, contesting publics, including both dominant and counter-publics of various forms’ (Dahlberg 2007: 60) there is some consensus that liberal democracy depends on opportunities for citizens to come together in public, in various formations, to discuss issues of shared concern. Of course, how they do so and the role that the media (whether conceptualised as technologies, texts, or practices) plays in this can be highly variable. In terms of relationality, for example, it is possible to point to varying degrees and forms of social intensity. Warner (2002: 74) has argued that a public is a ‘relation among strangers’ that emerges through the circulation of culture. To pay attention (however minimally) to circulating discourse is to become a member of a public and to be aware of oneself as belonging to the group. Imagining a somewhat stronger social bond, Livingstone (2005: 17) argues that the concept of public implies ‘an orientation to collective and consensual action’. In a similar vein, Dayan (2005: 49) suggests that a public requires a ‘shared (and imagined) identity, a certain style of sociability, a degree of persistence through time’. The nature of the relations that documentary fosters (both interactive and audio-visual) is fundamental to its political ambition. As Aguayo (2019: 21) argues, it is documentary’s ability to bring people together and foster collective identities – forms of perceived and felt association with a community – that orients them toward political action. Digital media, as she demonstrates, facilitate new social formations to emerge around documentary media and new tools to facilitate political action. However, also significant are the many contexts in which digital media might foster feelings of belonging while eschewing any real engagement with questions of identity. Publics are further characterised by a desire for visibility and audibility in the arena of public discourse. While democratic participation is nurtured by communicative spaces that allow individuals, particularly marginalised social groups, to ‘formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests and needs’ as publics they seek to contribute to a wider debate (Fraser 1990: 67). Chanan (2007: 6–7) notes of much political documentary, for instance, that while it is often

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‘peripheral’, with little visibility within the mainstream media, the small publics it attracts and sustains are often some of the most active members of civil society whose collective efforts can make documentary ‘one of the forms through which new attitudes enter wider circulation’. The ‘permeability’ of the mainstream public sphere to alternative voices has been shaped in complex ways by digital technologies. While it is difficult to deny that documentary media (or fragments thereof) can be created and circulated more easily, potentially reaching quite large audiences, it remains difficult, particularly for more radical documentary media and practice, to reach and influence mainstream discussion. Framing a critical reflection on interactive documentary publics and their political ambitions is a growing body of work on listening as the ‘other side’ of voice (Dreher 2012). As a political act listening describes attentiveness to the voices of marginalised publics. It shifts focus away from a politics of expression concerned with acts of representation, towards a politics of impression (O’Donnell, Lloyd, and Dreher 2009: 423) which highlights relationships between forms of economic, social, and political power and possibilities for being heard. A politics of listening as Lloyd (2009: 484–5) suggests, calls for a consideration of the ‘structures in which meanings circulate’ and which privilege some voices as worthy of attention. Offers of voice associated with media projects, including many documentary projects, may be described as a ‘partial’ offer of voice when the message fails to engage those who have the potential to effect change (Dreher 2012). As many of the projects considered below demonstrate, convening publics involves a concern for the politics of listening. In exploring the notion of publicness and the political significance of publics (and counter publics) I have sought to lay a foundation for delving further into the claim that interactive documentaries convene publics. How is it that digital technologies and cultures are shaping the ways in which documentarians seek to engage individuals and support the emergence of publics? How does documentary culture and practice inform engagements with the digital? And is it possible to point to a range of strategies for convening different kinds of publics in different contexts? There are, I suggest, a number of deeply imbricated dimensions to consider in relation to the convening of publics – from identity and publicness, to relationality, civic cultures, and the role of documentary practice in relation to both. Identity draws attention to the ways in which individual and group identities are addressed and mobilised in the context of interactive documentary media and practice. It calls attention to the ways that documentary projects might provide spaces for identity work. Further, it asks us to consider the extent to which projects seek to foster a sense of the collective or whether it is possible to point to a shift toward a more ‘connective’ logic, which eschews the complexities of group identification in favour of personalized and expressive modes of political engagement (Bennett and Segerberg 2013). The shift from a connective to collective logic reflects documentarians’ ambitions to create spaces that foster solidarity and reciprocity in order to sustain political involvement and action.

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Many of the projects considered below are multi-dimensional, extending across digital and non-digital spaces and, in some cases, linking documentary practice and political action. Importantly, many build links between the private spaces of media consumption, in which civic cultures might be fostered, and forms of public involvement. As we saw in Chapter two in relation to documentary participation, documentarians often seek to work with established community groups providing pathways to involvement and visibility. Such pathways provide important examples of the ways in which interactive documentary audiences might be nurtured to become publics as they build knowledge, skill, and a sense of connection. Further, audiences become publics where they are able to see themselves as political agents, with voices that can be heard more broadly. Creating the conditions for listening beyond documentary projects plays a key role in the convening of publics, as I have suggested. It can be challenging for interactive documentary projects to achieve broad visibility and the existing literature points to a number of emerging strategies of visibility that will be explored further below. Miller and Allor (2016), for example, highlight the significance of partnerships with mainstream media organisations and documentarians’ efforts to place media in public space as ways in which interactive documentaries have sought to raise the profile of work which might otherwise be lost in the informational excess of the digital environment. However, also significant are more targeted offers of voice that specifically engage those with the power to produce change. The projects considered below are just some of the many interactive documentaries that seek to convene publics around political projects. Across their diversity they highlight both the diversity of interactive documentary publics and emerging strategies of convening.

I See Change: multiple and variable opportunities for civic engagement and political participation I See Change9 (2012 – present) is best conceptualised as a documentary ‘platform’ – incorporating an app and website, but also a social media presence and communitybased activities. It seeks to enable communities to collect and share data and stories ‘to inform climate adaptation, infrastructure design, and community-driven storytelling’. The project can be situated within the burgeoning digital citizen science movement which, in relation to ecological questions in particular, is fuelled by a sense that ‘urgent, large scale questions about environmental patterns and change can be answered only by combining the observations of numerous observers across large geographic areas’ (Dickinson and Bonney 2012: 4). It aims to ‘empower communities to respond to environmental change’, taking the activity of documenting climate change as the starting point for building a global community, albeit it one that might be conceptualised as a loose network of multiple, overlapping, and variously invested publics. The project’s action frame – ‘investigate how weather and climate change are impacting our communities and environment’ – eschews questions of identity and difference, inviting anyone who might be interested to get involved in data

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FIGURE 3.2

I See Change screenshot

collection, posting ‘sightings’ and/or contributing to partner investigations. The openness of the project’s frame reflects an ambition to foster broad public participation in line with the project’s goals, but it is also consistent with a recognition that climate issues attract individuals with very different political orientations. The project offers opportunities for a casual and personal involvement, either through the app or website which is connected with social media platforms. At the same time, the development of partnerships – with NGOs, government organisations, research institutions, universities, community and media organisations – aligns the process of ‘amateur’ documenting with ‘institutions of sobriety’ that lend the project credibility and visibility. Looking more closely at the way in which the platform supports individual and collective acts of documenting is instructive. The app/website mimics social media in inviting users to create a profile and share ‘sightings’ (geotagged information, often including photographic evidence and a short description). It is also possible to get involved in an ‘investigation’, responding to one of the many ‘briefs’ on topics as diverse as wildfires, trees, and extreme heat. The briefs scaffold participation by asking for responses to a range of questions: ‘Tell us what you’ve done to prepare for a tornado, hurricane, or blizzard. Let us know when an extreme weather event hits. What kind of disruption did it cause in your life? What did you do to stay safe?’ While it is possible to comment on others’ posts, and filter posts by location (suggesting the possibility of emerging local communities) there is relatively little evidence of interaction between community members (interaction mostly happens within the context of investigations). Where community events have been organised, however, there is some evidence of the emergence of more politically focused relationships and activity. An investigation into extreme heat in Boston10, for example, involved community data collection culminating in a forum involving officials, community leaders, and residents that looked at the city’s strategy

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for preparing for extreme heat events. A shared relationship to place provides the foundation for a potentially more collective orientation toward shared issues. Collectively documenting evidence of environmental change and providing the context in which suggestions for change might be publicly acknowledged provides an experience of collective agency. In terms of strategies of visibility, it is possible to point to several approaches across the I See Change project. Hyper-local strategies that bring citizen-researchers into dialogue with local decision makers provide a key form of visibility for those involved. These might be conceptualised as micro-publics (see below). However, a broader visibility is achieved through journalistic storytelling. The project’s ‘stories’, written by the project team, connect the contributions of contributors into newsworthy narratives that have the potential to gain wider visibility, drawing attention to the value of collaborative action. ‘How I See Changers influenced stormwater project designs in Gentilly’ (August 2020), for example, incorporates posts from contributors with a history of the region and an interview with a project engineer to show how residents’ sightings (more than 200 submitted since 2016) had been used to inform the design of a new drainage system. Posts are embedded throughout the story, giving contributors a voice while also linking individuals’ experiences to produce a coherent, collective narrative. Stories (along with individual sightings) are also shared on social media where the strategic use of hashtags provides another path to enhancing visibility. Hashtags (#) serve a variety of functions on social media platforms, but one among them is helping to connect different groups, potentially forming ‘ad hoc’ publics (Bruns and Burgess 2011). The co-occurrence of hashtags, i.e. using #ISeeChange in conjunction with tags like #Flooding, #MiamiDade serves to link different groups and conversations, allowing individuals to connect around shared concerns.

Quipu: linking participation and listening The Quipu Project11 is significant for any consideration of the political ambition of interactive documentary and has been the focus of a number of studies from different perspectives. The project seeks to facilitate the collective documentation of the impacts of a forced sterilisation campaign instigated by President Alberto Fujimori in Peru during the 1990s. Working with NGOs and several women’s groups, the documentary team sought to create a process and platform for those affected to tell their stories, creating a testimonial archive, but also a process of media-making that could become an ‘agent in the fight for justice’ (Lerner, cited Rose 2017: 58). While there have been numerous previous attempts to make use of documentary media in the context of campaigns for reparations for those sterilised there has been a tendency to reproduce a victim narrative that reinforces a sense of passivity amongst those sterilised (Maraschin and Scafe 2016). Conceptualising Quipu as a process of media-making that aims to convene a public around the issue of forced sterilisation highlights connections between the project’s participatory architecture, its role in network building, and its focus on creating the contexts for listening. These various dimensions together contribute to realising the project’s political ambitions.

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Rose (2017) provides a detailed account of Quipu as a participatory media production process in which the production team, led by Maria Court and Ros Lerner, sought to empower communities to tell their own stories. This concept of narrative agency was also wrapped up in a sense of political agency. Citing the production team, Rose notes (2017: 58) that while there had been a lot of media interest in the case and in the fight for justice, those who had told their stories had not seen the impact of having done so. In response, the production team conceptualised participatory media-making as a part of the political struggle, devising a process that linked speaking, listening, and network building. Central to the project was the development of a platform (using voice-over-internet telephony) for collecting and making audible the testimonies of people living in remote regions of Peru without access to digital technology. Individuals were enabled to record, listen back, and share their testimony and to engage with the testimonies of others. As the project evolved it became clear that for many of the participants, the chance to record their testimony became a means by which to ‘rehearse and refine their statements as potential future witnesses in court’ (Rose, 2017: 59). Listening back to their own testimony was, as Mitchell (2015: 10) has argued, critical to building confidence and to conceptualising oneself as part of a political community. Through the process of recording and sharing testimonies the project provided a space for the creation of counter-discourse and collective identity. Quipu is a project that links three key modes of communication – speaking, listening, and response (Mitchell 2015). It can be conceptualised as a ‘relational channel’ (Brown and Tucker 2017), a communicative loop between speakers and listeners in Peru and beyond. Within the community of those forcibly sterilised these three modes of communication – which may be mediated by the phone technology, but which also included forms of face-to-face networking – were significant in building solidarity and helping to strengthen networks. The project arguably made a dispersed public visible to itself and created the conditions for the emergence of a counter public. For at least some Quipu participants the experience of being heard and acknowledged, both within and beyond their community, was empowering and transformative, giving a sense of recognition and building solidarity (Brown and Tucker 2017: 1197). The importance of fostering listening beyond those affected was a key ambition. As the project website notes, ‘For many collaborators this will be the first time their stories will be acknowledged outside their own communities’. The interactive documentary tracks and renders visible acts of listening, revealing listeners’ paths through the database of testimonies; allowing those who have recorded their testimony to see that they have been heard. Further, the site encourages listeners to leave messages of support for those involved in the struggle for justice, giving participants tangible evidence of global impact. Quipu did not create a social movement (the movement was already in existence), but by linking practices of documenting to listening and response, it contributed to its distinctive mediality. It helped to strengthen a counter public by building networks, fostering a sense of agency, and by rendering acts of listening visible. In helping to accumulate testimony within the context of a media-activist ecology (Watson 2019)

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the project addresses the broader political and legal contexts in which these circulating stories of injustice, together with acts of listening and statements of support, come to have agency. Quipu makes use of networked technologies not only to capture marginalised voices, but to connect those voices to each other and to a broader field of support.

Question Bridge: dialogic documentary practice It has become commonplace to hear claims that interactive documentary convenes publics by providing opportunities for dialogue. Where dialogue does emerge as part of interactive documentary practice it is of the utmost significance, however, we must be clear on what we take dialogue to be and look closely at the extent to which dialogic ambitions are realised in practice. Dialogue typically points to something more than a ‘back-and-forth of messages in interaction’, describing a ‘quality of engagement with another, a kind of “meeting” oriented toward an exploration of mutuality’ (Cissna and Anderson 1994: 10). It points to an attitude of openness to alterity, and a commitment to relationality. As Cissna and Anderson (2002: 174) have argued, ‘dialogue is an awakening of other-awareness that occurs in and through a moment of meeting’. It describes an openness to being challenged or changed by one’s encounter with another, but while mutual understanding is sought, dialogue does not seek resolution or closure, but rather allows differences to persist (Wood 2004). Dialogue is an emergent, open-ended, fluid and unpredictable communicative encounter that while typically private, can emerge within forms of public communication (Black 2008). It is possible to suggest, following Renov (2004) that a commitment to dialogue as an openness to difference has been an ideal to which documentary makers have at times aspired. In place of a ‘totalizing quest for knowledge’ (148) a commitment to dialogue points to the importance of doubt, uncertainty, and contradiction in documentary representation. Interactive documentary has, at times, been grounded in a commitment to dialogic practice.

FIGURE 3.3

Question Bridge screenshot

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Question Bridge: Black Males12 offers one of the clearest examples of such a commitment to dialogic practice. A transmedia art project, Question Bridge began as a five-channel video art installation that sought to create a safe space for dialogue between professional suburban and working-class inner-city black men in California (Ramasubramanian 2016). It has since expanded across a number of platforms: museum installations, a website, app, book, social networking sites, school curricula, and ‘roundtable’, community discussions (some of which can be accessed online). It has achieved a broad visibility through exhibitions at museums, festivals, and public art spaces, as well as via significant media coverage. While Question Bridge has been variously conceived, at its core it can be conceptualised as a dialogic method, a means by which to foster and share dialogue across digital and non-digital spaces. It aims to foster ‘honest expression and healing dialogue’ revealing ‘the diversity of thought, character, and identity’ that is typically subsumed by singular notions of Black male identity, revealing and mapping complex, intersecting identities and stimulating connections and understanding between Black men. ‘This project brings the full spectrum of what it means to be “black” and “male” in America to the forefront. “Blackness” ceases to be a simple monochromatic concept’ (artists’ statement). As a method Question Bridge provides a framework within which Black men are encouraged to explore questions of identity. It creates a dialogic space by inviting participants to ask a question of another man from whom they felt estranged and/or to answer a question posed to them. The invitation to ask and answer questions via video was intended to be both inclusive and empowering, but also to bridge divides – economic, geographic, religious, cultural, and generational – that have historically separated Black men (Media Impact Funders 2016). Travelling across the US, the project team collected 1500 video exchanges from diverse contributors which are integrated to produce a virtual dialogue. The video mediation of dialogue, while lacking the reciprocity of real-time conversation, enables frankness and honesty as well as an openness to the other that can be difficult to achieve in face-to-face communication. As Sora (2017: 13) suggests, by reducing the stress of face-to-face communication ‘[t] he distance between the participants that is created through the digital window allows people to express themselves more deeply’. Having used video to draw out the complexities of Black male identities, the project team sought out ways to bring people into real-world dialogue through structured, community focused events. ‘Blueprint roundtables’, as these events were called, were held in several locations to provide opportunities for communities to come together and explore strategies to address issues of Black male achievement, the lack of diversity in media representation and to help build more inclusive communities (Media Impact Funders 2016). These events offered opportunities for building political identity and agency and connecting with others across traditional divides. The virtual dialogue serves as a catalyst for the kind of openness to difference that is required for the formation of localised publics oriented toward collective action. As with The Shore Line, educator materials extend the project into the realm of civic culture, with teachers serving as intermediaries for conversations about identities, representation, and conflict resolution. Key here are democratic

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values – listening, openness, compromise – as well as opportunities for students to develop skills and identities that foster agency. In convening encounters – whether virtual or face-to-face – the project provides a model for an exploration of a complex topic that eschews a pre-determined end point or overarching discourse. Question Bridge works to convene publics on a number of levels. At a hyper-local level it has the potential, through face-to-face events, to bring people together to work collectively to achieve meaningful local change (the extent to which it does so is a matter for empirical exploration). Equally, it could be argued that the project contributes to the emergence of an imagined political community (Anderson 1991) by fostering a sense of relationality that transcends physical or geographical co-presence. In creating the conditions for Black men to collectively reimagine their shared identity by participating (whether directly or indirectly) in dialogue, the project fosters agency and political involvement. The project has also been successful in creating the conditions for Black male voices to be heard in the mainstream public sphere, inviting audiences to stand as witnesses to a virtual dialogue.

Micro-publics and strategic listening I want to turn now to interactive documentary that seeks to convene publics at the hyper-local level. Each of the projects considered so far – Question Bridge, Quipu, and I See Change – has focused on the local, but each has also sought forms of national and/ or international visibility. There are interactive documentaries, however, that seek to engage politics at a local level, inviting forms of strategic visibility and listening with a view to intervening in local issues. Notions of the micro and small scale have begun to emerge in thinking about interactive documentary. Hudson and Zimmerman (2015: 24) introduce the concept of the ‘micro-public’ as a way of reconceptualising the shifting relationships between digital artists and audiences and their political significance. In a similar vein, Zimmerman and De Michiel (2018: 17) explore small spaces as an aesthetic and political strategy for documentary. Engaging local issues, the small spaces of interactive documentary, like microhistories, engage the everyday, ‘uncovering multiple layers of historical and political complexities.’ They draw attention to the importance of small-scale political activity, place, and the role that documentary practices can play in bringing people together around shared concerns. In drawing attention to the small scale at which much interactive documentary seeks to engage politics, a concept of documentary micro-publics becomes a useful way of highlighting the ways in which documentarians are engaging local problems and creating opportunities for dialogue and collective involvement. Micro-publics seek visibility, albeit not via the media ‘mainstream’. Rather, they seek forms of targeted and strategic visibility, connecting individuals and communities to others who can contribute to achieving the public’s objectives. While targeted documentary distribution is not new per se (the NFB’s Fogo process sought to promote forms of ‘vertical’ communication, linking the voices of the Fogo Islanders to those in power), it is possible to trace a growing interest in forms of broadly ‘strategic’ uses of documentary media in the context of social change movements (Nash and Corner 2016).

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FIGURE 3.4

Lunch, Love, Community screenshot

Lunch, Love, Community13 (2010–14) exemplifies the use of documentary media in the convening of micro-publics. Telling the story of a pioneering programme to bring fresh, healthy food to schools in the Berkeley (US) public school system, the project describes itself as a ‘transmedia’ documentary. In talking about the origins of the project, Zimmerman and De Michiel (2018: 45–6) point to the formal and financial costs of achieving mainstream visibility through festival and television documentary. Turning this to an advantage, De Michiel (producer/director/writer) sought to take advantage of the growing capability of digital media for community building, fostering ‘a fluid, constantly changing open space for convening of collaborative publics’ (Hudson and Zimmerman 2015: 74). Describing itself as a ‘transmedia’ documentary, the project consists of a series of short documentary videos, initially distributed online, via YouTube or mobile devices, with a view to promoting shareability, as well as social media activity and a series of face-to-face ‘media socials’. Combining screenings with facilitated discussions, media socials address people active in their own school communities with a view to supporting local reform. Building on partnerships with ‘groups, organisations, and sponsors’ media socials involve a range of people, including ‘educators and policymakers’ offering the opportunity to hear from, and be heard by, a range of ‘experts’.14 Connecting people with each other and providing contexts in which collective opinions might be formed and shared, Lunch, Love, Community deploys documentary media as a focal point for community building, producing multiple, small, issue-focused publics that seek targeted forms of visibility. In many cases, as already noted, documentary projects seek to convene micropublics at the same time as seeking broader visibility. The Waiting Room15 is a film and participatory storytelling project that seeks to tell the stories of staff and patients at a Californian ‘safety net’ hospital. The project’s aim is to improve the patient experience by collecting and sharing stories and providing patients with tools to

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enhance their own health care experience. The project is twofold: on the one hand a documentary film sought to bring a general visibility to the health issues facing uninsured and under-insured individuals and communities through cinema distribution, mainstream media and targeted screenings; my focus here, however, is on the project’s location-based digital storytelling initiative which sought to reimagine a hospital waiting room as an opportunity for the formation of ‘adhoc’ publics, by facilitating patient-driven conversation (Bruns and Burgess 2011). The digital storytelling project has a number of dimensions including a website, mobile app, social media architecture, and interactive kiosks placed in hospital waiting rooms. For the community served by the Highland hospital, waiting is reconceptualised as an opportunity to give public voice to their experience of illness within the space of the hospital itself and via the project’s various social media channels, with the hashtag #whatruwaitingfor serving as a frame for personal storytelling. The Waiting Room digital storytelling project produces ad-hoc publics by reconfiguring the space of the hospital as a discursive space, but also a hybrid (public–private) space that fosters civic cultures. With many patients having limited access to digital technology, the kiosks are key enablers, providing an opportunity for patients to access the internet and to use the resource to hear the stories of others and/or tell their own stories. Reinforcing agency and building digital skills, the kiosks enable patients to express themselves and to see themselves as part of a larger patient community. Patients can also reach out to each other within the space of the waiting room by sending a text (anonymously) to be displayed in screens within the space. This provides a means of connecting with others in the moment, with the potential to lessen feelings of anxiety and isolation, but it also provides a form of strategic visibility, rendering patients visible to each other as a public and to medical practitioners. While there is the possibility that such encounters might foster forms of collective action, as ad-hoc, ‘affective’ publics (Papacharissi 2016), the waiting room as a space is likely, for the most part, to foster fluid connections grounded in feelings of belonging and statements of affect. These affective publics are extended into digital spaces via the project’s social media architecture, linking the local and small-scale visibility of the waiting room to broader political debate.

Interactive documentary and the political In this chapter I have sought to draw attention to the political ambitions of a number of interactive documentaries and to suggest ways in which we might conceptualise and critically evaluate their political significance. I began the chapter by noting how varied interactive documentaries were in terms of the ways in which they engaged the political. From providing private opportunities for nurturing political identities and building political skills, to creating the conditions for people to move from the private realm of media consumption to more public forms of expression and/or action, interactive documentaries raise important

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questions about documentary media and politics. It is worth stressing, however, that in many respects what we are seeing is evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Documentarians have long sought to foster civic cultures – through community screenings and discussions and by involving individuals and groups as collaborators in documentary making. In drawing attention to the various ways in which media might nurture citizenship, a focus on civic cultures highlights the contributions of documentary media and practices in linking the private and public and creating the conditions under which publics might be convened. I have sought to flesh out the important claim that interactive documentaries convene publics. I have explored interactive documentary publics as multidimensional, highlighting the importance of collective identity and shifting strategies of visibility in a crowded digital media marketplace. Convening publics begins with a concern for knowledge, values, skills, and identities, recognising the importance of spaces within which individuals might come together to create counter-discourses and identities. However, in seeking publicness interactive documentaries go further towards achieving visibility and community building. Of course, as the projects considered in this chapter demonstrate, the nature of visibility and community is itself highly variable. A project like Quipu, which is directly linked to political and legal struggle and which was produced in collaboration with a political movement, seeks to foster a stronger sense of collective orientation and community than a project like The Waiting Room. However, The Waiting Room which sought to intervene in a national conversation about health care by making the patients’ voices audible highlights the value of ad hoc forms of association grounded in feelings of solidarity, particularly when combined with targeted opportunities to foster listening. Interactive documentaries, as I have sought to show, offer distinct resources for nurturing citizenship and convening publics. By creating opportunities for action bound up with the idea of documentary representation they provide contexts for connecting individuals to discourse. Publics, as many have argued, are shaped by discourse and bound together by shared identities. Documentary practices, both those bound up with representation (acts of documenting) and forms of dialogue (which in the case of interactive documentary become more central to documentary making) clearly provide important mechanisms for bringing people together around shared issues, building capabilities and connections. A critical engagement with the practices through which civic cultures and publics are nurtured and/or convened is essential for scholars and practitioners of interactive documentary. While much has been said about the political ambitions of those who create interactive documentaries, the effectiveness of their efforts can only be determined by investigating the experiences and actions of citizens. Thinking about the political ambition of interactive documentary in terms of civic cultures and publics also frames a broader discussion that will be taken up in the next two chapters, as I consider how documentary makers might seek to produce forms of experiential and/or conceptual insight into the experiences of others, often with a view of nurturing cosmopolitanism. How might our experiences of play and immersion be tied to the political? And how might we approach the ethical questions that these new modes of engagement raise?

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Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

https://www.sandystoryline.com/about/ https://radiorightleft.org/listen.html https://www.nfb.ca/interactive/fort_mcmoney/ https://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/nov/01/snowden-nsa-files-surv eillance-revelations-decoded https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2014/piratefishingdoc/ http://www.honkytonk.fr/index.php/webdoc/ https://whitenessproject.org/ http://theshorelineproject.org/ https://www.iseechange.org/ https://stories.iseechange.org/boston-residents-and-the-museum-of-science-map-a-warmi ng-city/ http://blog.quipu-project.com/home/ http://questionbridge.com/ http://www.lunchlovecommunity.org/ http://www.lunchlovecommunity.org/media-social/ http://www.whatruwaitingfor.com/about-the-waiting-room/

4 REALITY EFFECTS Simulation as interactive documentary practice

Imagine that life as you know it is turned upside down; that you must flee your home and get your loved ones to safety. Who do you trust? What will you do? This is the scenario presented in the simulation game Asylum: Exit Australia1. Depending on how the game plays out, you may find yourself trapped in an increasingly violent and, ultimately, untenable situation or forced into family debt in order to pay people traffickers, before spending endless years navigating the refugee ‘system’. In the virtual reality documentary experience 6 x 92 you are challenged to imagine yourself in solitary confinement. Stepping into a virtual confinement cell you ‘experience’ hallucinations and perhaps also feelings of claustrophobia or anxiety. You ‘perform’ the role of the prisoner, eyes darting around the room noticing the detail of your cell, listening to the calls from neighbouring cells. 51 Sprints3 explores the Olympic myth by allowing the user to compare the performances of 100m sprinters ‘equalising’ various dimensions of performance – race, gender, body type and so on – to reveal how sport is wrapped up in politics and culture. The projects described above are incredibly diverse. Not only do they cross platforms from the internet to virtual reality, but they also take different forms: an imagined relationship, virtual reality, a game, and a dynamic model. They call for an engagement with reality, but they do so by engaging the audience in acts of imagination, performance, exploration, experimentation, and play. They blend fact and fiction, producing spaces within which audiences/users/players are invited to take up aspects of their experience as relevant to reality, while being aware of the imitative dynamics at play. In spite of the tremendous variation across these projects it might be suggested that each, in its own way, simulates an aspect of reality. On the face of it, simulation, with its connotations of falsity and pretence, seems quite at odds with documentary’s complex, yet fundamental, relationship with reality. Indeed, for at least some scholars, simulation is quite simply ‘not documentary at DOI: 10.4324/9781315208862-5

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all’ (Winston et al 2017: 27) since it implies the impossibility of this foundational relationship. As video game scholar Seth Giddings (2013) asks: What is it that simulations simulate? In response, he suggests that simulations may not simulate what they might at first seem to simulate, they may simulate nothing (or at least nothing actual) or, alternatively, they may simply simulate themselves. And yet, there is a body of work that has sought to explore digital media, most notably digital games, as exhibiting factual or documentary ambition in their attempts to simulate aspects of reality (Flynn 2002; Uricchio 2005; Raessens 2006; Fullerton 2008; Sorensen and Thorhaugh 2013). In this chapter I aim to build on this body of work to produce an account of simulation as an interactive documentary practice. Simulation, I will argue, opens up a way of considering the distinctive ways in which computational media might ‘claim the real’, producing truth claims that are complex, contingent, subjective and/ or partial. Simulation, as Uricchio (2005) has suggested, extends our thinking about mediation beyond the linguistic to incorporate the variety of imitative practices that digital media facilitate. In particular, it draws attention to forms of dynamic mimesis that distinguish computational from audio-visual media. Might, as Nichols suggests (1988: 26), ‘montage now have its equivalent in interactive simulations and simulated encounters experienced according to predefined constraints?’ and might this emerging way of engaging with reality lead to ‘apperceptions of the “deep structure” of post-industrial society?’ Simulation, while variously defined across a range of disciplines, points generally to a mimetic ambition and it will be my aim in this chapter to approach simulation as the production of ‘reality effects’4 – through modelling, representation, and experience – that link digital media experience to truth claims. While many different forms of interactive documentary might be said to simulate reality, my focus in this chapter will be on digital games, albeit with a view to developing a concept of simulation that may be more broadly applicable. While there are a number of games that claim to be ‘docu-games’ the extent to which games might have a documentary ambition has been debated. Have we, as Bogost and Poremba (2008) suggest, ‘conveniently hijacked the nearest existing genre?’ Or it is possible to see in digital games a continuity with documentary practice and/or value? I will engage this debate through the concept of simulation, suggesting that insofar as digital games seek to simulate reality, they aim to model systems or spaces, creating analogues that are partly true. I will begin by developing a concept of simulation that aims to capture the ways in which digital media imitate the behaviour of real-world systems through forms of proximity (data, audio-visual detail, first-hand experience) and distance (simplification, abstraction, approximation, extrapolation, distortion). As Dovey (2006) has argued, simulations engage realities through processes of approximation and extrapolation and are reflective of a shift towards a ‘probabilistic’ regime of truth in contemporary culture. While it is tempting to point to the distinctive logics of digital media as marking a profound rupture with audio-visual documentary practice, I will also consider the ways in which audio-visual documentary culture includes practices – re-enactment, pre-enactment, and staging – like digital simulations, engage realities through

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forms of imitation and extrapolation. I will briefly survey these practices with a view to drawing out the ways in which they have been understood to manage the tension between proximity and distance, fact and fiction. Finally, I will consider a number of digital games with a view to exploring how they might simulate reality at the level of their underlying rules, audio-visual style, and/or gameplay experience.

Simulation: imitating and approximating realities What is simulation and what might it mean to suggest that simulation might, in at least some contexts, be conceptualised as a form of documentary practice? This question invites us to consider the relationship between simulation and an ambition to ‘document’. A cursory exploration of the meaning of simulation points to the apparent irreconcilability of these concepts. Simulation suggests imitation, but it might just as equally point to forms of pretence or deception. In the context of cultural criticism, with Baudrillard a key influence, it has also been understood to describe ‘the generation of models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal’ (Baudrillard 1983:2). Here we find simulation as the antithesis of representation, the ‘liquidation of the referent’ which marks a fundamental break with practices of representation. Simulation is, therefore, an ambiguous term and not one that aligns naturally with an ambition to ‘document’ reality. In order to consider simulation as an interactive documentary practice, I will home in on simulation as mimetic, as an imitative process that aims to foster understanding/ reveal realities, albeit often indirectly. There is, I suggest, a certain kinship between simulations claiming a documentary ambition and uses of simulation in various sober contexts. While interactive documentaries that seek to simulate aspects of reality must also be considered in terms of their playful orientation and ambition to entertain, their alignment with documentary points to a desire to produce relevant understandings of natural, social, and political realities. Simulation, as explored here, describes communicative logics that make claims about reality through practices of imitation rather than audio-visual correspondence. However, as with audio-visual documentary practice, simulations mediate an engagement in the world by virtue of both proximity and distance. Taking scientific simulation as a touchstone, it is possible to argue that simulations model real-world targets – whether as analogues, isomorphs, or idealisations – abstracting, simplifying and in some cases distorting so as to produce new information. Simulations copy ‘the essential elements of reality in a dynamic model’ facilitating understanding by making aspects of reality tractable and manipulatable (Sauvé et al 2007: 251). Scientific simulations are productive fictions that get at complex realities through forms of distortion, simplification, abstraction or idealisation (Grüne-Yanoff and Weirich 2010: 25). Simulations are understood to ‘work’, in large part because they are only ‘approximately’ true (Frigg and Hartmann 2006). They invite an exploration of the possible ‘a much wider domain than that of the actual’ (GrüneYanoff and Weirich 2010: 25) and might be described as ‘imaginary’ (Weirich 2011). However, the instrumental and sober ambitions of scientific simulation rest,

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ultimately, on relevant correspondences that render the imaginary relevant to an understanding of the actual. In the cultural domain computational simulations can be understood to claim the real in two distinct ways. Firstly, as digital media scholar Gonzalo Frasca (2003: 223) has argued, ‘to simulate is to model a (source) system through a different system, which maintains (for somebody) some of the behaviours of the original system’. In the case of digital games, as Frasca suggests, models approximate realities by approaching them as systems and focusing on behaviour (i.e., change). Focusing on the ways in which historical video games make claims about the past, Chapman (2018) describes this as a conceptual simulation style, a process of revealing aspects of the past through the behaviour of the game as a processual system. Modelling realities conceptualised as dynamic systems, conceptual simulations offer a way of engaging with aspects of reality that are typically difficult to render visually. They can reveal the complexities of historical processes, demonstrate causality and connection, and reveal patterns of change over time. Where games simulate history conceptually, they make claims through the experience of play which is shaped (although, rarely determined) by an underlying model that captures the behaviour of aspects of reality algorithmically. As conceptual simulations, games invite actions within a ‘rule-governed’ possibility space (Salen and Zimmerman 2004: 67) in which goals, (im)permissible actions and rewards become ways of making claims about reality. Ian Bogost’s (2007: 19–29) concept of ‘procedural rhetoric’ captures the fact that as computational models, games seek to persuade and make claims about reality. We can also point to a realist simulation style (Chapman 2018: 61) in which claims about reality are made through forms of audio-visual verisimilitude. This is a style in which history is engaged perceptually, with rich audio-visualisations purporting to show the past ‘as it was’ from the perspective of historical agents. Cinematic realism, as technique and experience, is a key touchstone for the creation of a believable sensory experience, although in contrast to historic film the player tends to be given a high degree of spatial agency, with latitude to explore the audio-visual space. Historic re-enactment with its emphasis on a first-person affective engagement with history (Chapman 2018: 198) is also a point of reference (a point that will be developed further below). Many interactive documentaries (particularly recent, more ‘immersive’ modes) seek to simulate the subjective experiences of others, realistically mimicking normally inaccessible perceptions, experiences, and conscious states, and proposing forms of relationality between self and other (the ethical ambitions and implications of such efforts will be considered in more detail in Chapter five). Spatial simulations (Manovich 2001: 112) such as forms of virtual reality, mimic the perceptual experience of being in a virtual environment, also exhibit a realist simulation style. Regardless of the different ways in which they claim the real, both realist and conceptual simulation are processes of signification in which subjectivity plays a key role. As Frasca (2003) notes, the system maintains ‘for someone’ a connection to reality. It is through the embodied and cognitive experience of interacting with a

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simulation that it is taken up as relevant to reality (or not). Frasca goes on to contrast the playful and performative experience of interacting with a flight simulator, which might allow an exploration of what it feels like to fly (or crash), with the visual detail that a photograph of a plane might have to offer. While a flight simulation might provide less detail (depending on the play off between conceptual and perceptual simulation styles) it allows for an experience of flight that can be realistic enough to have instructional value. Video games typically do not aim to be instrumental as such, nevertheless as simulations they invite an engagement with reality that is shaped by our cognitive and affective involvement as a player. Immersion in the experience of play points to players’ agency with respect to the processes of signification (although we must be mindful of the role of simulation rules in shaping the experience of play). It indicates, also, the potential for a deeper, ‘immersive’ involvement and the risk of a tighter, ‘ideological grip’ (Giddings 2013). Neither, of course, can be taken for granted. Finally, it is important to consider simulations’ distinct epistemologies. Simulations invite us to engage with the realm of the virtual (a realm that is larger than the actual) the ‘as-if’ and the ‘thought experiment’ (Elsaesser 2014). They offer a ‘prosthetic’ for the imagination, producing speculative rather than definitive knowledge (Giddings 2007: 423). As such, simulations can foster an awareness of the nature and limits of knowledge. Uricchio (2005: 333) has suggested, for example, that historical simulation games are ‘machines for producing speculative or conditional representations’, arguing that in their ability to foreground alternative realities and promote a ‘what if’ mode of engagement that simulations have the potential challenge notions of ‘fact’ and ‘fixity’ in historical representation. While simulation allows for more complex engagements with history as a process, Chapman (2018) finds little evidence that historical video games are inclined to challenge traditional historiography. Realist simulations, he suggests, tend to ground knowledge about the past in the idea of referentiality (their detailed audio-visual rendering, like the photographic image, imply an indexical link to an empirical referent) and historical accuracy. The invitation to explore the past is often presented as a process by which ‘the truth’ is uncovered and recorded, engaging the player in the reproduction of a singular representation of the past. Conceptual simulation reflects a constructivist epistemology, drawing attention to history as an active process of meaning-making. And yet, it is often the case that the simulation rules work as a kind of historical theory ‘proving the governing logics that ensure the produced explanations about the past are rarely contradictory no matter who plays’ (77). Abstraction may function not as a way of drawing attention to complexity, but as a means by which to make highly generalised and totalising claims. I have, so far, developed an account of simulation as a mimetic process that seeks to foster an engagement with reality, albeit often through forms of distortion, abstraction, and/or simplification. There is a central and productive play-off between correspondence to the real and these forms of distancing. The value of simulation as a means by which to reveal realities in various sober contexts serves as a touchstone for considering simulation as an interactive documentary practice. Following Chapman (2018) it is possible to point to two distinct, and in practice

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typically imbricated, styles of simulation – the dynamic modelling of realities conceptualised as systems (conceptual simulation) and realist simulations that aim to provide detailed renderings of virtual realities, inviting exploration, and self-discovery. These two styles of simulation provide a starting point for thinking about the ways in which video games might produce reality effects for players. Of course, there is much variation in the way in which these two styles of simulation are deployed across the range of games that might be said to have factual ambition, with implications for the strength with which they claim the real. While the simulation of physical processes such as the movement of objects in space may make a strong claim (since the laws of physics are more amenable to algorithmic rendering) the simulation of social processes may make a weaker claim, but may, nevertheless allow for a meaningful exploration of aspects of reality that cannot be explored otherwise. But while video games simulate, they are also more than simulations. They may incorporate fictional or factual narrative and there is inevitably play off between factual ambition and the need to create a playable game. In this respect there is an obvious kinship between computer simulation and some modes of audio-visual documenting. Documentary studies, therefore, has much to contribute to understanding video games in their factual ambitions. As fact–fiction hybrids, the video games that I will consider below seek to reveal realities through play offering evidence for their claim on the real through the expressive possibilities of computational media. While there are many connections that might be made between audio-visual documentary practice and digital simulation, I will concentrate on three touchstones: re-enactment, conditional documentary, and forms of staging. Making connections between these documentary practices and documentary video game scholarship, I aim to draw out the various ways in which video games might be understood to claim the real through various forms of computational simulation.

Revealing realities: documentary practice as touchstone Re-enactment as vivification As Nichols (2008) has observed, re-enactment ‘the more or less authentic re-creation of prior events’ was a documentary staple until ‘slain’ by the practices and ideologies of observational documentary. However, as he points out, ‘times have changed’, so much so that since the last decade of the twentieth century it has been possible to point to an active exploration of re-enactment across a wide range of documentary practice (Kahana 2009). Although a certain anxiety might attend practices of re-enactment that overly stretch notions of authenticity (Ward 2005: 35), re-enactment has generally been valued for the illusion of proximity that it creates to events that would otherwise be unrepresentable. And yet, re-enactment also foregrounds its distance from those events, signalling an allegiance to the present as well as the past. As Nichols has argued (2008: 80) ‘the very syntax of re-enactments affirms the having-been-thereness of what can never, quite, be here again’. Facts

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remain facts, their verification possible, but the iterative effort of going through the motions of re-enacting them imbues such facts with the lived stuff of immediate experience. They ‘contribute to a vivification of that for which they stand. They make what it feels like to occupy a certain position, to perform a certain action, to adopt a particular perspective visible and more vivid’ (88). Affective and persuasive, the re-enacting body links past and present, bringing historic events to life through ‘the lived stuff of immediate experience’. This blending of the factual and speculative, historic and contemporary, is managed through the voice of the documentary, which serves to locate the re-enactment within documentary discourse. As simulations, digital games might also be understood in terms of their ambition to vivify real-world systems, spaces and/or documents. In analysing the video game Escape from Woomera5, which challenges players to imaginatively occupy the position of a refugee trying to escape from the Woomera detention centre in central Australia, Cindy Poremba (2013) makes the case that as a simulation of the detainee experience the game works, like re-enactment, to vivify the documentary content. With reference to Nichols, she argues that play can usefully be conceptualised as a process of enacting that offers an experiential awareness which is not evidential but interpretive, with the enacting body serving as a vehicle for re-animating physical or psychological experience. Simulations, she suggests, work to create a ‘third space’ in which the enacting body of the user provides a way of vivifying real events and experiences, while remaining essentially distinct from them. In my research with players of the simulation game Asylum: Exit Australia (see Nash 2015) I have explored this process of vivification. The game invites players to imagine themselves as members of a persecuted minority seeking to flee their homeland. However, the game establishes a discursive frame that connects this imaginative, fictional world of game play to the experience of refugees: ‘This simulation puts you in the shoes of an asylum seeker and exposes you to some of the difficult situations and decisions that are faced by people who are forced to flee their home country’. While the fictional scenario prompts forms of self-reflection, reinforced by the game’s conditional first-person address (if you were an asylum seeker), players connected this imagined experience, and the feelings it generated – suspicion, anxiety, frustration, defensiveness, fear, vulnerability and helplessness – to the refugee experience, albeit recognising the limits of a game to capture such a complex reality. For game play to vivify documentary material requires, as Nichols suggests, forms of discursive management and warranting. Players need to be supported to both engage with and through their experience of game play. In the case of Asylum: Exit Australia, for example, a realist simulation style (Chapman 2018) combining still images and ‘news-like’ reports produces a degree of verisimilitude, and provision of data and links to external organisations, fosters a factual orientation to the experience of game play. In imagining how they might respond in the face of similar decisions players described forms of reflective understanding. Going through the motions of an imagined refugee journey players took up an ‘as-if’ orientation, understanding their own experience as insightful (offering in some cases a distinctive re-orientation to the issue) but recognising also the game elements and the distance between game play and

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reality. As with re-enactment, game play might be described (to varying degrees) as a ‘body-based discourse’ that promises alternative and affective paths to knowing while also drawing attention to the limits of embodied knowledge (Agnew 2004: 330).

Conditional documentary: warranting and positioning My second touchstone is the forms of documentary that have been understood as sharing something with the subjunctive or conditional moods of spoken and written language. Although cueing forms of documentary viewing, these programmes present fictional scenarios that might be considered to be, to varying degrees, ‘factual’ by virtue of extrapolating from actual states of affairs. Documentary scholarship highlights significant variation in the propositional and predictive ambition across the spectrum of conditional documentary work, deploying a variety of ‘warranting’ strategies such as the use of real locations, the blending of documentary and fictional content or a more general audio-visual likeness that in some cases renders the imagined events chillingly plausible (Lipkin, Paget, and Roscoe 2006: 20–2). Peter Watkins’ documentary fiction The War Game (BBC 1965) provides a particularly powerful example of the ways in which forms of warranting produce this factual (and chilling) effect. While the fictional story of a Chinese invasion of Vietnam produces the film’s speculative possibility space, as documentary it makes explicit appeals to historical and scientific ‘data’ – from the amount of energy released after a nuclear explosion and its effects on the human body to the challenges of civil unrest and food shortages experienced in Germany after WW2 – to ground its truth claims. Also relevant to the production of a documentary effect is the positioning of the viewer as a potential actor with respect to the documentary subject, the proliferation of nuclear weapons. In positioning the audience as social/political actors with respect to the issue of nuclear arms proliferation, The War Game links present and future, actuality and possibility through the potential for contemporary action (Salazar 2015). Conditional documentary serves as an important reminder of the variability of documentaries’ claims on the real. It also highlights the ways in which speculative claims may produce a factual stance toward a projected world by encouraging extrapolation from available evidence. Computational simulation might be compared to conditional documentary where it seeks to extrapolate from what is presently known. Wolf (1999) nuances the argument comparing simulation to claims made in the subjunctive mood which express doubt, desire, and/or speculation. However, Wolf also points to the importance of warranting through appeals to data. As a simulation’s data set ‘becomes larger and more comprehensive the link to the physical world grows stronger, until the simulation is thought to be sufficiently representative of some portion or aspect of the physical world’ (280). I argue that a simulation’s underlying data not only has the potential to play a role in warranting claims made, but also produces a shift in the nature of the claim being made – a shift from the subjunctive to the conditional. The nature of the data that might underpin computational simulation is, of course, highly variable. While physical phenomena such as the trajectory of an object

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through space is amenable to data-based modelling (and might be better described as conditional in its relation to reality, i.e. if a ball were thrown with this force in that direction it would land there); the historical, social, and political phenomena that are the subject of many factual video games are typically more difficult to render algorithmically and in these cases a more subjunctive mood is arguably evident. In addition to data, computation itself might be understood to play a role in warranting the outputs of computer simulations. Video game scholar Cindy Poremba has suggested (2011: 56), for example that simulations ‘may draw upon the potential for computational machines, like cameras and other instruments before them, to provide a sense of detachment from human interpretation that plays into judgements of indexicality’. Approaching computation as a route to something akin to indexicality, a ‘quasi-indexicality’ or ‘computational-native’ indexicality (2011: 30) she argues that chains of operations link data to simulation outputs in ways that might be compared, in general terms, to the indexicality of the photographic image. While indexicality is not, as we have seen, foundational to documentaries’ truth claims a sense of the ‘objectivity’ of computation may, in some cases, warrant a simulation’s output. A simulation game like 51 Sprints6 demonstrates how an appeal to data and computation might play a warranting role. The game allows the player to ‘run’ a number of 100-meter Olympic sprint finals as a way of exploring myths of a level playing field. The underlying model or ‘equaliser’7 represents the impacts of a range of variables – class, race, nationality, body, and gender – on athletic performance. By ‘running’ various historical and/or imaginative sprints and ‘equalising’ the effects of its identified factors, the simulation aims to challenge the myth of the Olympics as a level playing field. 51 Sprints incorporates a link to the underlying data set and provides detailed information about the algorithms used to ‘equalise’ athletes’ performances. The simulation provides plausible ‘evidence’ in support of a

FIGURE 4.1

51 Sprints screenshot

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discourse on the effects of inequality on athletic performance, through an (extra-textual) appeal to data and computation. As a model of reality, the ‘equaliser’ simplifies and abstracts from a complex reality to isolate the operation of specific factors. The outputs of the simulation – the results of various imaginary races – are conditional. Warranted by an appeal to computational processes and data (which are made available to the player) the simulation presents what ‘would have been’. Extrapolating from this the player is encouraged to recognise ‘what is’.

Staging and provoking realities A final touchstone for simulation can be found in those practices of staging and performance that have been seen to ‘reveal’ realities that otherwise resist audio-visual rendering. Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s ‘social experiment’ Chronique d’un été (1960), is an influential early example in this line. As Winston (2007) has argued, its legacy for Anglophone documentary has been highlighting the value of forms of ‘staging’ situations that reveal realities, particularly in relation to questions of identity and/or experience. It highlights the potential of the camera not just to film ‘reality as it is, but “truth” as it is provoked, simulated, modified, or catalysed’ (Beattie 2008a: 90). In the context of reality TV, Dovey (2008) compares such provocations to computer simulations approaching shows like Big Brother as models of complex, but generally invisible, social processes. Like social psychology experiments employing methods of social role-play, that might be likened to agent-based simulation, Dovey suggests that such programmes rest on models of group identity formation and human interaction that facilitate an exploration of complex social issues under the conditions of reflexive modernity. The various activities reflect the programme’s underlying model, isolating relevant elements such as intimacy and identity formation. Referencing the audience’s own empirical experience of identity work, Big Brother’s ‘experiments’ reveal the dynamics of these complex processes in ways that have the potential to promote critical reflection. Of course, the extent to which Big Brother might be seen as ‘modelling’ complex social processes must ultimately turn on analysis of its ‘underlying model’ and the extent to which it seeks to aim at anything, beyond a certain audience appeal. What Dovey’s comparison with computational simulation does highlight, however, is the similar logic at work in attempts to stage and/or provoke engagements with realities in forms of factual programming and computational modelling and play. In both cases there is the promise of revealing social processes and dynamics, addressing the invisibility of social process and in both cases this potential must be balanced against a certain tendency toward distraction and trivialisation. Forms of discursive management contribute to the production of a factual reading, although also central is what we might call procedural verisimilitude, the extent to which the staging (or underlying model) seems to capture something relevant about reality. In the case of a staged documentary like Supersize Me (Spurlock 2004), for example, the reality revealed turns in part on the extent to which the ‘rules of the game’ seem to be reasonable. While certain aspects of the underlying model – ‘supersizing’ when offered serves as a measure and

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critique of the impact of McDonald’s marketing strategies, walking only as far as the ‘average’ American allows for a certain extrapolation from the model – work to support an extrapolation from the experiment, other aspects of the model – eating only McDonald’s and eating everything from the menu at least once – are more rhetorical, designed to reflect a possible, if not universally plausible, ‘worst case scenario’. I have already touched on the importance of the underlying ‘rules’ in shaping the meaning of digital games. While an appeal to data is one way in which a simulation might produce reality effects, also significant is the believability of the underlying model. Supersize Me is likely sufficiently believable as a model of the effects of eating McDonalds, for at least some viewers, to be taken as a simulation of reality. In a similar vein the simulation game College Scholarship Tycoon8 produces reality effects by virtue of the verisimilitude of its underlying model. The simulation seeks to give the player insight into the logic underpinning college admission processes in the US. Challenging the player to improve the ranking of a fictitious college by selecting and attracting ‘the best’ students, the simulation demonstrates how and why existing selection processes work to entrench privilege. The game is accompanied by extratextual elements, such as a ‘player’s manual’ that explains the underlying model in some detail, providing links to new stories about the ‘enrolment management industry’. Attracting the best students (with the highest SAT scores) boosts a university’s rankings and using financial aid to attract the best students (regardless of their financial situation) is key to achieving this. While the game blends fact and fiction, the underlying model is highly specific (a point to which we shall return) and is further bolstered by links to relevant evidence (indeed the project might be considered a transmedia game). While a documentary about college admission might reveal the injustice and effects of the system, through play, College Scholarship Tycoon reveals the hidden ‘logic’ of the college admissions process. This brief exploration of the kinship between computational simulation and documentary practice allows for a recognition of the ways in which simulations and documentaries qualify, contextualise, and manage complex forms of referentiality. Vivification suggests the value of ‘going through the motions’ as a means by which to foster embodied understanding, recognising the space between reality and re-enactment as well as their imbrications. Conditional documentary serves as a reminder of the variability of documentaries’ reality claims, highlighting the role of warranting (data) as a ground for extrapolation. The stronger the connections made (and made explicit) at the level of data the more the claim might be considered conditional. A looser connection – as is likely to be the case for social, political, and/or historical claims – may tend toward a more subjunctive mood. A comparison with forms of staging, on the other hand, highlights the significance of the simulation model itself and the extent to which it offers a believable frame for producing insights into reality. Across all of these forms of documentary practice, and I argue simulation as well, forms of discursive management (documentary ‘voice’) contribute to the production of a factual orientation. Following Sorensen and Thorhaugh (2013) I extend this insight to digital games, suggesting that as simulations, they manage both a referential/assertive and fictitious/ playful mindset through something akin to documentary ‘voice’.

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In the rest of this chapter, I will consider the factual ambition of several digital games. Drawing on the arguments above I will highlight the diversity of their reality claims and the ways in which they produce reality effects. My intention is not to make a case for digital games as documentary, but rather to consider how a certain documentary ambition might be identified across a number of different games. In doing so, I will draw more expressly on documentary games scholarship. I will begin by considering the question of specificity. While it is more straightforward, and typical, to identify documentary ambition in games that engage with specific systems and events, building on an analysis of documentary staging it is possible to point to the ways in which games work as models that create performative spaces that produce ‘flickers of authenticity’ (Jane Roscoe, cited Flynn 2002: 50) in the form of self-understanding. Simulation games also provide contexts for ‘doing’ documentary (journalism), inviting an imaginative engagement with the practice of documenting. The reality effect of these games turns on a commitment to documenting as a particular kind of orientation toward events grounded in investigation and image making. Finally, I will consider further what it might mean to vivify a document, providing experiential insight into the experience of other through play.

Simulation and the documentary ambition of digital games Reconsidering specificity Documentary and journalism, as has been noted above, have traditionally been defined by their commitment to imaging and revealing realities in their particularity. For those wrestling with the documentary ambition of digital games it is very often the specificity of games’ relationships to real events that prompts a comparison with documentary. As Fullerton (2008) has argued, it is in their reference to specific historical events that games like JFK Reloaded, which challenges players to ‘re-enact’ the assassination of John F. Kennedy, approximate documentary film and video. Referencing Renov’s four modalities of documentary desire, she argues that games connect with documentary in their urge to simulate specific historic events in a way that mirrors documentary’s orientation toward the ‘replication of the historical real’ (Renov, cited Fullerton 2008: 217). In a similar vein Raessens (2006: 215) argues that ‘documentary’ games attempt to document events in a ‘historically correct way’ while also providing a context in which to playfully reenact them. Docu-games, he argues ‘strive for “facticity” or “documentarity” to expose players to events and places that would remain inaccessible to them otherwise’. They contain textual or contextual evidence – from photorealistic visuals (a realist simulation style) to the priority accorded to historical detail – that give rise to a ‘documentarizing lecture’. Looking at player responses to games like JFK Reloaded and Escape from Woomera (see above) he found that players were in fact engaging with the games – whether accepting or contesting their vision of reality – as historical representations.

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However, many games lack the specificity that might suggest a comparison with documentary practice. They offer instead a ‘non-specific’ engagement with social and historical processes (Uricchio 2005). A game like Papers Please9 which asks the player to imagine themselves a lowly immigration officer in the fictional nation of Arstotzka, ‘processing’ a seemingly limitless stream of potential migrants, vetting them according to the ‘rules’ (or, alternatively, deciding to bend the rules) does not refer to a specific social system, but rather creates a space in which players are encouraged to reflect on the inhumanity of bureaucratic systems in general. As with many non-specific games, there is evidence that players do in fact take up their experience of game play as social and political critique. Morrissette (2017) has argued of the game that the dull visual and auditory environment replicates the ‘monotonous drudgery of actual bureaucratic work’ making the game a simulation of a Weberian modern rational state in which bureaucracy and technology produce a ‘dehumanized system that strives above all for objectivity in decision- making’. Boredom and tedium are key to game play, which provokes reflection on the experience of being trapped in Weber’s ‘iron cage of bureaucracy’. There are also many ‘news games’ that might be described as semi-specific in their engagement with reality. Games such as the Uber Game (2017, Financial Times)10 and The Amazon Game11 (2019, Australian Broadcasting Corporation), for example, model the extractive logic of the ‘gig’ economy, asking the player to make decisions as though trying to survive as a precarious worker. I have referred to these games as semi-specific, because although the games themselves generally lack reference to specific events or people, they typically do make (often extra-textually) clear a connection between the simulation and the experiences of several individuals. It is important, therefore, to acknowledge a certain variation in the nature and degree of specificity across simulations. The value of less-specific simulations lies, as Uricchio (2005: 330) has suggested, in their ability to ‘provoke a wider range of interrogations, encouraging a more abstract, theoretical engagement of historical process’. Often more ‘open world’, their distance from specific events allows for the creation of an expansive possibility space that fosters subjective investment in the exploration of social and political structures. While comparisons with audio-visual documentary practice may seem stretched at times, as Morrissette (2017) demonstrates in relation to Papers Please, the verisimilitude of game play can in some contexts provide sufficient foundation for a factual orientation. In thinking about whether and to what extent non-specific games might simulate, and thus be said to demonstrate a kinship with documentary practice, we might consider the extent to which the relationship between game play and reality is arbitrary or debateable. Debates about the game Tetris and the extent to which it sought to simulate are instructive (see Bogost 2006: 99–100). While some argue that Tetris has ‘no foot whatsoever in the real world’ (it just offers the chance to develop skill) others, like Janet Murray, took up the experience of game play metaphorically arguing (cited Bogost 2006: 100) that the game is ‘a perfect enactment of the overtasked lives of Americans in the 1990s’. Regardless of your position on Tetris, it is clearly a matter of debate as to whether

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it makes any claim with respect to reality at all. In the case of Papers Please there is less scope for debate and in the Uber Game or the Amazon Game there is less again. While the games are non-specific, they clearly have a foot in the real world. Further, it is their non-specificity that allows for an engagement with real-world dynamics and processes that resist visual depiction. This War of Mine12 is a survival strategy game that highlights both the value of non-specific simulation for engaging complex realities and the ways in which a non-specific simulation might nevertheless claim the real. The simulation game is focused on a group of civilians struggling to survive in a besieged city. The game trailer and other extra-textual elements claim that the game is ‘inspired’ by the Siege of Sarajevo (1992–6) with the game developers claiming that it is an attempt to ‘grasp the real face of war’ as reported by survivors13. However, the game itself is unspecific, set in the fictitious location of Porogen it points to the universality of conflict and the shared experiences of those caught up in wars past and future. For the game designers, the freedom from expectations of historical accuracy to a particular conflict was essential to simulating the experiences of survivors. One of the game designers (Dave, cited de Smale et al 2019: 398) reflects on the importance of non-specificity: ‘If we set the game as a recreation of particular conflict, we would have to take sides. And even if we didn’t, we would be accused of it. We would be accused of presenting historic events in some wrong way and so on’. What the designers sought to create was an ‘emotionally realistic’ experience for players, grounded in a recognition not only that such events have happened historically, but also that such events are happening now, will happen in future and could happen to them.

FIGURE 4.2

This War of Mine screenshot

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This War of Mine is a ‘sandbox’ simulation which, as Squire (2008) has argued, offers players open-ended worlds designed to be ‘inhabited’, often over long periods of time. The game calls on the player to ‘direct’ the actions of the various characters who find themselves sheltering in an abandoned house. The aim is to protect and provide for the characters, who each have different strengths (combat skills, negotiation skills, being good at scavenging or trading), and different personalities (more or less compassionate or quick to fight, and more or less inclined to respond to the directive of the player), as well as elaborate back stories. There are various things needed for effective survival: food, water, shelter, tools, and medicines; and a number of character states such as hunger/starvation, depression, illness and injury, and fatigue. A number of aspects of the game design seek to simulate the civilian experience such as: the lack of instruction when you start the game (you must ‘work out’ how to survive); the game has an indefinite duration, which tends to undermine longer-term strategy and focus play on day-to-day survival; finally, death is final – which tends to reinforce a sense of the precarity of life in a war zone. Fundamental to the experience of war, and to the game, is the need to make morally challenging decisions. And it is the process of deciding which is revealing – about war and also about oneself. One player wrote on the ‘This War of Mine Wiki’, for instance: ‘This game always makes me sad. I [sic] fell horrible when I can’t feed them all, or when they are freezing. I have never been in a warzone, but this game captures the feeling of it I believe. You only care about you, not because you are selfish but because you also have to survive14’. Another player reflects that ‘This War of Mine was meant to be played with a solemn attitude. It rips away at our guard and brings out the (often unwilling) monster in all of us’. In prompting players to make decisions that provoke moral reflection and in seeing the consequences of those decision play out, This War produces morally salient emotional responses – remorse, shame, guilt, pride – that can be compared to real-world moral experiences. The space of the game can be described as ethically ‘closed’ insofar as the players’ moral choices are strongly shaped by the game’s rules and narrative (Sicart 2009: 215). However, the underlying rules of the game contribute to its reality effects, producing a procedural (and arguably emotional) verisimilitude. The openness of the game play provides players with significant latitude to explore their own values. For one player, for example, the strategy was articulated as ‘audacity to think that I can survive this game with EVERY survivor well-fed, happy and hopeful while staying away from senseless murder’. At the same time the game forces players into morally uncomfortable positions, producing a more intense exploration of individual values and boundaries. The combination of these two modalities of ethical play produces ‘rich game experiences in which ethics play a fundamental role’ (Sicart 2009: 217). While not explicitly claiming any documentary ambition This War exemplifies the ways in which non-specific simulations can provoke self-revelation. The game works by simulating the process of moral decision making, staging a situation in which players can engage imaginatively with the experiences of survivors of conflict, while foregrounding the ‘asif’ nature of this engagement and the limits of understanding.

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Play as ‘documenting’ Another group of factual games can be said to simulate practices of documenting, fostering a factual engagement through play-as-documenting. 1979 Revolution: Black Friday is a role-play game/interactive drama which tells the story of the 1979 Iranian revolution from the perspective of young photojournalist Reza Shirazi. While initially ignorant of and seemingly indifferent to the revolutionary movement, Reza is deeply embedded within it with his parents and brother Hussain on the side of the Shah and the government and his friend Babak Azadi and cousin Ali Shirazi agitating for (or in Ali’s case violently working toward) revolution15. Ultimately, Reza is drawn into the revolution and must deal with the complexities this raises in the context of his family, while also navigating the various factions within the revolutionary movement. Narratively, 1979 Revolution is shaped by a series of dialogue trees that produce an experience that might be described as interactive docu-drama in which the player’s subjectivity shapes the character of Reza. The game arguably simulates (although very loosely) the experience of navigating the complex interpersonal relationships that surrounded the social and political upheavals of the Iranian revolution. It is necessary, for instance, to choose a path between peaceful revolution and violence, whether or not to reveal information and to decide how. Narratively, however, 1979 is tightly scripted and while the player clearly has some influence, the extent to which this might be said to provide insight into the experiences of those caught up in the revolution is questionable. More significantly, play simulates the act of documenting, revealing information about the revolution and aligning the fictional story of Reza to the events of 1979. Reza is a photojournalist who finds himself drawn into making a visual record of the revolution. In a number of scenes, the player (as Reza) must document events

FIGURE 4.3

1979 Revolution screenshot

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as they unfold. Entering a ‘camera mode’ the player engages the scene as though through a camera’s viewfinder. The aim is to search the scene for various ‘hotspots’ which prompt the taking of a ‘photograph’. This ‘re-creates’ historical images of the revolution that are then unlocked (along with other historical evidence) and presented to the player alongside the image they captured. The effect is to create a link between the game play and the reality to which it refers. A realist simulation style contributes further to the reality effect created by the integration of archival material. The result is the production of a hybrid possibility space in which the fictional scenario provides a pretext for play that is centred on the recording of ‘fact’. Following Chapman (2018) I suggest that what is involved here is playing with the ‘event-as-documentary’, gathering evidence intra-ludically to produce an evidential base which in turn fosters a factual engagement with the narrative and game. A similar logic is found in Al Jazeera’s Pirate Fishing: An Interactive Investigation16 which invites players to enact a process of investigative journalism that parallels many forms of television documentary. The journalistic function of much television documentary is linked to ideals of democratic accountability, advocacy, and the ideal of the ‘Fourth Estate’ in which the press are seen to act as ‘watchdogs’ serving the public interest, ‘engaged and committed in its critique of officialdom’ (Beattie 2008a: 165). Key here are professional norms – independence, accuracy, impartiality, and transparency – that underpin the ability to hold those in power to account. The process of investigation therefore plays a key role in sustaining the claim that what is depicted can be said to be ‘true’ and this process is very often foregrounded visually and narratively through the journalist’s ‘quest’ to delve ‘behind the headlines’ (Corner 1995: 84). Pirate Fishing remediates this logic in the form of a news game that invites the player to enact the journalistic process, becoming part of an investigative team uncovering evidence of illegal fishing off the coast of Sierra Leone. Combining audio-visual documentary journalism (the game was made to accompany a television documentary) with game elements the player follows the investigation of Al Jazeera journalist Juliana Ruhfus while ‘helping’ by categorising the information uncovered (is it evidence, noteworthy, or merely background?). The game depicts the investigative process as one of ‘evidence-collection, fact checking and note taking’ (Al Jazeera cited Conill 2018: 171), grounded in journalistic norms and drawing attention to the investigation’s specific ‘context of justification’. In addition, the game aims to foster involvement with the social role of the journalist. At the end of the game, the player receives the message that their investigative work has ‘made a real difference!’ The rogue trawler has been identified and fined and, as a result, others have stayed away from Sierra Leonean waters. The winning condition is therefore linked to the social value of journalism which in turn is tied to the successful enactment of the journalistic process. In contrast to 1979, Pirate Fishing makes a strong reality claim both stylistically (the use of video clips from the accompanying television documentary contributes to a sense of realism) and through the underlying model of the journalistic process on offer. The appeal that the model makes is to the ideal of journalism as the Fourth Estate which, although it is only one way of conceptualising

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journalistic practice, nevertheless has cultural purchase as an ideal. The game is grounded in rules of truth that are not only believable, but also valued within the context of liberal democracy. To play the game is to engage experientially with this ideal, to understand the process of investigation from a ‘first-person’ perspective. There is a strong educational dimension to the project, and it has been picked up by many journalism educators. As with 1979, simulating the process of documenting reinforces a commitment to audio-visual recording (and the audio-visual record) as a basis for engaging with and understanding reality.

Play as vivification and self-discovery The final game that I will consider simulates philosopher Henry David Thoreau’s experiment in self-reliant living with a view to creating a space for reflection and self-discovery. Walden: The Game17 is an open world simulation/survival game, ‘sandbox’ that invites a playful engagement with Thoreau’s ‘experiment’ of living simply by the shores of Walden pond. His words frame the experience of play: ‘to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived’. The game invites deliberate play, ‘a slow and reflective experience which would engage those who took it up as a play of ideas’ (Fullerton 2020: 96). A realist simulation style, informed by Thoreau’s extensive records of life at Waldon pond, draws attention to the detail of the natural environment. The player has complete freedom to explore visually, with the movement of the trackpad producing a realistic shift in the visual field. Leaves crackle underfoot as you ‘walk’ through the forest, plants rustle as you touch them and animals dart away realistically. There is also an attempt to simulate the effort of physical work, the difficulty of banging in nails and the repetitiveness of chopping wood.

FIGURE 4.4

Walden: map of the game space

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On one level, the game is a simulation of Thoreau’s experiment, the ‘unique kind of game that he had set for himself’ (Fullerton 2020: 96). His writings and reflections, including his book Waldon, provide a documentary foundation for the simulation (as do the writings of many others – letters, books, etc.). These documents contribute to the game’s reality effects and the experience of play may be understood as their vivification. However, on another level the game is less about Thoreau’s specific experience of living simply and more about the player’s personal reflections on his experiment. Play is slow and reflective; it is a process of becoming immersed in, and attuned to, the simulated environment – noticing different plants and animals, and the change of the seasons. It is possible to ‘live’ the experiment in very different ways – with more or less engagement with society, more or less focus on material possessions and so on – and so it is less a matter of re-enacting Thoreau’s specific experience than using it as a point of departure for self-reflection. As the game’s creator Tracey Fullerton (2020: 103) states, ‘[m]y purpose as a player may or may not be the same as Thoreau’s purpose as a philosopher, but by immersing myself in his world and his experiment in living, I can challenge myself to discover my own answers’. The reality that is engaged and revealed through play is an inner reality; the knowledge on offer is, ultimately, self-knowledge.

Conclusions Ours is increasingly a world shaped by computer simulation, a world in which the real and the virtual are variously intertwined. As Sherry Turkle (2009) has argued, simulations demand our immersion, they excite us with possibilities offering an illusion of totality and completeness that can be hard to resist. Computer simulations are characterised by a fundamental opacity (Humphreys 2009) that complicates this task. What is needed are methods of critique, ways of seeing past the illusion of totality to understand how simulations claim the real and shape understanding. In this chapter I have sought to contribute to this undertaking through an exploration of simulation as a documentary practice. If simulations can just as easily simulate nothing, or nothing actual, then it remains to understand how they come to be taken up as relevant to reality in some contexts. In this chapter I have focused on some of the many ways in which simulations create reality effects, from a realist simulation style, and (extra-textual) appeals to data to the (emotional and procedural) verisimilitude of the simulation model and forms of vivification. In all these cases established documentary practices have provided important touchstones. I have sought to demonstrate the various ways in which forms of simulation both reference documentary media and re-imagine practices of documenting. Of particular significance is the attention drawn to the ways in which simulations, like many documentaries, blend fact and fiction to claim the real to different degrees. Forms of discursive management, as has been suggested, are key to this process. As the examples considered throughout this chapter suggest, simulations offer potentially new and powerful ways of engaging with complex realities, revealing social, political, and natural processes that are not amenable to audio-visual

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representation. As dynamic models, simulations allow us to engage with processes, exploring the ways in which different, oftentimes competing, forces shape real-world outcomes. As realistic spatial simulations they allow us to see the world as another might see it (to some degree). They allow us to see possible futures, and they provide routes to self-exploration and understanding. These are powerful possibilities. However, as I have also sought to demonstrate in this chapter simulations are not inherently progressive or revolutionary. They can equally be deployed in the service of dominant interests and voices and/or to produce singular and totalising visions of the world. The abstraction, simplification, and distortion – the distance – that makes simulation powerful, is a double-edged sword. Documentary scholars need to embrace simulation, just as they did montage, to understand it in its multiplicities and to build critical languages with which to understand its discursive effects. In the next chapter I will engage further with this task by considering the link between virtual reality and empathy.

Notes 1 https://www.sbs.com.au/asylumexitaustralia/ 2 https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2016/apr/27/6x9-a-virtual-experien ce-of-solitary-confinement 3 https://51sprints.hetnieuweinstituut.nl/en/home 4 I have borrowed the concept of reality effects from (Ellis 2012: 34–5) although my use here is less focused on the role of technology in contextualising audience responses and more on the ways in which digital media seek to produce forms of verisimilitude through interaction. 5 https://julianoliver.com/escapefromwoomera/ 6 https://51sprints.hetnieuweinstituut.nl/en/home 7 https://51sprints.hetnieuweinstituut.nl/en/making-51-sprints/how-does-equaliser-work 8 https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/11/1/16526202/college-scholarship-ty coon-game 9 http://papersplea.se/ 10 https://ig.ft.com/uber-game/ 11 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-27/amazon-warehouse-workers-game-race/ 10803346 12 http://www.thiswarofmine.com/#home 13 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gotK5DLdVvI 14 https://this-war-of-mine.fandom.com/wiki/This_War_of_Mine_Wiki 15 The name Reza Shirazi embodies this idea of tension, Reza being the name of the Shah and Shirazi the name of one of the revolutionary leaders. 16 https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2014/piratefishingdoc/ 17 https://www.waldengame.com/

5 STEPPING INTO THE STORY FOR GOOD Virtual reality (VR) and empathy in the context of first-person media

In her book Hamlet on the Holodeck Janet Murray (1998: 13–14) describes a scene from the TV series Star Trek in which Captain Kathryn Janeway enjoys some time out in the ‘Holodeck’ by becoming a character in a Victorian drama. Kathryn, she writes, ‘enters a three-dimensional simulation of an English drawing room, exchanging her Starfleet uniform for a crinolined Victorian dress and assuming the role of Lucy Davenport, governess to the romantic hero Lord Burleigh. He stands, broodily, by the fire. ‘Lord Burleigh is something wrong?’, asks Lucy. ‘Yes, terribly wrong’ he replies. He suddenly steps toward her, takes her in his arms and kisses her passionately. ‘I have fallen in love with you, Lucy’. This scene gives voice to our long-held desire to ‘step into the story’, to go from being viewers of someone else’s story to playing out our own dramas. This desire lies behind much current excitement about the possibilities of 360-degree video, cinematic VR, computergenerated environments, photogrammetry, and 3-D modelling, augmented and mixed realities. While this latest wave of ‘immersive’ media technologies is still far from delivering the Star Trek fantasy of involvement and agency, there is nevertheless a sense of the significance (both academic and commercial) of our desire to step into the story and the ways in which this might be facilitated by a new generation of immersive media technologies. In this chapter I will consider some of the implications of stepping into stories that have a factual ambition. What happens when we are invited to see ourselves not only as viewers of others’ stories, but as participants invited to experience reality as though ‘first-hand’? Exploring a number of projects1 I will suggest that VR (in its various guises) reflects an epistemological logic that has shaped factual television over the past 30 years: the logic of first-person media (Dovey 2000). As we become ever more sceptical of expertise, the shift from being viewers of others’ first-person testimonies toward simulated first-person ‘experiences’ of reality takes on particular significance. In so far as VR projects seek to simulate (see Chapter four) they are grounded in the DOI: 10.4324/9781315208862-6

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production of a perceptual and sensory illusion – of being elsewhere and/or being another. Building on the account of simulation developed in Chapter four we might reflect on the intersections of realist simulation styles, subjective and embodied involvement in the process of signification, and the production of an ‘as-if’ orientation that fosters awareness (to varying degrees) of the contingency of knowledge. The potential for VR experiences to produce a heightened engagement with, and/or altered understanding of, real-world issues and distant others has been a particular driver for VR production. The possibility that we might step into the story for good, engaging in distinctive ways with issues and distant others in ways that might foster pro-social attitudes, behaviours and social impacts, has been attractive to many organisations keen to garner attention and support for various causes. Claims about VR’s ability to produce empathy, in particular, have been both much hyped and critiqued. I will engage with these debates about empathy by going beyond general arguments about VR as a technology to consider some ways in which it positions and addresses audiences so as to suggest and/or foster different (in some cases moral) orientations toward issues and others. Approaching empathy from the perspective of production, as one among a number of ways in which virtual reality projects seek to position the spectator with respect to others, my aim is to open up a more nuanced space for the exploration of VR and ethics. Drawing distinctions between different concepts of empathy I will also consider ways in which participants might be encouraged to feel with others while resisting both narcissistic self-involvement and the absorption of the other into the self. The chapter will begin by considering VR technologies in terms of immersion and presence and the ways in which both contribute to fostering a sense of first-person involvement with reality. There can be much conceptual confusion surrounding immersion and presence and in many cases the terms can be conflated. However, they do point to distinct characteristics of mediation which, when combined, produce an illusion of first-person experience. Building on this analysis, I will locate VR with reference to the epistemic logic of first-person media. I will then go on to consider VR works in their specificity, exploring the different ways in which the spectator might be positioned vis-à-vis the VR experience, either as herself (as tourism, encounter, or with an attitude of witness) or through forms of imaginative self-other hybridity. Building on this initial analysis I will then engage debates around VR and empathy, distinguishing between two, often conflated, notions of empathy and exploring how both can be seen to structure VR experiences. Considering both, I will highlight opportunities and risks with respect to understanding and moral orientation.

Immersion and presence: VR as first-person media Immersion and presence are both terms that have been widely invoked to explain audiences’ experiences of media as texts and technologies, particularly virtual reality. They are terms that aim to explain our imaginative, affective, and sensory involvements with media, pointing to the pleasures associated with being absorbed

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by media experiences. The two terms are often used interchangeably and are clearly deeply connected when it comes to VR experiences. However, I want to tease them apart in order to locate VR experiences with respect to the communicative logic of first-person media. I will suggest that while immersion points to our relationship to the world of the VR text, and more particularly our willingness to imaginatively project ourselves into that world, presence describes the subjective experience of ‘being there’ that can be produced. In other words, while immersion gives emphasis to the VR experience as offering a world to be explored, presence focuses back on questions of experience and affect that contribute to a sense of reality. Taken together they reveal the ways in which VR experiences align with the logic of first-person media (Dovey 2000) in which knowledge of the world is grounded in appeals to first-person experience. In the case of VR experiences, the simulation of first-person experience serves an analogous function. I will briefly explore both immersion and presence before considering VR in terms of the logic of first-person media. Widely invoked to describe VR and many other digital and non-digital media, immersion has arguably become ‘an excessively vague, all-inclusive concept’, tied up with a range of similarly vague ideas – including presence, engagement, and involvement – to the extent that its analytic value has been widely questioned (McMahan 2003: 67). As a way of describing a certain kind of mediated experience – noting particularly that media here may just as easily include novels and film as digital media – Janet Murray (1998: 98–9) draws a parallel with the experience of being submerged in water. We desire, she suggests, an experience of media that parallels a plunge in the ocean; an experience of being perceptually ‘surrounded by a completely other reality’. Scholars working across a range of disciplines have sought to tease out the various dimensions of this experience, focusing on the interplay of perception, attention, and imagination (Nilsson et al 2016; Thon 2008). In relation to virtual reality, our perceptual and sensory immersion in the world of the VR experience is of particular significance. The loss of the frame that has been hegemonic in structuring the relationship between viewer and viewed, offering privileged visual access to unfolding events while also separating the viewer from the image-space (Elsaesser and Hagener 2015), produces the illusion of being surrounded by the image. Favero (2018: 45) describes this illusion as the immersive image, an image that seeks to ‘wrap, embrace or suck in their viewers’, blurring the relationship between the viewer and viewed and creating opportunities for viewers to ‘occupy’ the mediated environment and creating a sense of spatial immersion. However, immersion goes beyond the technical achievement of sensory illusion. It also describes a relationship between the viewer and the world of the media text. Drawing parallels with novels and films (which can offer narrative and emotional immersion), Ryan (2015: 9) defines immersive texts as those that create spaces that feel extensive in time and space, offering a felt totality that invites exploration and suggests possibilities for action (however constrained in practice). Immersion depends on our willingness to engage imaginatively with the spaces, characters, and possibilities that texts offer. Stepping into the story and engaging with the mediated

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world, imaginatively, as though from the ‘inside’ brings about a shift in orientation from modes of viewing towards forms of exploration (Uricchio 2018). In relation to the world-making potentials of factual VR, spatial immersion and audio-visual richness play a key role in establishing this relationship (with narrative and character development typically minimal). However, also key are the various ways in which the viewer is encouraged to imagine herself within this world – including forms of direct address (whether verbal or via eye contact or other gestures), and voice-over. A sense of verisimilitude, the correspondence with our sensory experience of the real world, also serves to underpin the ‘world-making’ of factual VR experiences, encouraging the viewer to project herself imaginatively into the space of the experience. Where immersion highlights the relationship between the participant and the space of representation; presence is often defined loosely as the ‘feeling of being there’. This may involve the feeling of being within a space (physical presence), or with others (social presence) or a more reflexive awareness of one’s self within a virtual world (Lee 2004). Of most significance for factual VR is a sense of presence as an ‘illusion of non-mediation’, the extent to which the experience is created to be taken up as ‘“natural”, “immediate”, “direct”, and “real”’ (Lombard and Ditton 1997). The transparency of VR, its disappearance as a medium, and the emphasis given to simulating direct sensory experience of physical spaces, others, or oneself, contributes to a felt sense of ‘reality’, however partial. Presence is deeply tied to what Laurel (2014: 142) has termed as ‘sensory first-personness’, the ability of audio-visual media to produce forms of embodied perception, by creating a ‘dynamic relationship between viewer and image’ (Marks 1998: 332). Building on Marks’ concept of haptic perception, as a form of viewing that addresses the whole body, with the eyes functioning ‘like organs of touch’, Ross (2018: 2) suggests that ‘the optical illusion of virtual reality enhances the synesthetic qualities of screen media with new implications for how we might “feel” our way through diegetic space now that distance from the screen is seemingly dissolved’. The ability of VR experiences to produce forms of involuntary bodily responses – a rush of adrenalin, racing heart-beat and tensing muscles – indicates its potential as a technology of ‘corporeality’ that prioritises forms of embodied and experiential knowing (Rose 2018b). Taken together, immersion and presence draw attention, I suggest, to the ‘first-person’ nature of VR experiences (Dovey 2000). In examining new forms of factual television emerging at the end of the twentieth century, Dovey points to a shifting regime of truth in which various ‘subjective, autobiographical and confessional modes of expression’ reinforce the expectation that ‘statements about the world (i.e. the way we make truth) are not valid unless grounded in individual subjective experience – unless they are embodied, relative and particular rather than totalising, general and unified’ (Dovey 2000: 22). From the various forms of reality TV to the proliferation of variously ‘autobiographical’ video practices and daytime ‘talk-shows’, priority is given to first-person testimony, emotional self-performance and other forms of confessional self-speaking. Liesbet van Zoonan (2012: 57) traces this idea across contemporary culture, arguing that

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it is becoming all the more important in the context of growing epistemic suspicion. As expert and official sources of knowledge become suspect, the truth can no longer be found ‘out there’, so we must look for it ‘in here’, in our personal experiences, feelings, judgements and memories. She introduces the concept of I-pistemology, to capture the growing significance of the self as the ‘origin of all truth’. In a similar vein Dahlgren (2018: 926), argues that, in the context of contemporary epistemic crises, what we feel has become an increasingly important determinant of what we trust to be true. Truth, he suggests, has ‘been reconfigured as an inner subjective reality’. Interest in the factual potential of VR experience aligns with this broader cultural shift towards the self as epistemic foundation. In fostering a sense of immersion and presence VR experiences produce an illusion of first-hand, experiential knowledge. If, as Bolter and Grusin (2000: 165) argue ‘virtual reality can evoke emotions, how can our culture deny that the experience of virtual reality is authentic?’ Reflecting a similar logic, Google News Lab (2017) have described virtual reality as marking a shift from storytelling to ‘storyliving’. Where storytelling describes the recounting of something that happened to someone else in the past, VR is – it is claimed – ‘happening to you, here and now’ (Ola Björling cited in Google News Lab 2017). There is much hype here, of course, nevertheless it points to the desire to ground engagements with reality in forms of simulated first-person experience. As a simulated experience it is important to recognise it’s ‘as-if’ quality. De la Peña et al (2010: 292), also working in the context of immersive journalism, highlight the significance of virtual reality’s offer of a ‘first-person’ engagement with news. Immersive journalism, they argue, offers the chance to experience the ‘sights and sounds and possibly, the feelings and emotions that accompany the news’. Audiences, they have found, often respond within the VR experience ‘as though real’, behaving in ways that are consistent with both immersion and presence. The as-if is important, however, indicating that no matter how powerful the illusion there is no evidence to suggest that audiences are misled as to what they are experiencing. Approaching VR experiences from the perspective of first-person media raises questions about the range of VR’s first-person address and the implications of this for the participant’s understanding of, and engagement with, real-world events and issues. While we have long understood the significance of audience positioning and address for cueing the interpretive activities of media audiences, little attention has so far been paid to variation in subject positions offered to VR participants. How is the participant encouraged to take up her experience as relevant to her knowledge of events and others? A starting point for addressing this question is to consider the different ways in which participants might be invited to enter into the VR experience. De la Peña et al (2010: 292) have noted that participants can enter VR experiences either as themselves, gaining first-hand access to the spaces and events of stories, or be called upon to imagine themselves in the position of a character in a news story. While the first suggests a kind of eyewitness position, the latter points to forms of self–other hybridity and the possibility of insight into the subjective experience of others. However, going beyond an explicitly journalistic context and considering a range of VR experiences, it is possible to expand on these broad

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categories to highlight variations in the nature of the first-person experience and the level of participant involvement in unfolding events.

Being there or being them: exploring first-person positioning in VR experiences I have often heard VR experiences described as offering participants the chance to ‘be there or be them’. In both cases VR purports to offer access to places that might, under normal circumstances, be thought of as inaccessible, at least to some degree. Certainly, there are few places that might be thought of as more inaccessible than the consciousness of another. But as Bolter and Grusin (2000) highlight, VR has been particularly shaped by the fantasy of being able to ‘be’ another (a point that will be taken up further below). A desire to ‘experience the world as others do’, to occupy different visual perspectives and thereby come to understand what it is like to be a dinosaur or even a molecule (251) seems to provide a motivation for at least some factual VR production. But whether she is encouraged to be herself, imagining that she is ‘there’, or to indulge in the fantasy that she ‘is’ another, there are still a range of ways in which the spectator can be positioned vis-à-vis the VR experience. In each case there are implications, both at the level of truth claims and moral attitude. I will outline below what I see to be some of the key positions offered by factual VR experiences. Beginning with those that prioritise ‘being there’ I suggest that the spectator may be cued to take up the experience as a tourist, as an encounter or as witness. Where the experience is one that produces a fantasy of ‘being them’, I will distinguish between those that foster a form of self–other hybridity, in which one’s own experience provides a foundation for extrapolation and those that imply a more direct access to the subjective experiences of the other. My aim here is not to offer a taxonomy of mutually exclusive subject positions, indeed as will become clear, VR experiences may shift between different positions inviting different orientations within the single experience. More modestly, my aim is to begin the task of teasing out variations and patterns across the range of factual VR experiences.

Being there: tourist, encounter, witness Entering into the VR subject as herself, there are a range of ways in which the spectator might be encouraged to make sense of her experience. I will explore three that, I suggest, predominate in much existing content: tourist, encounter, and witness. The differences between them turn on the nature and purpose of the invitation to enter into the space of representation and the ways in which this shapes the experience epistemically and morally.

Being there as a tourist For a tourist, emphasis is given to the illusion of ‘transportation’ to virtual environment as a pleasurable experience. Leotta and Ross (2018) locate VR as the latest in a long

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line of visualising technologies that have sought to make the world available for consumption, offering ‘Western spectators the opportunity to symbolically appropriate the world through pictures of it’. Like the panorama and related visual spectacles, which sought to produce for the spectator the feeling of being ‘really on the spot’, luring her into a sense of having a ‘complete view’ (Uricchio 2011b), the VR experience is approached as a spectacle organised around the gaze (Urry 1990). Like the real-world tourist, whose performative engagement with the spectacular ties vision to experience and pleasure (Larson and Urry 2011), the VR tourist takes up the invitation of ‘transportation’ in relation to her own desires. While it is possible to point to any number of explicitly touristic VR experiences, my concern here is with the ways in which factual VR experiences might also appeal to our wellestablished touristic inclinations. As with the filmic tourist gaze (Corbin 2014) a form of ‘distanced immersion’ combines the pleasurable sensation of ‘being there’ with forms of protective distancing – the bubble of the organised tour, air-conditioned cinema or, in the case of VR, the headset. The Real Thing: Real life in Fake Cities2 exemplifies this touristic gaze in factual VR. It offers an immersive experience of three so-called ‘fake’ cities in China, each an elaborate copy of a famous European city – Paris, Venice, and London. There is a hyperreality to the fake cities themselves, with each simulating its European counterpart in intricate detail. Visually striking, the cities have been created as tourist attractions, a spectacle of famous European monuments and streetscapes that are also, somehow, quintessentially Chinese. They offer exotic spaces for visual consumption. The VR experience mirrors this touristic experience, allowing the spectator to glide through the spaces of the cities, gazing at and consuming these spectacular urban environments. The primary experience is one of visual spectacle, with very highresolution images contributing to the illusion of being there. The experience aims to reveal ‘ordinary Chinese life taking place within replicas of famous European architecture’, offering the spectator the chance to encounter the cities’ inhabitants. While the viewer ‘meets’ a number of inhabitants, the experience is reminiscent of a guided tour. The spectator is not directly addressed within the experience, nor are attempts made to foster a sense of social interaction. The spectator remains at a distance, engaging the cities and their inhabitants as a spectacle to be consumed.

Being there as encounter A shift from a touristic gaze to what I am calling here the act of encounter, a form of involvement in the VR experience that turns on relationality and often the negotiation of difference. While I will draw on ideas about the nature and significance of encounter as a specific form of relationality, it must be acknowledged that I am deploying the term unconventionally so as to get at the particularities of VR encounters. An encounter is an event of relation that foregrounds notions of difference (often inequality) and their potential for challenge or reinforcement. As such, it signals a move away from the more distanced position of the tourist described above, to foreground a sense of connection and involvement3.

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Immersion and presence are critical to producing the illusion of involvement with others with techniques such as the use of direct address, the look to camera and other gestures suggesting immediacy, intimacy, and reciprocity. Encounter, as Wilson (2017) suggests is a genre of contact structured by difference and its negotiation. While encounters hold out the promise of responsiveness and reconciliation, they are unpredictable and can as easily reinforce difference as challenge it. The interactive VR documentary Common Ground4 exemplifies the experience as encounter. Exploring the history and contemporary realities of the infamous Aylesbury Estate in London, the experience invites the visitor to engage with the issues facing the estate – from the demonisation of the working class to gentrification and housing policy – by enacting an encounter with the site itself and those who live there. Employing a range of techniques including ‘360-degree video, photogrammetry, 3D modelling, archive and interactive design’, the project takes the visitor into the spaces of the estate including the private spaces of residents. The metaphor of a visit shapes the experience and is reinforced by the interactive possibilities, picking up a leaflet, pressing the button to activate the lift and so on. The visitor engages the estate as a site of encounter, a communicative space and zone of contact that tells its own history (Lawson and Elwood 2014) in which a feeling of proximity has the potential to foster reflection on the connections between privilege and injustice. Encounters with individuals are set against the visitor’s experience of the space of the estate, challenging dominant discourse and humanising housing as a social issue, not just through representation but by fostering a sense of familiarity and connection. What distinguishes the VR encounter from a more touristic mode of engagement, is the extent to which relationality is bound up with a sense of mutual responsibility. Humanitarian VR experiences, such as those produced by the United Nations, the most discussed being Clouds over Sidra5, stage an encounter with another in order to appeal to such notions. Particularly evident in these experiences (which will be discussed in more detail below) is the risk of reinforcing difference.

Being there as witness The position of witness within VR experiences is one in which immersion and presence might be seen as capable of producing moral responsiveness, an obligation to speak or perhaps to act, rather than to appreciate. Witness has been variously conceptualised in relation to the media, pointing to ‘the appearance of witnesses in media reports, the possibility of the media themselves bearing witness and the positioning of media audiences as witnesses to depicted events’ (Frosh and Pinchevski 2011: 1). The potential of media content, images in particular, to move audiences towards forms of ‘response-ability’ (Tait 2011), speaking of injustice (Boltanski 2004) and ‘paying heed’ to the interconnections between privilege and suffering (Zelizer 1998) has been the subject of significant scholarly debate. As Peters (2001: 709) has argued, if we accept that the situation of ‘being there’ as the paradigmatic condition of witness, then it follows that with more distance – in time and space –our sense of responsibility becomes more fragile. In so far as our

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engagements with mediated events sustain an attitude of witness, they do so, as Ellis (2000) has suggested, by fostering a sense of connection to events themselves (the image as evidence) and to others (the liveness of television being key to the production of co-presence that suggests temporal proximity). The electronic media provide access to ‘something of the event’ and we are addressed by the ‘imprint of reality’ such that we cannot say we didn’t know (Ellis 2012: 128). For Ellis, and for many others, media technologies are fundamental to the possibility of witness, allowing audiences to bridge temporal and spatial distance. I have previously considered the moral potential of virtual reality from the perspective of technology, arguing like Frosh (2011) that its significance lies in its potential to foster an imaginative engagement with other times, places and/or perspectives through imaginative world-making (Nash 2018). Virtual reality experiences, I suggest, seek to foster an attitude of witness by simulating spatial and/or temporal proximity to events or others and, in doing so, fostering an ‘asif’ involvement that provides a foundation for moral responsiveness. Immersion and presence are key to the production of a felt sense of proximity to events and have the potential to challenge a sense of visual mastery and detachment, perhaps producing feelings of vulnerability. Also significant are practices of warranting (see Chapter four) that highlight connections between the simulated experience and reality. Nonny de la Peña’s Kiya6, for example, positions the viewer as though witness to a domestic murder-suicide. The experience is grounded in emergency calls made by the sisters of Zakiya Lawson as she was being held at gunpoint by her partner. Jumping between computer-generated virtual environments – both inside the South Carolina home and outside where the two sisters are attempting to get emergency assistance – produces a felt sense of urgency. Audio recording of the sisters’ emergency call serves to warrant the experience of presence on the scene, linking the virtual experience to real events. The result is to position the viewer ‘as-if’ a witness to events, encouraging her to take up her experience as offering a feeling of proximity. Virtual reality experiences may also position the spectator as a witness to testimony, with social presence contributing to the need to pay heed to the experiences of others. In the cinematic VR experience Traveling while Black7 the spectator has the fantasy experience of stepping into a documentary. Following a remediated cinema experience that introduces the topic of the documentary, the restrictions facing black American travellers during the 1950s and 50s, the cinema fades away leaving the spectator outside (and then within) one of the most famous restaurants that catered to black travellers. The restaurant once again plays its role as a meeting point, with the spectator included ‘as-if’ part of the community. As community members ‘interview’ each other and deliver their testimony, the spectator bears witness. Although not included in the exchange, the sense of being co-present as testimony is delivered, fosters a sense of obligation to pay heed. In a slightly different vein the 360-video experience Step to the Line8, which documents a programme designed to rehabilitate high security prisoners, gives the spectator a felt sense of the space of incarceration: isolation, depravation, institutionalisation, and community. Remediating the

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observational documentary, a sense of seeing for oneself supports a sense of witnessing. Central to the experience is standing ‘on the line’ as prisoners deliver (and their mentors receive) their testimony. As with Traveling, spatial relationships, and particularly the experience of co-presence, serve to position the spectator as the receiver of testimony.9

‘Being’ another Many virtual reality experiences offer the chance to play out a fantasy of ‘being’ another. Not in a literal sense, of course, but as a desire for corporeal transcendence in which the ego (no longer a locus of identity), detaches from the body. VR has come to reflect the possibilities of a fluid postmodern subjectivity (Strain 1999). The body, as Rose (2018a) and others have noted, is both central and absent in thinking about VR. On the one hand VR might be described as a body genre (Williams 1991) in the priority accorded to embodied experience, while on the other, the apparent ability to transcend the limits of the physical body and project oneself elsewhere is a key appeal. Many virtual reality experiences are grounded in a desire to imagine oneself in the position of another, adopting their point of view and having an illusion of access to their experience. More accurately, however, virtual reality might be said to offer various opportunities for self–other hybridity in which the spectator’s experience is taken up as the basis for an imaginative engagement with the experience of others. In most cases, the spectator is encouraged to imagine herself as though in the place of the other, drawing on her understanding of how she would feel in a particular situation and extrapolating from this to gain insight into the experiences of others. More rarely virtual reality experiences suggest a more direct access to the experiences of others. While it would be a stretch to suggest that such experiences trigger identity confusion, their logic is such that an illusion of direct access to the experiences of another is foregrounded. The Guardian’s 6 x 9: A Virtual Experience of Solitary Confinement10, positions the spectator as though in solitary confinement, simulating a number of known psychological and physiological effects of long-term confinement, including hallucinations, delirium, boredom, and confusion. The experience works by encouraging the spectator to imagine how she might feel in such a situation and to take her own experience as the basis for understanding the experience of the absent, incarcerated, other. Similarly, Limbo: A Virtual Experience of Waiting for Asylum11 asks the participant to imagine that she is awaiting an asylum assessment. In drawing her into an imaginative process of self-reflection, reinforced by interviews with asylum seekers (which help to reinforce a factual orientation to the simulated experience), the participant is encouraged to see others as, to a greater or lesser extent, like her in their response to their situation. Experiences that encourage the participant to imagine that she has, at least to some degree, more direct access to the experiences of others include Across the Line12 which produces the illusion of taking the place of a young woman seeking an abortion. Beginning as a 360-degree video experience, in which the participant is positioned as a spectator following the story of a young woman seeking an abortion, the experience

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arguably seeks to foster a sense of sympathy and identification. In the final scene, marked by a shift into a CGI environment and a ‘first-person’ spectatorial position, this identification is extended such that the participant is invited to imagine that she has ‘become’ the young woman, a target of verbal abuse from protesters (with real audio warranting the experience). In exploring the range of subject positions in VR experience my aim has been to give some indication of the range of ways in which participants can be addressed and positioned within them. The various positionings suggested here are tentative and in no way intended as exhaustive. In recent years a number of more explicitly performative experiences such as Make Noise13 have sought to position participants in a more enactive mode and further explorations of interactive forms of VR are likely to result in new potential subject positionings. However, this initial survey of work highlights the ongoing relevance of first-person media, extending a concern with subjectivity and emotion to shed light on various ways in which ‘first-person’ experience underpins the offer of knowledge in virtual reality. In surveying VR work it also becomes clear that many of the subject positions offered to participants suggest pro-social possibilities, from witnessing to the possibility of gaining insight into the experiences of others. This potential has been important to much recent production as I will explore below. However, in my exploration I will draw on the analysis here to highlight the ways in which the pro-social possibilities of virtual reality are shaped by the various subject positions offered.

VR for good: the pro-social VR agenda and the empathy debate Rose (2018a: 138) has noted that the most recent wave of VR production has, across a range of fields, been grounded in a ‘vision of VR as an agent of human advancement, human betterment and life enhancement’. The claim that VR is an ‘empathy machine’ capable of producing deeper forms of interpersonal understanding and, flowing from this, a willingness to act in support of distant others has been central to this vision. So much so that, as VR producer Gabo Arora has noted, there has been something of an ‘empathy arms race’ among NGOs (cited in Robertson 2016). Paralleling this has been a debate about empathy: the extent to which empathy serves to justify the appropriation of the ‘experience of suffering people to enrich the cultural appeal of VR brands’ (Yang 2017); the extent to which claims to ‘know’ the experiences of others reinforce projection and appropriation on the part of ‘privileged’ subjects, reinforcing existing social hierarchies and silencing marginal subjects (Spelman, cited Pedwell 2012: 165); and calling into question the value of empathy as the basis for moral and political action, highlighting a tendency to prioritise the interests of those with whom it is easiest to identify (Bollmer 2017). The response has been a tendency to reject empathy as a problematic concept for producing or theorising VR experiences. As Yang (2017) argues ‘the empathy machine is now toxic and radioactive, so let’s bury it underground for 10,000 years. Someone else will reclaim it, but it will not be us’. Alternatives such as the notion of encounter (Scott-Stevenson 2019), radical compassion (Bollmer 2017), or

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imagination (Pedwell 2012) have been suggested. While there is tremendous value in these alternative frameworks for thinking about the pro-social value of virtual reality, I suggest that notions of empathy help to explain the social ambition of virtual reality and how this plays out in the ways experiences are structured. What I am not suggesting is that VR experiences necessarily foster empathy (while there is some research beginning to emerge around audience experiences, we do not yet know enough to make such a claim with any certainty), nor that empathy is morally superior or more valuable to other ways in which we might be encouraged to relate to others through the media, such as sympathy or understanding. What I am suggesting, more modestly, is that VR experiences are very often designed to suggest the possibility of forms of feeling with and for others and to recognise in such feelings a degree of moral obligation. In exploring virtual reality experiences, it is possible to point to two distinct notions of empathy at play. On the one hand, VR projects may seek to prioritise engagement with the feelings and experiences of others by promoting perspective taking – including forms of simulation and/or mimicry. There are also experiences that simulate an encounter with another. Such experiences are grounded in the ideal of the face-to-face as the basis of inter-corporeal understanding, the ‘circular, bodily-affective communication’ from which we are presumed to understand something of the experience of the other (Fuchs 2014: 157). I will explore both notions of empathy in more detail below, drawing connections to virtual reality experiences. Going beyond a focus on virtual reality as a technology (too often taken as singular) to consider the variety of ways in which it has been used, opens up a more nuanced space for considering its moral potential. While Rose (2018a: 142) is right to point out that the priority given to empathy has tended to preclude exploration of the variety of audience experiences, taking empathy as a concept that plays an important role in structuring the relationship between the spectator and the other can also help to highlight important questions about the ways in which proximity and distance in this relationship are managed and the implications of this for engaging ethical debate.

Proper distance: empathy and the problem of proximity Empathy is not a singular concept, but rather a collection of ideas about affect, emotion, and/or imagination in the context of relationships. In the context of psychology and philosophy empathy describes forms of co-feeling, a feeling with others, that may be understood literally either as something akin to emotional contagion or from a neuroscientific perspective as a form of universal embodied response based on an innate physical simulation of others’ behaviour and experience (which may or may not make reference to the currently popular concept of mirror neurons). It may also be conceptualised as a form of perspective taking, an imaginative engagement that facilitates an affective understanding of what it would feel like to be in the position of the other (Ramirez 2017). Laws (2020) usefully explores a range of concepts of empathy as they apply to VR journalism,

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highlighting perspective taking, perception, simulated experience, and mimicry and the ways in which these possibilities have been taken up as a foundation for beneficence. Bollmer (2017: 165) similarly notes that in relation to VR empathy has been conceptualised primarily as a capacity to access and to know the experience of another as a foundation for moral responsiveness and it is this way of thinking about empathy that has been at the heart of criticism. As he argues (2017: 74), ‘[i]t is not in “understanding” the other fully through which I come to care for them, but through acknowledging the limits and the infinite inability to grasp another’s experience’. The risk of empathy is the risk of subsuming the alterity of the other through projection and appropriation, making oneself the yardstick of the other’s pain and, consequently, prioritising one’s own VR experience over the other’s reality. To put this slightly differently, empathy is risky because it prioritises proximity and eschews distance. Roger Silverstone (2007) has been influential in his focus on proximity and distance as moral categories in the context of representation. Proximity, he suggests, points to the potential of the media to connect us cognitively and emotionally to those who would otherwise remain outside of our sphere of experience, fostering a sense of obligation and responsibility. But a moral response also depends on having sufficient distance to understand broader contexts, weigh competing needs and appreciate the limits of our understanding of the experiences of others. Putting this in moral terms, proximity draws attention to common humanity and the ability of representation to foster recognition of our shared experience, while distance focuses on the limits of representation and the importance of acknowledging what cannot be communicated (Chouliaraki and Orgad 2011). What is needed, Silverstone argued, is ‘proper distance’, a moral sense ‘in which the relationship between proximity and distance is mediated by an effective measure of understanding, care and responsibility’ (2007: 187). We must be wary of the illusion that the distances between us can be crossed ‘that in the spoken language and touch of the face-to-face encounter, as well as in the instantaneity and immediacy of the mediated one, connections are real and genuine’ (2007: 117). The concept of proper distance has provided a useful analytic framework for interrogating practices of mediation, drawing attention both to the ways in which mediation might provide insight into the experiences of others, while also allowing sufficient distance to deliberate as to why a particular instance of suffering matters and what is to be done about it (Chouliaraki 2006: 221). Improper distance, in contrast, describes representations in which the other becomes ‘indistinguishable from ourselves’ (Silverstone 2007: 172). Failing to acknowledge the impossibility of knowing the experience of the other, improper distance describes the risk of projection and assimilation. Chouliaraki’s (2006) study of television news provides a useful touchstone for thinking about proper distance. On the one hand she highlights the value of news images for the production of proximity, making the spaces and experiences of suffering palpable, resisting suffering as spectacle. Also critical is the extent to which the other is accorded agency within the news narrative, speaking in her own terms of her experience.

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Distance is produced where news reports contextualise instances of suffering, providing opportunities for viewers to form opinions and/or act in relation to what they see. Thinking about empathy and the relationship between the spectator and the other in virtual reality experiences, the risk of improper distance is revealed. In the case of those projects that aim to simulate aspects of the experience of others the autoptic illusion suggests a degree of privileged access to the feelings and/or experiences of the other that has the potential to mask awareness of difference, privileging the self as the basis for knowing the other. I will explore both the potential for the production of proper distance and the risk of improper distance further, arguing that the latter is possible. This is suggestive of an empathy that aims toward forms of feeling with the other while recognising this as an impossibility. Picking up on thinking about empathy as an aesthetic term, as Bollmer (2017) suggests, it becomes possible to think about the value of projecting oneself into the VR experience, while retaining an ‘as-if’ that acknowledges incommensurability and alterity.

Proper distance in the shoes of another? Experiences in which the participant enters the experience as another, and which seek to foster forms self–other hybridity, are often understood to foster empathy by placing the participant ‘in the shoes’ of the other. As noted above, in making the experience of others the explicit object of communication, there is a tendency to create an illusion of privileged understanding that elides difference. Given the very obvious risk of improper distance here, is there any scope for the preservation of alterity? While I will suggest that there is, taking the VR experience Notes on Blindness as exemplary, I also note the tendency towards improper distance with forms of self-regard prioritised over moral responsibility for the other. I will begin by considering three VR experiences created by The Guardian: The Party: A Virtual Experience of Autism14, Limbo: A Virtual Experience of Waiting for Asylum15, and 6 x 9: A Virtual Experience of Solitary Confinement16. These experiences seek to represent the experiences of others, although they differ in terms of participant positioning and the provision of contextual information. I will then go on to consider Notes on Blindness, arguing that it avoids improper distance by foregrounding the impossibility of understanding what it feels like to be blind. The Guardian, like many news organisations, has produced a number of virtual reality and 360-degree video news stories that explore the potential for a ‘firstperson’ experiential engagement with news (de la Peña et al 2010). For many news organisations, the possibility of an empathetic response to news content has been a driver (Archer and Finger 2018) although the extent to which this is seen in practice remains an open question. The three experiences that I will explore here are structured around notions of empathy as the ability to see and experience something of the experience of the other. The Party, which might be described as a virtual reality docu-drama, offers the participant the fantasy of stepping into the shoes of the fictional 16-year-old Layla, exploring her

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experience of autism as though transported into her body and mind. While in Limbo and 6 x 9 the participant enters the experience as herself, imagining herself to be in the situation of another. In all three experiences the perceptual, emotional, and/or cognitive experience of the other is the explicit focus. The production of hallucinations and other visual experiences, or forms of sensory ‘overload’ are intended to evoke feelings of confusion, stress, or anxiety (The Party, 6 x 9), austere sensory environments gesture towards feelings of boredom, isolation, and estrangement (Limbo, 6 x 9) and interactions with others are intended to provoke a sense of anxiety and vulnerability (Limbo, The Party). In their focus on simulating something of the experience of the other, all three experiences prioritise proximity and the illusion of direct, felt understanding. However, the experiences also manage this proximity to some degree, giving some priority to the voices of others and/or forms of contextual information and expert opinion. In The Party, the thoughts of the fictious Layla provide a heightened sense of access to ‘her’ subjective experience. While the voices of autistic women are included in the experience, they might be compared to ‘vox pops’, relegated to the closing credit sequence. Some information about the challenges of diagnosing autism in women and girls is given, providing some degree of context for the experience, however it is the autoptic illusion that is given priority as a ground for knowledge. In the case of Limbo, the spectator is cued from the outset that she will hear the voices of ‘real asylum seekers’ and these provide some foundation for imaginative engagement. The space of the experience is abstract, gesturing to the spaces inhabited by refugees rather than making their realities concrete. As with The Party some contextual information is given, primarily relating to the numbers of people ‘in limbo’ awaiting the outcome of asylum claims. The proximity of the autoptic illusion is more tempered by the extensive use of voice over and by the more abstract audio-visual experience and by the associated reporting. In contrast to The Party and Limbo, which tend to reinforce a sense of having privileged access to the singular experience of others, 6 x 9 tempers the autoptic illusion and gestures toward diversity by according a degree of priority the voices of others. From the outset, the participant is cued to recognise the limits of her experience: ‘You will be in solitary confinement just 9 minutes; many people are here for years’. The voices of inmates address the participant as someone new to ‘solitary’, offering ‘advice’ that acknowledges their experience, expertise, and agency. Expert interviewees (coupled with statements projected onto the cell wall) help to promote a more analytic engagement with the issue, opening up a space for critical reflection. While a first-person experience of solitary confinement is prioritised, these forms of distancing help to manage proximity and distance so as to preserve the alterity of the absent other. The virtual reality experience Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness17 serves as a good example of the way in which distance might be managed so as to promote fellow feeling while also making clear the limits of simulation. Based on theologian John Hull’s recorded mediations on the loss of sight and the experience of coming to perceive the world differently, Notes on Blindness poses the question ‘how does it feel to be blind?’ while foregrounding the impossibility of knowing. Notes is an

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experience for a sighted audience, making use of sight as a prosthetic for engaging with the richness of the acoustic world. Hull’s cassette recordings anchor the experience for the participant, guiding her into the world beyond sight. Reflecting on his own sensory experience he draws attention to the ways in which sounds – thunder, water, wind – reveal the landscape. The experience challenges notions of blindness as a sensory deprivation, presenting the participant with a rich sensory experience that she must be assisted to explore. The participant’s visual sense is dulled, challenging her familiar mode of being in the world and, guided by Hull, she is encouraged to pay attention to sound. Connecting her sonic experience to the visual outline of objects, offered in the VR experience, the participant is able to visually scaffold her engagement with an otherwise inaccessible acoustic space. While Notes strives for an empathetic, felt connection with the experience of the other, in its appeal to the visual as a prosthetic it points to the impossibility of understanding given our inviolable ocular-centric bias.

Exploring the empathic encounter In the case of VR projects that stage an encounter with the other, notions of empathy are more equivocal as frames for the relationship between the VR participant and the other. Notions of the empathetic encounter have been most obviously advanced by VR ‘entrepreneur’ Chris Milk in relation to the UN’s Clouds over Sidra. The illusion of sitting on the ground with Sidra, he suggests, leads to the participant ‘feeling her humanity in a deeper way’ and, consequently empathising with her in a deeper way (Milk 2015). In this formulation, Milk implicitly links the mediated experience of social presence, the feeling of being there with Sidra to empathy as a form of intersubjective understanding. As noted above, this takes the VR experience as providing something akin to the bodily-affective communication that characterises primary empathy, an implicit felt understanding that emerges in the shared gestures and embodied give and take of interpersonal communication (Fuchs 2014). However, as Fuchs has suggested, for all that the notion of the face-to-face encounter suggests inter-affectivity, the distance that inevitably separates self and other opens of the risk of a pseudo-intimacy based on self-projection. Virtual reality technologies, he argues, are not transparent enough to mediate the embodied resistance to self-projection that is fundamental to the face-to-face encounter. But we might nevertheless consider the virtual reality encounter and the ways in which it might structure self-other connection in terms of moral attentiveness. The concept of moral attentiveness has been a particular focus of the work of several philosophers concerned with the ethics of care. In the work of Nel Noddings, for example ‘Caring … involves attention, empathetic response and a commitment to respond to legitimate needs’ (cited Gendron 2016: 376). Attention is understood as a concern with the question ‘[w]hat are you going through?’ (Noddings cited Gendron 2016: 377). This concern awakens empathy as a form of attention to the other that aims to understand the other in her particularity, while recognising her fundamental alterity. Bringing the idea of attentiveness into dialogue with

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Silverstone and others’ work on proper distance it is possible to consider the extent to which virtual reality encounters encourage attentiveness to the other, a commitment to meeting her as an equal and seeking to feel with her, while nevertheless respecting her difference. Might some virtual reality encounters provide an opportunity for enacting attentiveness to the other, fostering awareness of the other in her particularity and challenging self-projection and the absorption of the other by the self? The United Nations has produced several 360-degree video experiences that, as noted above, make an explicit claim to foster empathetic encounters with women and girls caught up in humanitarian crises. As I have previously argued (see Nash 2018), the UN’s immersive video experiences adhere to conventions of humanitarian communication in that they seek to create feelings of connection with distant, deserving others. Clouds over Sidra is the most well-known of these experiences and is typical of their approach. The experience takes the form of a ‘tour’ of the Za’atari refugee camp, guided by the eponymous Sidra. The tour consists of 15 scenes that allow the user to experience a number of locations within the camp: the school, gym, bakery, computer room, and so on. Although the participant is positioned as though ‘with’ Sidra in the camp; she is also positioned as a tourist in the access given to a visual exploration of the space of the camp. The work favours wide shots with an ‘eye level’ point of view that mimics the touristic gaze. While the illusion of presence in the camp fosters a sense of proximity to Sidra by rendering her environment concrete, the experience aestheticizes the space of the camp, offering it as a spectacle for visual consumption. As a work that aims to simulate an encounter Clouds works to produce social presence (Lee 2004). Generally avoided in film and television production, the look to camera has become a staple technique in virtual reality, reinforcing a sense of interpersonal connection and a feeling of being addressed directly by the other. Also common to much of the UN’s work are scenes in which the spectator is positioned as though seated next to the subject, receiving her testimony in an intimate setting. In staging encounters between donors and beneficiaries, NGOs very often seek to reproduce the ideal of sitting together on the floor as though equal (Orgad and Seu 2014). The spectator receives Sidra’s testimony as though seated next to her in her family tent. There is an intimacy and intensity to the staged encounter, as Sidra addresses the participant directly, making eye contact. While the priority accorded her voice is suggestive of her particularity, the tightly scripted (and translated) voiceover positions her as the kind of ‘worthy victim’ that has become a staple within humanitarian communication (Dogra 2011). As Sidra gives voice to her hopes for the future, the spectator is addressed implicitly as benefactor giving emphasis to power inequality. Further, there is a tension in this moment between paying attention to Sidra, enacting attentiveness, and the invitation to explore the space of the camp as a visual spectacle. There is a risk of improper distance in so far as the spectator is tempted to turn away, giving priority to her experience of spatial presence. A project that encourages an enactment of attentiveness is Testimony18, an interactive virtual reality experience in which the spectator engages with the stories

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of five survivors of sexual assault. Testimony is unusual in that it resists the dominant trope of ‘transportation’ and visual spectacle, presenting the interviewees against a black backdrop, giving priority to receiving testimony rather than the illusion of ‘being there’. Producer Zohar Kfir (2018) describes the project as an attempt to create a ‘deep listening space’ in which putting on the headset represented a commitment to ‘be in a dedicated intimate space and be attentive’. For Kfir, to think of VR as an ‘empathy machine’ is to think about its potential to bring you close to another ‘and not being afraid to keep on listening’ (Kfir cited Goldstein 2017). The experience demands attentiveness, with the testimony only playing when the spectator turns to face the survivors (some, but not all, making eye contact) and paying attention to their very personal accounts of healing. Turning away stops the interview, an important protection for listeners who may feel overwhelmed, while being attentive symbolically brings them to life, gradually changing the image of the other from black and white to colour. At the heart of this process of enacting attentiveness is Noddings’ question ‘what are you going through?’, with the spectator encouraged to focus on the details of what is said and how – gestures, pauses, looks – while also being aware of the limits of understanding. To empathise here is not to feel with in a literal sense, but to make the effort towards an affective understanding.

Stepping into the story for good: possibilities and further questions In this chapter I have sought to interrogate claims that virtual reality might be understood as a range of technologies that offer new and/or distinct epistemological and moral affordances. Locating virtual reality within the epistemological logic of first-person media highlights ongoing shifts in regimes of truth and their implications for factual media. The current wave of interest in virtual reality technologies as platforms for documentary practice should perhaps be expected given our post-truth inclinations. However, I have also sought to draw attention to the different logics of virtual reality as first-person media, in particular the different ways in which spectators are invited into and positioned with respect to the experience. The various positionings suggested here – spectator, witness, tourist, encounter, and various forms of self–other hybridity – represent an attempt to make sense of the ways in which we are invited to feel and know the other (and the world) through immersive mediation. I have sought to demonstrate that whatever we might say about the pro-social potentials of these new, immersive projects, it is necessary to take into account not only the nature of technology, but to consider also the ways in which these technologies are being taken up in a range of contexts. In such an experimental field of production, which extends well beyond the ‘traditional’ media industries, there is clearly a need for further analysis to account for emerging contexts of production and ‘textual’ logics. The debate about empathy is ongoing, with some research starting to emerge into how audiences actually respond to experiences involving distant (usually suffering) others, particularly in journalistic contexts (see for example Nielson and

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Sheets 2019; Jones 2017). While such studies will be essential in getting beyond the hype attached to virtual reality technologies, their tendency to reproduce a focus on the technologies themselves (rather than the ways in which they are taken up by journalists) is limiting. Also challenging are the many, very different, ideas about empathy being deployed (or, more troublingly, a tendency to take the concept for granted). Further conceptual work is needed to arrive at a more nuanced debate. I have suggested here that ideals of empathy – either conceptualised as forms of fellow feeling or attentiveness in an encounter with another – help to make sense of the relationships, between the spectator and other, that many virtual reality experiences present. While it is possible that spectators may experience something that can be described as empathy, in the absence of more sophisticated audience research it is impossible to make such a claim. What we can say, though, is that concepts of empathy may serve as a valuable frame for critical evaluation of virtual reality experiences, particularly when coupled with notions of improper distance.

Notes 1 My focus in this chapter is not primarily technological and so I will refer loosely to ‘virtual reality’ for the most part, acknowledging that this term is describing a range of different technologies. I will draw out distinctions where relevant. 2 http://therealthing.film/ 3 I am conscious that tourism is typically understood as a paradigmatic encounter since it is premised on an awareness of difference. My uses of both tourism and encounter are, as acknowledged, idiosyncratic, and designed to capture differences in the priority accorded to spectacle and relationality. 4 https://eastcityfilms.com/commonground 5 http://unvr.sdgactioncampaign.org/cloudsoversidra/#.X9pC1en7Su4 6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYsAIukRqog 7 https://www.oculus.com/experiences/go/1994117610669719/?locale=en_GB 8 https://www.with.in/watch/step-to-the-line/ 9 I am grateful to Mandy Rose for comments on an early draft of this chapter, challenging me to think further about the significance of space for the position of the witness. 10 https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2016/apr/27/6x9-a-virtual-exp erience-of-solitary-confinement 11 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/05/limbo-a-virtual-experien ce-of-waiting-for-asylum-360-video 12 https://www.acrossthelinevr.com/ 13 http://www.bbc.co.uk/guides/zj26cqt 14 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtwOz1GVkDg 15 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/05/limbo-a-virtual-experience-ofwaiting-for-asylum-360-video 16 https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2016/apr/27/6x9-a-virtual-experi ence-of-solitary-confinement 17 http://www.notesonblindness.co.uk/vr/ 18 https://www.oculus.com/experiences/go/1454065214635967/?locale=en_GB

6 THE PETABYTE (ANTI)SUBLIME Big data, knowledge, and interactive documentary

We have come to understand our present as the ‘petabyte’ age. As reported in Wired (2008) more than ten years ago, a proliferation of sensors, and the ability to store and analyse vast quantities of information have ushered in the age of big data where more isn’t just more, it’s ‘different’. Arguably we are already beyond the petabyte (1,000 terabytes) and heading rapidly for exabytes and zettabytes. We inhabit an ever more datafied world in which our everyday lives are recorded, quantified, and analysed with or without consent. Big data is a term that seeks to capture the many dimensions of this transformation – as technology, as culture, and as myth. The latter, the myth of epistemic revolution, points to the possibility of knowing more (and better) by changing the questions we ask, adapting our sense of what it means to know. In this final chapter, I want to explore a question posed by Dovey and Rose (2013): what will documentary practice be like in the era of big data? As we move from terabytes to petabytes and beyond, how will the rapidly swelling ‘sea of data’ shape practices of ‘documenting’ and with what implications for knowledge and agency? Data, they suggest, are the actualities of the digital age. In this chapter my aim is to trace the logic of these actualities, linking them to historic practice but also revealing emerging data logics. Documentary has, in varying ways and to varying degrees, always been in the data business. We might conceptualise the image as a datapoint, which, combined with other datapoints, reveals the world in novel ways. From Muybridge’s images of animal motion and other scientific imaging to the revelatory potential of the observational camera to reveal life caught unawares, documentary practice is bound up with the creation and presentation of data. However, interactive documentary embraces new and different relations to data. Simulations appeal to data as a means by which to connect with and warrant claims about real-world systems, participatory projects invite collaborative collection and/or analysis of data and databases provide new ways of storing and organising large collections of data. All of these practices raise questions DOI: 10.4324/9781315208862-7

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about data – what is it? How is it deployed and with what effect? And how does it shape knowledge? In this chapter I will turn to yet another form of data practice that has a close relationship with documentary – data visualisation – to consider questions of epistemology. My appeal to the notion of the sublime in the heading of this chapter captures a current in the study of data visualisation in which data is significant in prompting an encounter with magnitude. Both pleasurable and overwhelming, the sublime points towards a desire for totality that pushes toward the limits of representation. A sense of the sublime is evident in many of the works that will be considered here. However, also significant are attempts to contain the excess of data, the desire to manage informational excess with a view to promoting a sense of understanding and mastery. I will suggest that the sublime and what has been termed the ‘anti’-sublime, exist in tension in many data visualisations. This chapter also seeks to make connections with the ‘big data’ history of documentary. While it is not common to think about the pre-digital history of data (Gitleman 2013 being an exception) I aim to explore connections between contemporary approaches to data visualisation and two ideas about data that emerge from early British documentary. On the one hand, the Griersonian documentary idea has its implicit appeal to the objectivity of data and positivist social science as a means by which to know and govern (albeit generally tempered by idealism and a promotional agenda). On the other hand, the Mass Observation movement with its links to the documentary movement, suggests a very different idea of data as a foundation for knowledge. The mass collection of data, the use of found data, and the search for patterns as a way of revealing realities otherwise repressed by dominant social forces suggests the value of data as a means by which to challenge official knowledge. These historic touchstones provide a backdrop for engaging with contemporary data practices, highlighting the significant relationship between documentary and scientism and the existence of counter-practices that challenge (to some degree) data as a route to rational understanding. I will begin by considering the concept of data, before turning to an exploration of historical documentary practice. Taking this history of data practice together with a sense of contemporary myths of big data I will consider the idea of the sublime (and related notion of the anti-sublime). Factual data projects, as I hope to demonstrate, negotiate and blend engagements with data, producing actualities that may suggest the possibility of total knowledge or, equally, gesture toward the ineffable. I will consider a range of data-based works that might be classified as journalistic, as data art or as forms of documentary practice. As always, my aim is less to draw tight definitional boundaries than to explore the ways in which data are shaping factual media practices and the contributions that documentary scholarship might make to understanding these shifting knowledge regimes.

Documentary and ‘big data’: two pre-digital ideas Documentary practice is grounded in the simultaneous production and visualisation of data. The image is, as I have suggested, a rich data point; a ‘document’ or

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actuality that, depending on the context in which it is encountered, may be understood to reveal realities in various ways. At the intersections of science and photography, the data value of the ‘informatic image’ has been fundamental (Ostherr 2015). The data value of the image underpins Fredrick Wiseman’s view of the image as ‘unanalysed data’ and documentary makers as field workers with ‘a camera instead of a notebook’ (cited Arthur 1993: 120). Documentary’s ‘sobriety’ (Nichols 1991) turns crucially, if not unproblematically, on trust placed in the evidential status of the image, bolstered by faith in the camera as a scientific instrument. However, beyond concerns about the image as a singular data point, documentary practice has also been wrapped up in debates about what it means to understand social realities through large scale data sets. As noted above the British documentary movement of the 1930s provides some insight into two ideas about data that continue to resonate: faith in data and statistical methods as a means by which the social might be represented, and ultimately, managed and, in contrast, the possibility of mass data collection and visualisation as processes that might reveal realities through intuition and unconscious processes. Data are bound up with questions of epistemology. Etymologically, as Rosenberg (2013) explains, the concept of data indicated those things given and accepted as a foundation for debate. In contemporary contexts, ideas about data are bound up with their role as the raw material for information (Whitelaw 2008). Data are measurements, extracted in some way from reality, analysed and visualised to produce information (or indeed, in some contexts to resist translation into information). Data propose a relationship between the particular and universal and are rhetorical by virtue of the fact that they are aggregative (Gitelman and Jackson 2013). How data are conceptualised, produced, and taken up in areas as diverse as art practice and public administration underpins contemporary data scholarship. Data come with an aura of objectivity and transparency reflecting their historical role in revealing and managing the social world. The systematic gathering of social data, which began in the late eighteenth century and continued throughout the nineteenth (most obviously in the form of the ‘social survey movement’ in the UK and US) reflected growing concerns about social problems, particularly poverty, and a desire to understand and deal with them ‘scientifically’ (Gordon 1973). This faith in the objectivity of numbers and scientific ideas was, by the 1930s, the backdrop against which the documentary idea developed with a productive alignment between science, narrative, and governance (Boon 2008: 76). Tracing the Griersonian documentary idea, Winston (1995: 134) points, among other things, to the growing turn towards statistical methods in the social sciences. While Grierson was arguably more inclined towards idealism and the promotional needs of government sponsors than positivist sociology, he retained a sense of the value of scientific methods as a means by which to interpret socio-cultural realities (Aitken 1990: 55–7). Inherent in many of his ideas about documentary is an implied sociology, a faith in the ability of stories to reveal patterns in social experience. The image as synecdoche underpins documentary actuality such that ‘every last Inuit, industrial worker, and deep-sea fisherman comes to stand both for themselves and for a class of persons of their type’ since it is on their status as representative

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that Grierson’s political and educative project rests (Winston 1995: 134). While typicality was most often implied in documentary practice, occasionally a documentary made an explicit appeal to statistics and norms in advancing its argument. Edgar Anstey’s Enough to Eat? (see Boon 2008: 94–104), often considered one of the first scientific films, is significant in this regard. Melding social reportage and the scientific lecture and presented by scientist Julian Huxley, Enough to Eat? is significant for its explicit appeal to social surveys of malnutrition, citing statistics and presenting them in diagrammatic and graphical form. Importantly, the film appeals to statistical knowledge (and more generally to the importance of science) as a basis for moral action. Enough to Eat? (and many similar films) highlights documentary’s debt to positivism and empiricism, revealing a widespread faith in the objectivity and transparency of data (and by extension documentary image as objective representation) and the ability of science to reveal realities. It points, in other words, to an underlying scientism by which documentary practice shares in the sobriety of the scientific project. Winston et al (2017) have recently drawn attention to scientism, declaring it a shaky foundation for documentary practice given the challenge posed by digital image making to our faith in the indexicality of the image. And yet, as I will suggest in this chapter, in an era of ‘big data’, characterised by faith in the revelatory powers of large datasets and deep learning, positivism might yet be an important philosophical position for at least some documentarians. It may be a matter of rethinking, rather than rejecting, scientism as a foundation for documentary practice, looking in more detail at contemporary data practices – the ways in which data are produced, analysed, and taken up and the ways in which they are deployed rhetorically – in terms of their epistemological assumptions. Perhaps the most famous ‘big data’ project with links to early documentary practice is Mass Observation. Established in 1937 by anthropologist Tom Harrison, journalist Charles Madge and documentarian Humphrey Jennings, Mass Observation became an organisation dedicated to producing ‘an anthropology of ourselves’, involving citizens in mass forms of data collection designed to reveal ‘the man in the street’ (Pollen 2013). The first published Mass Observation book (1937) describes the aim of the group as the collection of ‘a mass of data based upon practical observation, on the everyday life of all types of people: and to use the data for scientific study of Twentieth-Century Man in all his different environments’ (cited Highmore 2014: 1). The group gathered diverse forms of data through various methods: social surveys, diaries, participant observation, directives (questionnaires), day surveys and ‘overheards’. The result was the production of a vast but eclectic data set that consisted of photographs, drawings, poetry and prose, lists, questionnaire responses, and first-hand accounts. While on the face of it, the connection between data collection and our ability to grasp ‘the man in the street’ and patterns in everyday life suggests an alignment with empirical social sciences, it was a project informed to a large degree by the founding group’s interdisciplinary interests in political economy, psychoanalysis, poetry, surrealism and anthropology. Taking this interdisciplinary orientation into account the group’s engagements with data and its collection reveal a distinct epistemology.

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Mass Observation differed in fundamental ways from earlier generations of research into social issues. Summerfield (1985: 440) argues, for example, that where earlier research was driven by a positivist epistemology that sought the construction of statistically significant samples, the mission of Mass Observation was to liberate facts about what people did and said in order to ‘add to the social consciousness of the time’. Underpinning this approach to research was a desire to get around forms of social power, including the power of the media, to understand how events were understood by ordinary Britons. Methodologically, Mass Observation sought to combine subjective reflection and free association (through diary writing and responses to regular ‘directives’) with ‘objective’ observation. However, the group’s approach to data gathering was strongly influenced by surrealist ideas. Key to this process was ‘found’ data which was conceptualised as a form of surrealist ‘readymade’ that took on meaning not least because of the randomness of its discovery. As Winston (1995: 135) has suggested, the list of topics the Mass Observationalists sought to gather data on was very much surreal: shouts and gestures of motorists, the aspidistra cult, anthropology of football pools, bathroom behaviour, beards, armpits, eyebrows. The group’s ‘un-scientific’ approach to data collection was conceptualised as a means by which to facilitate the expression of a collective unconscious (Hubble 2006: 12). Humphrey Jennings began working at the GPO Film Unit, later the Crown Film Unit, in 1934 directing around 30 films before his death in 1950. He has become one of the most acclaimed of the ‘first-generation’ of British documentary directors, famously praised by filmmaker Lindsay Anderson as ‘the only real poet the British cinema has yet produced’ (cited Stollery 2013: 400) Quite how Jennings’ documentary work, his interest in surrealism, and his involvement (albeit brief) with Mass Observation intersect has been the subject of extensive scholarly interest. There is some consensus, however, that Jennings’ documentary work differed from the dominant approach and that Jennings was to some degree uncomfortable with Grierson’s simplistic socialism and unreflexive realism (Walker 2007). In Mass Observation, Walker suggests, Jennings sought ‘to make of Surrealism something other than romanticised escapism, and of documentary something other than realist usefulness’ (98). Jennings’ preference for surrealist collage over narrative unity similarly marks a significant break with the Griersonian documentary model (Beattie 2010). In this respect, his work parallels the prose-poems of the Mass Observationalists, which were characterised by their inclusiveness embracing ‘oneiric narrative, found objects, irrational juxtapositions, satirical mimicry of outmoded books, dysfunctional machines and distortions of textual logic introduced through chance and automatic processes’, their referential function ambiguous, though not effaced (Miller 2002: 231–2). Surrealism challenges documentary’s appeal to rationality, taking montage and fragmentation as prompts to foster unconscious association. It explores the limits of scientific thinking, prompting reflection on the fact in documentary practice. While we are encouraged to see the image as factual, surrealist documentary opens up the possibility of an absence of meaning. Spare Time (1939), very often referred to as Jennings’ Mass Observation film (Walker 2007: 110), exemplifies a surrealist

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preference for visually rich collage rather than the Griersonian focus on ‘typical’ characters and explicit argument. Images of wrestling, bike riding, pigeons, dogs, dramatic and musical rehearsals, and industrial landscapes merge in a film that is poetic in its ambiguity (Beattie 2010) and, critically, which refuses to draw any singular or general meaning from its collection of images. From the perspective of data, what we encounter in Spare Time is the antithesis of statistical revelation. We might approach it more as a non-digital visualisation of a ‘big data’ set that foregrounds the aesthetic inviting intuitive engagements with its disparate elements. In this brief exploration of pre-digital ‘big data’ and documentary practice I have sought to contrast two data logics, reflecting different epistemologies. Both, I suggest, remain valuable touchstones for interactive documentary data practices, although both are shaped by our contemporary data-centric regimes of knowledge as will be considered below. On the one hand data underpins truth claims by virtue of its potential to reveal realities through statistical methods (which may or may not be made explicit within the documentary itself). Here data provide not only a route to knowledge, but a justifiable foundation for action in the social world. Data works rhetorically to bolster the claims of documentarians and their project of moulding public opinion or, as with Enough to Eat? pose a challenge to public policy (however equivocal). Mass Observation similarly draws attention to data as a route to knowing, albeit within a regime of knowledge that prioritises intuition over rationalisation. The value of mass data collection, and the particular importance of ‘found data’, lies in their challenge to dominant ways of conceptualising and presenting realities. Visualisation stands out as a means by which to promote engagement with data. Most importantly, what documentary scientism and Mass Observation both point to is the powerful intersection of narrative and data visualisation. Exploring contemporary data cultures, tracing relations between data and story in the broadest sense, reveals connections with these positions albeit shaped by our shifting relationships with data.

Big data: the myth of epistemic revolution Like documentary, big data is, as boyd and Crawford (2012) have argued, in many respects a poor term. What do we mean by ‘big’ or ‘data’ and how much does either capture the social, economic, political, and epistemological shifts that seem most pressing? Nevertheless, it has become a frame within which to explore the cultural, economic, and political shifts that attend the mass collection, analysis and use of data across a range of fields as well as the political implications of these shifts. As boyd and Crawford note, the concept of big data provides a way into thinking about the ‘cultural, technological and scholarly phenomenon’ that emerges in the interplay of technology, analysis, and myth. It allows us to engage with data as technology, as social, and as imaginary. It points to the growing volume of data (increasingly moving towards petabytes i.e. 1,000 terabytes), the velocity with which it is produced, its variety and exhaustiveness (i.e. trying to capture entire

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populations), its flexibility and scaleability, and increasingly powerful analytic tools (Kitchin 2014), while also highlighting the social shifts that have served to normalise the mass rendering of human behaviour as data. Big data points to the ways in which we are co-opted by emerging data logics, drawing attention to new regimes of social, political, and economic control as well as strategies of resistance (Kennedy et al 2015). Fundamental to the concept of big data, and its critical exploration, is a concern with claims of epistemic transformation. Big data, it is argued, are shaping what it is possible to know and what it means to know, producing new forms of social knowledge. Data are associated with the promise of totality, objectivity, universality underpinning a ‘[w]idespread belief that large data sets offer a higher form of intelligence and knowledge that can generate insights that were previously impossible with the aura of truth, objectivity and accuracy’ (boyd and Crawford 2012: 663; see also Couldry 2017). Van Djick (2014: 201) points to a growing culture of ‘data-ism’ characterised by faith in the objectivity of quantification and the potential to derive meaning from the data traces left by online actions. There are two interlinked arguments that support data-ism. Firstly, that there is something qualitatively different about digitally ‘mined’ data. Insofar as data is a by-product of our day-to-day digital activities, rather than the outcome of a conscious process of data production, it carries an aura of objectivity. The rapid growth in the ‘data-fication’ of human life (Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier 2013) expands the realm of what it is possible to know. Secondly, computational analysis of large data sets suggests a transformation in what it means to know (indeed, raises questions about the very value of theory). In an oft-cited article titled ‘The end of theory: the data deluge makes the scientific method obsolete’, Chris Anderson (2008) captures this claim: This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behaviour, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is that they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves. In other words, the ability to discover patterns and correlations in complex data sets allows us to bracket questions of causation and interpretation, dispensing with theory and focusing instead on the prediction, and manipulation, of behaviour. What is claimed, as Couldry (2014) argues, is not just novel (better) ways of understanding social realities or claims about new ways of seeing and understanding the world, but a claim about what counts as social knowledge. Big data methods build knowledge, algorithmic processes generate predictions by looking at proxies that reveal something that we have come to understand as knowledge. Claims of epistemic revolution and rupture point, as many scholars have argued, to the mythical aspect of big data. It is a discourse that glosses over the fact that

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data are never ‘raw’, but always generated, or at least gathered, in specific ways (Gitleman and Jackson 2013) and that our digital traces are inherently opaque (Manovich 2011). Similarly, it disregards the fact that patterns don’t simply emerge from data sets but come about through interpretive effort. But myths of rupture and transformation rationalise certain states of affairs, fostering trust in governments, corporations, and organisations, and normalising practices of data generation on which they increasingly depend (Couldry 2017). The myths of big data are myths about social knowledge, about what it is possible to know (correlations, probabilities), how we come to know (through exhaustive data collection and computation) and the value of knowing (previously impossible insights). For all their emphasis on revolution, the myths of big data tap into, while subtly reframing, established ways of thinking and valuing data. In particular, belief in big data reprises a positivist epistemology, appealing to trust in quantification, the proliferation of facts and notions of ‘mechanical objectivity’, the objectivity of the machine and the apparent neutrality of data itself (Rieder and Simon 2016). These myths form a backdrop for interactive documentary makers’ engagements with data. To frame an analysis of these engagements, I will consider connections between documentary practice and data visualisation.

The sublime and anti-sublime: data visualisation and knowledge There is an obvious relationship between data visualisation and documentary. Takahashi (2017) makes the connection explicitly, arguing that data visualisation constitutes a mode of documentary since it is a means by which to make arguments about the world. As a documentary mode, data visualisations ‘speak’ about realities ‘that are too big to grasp from a singular embodied human standpoint in the world’ (378). Where data visualisations allow for forms of interaction, which may include forms of dynamic interrogation of a dataset or the creation of custom visualisations, there is an obvious point of contact with interactive documentary practice as will be explored in more detail in the remainder of this chapter. Data visualisations are the means by which big data are mobilised to represent the world, they are ‘cultural artefacts with distinct semiotic, aesthetic and social affordances’ (Kennedy and Engebretsen 2020: 22). They are a diverse collection of technologies that like ‘the clock, the compass and the abacus’ transform the ways we see and relate to reality (Cairo 2020). As such they are not simply representations of the knowledge embodied within datasets but are themselves key to the creation of knowledge. A key focus of data visualisation scholarship is the extent to which visualisations reinforce a sense of the world as knowable through data, providing a means by which to ‘grasp’ realities that would otherwise exceed human comprehension as Takahashi suggests, and the ways in which they might resist the totality of data, appealing to the excess of big data sets as a way of gesturing toward the ineffable. This tension can be figured in terms of the notion of the sublime and what has, following Manovich (2002), been described the ‘anti-sublime’. In developing both concepts, I aim to reveal two epistemic attitudes, two tendencies in the

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visualisation of data that might often be found at play in individual works. Notions of the sublime are frequently invoked to explain data visualisations’ potential to prompt a reflection on the limits of human understanding. Our scopophilic experience of the ‘spectacle of big data’ is one of vastness (Gregg 2015) which can often prompt an aesthetic engagement that ‘turns on the complexity and aura of an unimaginable object’ (McCosker and Wilken 2014). For Kant (1987: 103), the sublime is ‘that which is absolutely large’, that which produces an appreciation of quantity. Where the aesthetic experience of magnitude approaches its limit, it gives rise to the experience of the sublime ‘that emotion which no mathematical estimation of magnitude by means of numbers can produce’. This emotional experience, the sublime ‘cast of mind’, involves both anxiety as we approach the limits of our imagination to grasp magnitude and pleasure as we transcend these limits through an appeal to reason. The sublime describes feelings of inadequacy in grasping the whole, but at the same time the desire for total knowledge (Derrida’s fantasy of total knowledge). As applied to data visualisation, the idea of the sublime highlights the ability of data to prompt an experience of the infinite. It focuses on the feelings that our engagements foster, and the significance of these feelings for knowledge and understanding (Rettberg 2020). Although not articulated in terms of the sublime, Takahashi’s (2017) concept of the murmuring voice of data visualisation captures a sense of the magnitude of multiple speaking voices. In the patterns produced by these multiple ‘voices’ we are invited to engage with reality at scale, with sensory experience prioritised over informational perspicuity. The concept of the anti-sublime seeks to capture the desire for a different kind of experience of data. As articulated by Manovich (2002) it points to a desire on the part of data visualisers to find ways of presenting data that foster a sense of clarity, understanding, and utility. What makes these approaches to data visualisation anti-sublime is precisely the ambition to contain a sense of the vastness and complexity of data, and in doing so counter feelings of anxiety. Key to the production of an anti-sublime orientation are modes of production that manage the complexity of data, including simplification, abstraction, organisation, and opportunities for manipulation of data. The anti-sublime as an ideal in data visualisation prioritises the informational significance of data (and in some cases its potential for utility), prioritising the extraction of meaning(s). Of course, the extent to which visualisations succeed in managing the excesses of data and whether viewers do in fact experience feelings of mastery is an open question as McCosker and Wilken (2014) note. However, there can be little doubt that in at least some contexts data visualisers seek to produce such an experience. There are a couple of other points worth noting about the anti-sublime. Firstly, while the sublime in data visualisation is a primarily aesthetic experience, there is no reason to suggest that attempts to manage complexity need to eschew sensorial experience. Halpern (2014) has drawn attention to the emergence in the second half of the twentieth century of an aesthetic of truth, that linked sensation to visibility and measurement. The desire to simplify and clarify data need not be antiaesthetic, although the aesthetic experience will ultimately serve the visualisation’s

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goal with respect to the management of informational excess and the communication of information. Nor does the anti-sublime imply an absence of emotion in our engagements with visualised data. There is evidence that our feelings about data visualisation – shaped by the data themselves, design and visual style, subject matter and our sense of understanding (or not) – contribute to our engagements with data in a range of contexts. Felt engagements with data may include forms of confidence, comprehension, mastery and agency (Kennedy and Hill 2018). While the description above might be read as suggesting that the sublime and anti-sublime constitute discrete experiences of data visualisation, exploration of data visualisation across their range suggests imbrication. These are not categories into which data visualisations might be placed but rather terms that might inform an analysis of visualisations in their specificity. Obviously, some will be more closely aligned with one of the two concepts, where others will be more equivocal in the position taken. Returning back to our initial exploration of documentary’s ‘big data’ history we can see a certain alignment between the anti-sublime and a sense of data as the basis of a rational engagement with reality through processes of managed visualisation. The sublime, I suggest, represents a new mode of engagement enabled by the visualising possibilities of big data. There is a degree of continuity with Mass Observation insofar as data is conceptualised as a means by which to provoke awareness of reality by engaging the limits of rationality and analysis and prioritising intuition. In the rest of this chapter, I will trace these ideas across a number of data visualisations, highlighting the ways in which big data are shaping a digital orality, altering textures of information and practices of storytelling (Papacharissi 2015). Visualised, data communicate through the deployment of various elements, layout, diagrams, text, colour, and typography and so on. They tell stories about the world, but also about knowledge itself. The nature of data deployed and the extent to which they are present as transparent and ordered takes on a double significance.

Exploring digital oralities: interactive documentary and data Tracing digital oralities across data-based interactive documentary reveals a range of data textualities as well as various negotiations of the sublime and anti-sublime as epistemic attitudes. I will begin with a number of visualisations that seek to manage big data sets – to varying degrees – drawing out some of the ways in which they do so (filtering, narrative, graphic design). I will then consider work that shifts more towards a sublime engagement with reality, in which data provides a stimulus for engagement with magnitude. As will become apparent in the course of my analysis, there is no naturally occurring category that might be labelled ‘interactive documentary’ that will focus my analysis. The field of data visualisation is vast and heterogenous as I have previously indicated. While some of the works considered below consciously reference a connection to documentary practice, many do not. However, as previously argued, as factual forms that engage realities rhetorically there is a close relationship.

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Senseless1 and Poppy Field2 are visualisations of lives lost in global conflict. They are similar on a number of levels: both offer a free field for the exploration of data sets, giving the viewer the opportunity to explore the data set on her own terms (although both also structure data so as to faciliate a comparative analysis); they both engage with magnitude, providing a ‘god’s eye view’ of the dataset; and both foster a sense of the objectivity of the data through transparency (providing links to underlying datasets). Considering them together provides useful insight into the ways in which complexity can be managed as well as the significance of aesthetic elements in navigating the relationship between the sublime and its antithesis. Senseless represents the number of people killed in more than forty conflicts worldwide. It is organised along a simple two-dimensional x/y axis (time and deaths). Conflicts are ordered from least to most deadly and the viewer can manipulate the data, comparing total deaths and deaths per hour and linear, logarithmic, or chronological measure of time. Regardless of the view chosen the viewer confronts a black screen with conflicts (marked by simple dots) arranged within the space of the visualisation. While viewing total deaths reproduces a largely expected story of the most deadly conflicts (with the Holocaust and the World Wars at the upper extreme) looking at deaths per hour draws attention to many lesser known conflicts with comparative analysis fostering the creation of connections between conflicts. Senseless highlights the costs of global conflict, but it does so without overwhelming. While the dots marking the various conflicts create a complex visual experience, the conceptual familiarity of the x/y axis cues an analytic response (working across just two dimensions, number of dead and time), and the sparse visual treatment tempers emotional engagement. The result is less an overwhelming feeling of scale and more a sense of the amenability of conflict to statistical rendering.

FIGURE 6.1

Poppy Field screenshot

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Poppy Field offers a very different viewer experience, with a greater emphasis given to aesthetic elements. A narrative frame cues the viewer to approach the visualisation in light of the centenary of WWI (the war to end all wars), inviting reflection on the failure to eliminate conflict. The significance of the poppy is also foregrounded: ‘its colour, reminiscent of bloodshed, and its resilient yet delicate nature evoke the human relationship to war’. Sadly, the viewer is informed, there have been more than 200 conflicts since WWI. She is then invited to ‘explore’. The visualisation across three dimensions – the date of conflict (a timeline along the x-axis), the duration of conflict (measured logarithmically by default on the y-axis3) and the number of dead, represented for each conflict by a poppy of varying size. A fine thread links each poppy (which is located at the end point of the conflict) with its point of origin, giving additional visual emphasis to the duration of the conflict. The visualisation is more immediately communicative. Two big poppies stand out (representing the first and second world wars) and it becomes clear that over time conflicts have tended to become more protracted. Filtering options allow the viewer to ask a number of questions of the data set. It is possible to filter by location, chronologically, and by the scale of the conflict (on a sliding scale from 900–50 million) – such as where has war been concentrated? Has the death rate of conflict changed over the past 100 years, etc? Poppy Field is beautiful, and the poppy is a particularly emotive way in which to register the scale of loss. Poppy Field adds complexity – including place and chronology as analytic dimensions – to its visualisation of the toll of conflict, although the result is less a sense of the ineffable, but rather a focus on the potential of data to reveal patterns in conflict over time (with the implicit narrativising frame provided by the central timeline playing a key role). In the next data-based project that I will consider a narrative frame is deployed more explicitly to counter the tendency to be overwhelmed by the magnitude of the data. Out of Sight, Out of Mind4 is an animated data visualisation of 423 US drone strikes carried out during 2004–15 in Pakistan which resulted in 3341 fatalities. Short textual fragments establish the argument: while drone strikes ostensibly aim to kill high profile, military targets, they most often kill civilians and particularly children. Fewer than 2% of victims, the introductory text informs us, are high profile targets. The exhaustiveness of the data is emphasised: ‘this is the story of every known drone strike and victim in Pakistan’. Each strike is registered chronologically, beginning with the first strike in 2004. Animated ‘bombardments’ foreground the rapid increase in drone attacks over time, with ‘traces’ suggesting the path of each drone creating a dense but beautiful sense of the scale of the tragedy. At the height of the attacks – between 2010 and 2013 – the viewer has the experience of relentless bombardment. However, the way that titles and pauses are used to contextualise the data is significant, highlighting key events and providing interpretation. We learn, for example, that 69 children were killed while attending school in October 2006 and that the rate of drone strikes increased significantly following the inauguration of Barak Obama in 2009. The project also combines several visualisation techniques, creating a space within which the viewer can

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FIGURE 6.2

Out of Sight screenshot

further explore the data. A horizontal stacked bar graph registers the total number of victims, indicating the proportion of different kinds of casualties while an interactive line graph registers each attack and the number killed (with individuals represented by coloured squares). Viewing by victim produces a vertical histogram registering the number and category of casualties over time using coloured human symbols. The overall effect of Out of Sight is to foreground the scale of the attacks, but the inclusion of a strong narrative frame works to counter an experience of the data as sublime. Data art takes data as a material for artistic practice, often focusing on the ubiquity of data in contemporary society. In doing so, it often shifts focus away from data as indexical and as an informational substrate to draw attention to the data itself as an aesthetic object (Whitelaw 2008). As large, but ‘thin’ datasets, transport data (particularly when animated) have been used to foster an aesthetic experience with magnitude. Flight Patterns5, for example, offers an artistic visualisation of air traffic over North America on 12 August 2008. Based on Federal Aviation Administration data the visualisation categorises 205,000 flights using colour to indicate more than 500 aircraft types. Presented as a stop motion animation the work is mesmeric as coloured lines gradually reveal a familiar, but spectral, coastline and bright spots indicating cities. In a similar vein Ship Map6 plots the 2012 movements of the ‘hundreds of millions’ of merchant vessels ploughing the world’s oceans. Like Flight Patterns, both individual ship movements and routes can be visualised and there are options to highlight different vessel types and carbon dioxide emissions. It is similarly a visual spectacle that aims to produce scopic pleasure, revealing familiar coast lines and anticipated patterns of spatio-temporal activity. Similarly, weather data has been used to reveal beautiful patterns. Wind Map7 draws on meteorological data to produce a real time animated visualisation of wind speed and direction. Plotted on a simple and familiar black outline of the United States, white ‘comet-like’ trails representing wind speed and direction (with

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FIGURE 6.3

Wind Map screenshot

thicker lines representing stronger winds) swirl around each other creating an artistic effect. In spite of its artistic ambitions, creators Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg note that Wind Map has been used for a variety of real-world functions – from birdwatching and cycling to developing conspiracy theories8. All three of these projects are artistic in their intent, using available data to create a beautiful sensory experience that reveals the world anew by representing it at scale. However, in spite of the scale and complexity of the visualisations all offer familiar and easily comprehensible patterns (hence, the ability of individuals to make use of them for various functions) that suggest an ability to know reality as a unity. The city has long been a rich site of data production and consumption, and it is possible to point to a number of projects in which an aesthetic engagement with the data abundance of the city has been sought. It is arguably possible to trace a lineage from contemporary data-based visualisations of urban spaces and early ‘city symphony’ films such as Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin and Jean Vigo’s À Propos de Nice. The project On Broadway9, for example, reprises the spatial exploration of an urban space, using ‘found’ data to produce a multidimensional and visually complex representation of an urban environment. Beattie (2008a: 33) argues that city films exhibit an embodied aesthetic, revealing ‘the city and its occupants – the city as its occupants – within the expressive capacities of the documentary display’. While it has been typical to cast the city film’s project of formal innovation as at odds with documentary’s political project, Beattie points to the ‘cross-sectionality’ of such films as a political foundation. He highlights in particular the importance of surveillance in city films and the use of hidden cameras to provide support for social and journalistic discourse (41). Where city films use images to depict the city as an inhabited space, On Broadway uses multiple data sources to produce a similar effect. A sense of visual pleasure is maintained, however, it is digital traces of

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human activity rather than images of physically inhabited spaces that are displayed. As the project team says, ‘today, a city “talks” to us in data’. And just as Vigo used a hidden camera in an appeal to capture life ‘unawares’, On Broadway’s use of harvested data – Google street view images of facades and skies, the dominant colours in facades and Instagram images, median income data, social media posts, Foursquare check-in data, taxi data, and Instagram images – offer the promise of life caught unawares. On Broadway highlights the scale of data collection in the contemporary city. The project includes more than 660,000 Instagram images, Google street view images, data on 22 million taxi rides, several years’ social media data and economic data from the US Census (2013). The city is re-imagined as a ‘vertical stack of image and data layers’ (Goddemeyer et al 2017: 71) that produces a sense of data density. As Goddemeyer et al (2017) note, the project is an attempt to visualise ‘wide data’, including many different kinds of data in a single visualisation. Space provides a way of structuring an engagement with the data, encouraging a virtual ‘walk’ along Broadway looking at changes in the streetscapes, income level, social media use and transport. As the team notes, all of the variables they analysed are positively correlated, producing a visually striking difference between ‘two Broadways’. New York is shown to be a ‘correlated city’ where median income, social media use and transport patterns are aligned, serving as quantifiable proxies that reveal social and economic inequality. In the emphasis given to corelation, the project engages knowledge as revealed through big data while bracketing theory and causality. There is tendency toward the sublime; the experience of encountering the datafied city can certainly overwhelm in its sheer scale and complexity. Geography provides the most obvious frame for ‘making sense’ of the experience, the relationships between the very different data sets resist comprehension as a simple unity.

FIGURE 6.4

On Broadway screenshot

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The Exceptional and the Everyday: 144 Hours in Kiev10 (like On Broadway a product of the Software Studies Initiative) similarly uses harvested data in the context of the city, although in this case the aim is to reveal the experience of political transformation from a new perspective. The project’s underlying dataset consists of publicly available images (13,208 images posted by 6165 users) posted to Instagram on 17–22 February 2014 and their associated metadata (geolocation information and tags). The dates cover six days of protests sparked by the EuroMaiden movement in which tens of thousands of Ukrainians occupied Independence Square Kiev. The project sought to understand how the experience of social upheaval might be grasped differently when seen through social media (many thousands of ‘views’). Manovich et al (2014) liken the work to contemporary painting (rather than a photograph) suggesting that rather than providing a realistic copy it allows for the revelation of another image of reality through the use of images and metadata. Arranging the 13,208 images in various ways – chronologically, spatially, or on the basis of visual similarity and language – challenges dominant visualisations of political action, revealing that for most people life appears to be little impacted by political events. As the project team suggests ‘the exceptional coexists with the every-day’. The multitude of diverse images resists easy comprehension. Computational analysis and visualisation bring images into new relations with each other – a kind of computational montage – but the effect is one of visual excess. As with On Broadway, data is harvested and visualised in the hope of exposing patterns – frequency or place of posting, use of hashtags or visual style – that reveal something about reality. However, in both cases the visualisation of data gives emphasis to magnitude while resisting meaning, producing an experience that tends toward the sublime. Another data visualisation that illustrates a tendency toward the sublime is The Preservation of Favoured Traces11 a visualisation of the development of Darwin’s theory of evolution based on mapping changes made across six editions of On the Origin of Species. The entire text of Origin (190,000 words – depending on the edition) is rendered in miniature on a single white screen. Each chapter is visualised as a rectangular tower made up of small but indistinguishable elements, rather than words. Hovering over the towers reveals the text (or more accurately small fragments of it). The visualisation is dynamic, highlighting the changes made with different coloured ‘text’, each chapter expanding and becoming more colourful over time. It is possible to watch the visualisation in slow or fast modes, with the latter in particular producing an almost unfathomable picture of change over time (including the addition of a completely new chapter in the final edition). While it is possible to hover over and reveal specific changes in the text, the work as a whole and the idea that is being developed is not easily synthesised (even for a viewer relatively familiar with the text itself). Viewing the piece, resetting it, and pausing it, provides an illustration of the evolution of an idea – the evolutionary metaphor is further suggested by the project’s title – but the idea itself and the process of evolution remain ineffable. The experience is sublime in that while the project promises total knowledge and invites an engagement with something unimaginably vast, the viewer must ultimately feel inadequate to the challenge of making sense of what she sees. Favoured Traces offers a vast, beautiful experience that resists meaning.

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Finally, I want to consider a project that arguably is more explicit in sitting at the intersection of interactive documentary and data visualisation. Network Effect12 might more accurately be described as a simulation in that it aims to produce a subjective experience of data overload by rendering multiple data points both visible and audible. The project seeks to explore the internet as a space characterised by the generation and consumption of a vast amount of data. Based around a hundred different behaviours (sleep, meditate, fight, cough, etc.) the project consists of 10,000 two-second video clips and 10,000 spoken Tweets that relate to the behaviour in some way. It also includes millions of data points gleaned from Google books (the gender of the pronouns most associated with the behaviour or the words which most often surround it) and Twitter (Tweets that give a reason for the behaviour), newspaper headlines featuring the word and estimates of the number of people performing the behaviour now based on survey data. The piece is intended to overwhelm; visitors to the site are told from the outset that they have limited time to explore (based on average life expectancy in their current location) a prominent clock counts down the minutes before the viewer is locked out and forced to wait 24 hours to access the site again. Further, the sound of a heartbeat (on top of the audio cacophony of the many spoken data points) suggests anxiety. The data harvested highlights the scale of datafication, but beyond that eschews any obvious pattern or meaning. It might be argued that the project’s almost obsessive tabulation of data serves as a comment on the essential meaningless of contemporary data practices. There are some parallels between Network Effect and the Mass Observationalists’ surreal explorations of data: a preference for found data, the juxtaposition of different kinds of data, and an interest in the aesthetics of data and its potential to prompt insight. The insight here, however, does not emerge from the data itself (there are no patterns to be found), but rather in the relationship that the project establishes between the data subject and the internet as a space of data. Ultimately, the project suggests that only by turning away from data saturated digital spaces is true insight possible. Network Effect produces an overwhelming experience that invites reflection on the magnitude of data. However, as an experience what is produced is less a sublime ‘cast of mind’ than a simulated sense of data overload that reinforces the project’s central argument. It is an argument encapsulated in the Jungian quote that the viewer will encounter on being ‘locked out’ of the project: ‘Your vision will become clear only when you look into your own heart. He who looks outside dreams; who looks inside, awakes’. To engage with the project is to focus on the experience of data overload that is caused by complexity, but which is not – of itself – complex.

Beyond visualisation: gesturing toward a broader research agenda In this chapter I have begun to explore some of the ways in which data – as a resource for engaging reality and as an increasingly powerful cultural myth – is relevant to the practice and study of interactive documentary. In particular, I have

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sought to trace the significance of data for documentary’s claims to knowledge – from practices grounded in the scientism of the Griersonian project and the surrealist practices of Mass Observation to the digital sublime and the myths of big data. All of these ideas about data and knowledge form the substrate for our contemporary practices of documenting realities. I have sought to trace them through a number of examples, highlighting the ways in which they come together in the context of individual projects to shape not just our ideas about reality but about knowledge itself. There are, of course, many other points that could have been made about interactive documentary and data, not least the ways in which data has been an object of political critique in documentary projects such as Do Not Track13. Here data collection plays a rhetorical role, demonstrating to the user her own vulnerability to the practices of corporations and governments. Also significant are practices of data activism in which computational processes, machine learning, and vast data stores combine with seductive visualisations to reveal injustice (Milan and van der Velden 2016). There are also questions and debates about data that are emerging as forms of artificial intelligence become an ever more significant part of digital culture and practice. In focusing on data visualisation, however, I have sought to highlight a range of different and shifting debates about the relationship between data and knowledge that can be revealed through the visual. My aim has been to highlight the ongoing significance of ‘scientism’ for documentary practice, albeit highlighting the ways in which twentieth-century empiricism is transformed by twenty-first-century myths of big data. A sense of epistemic transformation hides the ways in which our relationships to data remain unchanged – data remains a valuable tool in the creation of discourse and in social management with documentary media playing a role in rendering data into narrative form (to varying degrees). Of course, it matters how we think about data, but it matters more that we think about data, the ways that it is created and deployed within media discourse. Across the projects considered here there is a tendency to engage data as transparent traces of an underlying reality, as something that shares with the documentary image a primary relationship to the real. Acknowledging the force of this illusion it is also very clear that, like the documentary image, data are created for a purpose, analysed for a purpose and presented with a view to shaping our engagements with reality.

Notes 1 http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/senseless-conflict-deaths-per-hour/ 2 http://www.poppyfield.org/ 3 As with Senseless there is an option to toggle between the logarithmic and linear representation of duration, although this works less clearly in Poppy Field. It is clear that the visualisation has been built around the logarithmic rendering of data. 4 http://drones.pitchinteractive.com 5 http://www.aaronkoblin.com/work/flightpatterns/ 6 https://www.shipmap.org/ 7 http://hint.fm/wind/ 8 http://hint.fm/projects/wind/

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9 10 11 12 13

http://on-broadway.nyc see also http://inequaligram.net http://www.the-everyday.net/ https://fathom.info/traces/ http://networkeffect.io https://www.nfb.ca/interactive/do_not_track/

CONCLUSION From ‘mass extinction’ to renewal?

A mass extinction? As I write these concluding thoughts, I am mindful that in just a few days the field of interactive documentary will go through something that might be described as a mass extinction. While that’s probably overdramatic, what I seek to capture is a sense of the immanent loss of many of the projects that have informed this study and been central to the field as a whole. At the end of 2020 Adobe Flash will reach its ‘end of life’. The once-ubiquitous tool for creating animated and multimedia content, including much interactive documentary, will disappear and, with it, the ability to access many interactive documentaries. The obsolescence of technology is hardly a new story for anyone with an interest in interactive art and media. As Matt Soar has previously reflected (2014), the highly significant Labyrinth Project directed by Marsha Kinder at the University of Southern California which produced a range of interactive works on CD-ROM and DVD-ROM may have been ‘archived’ but are now, for all intent and purposes unplayable. And that is just one example. Some may be saved (high profile projects like the National Film Board of Canada’s Bear 71 originally created in Flash have since been reimagined in VR); but many will not (particularly independent and/or smaller projects that can’t count on the resources of large media organisations). It’s interactive documentary’s inevitable ‘disappearance act’ (Verbruggen 2017), although the scale of this loss is significant, with implications for teaching and scholarship. Interactive documentary remains experimental, software platforms are far from established, audience awareness remains limited and ‘the case for interactive and transmedia production is not yet made’ (Dovey 2017: 274). However, there seems to be every reason to think that documentarians will continue to explore new technologies and revisit existing ones. Documentary festivals (Sheffield, IDFA and others) suggest a vibrant (if not mainstream) production culture, driven in part by DOI: 10.4324/9781315208862-8

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enthusiasm for the next new technology and the possibility of attracting new audiences. Of course, it is worth noting too that various organisations have shown interest in this space, with NGOs becoming increasingly significant as producers of interactive factual content (see for example Bodies at War1 a recent interactive documentary produced for mobile by Upian in collaboration with Medicines Sans Frontiers). There is little evidence that experiments at the intersection of factual media and digital technology will come to an end anytime soon. And as I hope I have demonstrated in this book, there is much to be learned from such experiments. We might think of interactive documentary as ‘niche’, in that it has rarely attracted large audiences (Kaufman 2013). However, we might also make the argument that it is niche in the ecological sense; that it represents a field within which innovation takes place, expanding our sense of how to tell stories (or not), ‘represent’ reality (or perhaps simulate it) and foster forms of community in support of civic cultures or political action. The importance of innovation within the cultural sphere often justifies the production of interactive documentary within public-service media organisations. Scholarship is as vital as production in fulfilling this important ecological role. It is only by interrogating interactive documentaries, their modes of production and the experiences of those who engage with them (in whatever form) that we can begin to understand what works and why. This book seeks to highlight, in essence, the importance of what Dale Hudson and Patty Zimmerman (2015) have described as ‘thinking through (and with) digital media’. Exploring projects that challenge our expectations and assumptions is a vital way in which to understand how change is produced (or managed). Across the chapters of this book, I have sought to engage debates in the field and to develop some tentative theoretical frameworks for engaging them critically. I hope that I have demonstrated both that there is a need to question existing theory, but also that much remains relevant. As Uricchio (2017) has long argued, the ‘rear-view’ is ultimately helpful in making sense of contemporary developments. It follows, then, that the theoretical tool kit we inherit has value (if only as a starting point) in thinking about the new. Of course, sometimes there is a need to think again, to expand our conceptual frameworks to make sense of new possibilities for engaging realities. In thinking about interactive documentary practice from the perspective of simulation, for example, it is necessary to recognise the ways in which projects might connect with reality (through underlying data sets, representational elements or the verisimilitude of experience) as well as the ways in which our sense of representation is challenged (how can something that has not happened be represented?). In a similar vein, in thinking about data, it is important to take into account the ongoing significance of scientism for documentary practice, but also to recognise the ways in which our understanding of what it means to know is being shaped by myths of big data. In both cases there is continuity and change. Thinking with and through specific projects provides a means by which to challenge assumptions and theoretical frameworks.

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Many of the debates I have engaged in over the course of this book have centred on questions of knowledge and communication. If we desire to see, hear, and to know reality through documentary media, how is this shaped by contemporary cultures and technologies? In engaging debates about narrative as central to the idea of documentary, I have suggested that while the ‘narrativisation’ of many digital projects attests to a desire to manage complexity in digital projects, documentary practice (and media practices more generally) has always included the opportunity to focus on complexity. Narrative is a significant media form, shaping meaning around notions of cause and effect. Digital media present opportunities to prioritise different connections or, indeed, to challenge audiences’ inclinations to narrativise their engagement with content. There is a clear need to further understand how and where audiences take up interactive documentary as an invitation to explore complexity (as opposed to disengaging). Participation similarly raises the promise of polyvocality and the possibilities of seeing the world from more, and multiple, perspectives. It is certainly the case that many interactive documentary projects have sought to explore the possibilities of opening up creation by sharing power in the process of documentary making. While there are some tremendous examples of participatory work, there is a value in recognising participatory intensities and taking broader account of the ways in which people might have a voice (or partial) voice within documentary making. Again, the history of participatory documentary making provides a useful touchstone. As I have already suggested, simulation calls for a broadening of how we conceptualise the relationship between documentary media and reality. It invites a consideration of the multiple ways in which documentary projects (digital and nondigital) produce reality effects. Our current epistemic moment is characterised both by a general scepticism towards forms of expertise and ‘official’ knowledge and a renewed (if modified) faith in the objectivity of computation and data (as mechanically objective modes of engaging with reality). Simulations of various kinds engage this space, proposing ways of knowing complex, real world systems (social, political, historical, and environmental) albeit with a recognition of partiality and contingency. Although I have focused most explicitly on games as documentary simulations here, a broader exploration of simulation would have particular value in the context of emerging practices of machine learning (a point that I will pick up in more detail below). Immersive storytelling might also be considered, at least in some contexts, as a means by which to simulate the point of view (and by extension the experience) of distant others. Empathy continues to be a buzzword for VR enthusiasts, and as I have shown in Chapter five, it has a value as a way of conceptualising the kind of relational attitude that is sought in many VR experiences. Of course, it is also a very limited concept that hardly does justice to the ethical possibilities of immersive media. Further, it is one that reinforces many of the inequalities that those who create immersive experiences would like to challenge. So, there is much further research and ethical debate to be had on the extent to which immersive media might foster attitudes of care and responsibility for distant others.

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The relationality of interactive documentary and its implications for political engagements has been, and remains, an important area for investigation. I have focused here on questions of citizenship – of civic cultures and the roles that interactive documentaries might play in the development of the skills and capabilities that citizenship requires. This is a fascinating possibility that is deserving both of additional study, but also further creative thought. There are lots of ways in which interactive documentary has, and might yet, provide digital spaces that foster agency and community. In exploring what it might mean to claim that interactive documentaries have the potential to convene publics I have focused on the importance of documenting and dialogue. Of course, these are only two concepts around which different forms of sociality might emerge, but what both point to is the progressive possibilities of working at the interface of storytelling (in all its richness, including those forms that seek to challenge narrative coherence) and interactivity. Such possibilities offer a much-needed alternative to the more dysfunctional spaces of online sociality. Interactive documentary may not be a mainstream media form, but as I hope I have demonstrated throughout this book, it is an important field for understanding the possibilities of digital media for understanding and engaging realities in productive ways. There is clearly a need for further, theoretically informed, and critically oriented scholarship that seeks to think with and through interactive documentary projects. This scholarship engages with the potentials of technology but recognises that in the end it’s rarely the technology that matters the most. I have engaged with a number of debates in this book, but I am mindful that there are many that I have not. Some of these are not so much debates as emerging questions and in the remainder of this final chapter I will sketch out what I take to be three important areas for further study: artificial intelligence, audience/user research and ethics.

From algorithms to explainable AI? I want to begin by considering a concept that is implicitly invoked across many of the chapters presented here, but never sufficiently explicated: the algorithm. On the face of it, it gestures towards computation as underpinned by rules and processes, a set of ‘instructions’ that govern the way in which information is processed. As Uricchio (2017) suggests, building on the work of Tarleton Gillespie, notions of the algorithmic point in three directions: as a shorthand for the operations of technology, data, model, and application; as a commitment to formalising problems through standard processes; and as a ‘talisman’ operating within the contexts of the myths of big data and mechanical objectivity (see Chapter six). Exploring algorithms in the cultural domain, Uricchio considers the present moment as a tipping point in which we enter into a new representational regime characterised by shifting subject–object relationships and epistemological challenges. Of most significance for interactive documentary, he suggests, are possibilities for a more extended form of computational authorship in which choices are increasingly made ‘on the fly’ (by us, although perhaps unconsciously through our constantly

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harvested data) to produce individually targeted documentary content that speaks to our interests, beliefs, and habits. Algorithms are not only inaccessible, but fundamentally opaque and, increasingly, machine generated. What does it mean for our knowledge of reality to be shaped by non-human, unseen forces? Questions of authorship demand new consideration, as does (and here the context of big data becomes particularly relevant) the faith in objectivity and rationality. The shift towards forms of computational ‘content creation’ raises a number of critical questions about authorship, creativity, and knowledge. In 2020 The Guardian ran a short op-ed2, ostensibly written by GPT-3, an advanced natural language generator. GPT-3 was challenged to write 500 words on why humans have nothing to fear from AI. It responded with a mostly cogent reflection on the differences between humanity and digital entities: ‘I only do what humans programme me to do. I am only a set of code, governed by lines upon lines of code that encompass my mission statement’. I fell for the illusion; felt that I was engaging with a non-human subjectivity. It was an illusion, of course. Yes, GPT-3 is a powerful natural language processing programme capable of constructing many paragraphs of coherent text, mimicking human communication. However, the software was not only instructed, but it wrote a number of articles from which human editors selected the most meaningful amalgam. The op-ed drew criticism for misrepresenting the state of AI and downplaying the fact that it was, at best, a jointly created piece. However important such criticisms are, they somewhat miss the point: The ‘uncanny’ experience of seeing the world reflected through a non-human consciousness is both compelling and concerning. While documentaries created using forms of machine learning have yet to produce this kind of uncanny experience, there has certainly been significant interest in how machines might shape content creation. From Frankie3 the ‘documentarian’ robot, an early (2013) exploration of machine learning that sought to understand what it means to be human by gathering and analysing people’s responses to a robot, to more recent experiments like Stealingurfeelings4 (2019) an augmented reality experience that makes use of emotional recognition software to draw attention to their deployment by media platforms and corporations. Or there is Jan Bot5, which uses Google Trends and natural language processing to detect topics of interest which then frame an engagement with archival material. Such projects gesture to the generative potential of machine learning, although a sense of the machine as taking us beyond the human-conceptualised reality still feels somewhat futuristic. As we move closer toward that future, however, documentary makers and media have the potential to play a key role. Firstly, by creating spaces that allow for critical reflection on mass surveillance (both state and corporate), drawing attention to their logics. This is a role that documentary has already begun to play in projects like Stealingurfeelings and, before that, Do Not Track. But I also want to suggest a second function for documentary (practice and critique) inspired by the emerging field of ‘explainable computational creativity’ (see for example Llano et al 2020)6. Explainable computational creativity seeks to foster deep collaboration between humans and machines through communication.

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Recognising that the opacity of the algorithm represents a barrier to trust and, ultimately, understanding, dialogue is proposed as a means by which we might come to understand the logic and intent of computational systems. Only by fostering effective bi-directional communication, it is suggested, can we really begin to create comprehensible, creative computers. In other words, what is required is that as we work more with learning machines, we think further about human-centred design for understanding. Documentary makers have an opportunity to model responsible engagements with AI, exploring its potentials while helping to engage us all with issues and solutions.

Understanding ‘users’/‘participants’ (in context) For a field that has been so focused on the transition from viewer to user, predicated on claims of qualitative shifts in engagement/experience (we’re active not passive now, right?) interactive documentary scholars have tended to veer away from empirical studies into audiences/users. This is perhaps not surprising given both the complexity of audience research and the lingering influence of textual analysis on the field. I hope I have shown that close attention to the ‘text’ of interactive documentaries, while necessarily incapable of capturing any project in its entirety, remains a valuable way of highlighting matters of form and content. However, where scholars have turned their attention to how projects are taken up (or not) the results have often been unexpected. It is pleasing, therefore, to note a significant uptick in the number of such studies. Questions continue to be raised about the desirability of interaction, or more positively, the optimal balance between lean forward and lean back experiences (Ducasse et al 2020; Vázquez-Herrero and López-García 2019). There has also been renewed interest on the ways in which audiences might ‘find’ stories within interactive (and immersive) experience. My own small-scale studies (Nash 2014c; 2015) suggested that audiences make sense of interactive environments by structuring their own experience according to personal frames. I also found that the stories users experience are not always the ones that documentarians seek to tell. The ways in which users ‘find stories’ within immersive documentary experiences is currently the subject of a research project being produced by researchers from the MIT Open Documentary Lab and Utrecht University (Uricchio 2020). The project is considering how interactivity challenges core narrative expectations – such as stability and notions of authorship – and how users adopt ‘meaning making strategies’. Importantly the research also focuses on questions of affect and emotion, which will greatly inform our understanding of the immersive media environment. While much research has focused (for practical reasons) on people already aware of and invested in interactive documentary, a recent study into virtual reality nonfiction (VRNF) importantly goes beyond the festival (and the research lab) to consider how households take up (or not) VR as a platform for non-fiction content. Working with 12 households the Virtual Realities: Immersive Documentary Encounters project team (Green et al 2020) tracked responses to a curated suite of VR content over a ten-week period. Some responses were broadly in line with

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industry and academic claims about the potential of VR: that it felt immersive, produced a visceral and engaging experience that allowed for an appreciation of space and a sense of greater understanding. On the one hand the research team point to a generally positive potential that reimagines a certain realist tradition of documentary making. On the other hand, they also found evidence of forms of emotional discomfort tied to feeling present but invisible or unsettled by an awareness of the persuasive potential as well as a more general sense of disinclination to use the technology in a home setting. Such results clearly strike a note of caution in relation to the more hyperbolic claims of industry, but they are also important in providing a more nuanced and contextualised account of responses to immersive content, drawing connections between technology, content, and society. However, I suggest that there is potential to further contextualise investigations of the user/participant/viewer experience to understand how interactive documentaries might have ‘impacts’ for particular individuals in particular contexts. The concept of impact has, as noted in Chapter three, been taken up in a particularly narrow way within certain production contexts (see Nash and Corner 2016 for further explication), but beyond that it is clear that interactive documentary has the potential to make productive interventions in a number of fields. One, in particular, is health, with studies pointing to interactive documentary as a method of intervention in the areas of mental health (Manni et al 2019) and HIV-related stigma (Baselga 2020). Understanding when interactive documentary contributes, in what contexts, and for whom, will be an important foundation for production and scholarship. Similarly, in understanding the changing role of documentary media in social and political contexts, further work with audiences/users/participants will be valuable. Non-Western scholarship and research that seeks to explore the varied (and rapidly changing) spaces of contemporary politics will be of particular value as will research that considers documentary engagement in terms of its social aspects.

Questions of ethics Finally, I want to return to questions of ethics which have been present, if somewhat under-developed within this work. Questions of ethics, as many scholars have argued, are central to the field of documentary studies and to the practice of documentary making. In the relationships that are formed between realities, individuals (as audiences or as participants), and documentarians, multiple questions arise and demand urgent consideration. Documentaries, in short, have consequences for all of us and whether we make, watch, or study them we can scarcely avoid ethical questions. Interactive media have the potential to alter the relationships between individuals, documentarians, and realities in many ways (some of which I have explored in this book). As such they may raise new ethical questions or bring renewed urgency to existing questions. The ethics of representation become more complex in projects that aspire to forms of dispersed authorship. Debra Beattie (2008) has written of feeling an obligation to historical accuracy when making her

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documentary The Wrong Crowd, and the consequent need to pre-empt users’ interactions. Trust becomes further complicated in projects that invite mass participation where the documentarian’s ability to ‘vouch’ for the claims made can be stretched (as was the case in 18 Days in Egypt). Where documentarians may once have considered questions of privacy, consent, and consequence in relation to participants, it may now be necessary to consider such questions in relation to the ‘audience’. In relation to virtual reality technologies, for example it may be necessary to consider potential harms.7 The digital environment complicates the power relationships that structure documentary making practices. While documentarians continue to embrace an ambition to share power with others, this may be complicated by the nature of technologies and platforms (platforms may be structured by logics quite at odds with the values of those committed to creating documentary media, raising questions about the privacy of information contributed via a ‘third party’). For all the attention paid to questions of ethics documentary makers, as Aufderheide (2014) notes, have no explicitly articulated ‘code’ to guide their practice. It is possible, however, to identify a number of shared values such as minimising harm, truthtelling, and doing good. Increasingly significant in the digital environment, as Aufderheide notes, is transparency. Revealing the process of documentary making, providing participants, users, and audiences with as much information as possible – about their data, contributions and how they will be used (framed, shared and/or preserved) and what they can expect as a result of their involvement – is a means by which to build trust and facilitate informed consent. But for all that digital media technologies shape our ethical conversations in some new ways, it is still a conversation that requires us to think deeply about the values that ought to guide our relationships with others as we create, consume, or study documentary.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

https://bodiesatwar.msf.org/en https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/08/robot-wrote-this-article-gpt-3 http://frankieproject.com/ https://stealingurfeelin.gs/ https://www.jan.bot/ https://sensilab.monash.edu/new-sensilab/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/XCC.pdf Questions about the ethics of VR are central to an ongoing research project VR Documentary Encounters http://vrdocumentaryencounters.co.uk/

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INDEX

18 Days in Egypt 39, 45–48, 52, 147 1979 Revolution: Black Friday 97–99 51 Sprints 82, 90 6 Billion Others 48 6 x 9: A virtual experience of solitary confinement 82, 111, 115–116 À Propos de Nice 134 Across the Line 111–112 Actor-Network Theory 13 Adobe Flash 140 After 6/4 30, 64 Algorithm 2, 13, 20, 22, 85, 90, 127, 143–145 Al Jazeera 5, 98 The Amazon Game 94, 95 Archive, database as 33 ARTE 5 Artificial: Room One 3 Artificial Intelligence 138, 144 Asylum: Exit Australia 82, 88 Audiences: as citizen 63, 89; and making sense 64; moral positioning 103, 109– 112; narrativizing 27, 32; as publics 14, 69, 71, 77; as users/participants, 2, 8, 16, 48, 50, 145–146 Aufderheide, Patricia 147 Authorship 2, 10, 14; community 43, 55; as computational 143–144; dispersal of 20, 22, 55; as facilitation 41, 43 Bakhtin, Mikhail 20 Bard, Parry 51

Baudrillard, Jean 84 Bear 71 140 Beattie, Debra 32, 146 Belongings 31 Berlin 134 Big Brother 91 Big Stories Small Towns 55 – 56 Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles (1920–1986) 17 Blood Sugar 21, 37 Bodies at War 141 Brasier, Hannah 22, 34, 37 Burn Out/Le Grande Incendie 30 Challenge, The 29 Challenge for Change/Société Nouvelle 42–44, 52, 55 Choose your own Documentary 29 Chronicle of a Summer/Chronique d’un Éte 42, 91 Citizenship 62–63, 143; and civic cultures 62–69, 80 Cizek, Katerina 47 Clouds over Cuba 28 Clouds over Sidra 109, 117–118 Collaboration 10, 20, 39, 41–42; continuum 47; interdisciplinary 45, 53–54; verification 45 College Scholarship Tycoon 92 Common Ground 109 Community: authorship 43, 55; formation and maintenance of 46, 48, 52–53, 55–56, 58, 78, 80; and identity 68–69; as

164 Index

imagined 77; of interest 57–58; media making 42, 56, 71; organisations 55; voice 61, 74 Counted, The 39, 52 Cronulla Riots: The Day that Shocked the Nation 34 Crowdsourcing 50–52, 53 Daniel, Sharon 21, 25, 37 Data 11, 12, 16, 123; activism 138; as art 133; big data 15, 121; and database 18, 23, 25; and epistemology 126; image as 121–122; as myth 127–128, 138, 141, 143; and participation 46, 52, 54, 71–72; and simulation 88–91, 100–101; visualisation 6, 128–138 Database: categorical 33–34; as cultural form 17–38; documentary 6, 14, 18–19; as generative 21–22; Mosaic 34–36; narrative 19, 21, 27–32; Poetic 36–38; and voice 37–38 De la Peña, Nonny 106, 110, 115 De Michiel, Helen 46, 77–78 Democracy: and citizenship 62; and Fourth Estate 98; and participation 44, 66; values 64–67, 76–77 Dialogue 4, 14; and artificial intelligence 145; and database 21–22, as participatory structure 47; political 61, 66–67; and public 73, 75–77, 143 Discourse 3; counter-discourse 74; and interactivity 8, 9; and participation 40, 46; and publics 68–69, 80 Do Not Track 138, 144 Documentary: British documentary movement 123–125; Conditional 89–91; Domain of 5; Journalistic 98–99, as performance 9; Poetic 36; scientism 124; social functions 5 Dovey, Jon 43–45, 83, 91, 104–105, 121, 140 Echoes of IS 31 Empathy 15, 101 102–120, 142 Encounter: face-to-face 113; and empathy 117–119; subjective experience of in VR 108–109 Enough to Eat? 124 Escape from Woomera 88, 93 Ethics 15, 146–147; and care 117; and game play 96; and immersive media 103, 142; and interactivity 37; of representation 6, 41 Exceptional and the Everyday: 144 hours in Kiev, The 13

Favero Paolo 104 Fibonacci 2 22, 36 Filming Revolution 20–21, 64 Filmmaker in Residence 44 First-person media 15, 85, 101–104; mode of address 88, 99, 112–119; and virtual reality 105–112 Flight Patterns 133 Fogo process 42 Fort McMoney 62, 66, 68 Fourth Estate 67, 98 Frankham, Bettina 36 Frankie 144 Fullerton, Tracey 93, 100 Game, digital 66, 83, 95–101; as documentary 93–95 Gaudenzi, Sandra 3, 4, 7; and living documentary 10, 46; strategies of participation 40, 46 Gaza/Sderot: Life in Spite of Everything 31 Grandmas Project, The 45 Grey Skies/Blue Skies 37 Grierson, John 42; documentary idea 67, 122, 123–126; 138 Guardian, The 115, 143 Hayles, Katherine 19 Highrise Series 52–55 Hollow 39, 56–57, 59 Hudson, Dale 20, 141 Hybrid: digital-non-digital 46; fact-fiction, 17, 87; interactive documentary as 6–8, 57; production 56, 58–59; self-other 103, 106, 107, 111, 115, 119; space 14, 98 Identity: and citizenship 63, 65–66, 76; collective 55, 68–71, 74, 77, 80; and participation 47–49, 56; and reality TV 91 IDFA Doc Lab 5 I-docs 5 Immersion 103–105; and experience 12, 86, 118; and image 6, 104; and journalism 106; and media technologies 2, 102; and storytelling 85, 142 Interactivity: Dimensions of 7–9; as performance 7, 9–14 Interface 24–26, 31, 35–36, I See Change 71–73, 77 Jan Bot 144 Jennings, Humphrey 125 JFK Reloaded 93

Index 165

Journey to the End of Coal 29, 67 Journalism 5, 93, 98; citizen 56; as collaborative 39, 52; immersive 106, 113 Kinder, Marsha 17, 19, 31, 140 Kinoautomat 29 Kiya 110 Korsakow 21–23, 36 Labyrinth Project, The 17, 140 Lebow, Alisa 20–21, 35 Life in a Day 48 Limbo: A virtual experience of waiting for asylum 111, 115–116 Listening 21, 64, 66, 70–71, 73–75, 77; strategic 77–79, 80; and virtual reality 119 Listen Tree, The 4 Lunch, Love, Community 78 Make Noise 112 Man with a Movie Camera: Global Remake 45, 51 Mapping Main Street 48 Marles, Janet 31–32 Mass Observation 122, 124–130, 138 Materialism 13 Mehta, Jigar 46 Miles, Adrian 8, 20, 36 Miller, Liz 68 Misere au Borinage 42 MIT Open documentary lab 5, 66, 145; Docubase 4 Murray, Janet 102, 104 Nanook of the North 41 Narrative 19, 142; and database 27–32; forking path 29–30; and immersion 105; modular 31–32; and non-narrative 17–22; 32–38; Parallel 30–31 National Film Board of Canada 5, 42, 44, 52, 54, 140 Network Effect 137 Next Day, The 35 Notes on Blindness 116–117 NSA Files Decoded: What the revelations mean for you? 66–67 On Broadway 134–136 One Millionth Tower 49, 53–54 Open space documentary practice 46, 78 Out my Window 52–54 Out of Sight, Out of Mind 132–133 Panorama 108 Papers Please 94

Participation 14, 39–59, 142; and citizenship 40, 65, 69–80; gap 44, 47; intensities of 48, 50–59; strategies of 46 Party: A virtual experience of autism, The 115–116 Perception, haptic 105 Performance: and first-person media 105; interactivity as 7, 9–14 91 Pirate Fishing: An interactive investigation 67, 98 Play 4, 15, 66, 85–88; as documenting 97–99; ethics of 96; as vivification 99–101 Polish Journey, A 27–28 Polyvocality 18, 20–21, 64, 142 Poppy Field 131, 132 Poremba, Cindy 88, 90 Possibility space 18, 19, 23–24 Power 6, 8; inequality and sharing in documentary making 38, 40–47; microanalysis of 48–58 Presence 103, 104–105 Preservation of Favoured Traces, The 136 Procedural rhetoric 85 Procedural verisimilitude 91 Proper distance 113–117 Public 68–70, 143; ad-hoc 73, 79; convening 68, 69; counter 62, 69, 74; micro 73, 77–79; sphere 59, 61–62, 63, 66, 68–69 Public Secrets 25 – 26 Question Bridge: Black Males 47, 76–77 Quipu Project, The 49, 62, 73–75, 77, 80 Racing Home 22–23 Radio Right Left 66 Rain 22 Reality effects 10, 11, 15; simulation and 83–101, 142 Real Thing: Real life in Fake Cities, The 108 Red Tales 57–58, 59 Re-enactment 15, 83, 85, 92; as vivification 87–89 Representation 2–6, 11, 13, 17–18; and algorithm 143; and data 123; and ethics 41, 49; and interface 25; and publics 80; and simulation 84–86; space of 105, 107 Rose, Mandy 43, 47, 105, 111, 112 Ross, Miriam 105 Ruby, Jay 41–43 Sandy Storyline 61–62 Senseless 131 Seven Digital Deadly Sins 33

166 Index

Sheep Project, The 4 Sheffield Doc-Fest 5 Sheldon, Elaine McMillion 56 Ship Map 133 Shoebox, The 31–32 Shore Line, The 67–68, 76 Simulation: as documentary practice 14–15, 82–102, 121; and ethics 113; and firstperson media 104; realist 85, 88, 93, 98, 99, 100, 103; sandbox 96; spatial 85, 101 Soar, Matt 22, 34 Space: and interface 25; and participation 46–47; as political 64–65 Spare Time 125–126 Staging 91 Step to the Line 110–111 Stoney, George 42 Studies in Documentary Film 5 Sublime/anti-sublime, the 122–123, 128–130 Submarine Channel 5 Supersize Me 91–92 Spatial montage 24 Specificity: and documentary games 93–94 Stealingurfeelings 144 Sunny, Rainy, Foggy 29, 46 Technology 4, 11, 15, 22; and participation 42–44, 49, 54, 57 Testimony 118–119 Tetris 94–95 Thanatorama 29 This War of Mine 95–96 Tourist: as subject position in VR 107–108 Traveling while Black 110, 111

Trust 42, 56, 63, 64, 123, 128 Truth: aesthetic of 129; regimes of 11, 14–15, 83, 119; as subjective 105–106; post-truth 11, 119 Two Laws/Kanymarda Yuwa 43 Uber Game 94, 95 Universe Within, The 53, 54 Upian 5, 7, 141, 174 Uricchio, William 105, 141 Videogames 104, Video Nation 42, 49 Virtual reality 102–120, 142 Vivification: and re-enactment 87–89; and play 99–100 Voice: as braided 26–27, 38; and data 129; database 24–27; documentary 18, 23–24, 37; as political 61–62, 71 VTR:St Jacques 42 Waiting Room, The 78–79, 80 Walden: The Game 99–100 War Game, The 89–90 Waterlife 35 Whiteness Project, The 67, 68 Wind Map 133–134 Winston, Brian 19, 91, 123, 125 Witness: as subject position in VR 109–111 Worry Box, The 33 Wrong Crowd, The 32, 147 You Are on Indian Land 42 Zimmerman, Patricia 20, 46, 77–78, 141