Of Trees and Clouds: Software-Mediated Visions in Documentary and Ethnographic Filmmaking Practices [1 ed.] 9783737011303, 9783847111306

Citation preview

Franziska Weidle

Of Trees and Clouds Software-Mediated Visions in Documentary and Ethnographic Filmmaking Practices

With 22 figures

V& R unipress

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available online: https://dnb.de.  2020, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Theaterstraße 13, 37073 Gçttingen, Germany All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher. Cover image: Illustration of the basics of Korsakow by Korsakow-Institut. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlage j www.vandenhoeck-ruprecht-verlage.com ISBN 978-3-7370-1130-3

Contents

List of Figures and Videos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

7

Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Prolog: Attuning to Trees and Clouds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Part I: Introduction 1 A New Playground Stuck in Old Paradigms: Reconsidering the Rules of Representation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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2 In Search of the Digital: Towards a Framework for Studying Software .

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Part II: The Korsakow System 3 Korsakow Perspective(s) – Rethinking Documentary Knowledge in Digital Multilinear Environments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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4 Software as Co-Teacher – How Korsakow Disrupted an Ethnographic Film Program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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5 Gaining Control over the Loss of It – Software as Focusing Media in Digital Visual Ethnography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Part III: Conclusion 6 Software-Mediated Visions: Between Mapping Trees and Sketching Clouds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

141

6

Contents

Epilog: A Computational Correspondence with the World . . . . . . . .

171

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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List of Figures and Videos

Fig. 1: Fig. 2: Fig. 3: Fig. 4: Video 1: Fig. 5: Video 2: Video 3: Video 4: Video 5: Video 6: Video 7: Video 8: Fig. 6: Fig. 7: Video 9: Fig. 8: Fig. 9: Fig. 10: Fig. 11: Fig. 12: Fig. 13:

Screenshot of the iAm Web-Based Software Interface Klynt’s Visual Storyboard Korsakow’s SNU Editor Layers of Abstraction and Complexity Korsakow – A Tool for … What? Interview Excerpts from my Fieldwork at the non/fictionLab Screenshot from Hannah Brasier‘s Sometimes I See Palm Trees. Last Night First Interview with Hannah Brasier: First Encounter with Korsakow First Interview with Hannah Brasier: Noticing Patterns First Interview with Hannah Brasier: Recursive Process First Interview with Hannah Brasier: No Need to Tell Stories Korsakow Workshop with Adrian Miles: Introducing Lives First Interview with Adrian Miles: Reactions to Korsakow Interview with Adrian Miles and Florian Thalhofer at i-Docs 2016: The Need to Storify Translated Graphic Depicting the Students’ Mind Map of Their Initial Encounter with a Work Authored in Korsakow, 17 May 2016 Project Homepage Bilder Machen Interview with Adrian Miles: Common Mistakes Visual Lab Session Basic Structure of a Work Authored in Korsakow Building Clouds by Translating Categories into Keywords Interface for Short SNUs Interface for Narrative SNUs Narrative Path and Linking Logic of the LoveStoryProject

22 35 37 55 76 77 78 79 80 83 84 85 86 93 94 102 105 107 108 111 111 153

Acknowledgements

This book is the result of my time as a research fellow at the German Research Foundation (DFG) Research Training Group 1787 “Literature and Dissemination of Literature in the Digital Age” at the University of Goettingen, Germany, between 2014 and 2017. During that time, I had the great pleasure of working with a number of likeminded colleagues from a variety of disciplines who all share a large interest in digital technologies and their complex roles within culture and society. Thanks are thus to the people affiliated with this research group for providing me with the unique opportunity to delve deeply into the fascinating world of i-docs, digital ethnography, software studies, new materialism and nonrepresentational theory. Special thanks go to Prof. Dr. Regina Bendix, my main thesis adviser and one of my earliest academic mentors. Equally supportive and critical of my work, she has always pushed me and my thinking further. I would also like to thank my other supervisors Prof. Dr. Babette Bärbel Tischleder and Dr. Christian Hißnauer for their continuous feedback, advice and support. Moreover, I am grateful to Dr. Torsten Näser who, over the years, has turned from a teacher into a valued colleague and friend. I owe him thanks in particular for always being there to run ideas by and for his trust in our joint venture. Another vital environment for this research project as well as my academic and personal development was the one provided by Adrian Miles, former new media lecturer at RMIT University in Melbourne and dearly missed colleague. Without his generosity, openness and ongoing support this work would not have been possible. What I learned from him during hours and hours of filmed interviews, teaching sessions and informal chats is a fundamental shift in perspective. This book is a manifestation of that and thus dedicated to Adrian and his witty, tireless, at times fierce but always approachable way of looking at, engaging with and thinking through the world. I also owe thanks to Hannah Brasier, Kim Munro and the other research-practitioners at the non/fictionLab for welcoming me and sharing their work and ideas so openly. Last but not least I am extremely grateful to my husband and parents for their love, patience and encouragement. I could not have done it without you.

Prolog: Attuning to Trees and Clouds In the face of so-called “anthropogenic climate change” in the “Anthropocene”, the era of the anthropos, we need, more than ever, to find cultural forms which allow us to encounter the world outside the hall of mirrors provided by our technologies, where everything that happens is pre-interpreted to be proportional to conservative human aesthetics, human proclivities, human needs. Baruch Gottlieb (2018: 13).

The digital, it seems, is deeply saturating the ways we perceive, experience and engage with our lifeworld. With its discrete numerical quantities, it introduces a new set of rules that challenges established forms of expression and contributes to a new understanding of mediation itself. At the same time, it is intricately tied in with earlier systems of representation including the discrete, sequential structure of text and the continuity of proportional, analog media. This book looks at the influences of recent technological advancements on documentary and ethnographic filmmaking practices, which, among other things, have led to a renewed interest in the (im-)possibilities of reproducing empirical realities. Critical questions concerning the use of interactive media and their acclaimed non-linear, performative, evocative, and polyphonic potentials are well addressed from a field grappling with this issue long before digital technologies became as ubiquitous, affordable and accessible as they are today. Inspired by postmodern and postcolonial theory, the long crisis of representation in social, cultural, and visual anthropology began over 30 years ago with James Clifford’s and George Marcus’ Writing Culture (1986) and was continued, among others, by feminist scholars Ruth Behar and Deborah Gordon in 1995. Since then, authoring strategies have been under close scrutiny for either being too close to fiction or too rational, didactic and monologic. Thus, the distribution of ethnographic knowledge has continuously evolved into both, a minefield and a creative playground. As a minefield, it has given rise to a long discourse about questioning the validity of subjective accounts of the world up to a point where creative treatment was dismissed altogether for its constructed, unreliable, and nonscientific nature. As a playground, though still tied to established academic formats and conventions, an experimental impetus has been unfolding over decades, opening ethnographic theory and practice up towards the creative possibilities of different media technologies. Just as the use of photography and film enabled anthropologists to develop new perspectives on ethnographic representation, so did computer-based forms stimulate critical reassessment and creative innovation (cf. Pink 2013). Yet, similar to the lack of attention media technologies initially gained outside of

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specialized sub-disciplines, David Zeitlyn and Gustaaf Houtman (1996) argued that the computer has not been studied enough in the ways it impacts anthropology as a whole. Starting in the late 1970s and early 1980s, initial experiments with software1 already hinted at the possibilities enabled by digital computation for the documentation, manipulation, analysis, presentation and distribution of qualitative data (cf. ibid.; Underberg and Zorn 2013: 43–4). Among other aspects, its capabilities of storing, indexing and retrieving increasing quantities of information were welcomed due to the “intuitive relationships between image, sound, and word” they facilitate (Barkin and Stone 2004: 205). The promise of a richer, more integrated and contextualized treatment of heterogeneous data sets also prompted critical engagements with hypertext and hypermedia in ethnography, which seemed to offer better ways for coping with complexity (cf. Howard 1988: 314). Fueled by the scientific-realist paradigm of the twentieth century, these experiments were initially disputed and restricted on the grounds of text-centric principles2 before they gradually inspired new approaches to rethink anthropology “through use of a visual medium” (MacDougall 1997: 192) or “through experimentation ‘against the grain’” of the digital form (Fortun et al. 2017: 14). Since then, new tools have emerged and inspired anthropological researchers to explore novel forms of knowledge production and dissemination. These forms combine different technologies, formats and modalities and ultimately seek to go beyond the established text-based standards.3 Conceptualizations underlying this experimental tradition acknowledge that, as acts of translation, ethnographic representations need their fictional counterparts not only as point of differentiation but also as a means to making statements about socio-cultural 1 Launched in 1985, The Ethnograph is an early example of software specifically developed for the purpose of analyzing qualitative data with the support of the computer (see: http://www. qualisresearch.com/ (accessed 31/07/2018)). In the 1990s, other software packages followed such as HyperResearch (cf. Hesse-Biber et al. 1997, online: http://www.researchware.com/ (accessed 31/07/2018)) as well as models to arrange data in website form (cf. Barkin and Stone 2004). 2 Take, for example, Peter Biella’s (1993) approach to ethnographic film and its supposed shortcomings with regard to anthropological scholarship. 3 The works by the curatorial collective Ethnographic Terminalia, for example, seek “to develop generative ethnographies that do not subordinate the sensorium to the expository and theoretical text or monograph” (see: http://ethnographicterminalia.org/about (accessed 26/ 10/2018)). Another example would be #Colleex – a network for ethnographic experimentation that has been forming since 2013 within the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) and counts over 100 members (see: https://www.easaonline.org/networks/colleex/ index.shtml (accessed 28/10/2017)). Moreover, new journals specifically dedicated to sensory, experimental and multimodal ethnography have emerged such as the newly founded Entanglements: https://entanglementsjournal.org/entanglements-that-matter/ (accessed 22/05/ 2018).

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phenomena in the first place. However, creative ethnographers might also draw on methods and styles that depart further from representation as such. Leviathan (2012) by V8r8na Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor is an often-cited example that demonstrates the influence of digital technology on the process of filming but also on the aesthetics of the documenting experience itself. According to Andrew Murphie’s analysis of the film (cf. 2014: 193–5), the mobile and small-scale design of GoPro cameras, which are strapped onto bodies and plunged into water, allows for a specific kind of relation with the world of a trawler at sea.4 This relation is translated into an intense sensuality while the cameras’ technicity is simultaneously amplified. At the intersection of documentary art, visual research and ethnographic practice, formal experiments become more frequent such as those that explore the web and its epistemic potentials for non-linear, collaborative and participatory forms of knowledgemaking (cf. Aston 2010; Coover 2011; Favero 2013; Ramella 2014). The wellknown work by filmmaker and scholar Roderick Coover is a case in point. From early multimedia experiments on CD-ROM and interactive scrolling environments to video installations and generative combinatory films, Coover incorporates new technologies and investigates their poetics and politics.5 His projects also clearly challenge linear storytelling, which has become a central mode of knowledge representation in ethnographic monographs and films. Turning from the linguistic to the (new) materialist paradigm, dissatisfaction with the linear, often narrative organization of empirical data is brought to the next level. The world is increasingly recognized as messy, so are our encounters of it (cf. Law 2004; Pink et al. 2016: 12–4; Dourish and Bell 2011). The discrepancy between coherently structured accounts on the one hand and simultaneous multiplicity, unruly things and contingent experiences on the other is one of the core challenges anthropologists face. The digital is such an unruly thing that asks us to rethink established concepts, methods and methodologies: It spreads across different layers and frames of reference while constantly changing its form, function and meaning. Mess and unruliness, Sarah Pink and her colleagues argue, “is constituted through the relationality of things” such as digital materiality (2016: 13). Following Tim Ingold (2008, 2011) in his understanding of life as an ongoing making of connections, they describe the digital, the material and design to be porous elements of the same processes: “Digital materiality refers to the making and to what emerges of these entanglements, not to a state or a quality of matter” (ibid.: 11). If materiality is a reciprocal process 4 The practical and theoretical work of visual anthropologist Sarah Pink is another much-cited example that illustrates how engaging with video and hypermedia can lead to a rethinking of knowledge production and representation in visual ethnography (cf. 2006, 2012, 2013). 5 For an overview of his work, see: http://unknownterritories.org/ (accessed 27/11/2017).

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rather than an object with distinct properties and designing means thinking with, through and along these processes (cf. Bratteteig 2010: 148; Akama and Prendiville 2013), then engaging with digital materiality from an ethnographic standpoint involves attending to the moments when these porous elements come together. This refers to actual design practices and how digital culture is materially pre-configured. However, it also means looking at everyday applications of technologies and how so-called ‘users’ experience and perform the design of others, often in unexpected ways, according to their own needs and specific circumstances. On a similar note, ethnographic activities could be understood as a means to skillfully attuning to, following, improvising with and intervening in the active forces of a digital-material world continuously in motion. The struggle with representation, too, is an expression of an embodied thinking-inaction and, thus, a question of design and how to facilitate this ongoing conversation with materials (cf. Schön 1984). In response, Pink and her colleagues (cf. 2016: 3) recently advocated for an extended dialogue between digital anthropology, media anthropology and design anthropology through the lens of digital materiality. Such a dialogue, I argue, should be broadened further to map out a field where anthropological theory and practice intersect with digital design and interventions, but also with other materialities, activities and intensities. After all, in one way or another, the digital has become entangled in every ethnographic research project. Yet, deterministic views are still commonplace, even if only implicit, and treat research devices and environments all too often as ‘tools’ merely assisting anthropologists.6 This doctoral study continues the experimental trajectory in visual anthropology to test novel forms of knowledge production and dissemination. It does so by focusing on media software and acknowledging it as an active participant in the processes of knowledge-making at two levels. While the main interest is to observe documentary practitioners as they retrain their visions with and through digital materiality,7 it is also my concern to transfer these observations to the field of ethnographic film-work and propose a methodology for joining with the materials and devices of our research (cf. Law and Ruppert 2013) more consciously. This entails reconceiving ethnography as an active opening up to method and process as forms of knowledge in their own right.

6 Susanne Friese, for example, remarks that “software is a tool that (only) supports the process of qualitative data analysis” (2006: 311, emphasis added). On a similar note, the mobile application EthnoAlly is advertised as “a personal assistant for ethnographers” enabling him or her to create, organize and share GNSS-tagged multimodal field notes (see: https://docubase. mit.edu/tools/ethnoally/ (accessed 26/10/2018), emphasis added). 7 All of the interviews conducted over the course of this research project have been archived by me and can be made available for further research upon request.

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The essays gathered here can be seen as a step beyond the representational idiom. This step continues the move towards the performative as Andrew Pickering (cf. 2002: 414) described it for the study of science and technology. Because digital media are “fluid, malleable, responsive, and changing”, Dale Hudson and Patricia Zimmermann note, they “recalibrate the relationship between maker/designer, audience, and content/context into a more open system” (2015: 5). Although not without challenges of their own, such open systems could certainly draw action and attention towards the present of practice and amplify the contingencies, uncertainties and potentialities that derive from our engagements with the world. Cultural geographer Hayden Lorimer describes the shift in emphasis this more-than-representational undertaking implies: The focus falls on how life takes shape and gains expression in shared experiences, everyday routines, fleeting encounters, embodied movements, precognitive triggers, practical skills, affective intensities, enduring urges, unexceptional interactions and sensuous dispositions. Attention to these kinds of expression, it is contended, offers an escape from the established academic habit of striving to uncover meanings and values that apparently await our discovery, interpretation, judgement and ultimate representation. In short, so much ordinary action gives no notice of what it will become (2005: 84).

In short, one way to break with anthropocentrism is to focus on what things do, can or could do rather than what they mean or represent. This book suggests that digital computation can enact the emergent relationality of things. It is on us to put this opportunity to work by advancing the analysis and critique of dominant design principles, standardization processes, software-mediated visions, narratives and fetishisms further. Why continue mapping the web as a giant tree when, instead, we have all it takes to think through the shifting contours of clouds?

Part I: Introduction

1

A New Playground Stuck in Old Paradigms: Reconsidering the Rules of Representation

With the proliferation of computational technologies in the creative industries and the resulting scope of digitization in our media landscape today, it seems almost natural to expect that established cultural forms and routines would undergo significant transformations. Indeed, the consequences of cultural computerization, networked1 and ubiquitous connectivity2 become evident in the sheer abundance of content creation, authoring and sharing applications available (though only in particular parts of the world) to a broad range of media practices, from the highly professional to the everyday. These tools simplify existing workflows by making formerly laborious tasks programmable, which lowers the threshold for novice practitioners (cf. Hight 2014a). The capability for discrete computation, however, also provides new creative possibilities stimulating imaginations. Current smartphone technology presents a powerful example of hardware bundled with and configured by a myriad of applications including built-in recording, editing and sharing functions. Such mobile devices are embedded within a continuously updated and growing ecology of systems and services designed for a seamless insertion into everyday activities. Exceeding the scope of previous forms of collaborative media, “the widespread advent of social media”, according to digital media scholar David Golumbia, “has allowed interactive commentary on and response to original productions in such detail and with such rapidity as to suggest their own implication in the production process” (2014: 58). These tendencies are encapsulated in the notion of the computer as metamedium, a term coined by computing pioneer Alan Kay (cf. Kay and Goldberg 1977: 40) and invoked frequently throughout (new) media theory. A metamedium is capable of simulating already existing media as well as inventing new ones (cf. Manovich 2013: 44–5). Given the pervasiveness of dig1 Among other things, I mean the restructuring phase of the web, also known under the term Web 2.0, which primarily aimed at opening it up towards its users by serving applications to them that facilitate the creation and sharing of information online. 2 Here, I refer to the idea of what is generally known as ubiquitous or pervasive computing, i. e. the move from personal desktop computers to interconnected everyday devices and objects.

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ital, that is software-based, technologies,3 it becomes increasingly necessary to scrutinize to what end and to what extent4 aspects of cultural forms and practices are becoming subject to programmability. Yet, taking a closer look at film as central media format and aesthetic of the twentieth and early twenty-first century, its material principle appears surprisingly stable. In analog film, strips of celluloid had to be cut and glued together into a linear sequence so that they could be run on reels through the projector. These conventions have influenced decades of film and video production and are even applied to editing software today where clips are still ‘cut’ into linear sequences, though, without the material imperative to do so. In light of software-driven digital data, already in 2003 new media scholar Lev Manovich imagined a different scenario for the contemporary Hollywood film: An individual viewer receives a customized version of the film that takes into account her/his previous viewing preferences, current preferences, and marketing profile. The film is completely assembled on the fly by AI software using pre-defined script schemas. The software also generates, again on the fly, characters, dialog, and sets (this makes product placement particularly easy) that are taken from a massive ‘assets’ database (2003: 18).

What Manovich had anticipated for the film industry 15 years ago almost reads like a description of the World Wide Web as we know it today. In fact, visiting a customized version of a website that is algorithmically generated on the fly based on previous search, like, share, up- and download activities has turned into the default of targeted advertising. This dominant ‘business model’ does not appear to occupy an equally relevant status in the movie-making domain thus far. Needless to say, the digital and its ascribed principles5 have left substantial marks on the way films are currently produced and distributed.6 Hollywood, the “Mecca of filmmaking”, is renowned for its trendsetting role as early adopter in 3 The reasons for specifying digital technologies as software-based will be elaborated in Chapter 2. Suffice it to say at this point that software can be understood as the one common feature all computer technologies share (cf. Frabetti 2015: x). 4 In his analysis of video editing software, Craig Hight (2014a) identifies a continuum from low to high-level forms of automation. The latter is primarily used in entry-level tools such as Magisto – “a superhuman video editing team” designed to virtually erase the formerly manual and skill-intensive labor involved in the processing of images and sound (see: https://www. magisto.com/ (accessed 13/08/2018)). 5 While Janet Murray (cf. 1998: 71–93) emphasized the procedural, participatory, spatial and encyclopedic properties of digital environments in relation to storytelling, Manovich (cf. 2001: 27–46) advocated for a transferal of categories from computer science to new media objects, above all the principles of numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability and transcoding. In his study of code, Adrian Mackenzie (cf. 2006: 6) criticized such formalisms for their unsuitability to capture the mutability of software and its underlying multiplicity of relations. 6 For a documentation of the influences of digitization on film production, cf. McQuire 1997.

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the field.7 Take, for example, digital cameras as standard recording equipment, digital nonlinear editing software (DNLE), computer generated imagery (CGI), motion capture technology or the ubiquity of video on demand streaming services (VOD) and the ongoing expansion of transmedia(l) story worlds.8 Still, apart from ever more elaborate visual effects,9 the computer does not seem to be truly involved in “the key ‘creative’ decisions” but rather takes on “the position of a technician” (Manovich 2003: 18). Although the influences of digitization “are affecting all sectors of the industry”, media scholar Adrian Miles notes, “these changes generally maintain cinema and television as a specific cultural and aesthetic institution, so what has been affected are the means and processes of production, but not the form itself” (2008: 10). Miles calls this “the material hegemony of video and film” (ibid.), which lends itself to the production of time-based narrative arts. Film scholar Kristin Thompson (1999) made a similar observation, demonstrating that the industry-standard of the classical narrative feature film has exhibited an enormous endurance and adaptability over the course of technical innovations, from the introduction of sound and color to that of digital imaging.10 Nevertheless, such a “business as usual” perspective also bears a certain risk because, as film scholar Thomas Elsaesser points out, it assumes that [t]here have been technological innovations all along, but they have always been absorbed and accommodated, possibly reconfiguring the economics of production, but leaving intact the context of reception and the manner of programming. Digitization does not seem to change this state of affairs. On the contrary, the contemporary industry-standard – the star- and spectacle-driven blockbuster – dominates the audiovisual landscape more visibly than ever […] (2006: 14).

While monolithic spectacles are, indeed, taking center stage, there are and always have been experimental approaches to the interplay of media technology, form 7 See: http://filmmakersfans.com/7-types-cameras-used-hollywood-movies/ (accessed 13/08/ 2017). 8 In their reconsideration of intermediality and transmediality, my colleagues Nicole Gabriel, Bogna Kazur and Kai Matuszkiewicz (2015) make an interesting differentiation between transmedial and transmedia worlds. While identical in appearance, they differ in their origins from an incidental emergence in the first case to a highly planned development in the latter (cf. ibid.: 172). Regardless of this difference, the authors argue that digital technologies can be identified as “catalysts for transmedia(l) phenomena” (ibid.: 190) and that, under the influences of the digital, transmedial world-building has become “one of the most important strategies of media production” today (ibid.: 164). 9 A prominent example would be computer animation and artificial intelligence software packages such as MASSIVE (see: http://www.massivesoftware.com/ (accessed 13/08/2017)) that are used for automatically generating individually responding agents in crowd-related visual effects. 10 The persistence of the classical narrative form is supported, among other things, by the way screenwriting manuals as well as academic studies describe and canonize Aristotle’s model of unity and order (cf. Cameron 2008: 4).

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and content, specifically to challenge the established modes of and dividing lines between production, distribution and reception. There are concepts, for example, that expand film towards the performative engagement and influence of viewers (cf. Shaw and Weibel 2003) including Graheme Weinbren’s interactive cinema installations.11 Going beyond the formal experiments of film noir and Nouvelle Vague, the emergence of narrative complexity in Hollywood, independent and international cinema in the 1990s is another indication of the continuous challenging the canonical storytelling format undergoes (cf. Cameron 2008; Hven 2017). According to film and media scholar Allan Cameron, these complex filmic structures are influenced by the cultural model of the digital database: While they “continue to display the linear form that has long been integral to narrative cinema”, he argues, “these films present themselves as made up of discrete temporal or narrative units, arranged in ways that gesture towards non-linearity” (2008: 5). Film scholar Steffen Hven goes further in positing that narrative complexity allows us to overcome the linear-non-linear dichotomy altogether and rethink the cinematic experience as an “embodied thinking in action” (2017: 10, original emphasis). Constituted by the interplay between cognitive, emotional and affective elements, moving images are more than representations that appeal to our need for meaning and sense-making. They also act upon, move and transform us.

Fig. 1 Screenshot of the iAm Web-Based Software Interface. T2018 Quelic Berga.12

11 Cf. The Erl King (1986) or Sonata (1991). 12 Online: http://iam.caotic.net/play.php (accessed 14/11/2017).

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Digital media projects not only gesture towards modularity and the dissolution of linear-non-linearity. “‘iAm’ is an online short-film editing engine that generates pseudo-infinite instances of the same story” (Berga et al. 2016: 308). The academic experiment explores how the database as fundamental concept of software and computer-based design could work together with the notion of narrative more effectively. Whether consciously or not, “every filmmaker”, Manovich notes, “engages with the database-narrative problem” (2001: 237–8). Although theoretically combinable in a myriad of ways, the large choice of shots accumulated for the production of a film is usually burnt down during editing to an immutable montage. Triggered by a click on the play-button (see Fig. 1), the user interface of iAm visualizes how shots are accessed and selected from the database according to a prescribed pattern. The server-software edits them in real time13 into “a unique video” (ibid.) and encodes the resulting version of the film for online viewing. “This solution”, media artist-scholar Quelic Berga and his colleagues write, “allows the control of the flow and rhythm of the film, ensuring it makes sense and stays coherent, and at the same time maintaining a possibility of the greatest number of combinations” (2016: 315). Another recent attempt of advancing the computer from a mere technician to a central player in the creative process is the short film Sunspring (2016). In the context of The London International Festival of Science Fiction and Fantastic Film and its 48hr Film Challenge,14 filmmaker Oscar Sharp and artificial intelligence (AI) researcher Ross Goodwin created the long short-term memory recurrent neural network Benjamin. Benjamin is a particular type of AI that was trained to produce the screenplay for the film automatically based on a data set of online sourced science fiction movies. In Sunspring as well as iAm, software-based technology is explicitly involved in the creative decisions needed for arriving at a filmic output. Yet, the idea of a more or less final cut linearly fixed in time is largely left intact. When the computer is suddenly assigned such decisive tasks, it remains rather difficult to produce a satisfactory outcome within the framework of causal linearity and the material constraints of film. As Pat Cadigan, one of the judges of the 48hr Film Challenge, so tellingly commented in response to Sunspring: “I’ll give them top marks if they promise never to do this again”.15

13 Generally, real time refers to the direct response of a computer system to a user’s input. This is also known as interactive processing. 14 The contestants of the Sci-Fi-London 48hr Film Challenge are given a set of prompts to write, shoot, edit and finish a short film over a period of two days. See: http://48hour.sci-fi-london. com/ (accessed 14/05/2018). 15 https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/06/an-ai-wrote-this-movie-and-its-strangely-moving/ (accessed 16/11/2017).

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Nonfiction Collaborations with the Computer The aim of this book is to take a closer look at the margins of the film industry and investigate to what extent ‘the digital’ is, indeed, challenging and changing well-established customs of the trade. If computers are imagined to be universal machines capable of simulating any media including those yet to be invented, why do they still play such minor roles within the creative process of filmmaking? While used to evermore sophisticatedly emulate the industry-standard of the classical narrative feature, software-based technology could reinvent the (materially informed) poetics and politics of film. As has been outlined above, divergences from linear storytelling are rather scarce in the area of fiction filmmaking. Often, these are avant-garde experiments that transgress established limits but fail to gain traction with a wider audience. Shifting the focus to audiovisual nonfiction, however, reveals a noticeably more nuanced landscape of projects, some of which come strikingly close to Manovich and his envisioned scenario. Introducing the VIEW Journal’s special issue on Non-fiction Transmedia, media and communications scholar Arnau Gifreu-Castells and his co-editors note that interactive digital media have greatly affected the logics of production, exhibition and reception of non-fiction audiovisual works, leading to the emergence of a new area called ‘interactive and transmedia non-fiction’ (2016: 1).

This new area comprises a diverse and ever-growing number of filmmakers, artists and research-practitioners who experiment with the possibilities enabled by software-based technologies. Produced in the context of documentary, journalistic and ethnographic praxis, these digital media projects utilize database structures, integrate social media channels, introduce game elements and generate immersive environments with the help of augmentation, 3608, virtual reality (VR) and motion capture technology.16 They take on different forms, use different types of media assets (from filmed or found footage to computergenerated imagery) and follow different aesthetic principles. They are showcased online, in exhibition spaces, on mobile touchscreens, in cinema theaters or via a head mounted display. Currently grouped under broad headings such as 16 Amongst the projects regarded as most influential are productions commissioned by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) including the Highrise series (2010; 2011), Fort McMoney (2013) or Bear 71 (2013). Other much-discussed works include the Quipu Project (2015) as well as the VR documentaries by journalist Nonny de la PeÇa. For a comprehensive overview, cf. MIT Open Documentary Lab’s website “Docubase”, which provides a curated archive of works “that both exemplify and press the limits of the documentary in its many new forms”: https://docubase.mit.edu/about/ (accessed 21/11/2017).

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interactive documentary17 or New Documentary Ecologies (Nash et al. 2014), creative works positioned within this rather elusive field share at least two commonalities: 1) They pursue a documentary intent (in the widest sense) and 2) their emphasis lies on interactivity as key principle for an enhanced ‘user engagement’. Accordingly, early theoretical pioneers in the field, Sandra Gaudenzi and Judith Aston argue: “[A]ny project that starts with an intention to document the ‘real’ and that uses digital interactive technology to realize this intention can be considered an interactive documentary” (2012: 125–6). These projects draw on and seek to extend what documentary scholar Stella Bruzzi called negotiation (cf. 2000: 4) by involving viewers and other participants more actively in the creative process and outcome (cf. Aston and Gaudenzi 2012: 128; Gaudenzi 2013: 17–8). According to documentary scholar Craig Hight, such formal and thematic negotiations could also encompass collaborations with the very machines that enable and govern this “creative treatment of data structures” (2014a: 246). Given its continuously evolving and diversifying character, this area of media praxis appears ideally suited to pursue questions regarding the role of softwarebased technology and its impact on filmmaking. To what extent is computation included in creative decisions and advances from a mere technician to that of a collaborator? In which climate are works distinctive to software culture flourishing and what drives their creation? How have digital innovations, indeed, contributed to a transformation of nonfiction filmmaking? By that I mean a transformation that encompasses not only new and more tightly interwoven modes of production, distribution and reception. I am also referring to significant deviations from the notion of film and the conventions established in accordance with its former material constraints. The publication at hand seeks to address some of these pressing questions from an ethnographic perspective. Specifically, it presents two case studies of and a meditation on a set of practices emerging within contemporary documentary and ethnographic filmmaking. The production of representations committed to the dissemination of knowledge about the world is of particular interest due to the long-standing debates about the limitations and challenges of (audio-)visual mediation. Therefore, special emphasis is placed on the ideologies underpinning digital trends currently surfacing in these fields of media praxis. In what ways are modularity, non-linearity and other digital principles used to generate knowledge about the 17 Probably one of the most prominent terms, interactive documentary is commonly abbreviated as “i-docs” and was coined by Sandra Gaudenzi who co-initiated the biennial “iDocs” Symposium in 2011 and devoted her dissertation to the development of an analytic approach to and taxonomy of Living Documentaries (2013). Later, she also introduced the terms “interactive factuals” and “interfactuals”, which, however, did not gain the same traction. See: http://www.interactivefactual.net/ (accessed 19/12/2017).

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world? Which production languages are developed to create such computermediated encounters? Which reasons support and justify a divergence from the linear sequentiality and narrative orientation of film and what forms and modes of knowledge emerge instead? The following paragraphs will offer a brief survey of the current status quo in software-based nonfiction filmmaking. Against this backdrop, I will argue that the common use of software and how it affects the ways (audio-)visual practitioners experience and creatively engage with the sound- and sightscapes of the world constitute a research desideratum. The main intention of this postgraduate project, then, is to attend to this desideratum and critically reflect on the creative strategies employed in approaching software-based technologies, which are themselves strongly inflected by particular conceptions of filmmaking. This will be demonstrated on the basis of a single computer program named the Korsakow System.18

Between Stylistic Liberty and Media Deficiency The concepts Aston and Gaudenzi’s definition builds on come with some baggage, to say the least. Interactivity is a widespread term standing in for the promise of enhanced user engagement. As such, it is misleading because technically, “the media is reactive to user input from a defined subset of possibilities rather than interactive with users” (Hudson and Zimmermann 2015: 4, original emphasis). Although it has been subject to a range of analytical approaches coming out of different research traditions (cf. McMillan 2002), interactivity still appears as an undertheorized concept (cf. Schönhagen 2004: 19; Quiring and Schweiger 2006: 5). Nevertheless, recent theoretical efforts in interactive documentary have steered towards establishing a more systematic and multidimensional understanding, which combines the possible actions offered by a system with the actual experience of its users (cf. Nash 2014a). Suffice it to say at this point that the term describes a variety of potentialities for opening up the documentary project, technically as well as conceptually. Documentary, on the other hand, has been heavily debated and even negated due to its central dialectic: “[I]t is not like fiction and it is like fiction” (Huck and Kiefer 2007: 103). Alluding to the problems involved in this dual relationship to reality, filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha famously writes: “There is no such thing as documentary – whether the term designates a category of material, a genre, an approach, or a set of techniques” (1990: 76). This struggle for definition is indicative of the aesthetic and generic processes of hybridization that have, in a way, been part of the 18 See: http://korsakow.com/ (accessed: 11/02/2020).

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“creative treatment of actuality” (Grierson 1933: 8) all along. Regardless of the generic group, film always creates a space of both, realistic and imaginary experience, according to cultural anthropologist and media scholar Philipp Blum (cf. 2013: 104–5). Thus, it is also the need of a viewing experience to ‘feel real’ (cf. Näser 2008: 1) that reinforces the steady reproduction of genre conventions such as strategies of authentication.19 Whether documentary is approached from the side of makers and their creative decisions or theorized as a mode of reception (cf. Andris 2011: 46; Eitzen 1995), it is embedded within a field of discourse still circulating around the hallmarks of truth-claims and factuality. Without losing the thread in endless terminological clarifications and confusions, I will briefly follow up one question that suggests itself if we assume these recent developments subsumed under the term interactive documentary to be rooted in a common generic background. Why does nonfiction filmmaking, in contrast to its fictional counterpart, occur as more prone towards destabilizing film, filmmaker and film viewership by incorporating computational principles? First of all, throughout its history, the documentary mode has been understood as a rather fluid concept accommodating a variety of often contradictory poetics and politics. Although linear storytelling has become central, the genre relies on the combination of different elements including poetic experimentation and rhetorical oratory (cf. Nichols 2001: 88–98). Not least due to the influences of technological innovation, various modes and styles have evolved over time, some of which also work with non- or less narrative structures (cf. Nichols 1991: 32–75; Lipp 2012: 51–111). In the late 1950s and early 1960s, for example, the advent of lightweight 16 mm portable cameras, zoom lenses and, later, synchronized sound equipment affected documentary practices substantially and, together with other socio-material aspects, contributed to the emergence of Anglo-American Direct Cinema and French Cin8ma v8rit8. In both cases, the ease of movement enabled by the new sociotechnical configuration directly fertilized distinctive stylistic and theoretical approaches. In the first, the camera attained the status of an omnipresent and 19 Following media scholar Klaus Kreimeier, documentary images have to be authenticated in certain ways to be perceived and acknowledged as valid and credible (1997: 30). The shaky, hand-held camera aesthetic is a widely noted example. In the context of social, cultural and visual anthropology, the issue of authenticity has been subject to heated debates, not least due to the growing discontent in the 1970s and 80s over the constructed and fictional character of ethnographic representations (cf. Geertz 1988; Ballhaus 1995). While creative treatments were initially dismissed as unscientific manipulations, narrativization, reenactment and other procedures are now seen as inevitable to “reveal something about the world” (Huck and Kiefer 2007: 109) and have turned into essential tools for ethnographic and documentary filmmakers. As a category of reception, however, the significance of authenticity persists and even extends into new media forms and platforms including YouTube (cf. Näser 2008).

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unobtrusive “fly-on-the-wall” (Crawford 1992: 78) that could capture the unfolding of an event in presumably immediate and, thus, more ‘authentic’ ways. In the latter, the camera’s presence was amplified as a tool for addressing and intervening in socio-cultural processes (cf. Rouch 2003: 29–46). Reflected upon and, to some extent, adopted by visual anthropologists, these strands were developed into an observational approach for ethnographic filmmaking that is closely tied to the method of participant observation and tends to avoid narrativizing devices such as commentary or interviews (cf. Young 1975: 99–114). Documentarians have also tested a wide range of representational forms and communicative contexts. Although closely tied to film as its main point of material and aesthetic reference, the documentary concept has traversed literature, theater, film, television, and radio. It is displayed on big and small screens, in exhibition spaces, and, last but not least, the internet. Media scholar William Uricchio describes this “innovative formal tradition” as a crucial point for steadily enabling documentary “to take on radically different realities and to deploy radically different approaches to explore them” (2017: 193–4). He understands digital projects as a continuation of the series of experimentation and innovation set in motion by documentary’s actuality claim. In contrast to fiction storytellers, he argues, documentary makers enjoy greater stylistic liberty since “they can turn their focus away from world-building to the task of world-revealing” (2017: 193, original emphasis). Freed from the requirement to establish the rules of the represented world, documentary praxis and discourse would focus on content rather than form.20 Scholar of media and culture, Ersan Ocak (2012) also attests an experimental formal tradition to documentary but finds a rather different explanation. He draws on documentary theorist Bill Nichols (2001: 101) to suggest that, due to the constantly changing set of circumstances, a “sense of dissatisfaction” (2012: 960) drives each generation of documentary filmmakers to explore new, potentially better ways of representing socio-cultural phenomena. Indeed, it seems questioning the constructed character of mediation has become a widespread habitus, not only in documentary but also in ethnographic scholarship (cf. Weidle 2018: 414). Whether it is a perception of stylistic liberty or one of media deficiency, the particular circumstances of production at any given point in time doubtlessly have been central to the critical interrogation of established documentary modes and the introduction of new ones. “To some extent”, Nichols states, each mode of documentary representation arises in part through a growing sense of dissatisfaction among filmmakers with a previous mode. In this sense the modes do 20 As has been previously pointed out (cf. Gaudenzi 2013) and will be demonstrated empirically throughout this book, rule-making is in fact becoming a central aspect of documentary and ethnographic engagements with software-based technologies.

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convey some sense of a documentary history. The observational mode of representation arose, in part, from the availability of mobile 16 mm cameras and magnetic tape recorders in the 1960s. Poetic documentary suddenly seemed too abstract and expository documentary too didactic when it now proved possible to film everyday events with minimal staging or intervention (2001: 100).

To unfold their persuasive stance, naturally, documentary modes and their acceptability change depending on the prevalent worldviews and available media technologies of the time (cf. van de Port 2011: 88). Given the rapid developments in computer technology and their enormous impact on our everyday life, yet another mode is on the brink of contesting previous ways of mediating encounters with the world. With the mode of interactive negotiation, however, it seems documentary makers and thinkers are looking for more than simply adding another conceptual layer to the issue of representing reality. In fact, this mode implies a shift in category and, thus, signals dissatisfaction with the very notion of representation itself.

A Shift in Ideology Between the poles of rendering an empirical reality as accurate as possible and a creative but self-reflexive negotiation of it, the latter is clearly emphasized if not taken to a new extreme in the discourse emerging around interactive documentary. As Gaudenzi notes, “the act of negotiation now implies direct participation by the user to the construction of the world that is portrayed” (2013: 18). Although varying in degree, this “direct participation” repositions viewers as ‘users’, ‘interactors’21 or even ‘co-creators’ who perform (inter-)actions that coconstitute the documentary project and claim. Refugee Republic (2014),22 for example, invites its users to explore the everyday life of Syrian refugees by clicking on an interactive map. The Quipu Project (2015)23 offers the chance to listen and respond to the recorded messages of Peruvian men and women who became victims of forced sterilization. In Journey to the End of Coal (2008)24 the deaths of Chinese coal miners can be investigated and in The Machine to Be 21 In her well-known Hamlet and the Holodeck (1998), Murray already used the term to describe the readers of digital narrative fiction. By now, it has also been adopted to characterize the users of interactive documentary, cf. Gifreu-Castells’ post to the i-docs blog on “Basic Characteristics of the Interactive Documentary”: http://i-docs.org/2011/12/25/basic-cha racteristics-of-the-interactive-documentary-featuring-the-interactive-documentary-ii/ (accessed 10/01/2018). 22 See: https://refugeerepublic.submarinechannel.com/ (accessed 17/05/2018). 23 See: https://interactive.quipu-project.com/#/en/quipu/intro (accessed May 17/05/2018). 24 See: http://www.lemonde.fr/asie-pacifique/visuel/2008/11/17/voyage-au-bout-du-charbon_ 1118477_3216.html (accessed 17/05/2018).

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Another (2014)25 VR technology is paired with full-body movements to experience the world from the perspective of another person. The focus on performativity can hardly be overlooked. Negotiating the world and different experiences of it is not confined to the act of filming (cf. Bruzzi 2000: 4) but also derives from acts of clicking, writing, walking, generating content and more. In conjunction with the computational processes running underneath, every usage scenario enacts a particular version of the work. Is this the shift away from the sequential and narrative orientation of film towards an embrace of more native computational capabilities Manovich envisioned for Hollywood productions? After all, facilitating possibilities for performative (inter-)action might very well “complicate or even undermine the principles of narrative logic”, as filmmaker Amir Husak (2014) observes with reference to the obstacles he encountered when building the web documentary Dayton Express (2009).26 Although technically more sophisticated, direct participation and negotiation are not entirely new concepts in nonfiction film as an expressive and affective media format. Moreover, linearity, representation and interpretation still play a vital yet differently pronounced role in the majority of these interactive projects, most commonly with regard to story.27 This is hardly a surprise when a large number of practitioners working in the field of interactive and transmedia nonfiction still passes through the same schoolings, institutions and contexts that produce more traditional forms (cf. Nash 2012: 197). Their approach to digital media is informed by professional backgrounds that heavily depend on linear storytelling (cf. Nichols 2001: 88–98), not least due to the materiality of the tools these media industries traditionally employ. Further progressions into computer-driven infrastructures require different skillsets, and multi-disciplinary collaborations become necessary, which easily provoke tensions among different creative industries and conventions. In her series of interviews with interactive documentary makers, Gaudenzi (2017) observed such a tension between the social praxis of filmmaking and interactive design. Although she found her participants generally agreeing on user-centered methodologies common in design, the filmmakers amongst them struggled putting them into practice because it implied a surrendering of authorial control. She concludes, “merging methodologies of work go beyond the practical adoption of new processes, touching upon core beliefs of individual responsibilities and power structures within a team” (2017: 118). Given the profound consequences for

25 See: http://www.themachinetobeanother.org/ (accessed 17/05/2018). 26 See: http://www.daytonexpress.net/ (accessed 17/08/2018). 27 In his presentation at the 22nd Visible Evidence conference in Toronto in 2015, Miles strongly criticized story for being the blind spot of interactive documentary theory. See: https://www. academia.edu/15099940/What_is_it_for_if_not_story (accessed 23/10/2018).

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these rather opposing forms of expertise, a common language for making interactive documentary is yet to be invented. Hence, many of the web-based documentaries I encountered during my research do exhibit transgressions from the standard film model. But when filmmaking professionals and associated stakeholders take a leading role in the production process, they are likely to aim for a final outcome that still makes sense according to a causal-linear schema. Following a process that hypertext and new media scholars David Bolter and Richard Grusin would describe as “remediation” (1999: 45),28 television and the internet mainly served as broadcasting and distribution platforms before their specific capacities were explored in their own right and would pave the way for formal innovations. In the context of interactive documentary, Jon Dovey and Mandy Rose draw on Bolter and Grusin (1999) when they remark, that “[u]ntil now, web video has been impervious to its networked context, reproducing the conditions of the TV screen in a hypermediated space” (2012: 159). With the shift from HTML to HTML5 as current standard for structuring and formatting web documents, however, the character of video has been changing gradually. Now, it is more ‘native’, meaning it is integrated further into the complex infrastructures of the web (cf. Keen 2014: 19; Dovey and Rose 2012: 159). These changes also bear significant implications for online documentary. It has become much easier, for example, to link a project to databases and live feeds that exist elsewhere on the web.29 Accordingly, a few scholars have advanced the idea, with varying intensity, that questions of storytelling are misplaced in the field of interactive documentary (cf. Husak 2014; Miles 2016; Brasier 2018). While such a perspective is substantiated by a number of reasons, one of them stems from the fact that moving towards programming and design implies a shift in emphasis. Instead of focusing on content and “the task of world-revealing” (Uricchio 2017: 193, original emphasis), filmmakers need to reconsider the rules of the represented world.30 They (or their technically more versed colleagues) set the rules for 28 The concept refers to “the representation of one medium in another”, which Bolter and Grusin regard as “a defining characteristic of the new digital media” (1999: 45). For the role of narrative media in the context of cultural memory-making, cf. Erll 2009. 29 In Cizek’s One Millionth Tower (2011), for example, automatic search engines and APIs pull in content from other online sources including Flickr and Google Street View, which is then dynamically linked to the video-based content of the documentary. 30 Gaudenzi suggests a taxonomy based on the respective mode of interactivity used in a documentary project. These modes rely on the rules created by the author(s) to facilitate certain (inter-)actions (and restrain others). While in the “hypertext mode”, the author’s role would lie in imagining specific “rules of linking” (2013: 53), in the “participatory mode” s/he “sets the rules and modalities of participation and frames it by designing an interface that will orchestrate the digital documentary” (2013: 56). Ultimately, Gaudenzi understands

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interaction and in doing so design the conditions for potential negotiations.31 But who establishes these rules and to what extent are they malleable? Which norms, ethics and standards guide the preparation and segmentation of documentary material? Which linking mechanisms are employed to connect different media assets? What kind and scope of “direct participation” is encouraged, which user actions are constrained? It remains to be seen whether this increased attention to form and world-building actually supports a more suitable approach to the issue of mediating empirical realities. As Nichols cautions us, the introduction of a new mode is often accompanied by a rhetoric of “improvement” that easily conceals a mere shift in ideology : New modes signal less a better way to represent the historical world than a new dominant to organize a film, a new ideology to explain our relation to reality, and a new set of issues and desires to preoccupy an audience (2001: 102).

This dissertation looks at the materiality of interactive documentary – digital computation – and what it means for a creative engagement with the world to take this materiality seriously. Such an intention requires, in a science and technology studies tradition, an understanding of the intricate ways specific technologies and socio-material infrastructures interact with theories and practices of knowledge-making in nonfiction film-work. A possible starting point, therefore, is to critically scrutinize why, how, and under which circumstances the computer is employed, as Nichols puts it, “to explain our relation to reality” (2001: 102). Just as other authoring strategies, rule-making clearly bears strong political implications. Thus, it is important to ask which assumptions and motivations drive this evolving ideology and how is it affecting the practice of filmmaking? Are makers and thinkers of interactive documentary really trying to subvert dominant notions of representation inherited by the materiality of film and if so, what other regimes of mediation are they aiming to install in the process? What is truly new about these New Documentary Ecologies?

Through the Lens of Korsakow In order to gain a deeper insight into how digital audiovisual engagements with the world might contribute to new regimes of mediation, I argue for an examination of their underlying authoring strategies. Software marks a pivotal these rules as conveying different statements about the world and our roles in it (cf. 2013:19). As will be shown frequently throughout this book, rule-making is also an important aspect of engaging with the Korsakow System. 31 For that reason, Seth Keen, one of my research participants, has re-conceptualized documentary filmmakers as “documentary designers” (2018: 51).

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point for observing the ways in which particular strategies come into being and are chosen over others. The purpose of the present endeavor, however, is not to offer an extensive overview of the practices and discourses surrounding the tools adopted and developed for the production of interactive documentary works.32 It has been demonstrated above that this field accommodates a fast-growing and increasingly heterogeneous amalgam of differently sophisticated projects. As a common but diffuse frame of reference, interactive documentary as a specific genre, approach, or set of techniques slowly escapes terminological clarity and systematization. Therefore, this book focuses on a relatively minor but nonetheless significant subset of practices loosely associated with this terminology. More specifically, it follows the emergence of a particular approach that, facilitated by the Korsakow System, explicitly engages with the computer “beyond its use as mere instrumental tool” (Miles 2018: 27). Throughout the research presented here, I will show how such an approach disrupts “skilled visions” (Grasseni 2009, 2011) in filmmaking by turning towards discretization, nonlinearity, rules and other computational logics. Attending to what Manovich termed “media software”33 – the programs “used to create and interact with media objects and environments” (2013: 26) – seems natural for a visual anthropologist trained in the theory and practice of ethnographic filmmaking. After all, the intention to make a film raises awareness of (digital) materiality and its participation in generating and disseminating knowledge. Take, for example, the rather practical concerns involved in mastering the necessary technical equipment from the size and operability of the camera to the acquisition of editing skills and the often required teamwork. Custom-built solutions require hard coding skills and, correspondingly, bigger teams and budgets. Media software, on the contrary, represents an affordable (if not open-source), low-threshold, off-the-shelf entry point for the non-programming majority of filmmakers including ethnographers. On a secondary level of observation, software is increasingly recognized for its mediating role and, thus, offers a suitable lens for studying documentary poetics and politics emerging with and through digital computation (cf. Dovey and Rose 2012; Miles

32 For an overview of tools available, see: http://i-docs.org/2014/07/15/interactive-documen tary-tools/ (accessed 21/11/2017) or https://docubase.mit.edu/tools/ (accessed 9/01/2018). 33 Although placing special emphasis on media software, Manovich (cf. 2013: 32) follows his understanding of software as another dimension added to culture and introduces the term “cultural software” to describe “certain types of software that support actions we normally associate with culture” including communication services and the broader information ecology (ibid.: 21–2). However, for the present investigation it will suffice to take into consideration only programs that enable the “creation, publishing, accessing, sharing, and remixing” of different media assets on the web (ibid.: 26).

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2014; Hight 2014a, 2014b, 2017).34 According to Hight, each software program “embodies a particular conceptual approach to the creation of content, and while some replicate, simplify or semi-automate existing practices, others open new possibilities for imagining interactive documentary” (2017: 87). Every application is considerably different not only in the features it provides but in the ways it presents these to a potential user. Miles (cf. 2008: 10), for example, claims that the design of sound and video editing programs used in domestic, professional and pedagogic contexts largely directs creative efforts towards the authoring of linear, time-based objects that, theoretically, could be still published on tape or film. As such, these tools “provide numerous advantages […] compared to analogue editing”, he concludes, “but not require us as ‘authors’ or readers to question or rethink any of our assumptions about video as an object” (ibid.: 13). On the other end of the spectrum, there are software-based technologies that assume desktop computer, tablet or smartphone screens to be the publication environment. These programs are suggestive of a departure from existing regimes of mediation and I will take one of them as my case example. Initially developed in 2000 by German media artist Florian Thalhofer, the Korsakow System is a desktop application for authoring multimedia web content. Authoring software, according to digital artist-scholar Judy Malloy, may be programming languages, such as Pearl, Pascal, or C++, or they may be applications or scripts created with a programming language. Unless the resultant work is print, software is usually inherent to the work itself. Thus, a compiler, application, browser, or ‘player’ is needed to ‘run’ the work and could be considered a component of the authoring system (2014: 32).

At first glance, then, Korsakow stands next to Klynt,35 Racontr,36 Eko Studio37 and other software available for the production, distribution and access38 of webbased documentaries. Different in their specific interface designs, features and organization, all of these programs provide the possibility for authoring content to be published on the web. However, many of them display and inspire a certain 34 Nevertheless, there is still a notable lack of critical evaluation concerning software as central component of interactive documentary. This was also pointed out by Fabiola Hanna at the Poetics and Politics of Documentary Symposium 2017 at the University of Sussex. There, she drew on her own work to reflect on the central role of software for providing the backbone to the claims usually attached to interactive documentary including user participation, agency and co-creation. See: https://vimeo.com/221890526 (accessed 17/08/2018). 35 See: http://www.klynt.net/ (accessed 21/11/2017). 36 See: https://racontr.com/ (accessed 21/11/2017). Another important but now-defunct software for authoring interactive media projects was Mozilla’s Popcorn Maker. 37 See: https://studio.helloeko.com/ (accessed 19/11/2018). 38 With increased regularity, functionalities of creation, distribution and access converge in one and the same tool, obscuring the lines between these traditionally established phases of media production.

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degree of continuity with conventions stemming from “the material hegemony of video and film” Miles identified (2008: 10). Klynt, for example, facilitates the creation of multiple pathways by means of linking discrete media assets. Similar to a branching tree,39 these pathways rely on well thought out narrative schemes that are organized on a visual storyboard as depicted in Figure 2.40 The storyboard is, in fact, the very first thing a user sees when opening a project in Klynt.

Fig. 2 Klynt’s Visual Storyboard. T2018 Honkytonk Films.41

Korsakow, too, allows for and encourages the organization and presentation of multiple connections between media assets (mostly video clips, still images and text). Linking individual units, sometimes also referred to as “lexias or nodes” (cf. Malloy 2014: 35, original emphasis), is certainly not new in the history of authoring software. Less common is the way relations between shots and sequences are established in Korsakow. Miles, who tuned into one of my primary interlocutors throughout this research project, told me in our first interview that Korsakow’s linking mechanism reminded him of Eastgate’s Storyspace42 and its “deep hypertextuality” (Interview Oct. 26, 2015). Storyspace was originally created by Jay David Bolter, Michael Joyce and John B. Smith. The now consumer-market system became central to electronic fiction and nonfiction 39 The branching tree concept is crucial for maintaining a narrative mode within interactive documentary practices and will be elaborated more in depth in the conclusion. 40 In our joint presentation at the 7th European Communication Conference 2018 in Lugano, Quelic Berga also compared Klynt’s storyboard with DVD authoring software. 41 Taken from the Klynt website: http://support.klynt.net/customer/portal/articles/183353-1introducing-the-storyboard (accessed 14/01/2018). 42 See: http://eastgate.com/storyspace/ (accessed: 22/10/2018).

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writing. Joyce’s afternoon, a story (1990) and Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden (1992) are among the most famous examples that came to stand in for the second wave of hypertext theory in literary studies. Most significantly, Storyspace’s text editor allows for the composing of one-to-many relations, which are (semi-) automatically generated during the reading and running of the work (cf. Rau 2014: 477). Fueled by this specific software design, artist-scholars of the second wave argued for the development of different hermeneutic attitudes that treat hypertext as relying on cycles (cf. Bernstein 1997) and rhythms of recurrence (cf. Ciccoricco 2007: 49). Figure 3 shows how so-called SNUs, smallest narrative units, can be tagged with IN- and OUT-keywords in Korsakow’s SNU editor. As a result of such tagging (or rule-making) activities, different types of connections are generated in real time amongst the discrete parts of an exported media project. In his materialist media analysis of Korsakow’s programmatic functions, Miles explains: [W]hen viewing a K-film the current video clip’s ‘out’ keywords are used by the runtime engine to find matching text strings that have been applied to the ‘in’ keyword of clips – in other words out keywords are matched to in keywords. Where the engine finds a match the results are displayed as clickable thumbnail images within an interface, and if one of these thumbnails is then selected by a viewer then, in turn, the video associated with that thumbnail is loaded, played, and that video’s ‘out’ words are used as search terms to match against the ‘in’ words for other clips in the project library (2014: 211).

Whether the video clips share linear, multilinear or completely random connections is up to the author and his or her keyword design. The linking possibilities Korsakow makes available are familiar options to theoreticians and practitioners coming out of a background in hypertext. Yet, the software also significantly diverts from Storyspace and other web authoring tools in the workflow it facilitates. While the text editor in Storyspace (just as the visual storyboard in Klynt) provides a canvas on which node connections can be mapped out spatially and/or sequentially, in Korsakow no previsualization is provided for the interlinked SNUs and their rule-governed behavior. It will become apparent throughout this book that this feature is missing for a reason. In order to see the structure of the film, the project needs to be exported into a web-playable bundle and interacted with via the browser interface. Among other things, this design choice is meant to encourage makers to surrender control and collaborate with the runtime engine from the outset. Only then can the many shapes of the work evolve generatively. Instead of emphasizing user agency and empowerment, here, software becomes amplified as “inherent to the work itself”

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Fig. 3 Korsakow’s SNU Editor. T Korsakow Institut. Screenshot of a test project by F.W.

(Malloy 2014: 32) but also as crucial component of the editing, viewing and distributing process. There are at least two central points of interest when it comes to Korsakow as a case example for studying software-mediated, documentary authoring strategies. First, it brings together two very different creative practices, skillsets, and work methodologies – that of cinematic storytelling and that of programming deep hypertextuality, or rather hypermediality. Second, its particular design lets the computer advance from a mere technician to an essential agent in the making and viewing of documentary works and, thereby, supports the emergence of a new understanding of mediation. In our email interview, David Reisch, one of Korsakow’s chief programmers, hinted at this point when asked to describe Korsakow’s uniqueness: I think what is special about Korsakow is less what it lets you do – which is to produce multimedia web presentations – and more about how it encourages you to do so. Of course, Korsakow provides a platform – a higher-level abstraction with which to produce content, but in the end, anyone with enough programming knowledge could make their own non-linear web films. Korsakow is special in that everything in the interface and the way it works is oriented around a non-linear experience (Nov. 12, 2017; emphasis added).

This encouragement towards non-linearity is what sets Korsakow apart from other media software currently used in interactive documentary and what opens up new possibilities for re-imagining digital audiovisual engagements with the world beyond the material constraints of film and video.43 43 Although generative combinatory filmmaking is nothing new in the field of narrative fiction

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Linearity is Over(rated)44 Behind the non-linear bias Reisch described lies a particular worldview propagated by Thalhofer under the catchphrase “the Korsakow-Way-Of-Thinking”.45 There are numerous interviews I could quote from where Thalhofer tells the story, similar to a myth of origin almost, of how turning towards the computer ultimately liberated him from the linear way of thinking film imposes on us: The beauty of computers is that they can free you from this linear way of thinking. But it is difficult; we don’t really understand how to do it. We have a lot of knowledge about how to tell linear stories, more than 120 years of film history in fact. We’re still learning how to tell stories in a non-linear way, but there’s a universe of stories that can’t be done in a linear way and when we can achieve this it comes closer to what we experience in real life; we take bits and pieces and put them together ourselves. Putting things into a linear structure doesn’t feel natural to me (Thalhofer in Nash 2014b, 193–4).

Evoking well-known statements in documentary theory such as Minh-ha’s (cf. 1990: 76) controversial contention that there would be “no such thing as a documentary film”,46 Thalhofer continuously voices his frustration with the manipulative power and narrow mindedness of linear narrative film. To him, it neither adequately conveys the complexity of the world, nor our inherently nonlinear experience of it. “Computers”, he claims, “don’t want stuff linear”, which is why they offer an alternative to the materiality of film and the principles it suggests to make sense of the world (in Nash 2014b: 193).47 Giving the software its first shape and name in the context of his studies at the University of the Arts in Berlin, Thalhofer created Korsakow version 1 in Adobe (previously Macromedia) Director.48 The application was meant to help him realize his final film project about a neurological condition often related to excessive alcohol consumption and characterized by severe memory loss – the

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(cf. Toxi City: A Climate Change Narrative (2016): http://www.crchange.net/toxicity/ (accessed 22/08/2018) or Three Rails Live (2011)), it is still a territory barely explored in documentary and ethnographic filmmaking. This expression is taken from the title of a talk Korsakow inventor Florian Thalhofer gave at the Belo Center for New Media at the University of Texas in 2013. See: http://news.thalhofer. com/2013/03/talk-in-texas/ (accessed 9/11/2018). See: http://pha.de/about-pha/ (accessed 12/01/2018). See: http://pha.de/texte/the-monkey-drowns-an-interview-with-florian-thalhofer-aboutnonlinear-storytelling-and-korsakow/ (accessed 12/01/2018). Another example where Thalhofer voiced similar ideas can be found in an interview he gave at the Universidade Lusjfona: https://www.ulusofona.pt/lessons/florian-thalhofer (accessed 22/08/2018). Director is an authoring system to create interactive multimedia presentations for Windows and MAC OS. They can also be used across platforms in web-browsers on- and offline if combined with the Shockwave-Plugin.

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Korsakow syndrome (2000). Willem Velthoven, one of his former professors, invited him to co-teach a studio on “Interactive Narration” in which the students could use the application to make their own interactive films. From 2007 to 2014, Matt Soar and Monica Kin Gagnon initiated the software’s complete redesign at the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University in Montreal. With this support, Korsakow gained academic attention. Since then Thalhofer has been presenting Korsakow at documentary festivals and international conferences on film and media studies. He made his application available to other media practitioners, first as an open-source tool for small-scale projects under the GNU General Public License49 and later as paid software. Besides regularly teaching workshops, he set up a Facebook group connecting the growing Korsakow community globally. Over time, this group has turned into a ‘living manual’ for its members to discuss common issues and share work. Thalhofer emphasizes that the software originated from his lack of knowledge about storytelling. Yet, over the years of developing subsequent versions, producing evermore ‘K-films’ and advertising his ideas to a small but growing interested public, he realized that Korsakow was more than a principle for (re-)structuring stories via computational means. Gradually, it emerged as key component of a philosophy seeking “a better understanding for the complexity of the world”:50 Using Korsakow is an exercise that teaches a different way of understanding and thinking. It is different from the linear way that we practice so much with linear narrations. Humans are developing increasingly complex societies, and this is only possible with better and better skills to understand multiple perspectives. Korsakow is a tool that trains those skills (Thalhofer et al. 2018: 109).

Reflecting on his own learning experience, Thalhofer believes that his tool encourages less linearly fixed and more flexible ways of thinking.51 It helps filmmakers to identify that “there is not just one meaningful order” but many possible relations and perspectives (ibid.: 109). In one of our interviews, he even spoke of Korsakow as a yoga exercise to internalize the multifacetedness of the world (Interview Feb. 4, 2017). While initially criticized for their closed and limited degree of interactivity within the academic discourse (cf. O’Flynn 2012: 146; Gaudenzi 2013: 100–24), recently Korsakow documentaries have been reconsidered as “affective tools for thought” (Wiehl 2016: np). Slowly developing a life of its own, the system has gained in importance, not only as part of the 49 See: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html (accessed 12/01/2018). 50 See: http://pha.de/about-pha/ (accessed 12/01/2018). 51 Similarly, early hypertext theoreticians proclaimed that a dynamic, non-linear organization of information would come closer to the ways thoughts are stored and processed in the brain (cf. Bush 1945; Nelson 1965).

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theorization of interactive documentary52 but also in pedagogic contexts aiming to equip students with new media skills and literacies.53 One of these pedagogic contexts became a central field of interest for my research project. Located in RMIT University’s School of Media and Communication, the Melbourne-based non/fictionLab is an interdisciplinary research center dedicated to the exploration of new fiction and nonfiction work through an array of practices from creative writing to audio-/visual media-making and performance. Inspired by Adrian Miles, a practice-based researcher who made, thought and taught with Korsakow extensively from 2011 to 2018, several documentary scholars affiliated with the Lab started investigating the potentials of software-based technologies through their use of Korsakow. Between October 2015 and March 2016, I conducted the first phase of ethnographic fieldwork at the Lab to study the local role played by Korsakow. During this time, I became well acquainted with the core members of the documentary strand including Miles and his former postgraduate research students Hannah Brasier, Kim Munro and Seth Keen. What stood out for me as a camera-led ethnographer in this environment was the way Korsakow appeared as pedagogical interface. Through its lens, relationality came into view as an important aspect of mediating the complexity of the world.

Computational Nonfiction The approach to Korsakow practiced, theorized and taught by Miles, his colleagues and students resonates with and partly draws on the advent of a new intellectual paradigm in social and cultural theory that derives from diverse yet interlinked perspectives coming out of actor-network theory, environmental philosophy, speculative realism and new (or neo-)materialism (cf. Vannini 2015: 3). Generally referred to as non-representational theory (e. g. Lorimer 2005; Thrift 2008; Vannini 2015), these perspectives share an understanding of life as an emergent interplay of human and nonhuman, living and non-living things and forces. A relational, more-than-representational, more-than-human re52 One of the indications for such a shift in status is Gaudenzi’s and her colleagues repeated invitation for Thalhofer to speak at the i-Docs symposium. The fourth iteration in 2016 even featured a section on “tools for thought” dedicated to discussing software including Korsakow. See: http ://i-docs.org/about-interactive-documentary-idocs/i-docs-symposium/ (accessed 21/08/2018). 53 Among the scholars who have adopted Korsakow into their teaching practice are Matt Soar at Concordia University, Scott Wilson at California State University, Jennifer Proctor at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, Jennifer Cool at the University of Southern California, Paolo Favero at the University of Antwerp and, last but not least, Adrian Miles at RMIT in Melbourne.

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search practice seeks a “correspondence” with the world, as Tim Ingold formulates, in the sense not of coming up with some exact match or simulacrum for what we find in the things and happenings going on around us, but of answering to them with interventions, questions and responses of our own (2015: vii, original emphasis).

According to Phillip Vannini, the research style developing from this angle is not one that rejects representation but that shifts its focus from the past to the present and future: [W]hat truly distinguishes the non-representational research from others is a different orientation to the temporality of knowledge, for non-representationalists are much less interested in representing an empirical reality that has taken place before the act of representation than they are in enacting multiple and diverse potentials of what knowledge can become afterwards (2015: 12).

Returning to interactive documentary, there appears to be a remarkable resemblance between non-representational methodologies and the aim to open up the documentary project towards possible negotiations waiting to be actualized between different actors: filmmakers, users, data structures, and technologies. Yet, the theoretical potentials of such a performative idiom are largely constrained by conceptions and conventions connected to representationalism. Most importantly, creative experimentation in this area is stalled by a notion of authorship that centers on human agency as leading force in the creative process, mapping, taking control over and full credit for the final shape of the work.54 In such a setting, the conditions for interaction are clearly defined to meet expected ends. With his analysis of Alisa Lebow’s Filming Revolution (2018), Miles provided an illustrative example of the hesitation and resistance frequently displayed in the face of more radical deviations from the standard narrative model. According to him, Lebow’s web-based documentary about Egyptian media-making in the time of revolution actively refuses to be a story and instead, uses a node-link structure […] to enable relations that are vectors of movement between its bits of media. There is little structural or functional distinction as to whether these bits are people, interviews, notes, works, themes, projects, or ideas. This produces a visual and architectural flatness that literally avoids the peaks and valleys of narrative, and is closer to the list than it is to story or even database (Miles 2016: np). 54 This became one of the central issues discussed at the 24th Visible Evidence conference in 2017. Due to the funding structures in place, documentary filmmakers are often obligated to define the final shape of their research outcome long before the actual shooting and editing starts. As part of what Ingold calls the “hylomorphic model” (cf. 2011: 210–2), this approach to making will be elaborated in further detail in the epilog.

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Referring to Lebow’s show and tell at the i-Docs symposium 2016 in Bristol, he observes that “[s]ome in the audience thought otherwise, insisting that story was not only present in Filming Revolution, but inevitable” (ibid.). He explains this reaction as indicative of the pressure stemming from constructivist and linguistic approaches prevalent in the field to justify the avoidance of story and its descriptive, explanatory and cathartic promise in non-narrative nonfiction work. This is but one example that demonstrates the literary heritage of filmmaking, which has also become the dominant paradigm in currently expanding documentary practices. Outside (or at least on the fringes) of industry demands, a small group of research-practitioners has started to re-imagine software-based documentary beyond its representational orientation.55 Miles began theorizing this paradigm shift under the term “computational nonfiction” (2017, 2018). As an alternative framework of engagement with interactive documentary, it stresses “the agency of the computer in a robust way” and provides “a thicker theoretical milieu” by “acknowledging the materiality of video and digital media, and the actor-networks that interactivity entails” (2017: 2). Such a “cocreation” (Hight 2017: 88) with software could fertilize what Ingold calls “correspondence-thinking” (2017: 9). It shifts attention towards the unfolding relations between humans and materials during the authoring and running of a project and “allows us to imagine a world in which openness, rather than closure, is a fundamental condition of existence” (ibid.). The Korsakow System presents a suitable resource for developing the concept of computational nonfiction further. Due to its particular design, it disrupts not only naturalized conventions of filmmaking that are underwriting current trends in interactive documentary but also established forms of knowledge production and dissemination in anthropological scholarship. Actively co-creating with the system requires different hermeneutic attitudes and fuels different ways of knowing. The main intention of this doctoral thesis, thus, is to tease out the mechanisms of disruption that steer such (re-)learning processes. While it is certainly crucial to observe these processes within the contexts they thrive in, it is my contention that the disruptive power of software becomes tangible best by analyzing the introduction of technologies into new, to some extent hostile, environments. In this sense, my research design is experimental because it suggests an integrated and, in a way, speculative approach to theory and practice. It combines camera-ethnographic fieldwork with practice-based experiments and design interventions to unpack the mediating role of software and render it 55 Apart from Korsakow-based or inspired projects, other examples include We Feel Fine (2006) and Cowbird (2011–17) by Jonathan Harris, which strongly rely on the generative, procedural and relatively autonomous work of the computer. See: http://wefeelfine.org/ and http://cowbird.com (accessed 22/08/2018).

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palpable for an anthropological inquiry. As a result, the focus of this research slowly shifts from studying the learning process of the documentary researchpractitioners at the non/fictionLab to a critical reflection-in-action (cf. Schön 1987) within the context of a student research project conducted at the University of Goettingen. In a final meditation, I will dwell on the lessons learnt from trying to observe and describe the role of the computer as a nonhuman collaborator in both, interactive documentary and ethnographic knowledgemaking.

The Structure of this Book Computer hardware is moving from mechanical to electrical to virtual, from one core to many and from static to mobile. Software access is increasingly provided remotely. Data can be uploaded in and downloaded from clouds and code executions are buried within everyday objects. These developments allow evermore operations to be processed in a split second, not only inside the computer. Our attention and activities are augmented, networked and mediated but in ways that exceed human sense perception. Still, we experience, imagine and contest these necessarily black-boxed workings of code on a daily basis. As a result, established positions underwriting audiovisual representation are gradually destabilized including “the knowledge of sequence in time, which”, according to Nigel Thrift, “allows orderly and guaranteed repetition” (2004: 178, original emphasis). Modularity, random access and automation seem to lend themselves to an engagement with the emergent complexity of the world. Nevertheless, these principles can be difficult to grasp given the layered and, to some extent, obscuring design of software-based technologies. In order to lay the theoretical foundations for the proposed methodology to unfold, it is necessary to devote the second chapter of this book to another overworked yet diffuse term of interest for this research project: the digital with its slippery onto-epistemology (cf. Gottlieb 2018: 80). “When it comes to digital material”, Marianne van den Boomen and her colleagues note, “the lines separating objects, actions, and actors are hard to draw, as they are hybridized in technological affordances, software configurations and user interfaces” (2009: 10). The brief survey of key concepts and approaches in the fields of new media studies, software studies, critical code studies and digital anthropology provided in this chapter will, thus, lay the theoretical foundation of a working model for the study of media software as participant in situated socio-material gatherings (cf. Latour 2005: 114). The second and main part of this book is comprised of three published journal articles that, while utilizing different methodologies, all follow Korsakow and its mediating roles within creative processes throughout different fields of

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application and appropriation. This cumulative approach will demonstrate the multiple ways in which the system’s particular functionalities (cf. Miles 2014; Soar 2014; Hight 2017) are experienced as enabling and constraining the production of documentary and ethnographic representations. Even within a rather small “community of practice” (Lave and Wenger 1991), Korsakow’s design invites a number of perspectives. What unites them is the struggle to overcome central notions currently driving audiovisual engagements with the world. More specifically, the non-linear experience Korsakow fosters moves filmmaking closer to programming and programming closer to the suspension, not of disbelief56 but, of authorial control. In this sense, the here presented compilation of papers is also an example of how standardized software design and everyday usage have cultivated a regime of mediation that hinges on an imagined relationship between creative practitioners (whether filmmakers or programmers) and their materials. Lastly, this book contributes to the profiling of an ethnographic methodology to study software as an object of research but also to take its participation seriously in the context of (re-)doing visual anthropology. Published in VIEW’s aforementioned special issue, Korsakow Pespective(s) – Rethinking Documentary Knowledge in Digital Multilinear Environments (2016) outlines the results of the first fieldwork phase I conducted as visiting PhD scholar at RMIT University’s non/fictionLab between October 2015 and March 2016. During six months of camera-led participant observation and guided interviews, I was able to investigate closely how creative practices are developed around Korsakow and its particular conceptual framework. Adopting a praxeological approach and drawing on Cristina Grasseni’s “skilled visions” concept (2009; 2011) allowed me to identify common features running through the multisensory processes of learning and training in the local apprenticeship. Within this experimental, practice-based research milieu, Korsakow appeared as pedagogical interface through which its users could devise and test non-narrative engagements with the world. Liberated from the constraints of film, they started investigating what web-based documentary could become after linear storytelling. Yet, following these creative research practitioners into international conference settings also revealed that what seems promising to the Korsakow community is unsettling to film-based schoolings of the eye currently dominating the field of interactive documentary. The second paper depicts the introduction of Korsakow into the master course in ethnographic filmmaking at the University of Goettingen’s Depart56 What I am hinting at here and what I will elaborate on in the following chapter is the fetishistic logic of software (cf. Chun 2008: 300). Although users are aware of the fact that software-mediated representations such as folders or files are not really folders and files, they are willing to suspend their disbelief and treat them as if they were anyhow (cf. Laurel 1991 in Chun 2005: 41).

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ment of Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology, Germany. Together with my colleagues Torsten Näser and Frauke Paech, we developed a concept for the Curriculum Visual Anthropology (CVA) student project57 of 2015–17. The aim was to explore Korsakow’s potential as visualization tool for producing and disseminating ethnographic knowledge. Under the overall theme of imagemaking, we asked our students to conduct empirical research on different imaging practices with the help of the camera. Korsakow was intended to combine the footage our students would capture within a single online platform and enable cross-comparisons between the differently situated practices. By inserting the software into this particular learning environment, however, a number of challenges arose throughout the implementation phase of the project. Published in Anthrovision and co-authored by Näser, Software as Co-Teacher – How Korsakow Disrupted an Ethnographic Film Program (2017) critically reflects on the mutual constitution of technology and practice within the “materiality of learning” (Sørensen 2009) specific to this environment. Introducing Korsakow and the corresponding counter-practice developed at the non/fictionLab to a training course historically oriented towards linear narrative and observational filmmaking led to considerable disruptions of the established socio-material configuration. Under such circumstances, the software appeared as co-teacher, facilitating a meta-perspective on ethnographic film and its milieu-specific formatting principles. The final article presents a meditation on media software and its participation in advancing digital visual ethnography. Gaining Control over the Loss of It – Software as Focusing Media in Digital Visual Ethnography (2019) was published as part of a special section on Skilled Mediation edited by Grasseni and Thorsten Gieser in Social Anthropology. The concept of skilled mediation calls for an examination of the transformative processes media objects and devices enable, namely the conveying of skills through an open and reflexive engagement with materials. Following Grasseni and Gieser’s approach, this paper analyzes the ways in which Korsakow can direct ethnographic attention and action towards the layered complexity of digital media. Drawing on the learning processes engendered in me and the research participants of my previous case studies, Korsakow and Korsakow-driven technologies including cameras, editing software and social media applications can function as focusing media, attuning the senses towards the performative dimension of programming code. This attunement challenges and complements engagements with digital materiality in that it asks visual anthropologists to gain control over the loss of it. Suspending authorial control also implies a move away from the representational paradigm and towards a correspondence with the world in real time (cf. Gatt and Ingold 57 The CVA film program will be explained in great detail in Chapter 4.

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2013). Research designs that can be developed from such a skilled mediation are more permeable to the influences of the digital – a demand recently made by Pink and her colleagues (cf. 2016: 7–13). These designs seek dynamic collaborations with digital computation to help disrupt the present and (re-)imagine future possibilities rather than (re-)produce backward-looking accounts and static objects. The conclusion will combine the results of these three papers to convey a broader picture of the different roles played by digital materiality in the context of documentary and ethnographic filmmaking. Above all, it will highlight the importance of the interface as principle layer mediating underlying machine functions and, thereby, stimulating creative imaginations and enforcing particular ways of working. While mainstream interface design tends to draw on familiar metaphors such as desktops, timelines and branching trees to make software use more intuitive, Korsakow actively breaks with these conventions. In contrast to the “causal pleasure” (Chun 2005: 41) software usually perpetuates, Korsakow is built around a gap: the missing visualization tool. Structure cannot be pre-mapped in the desktop editor but emerges generatively by moving back and forth between the modes of making and viewing. However, the disruptive effects of this ‘unintuitive’ design can only be witnessed when actualized within a concrete situated practice. If embedded in a learning environment attentive and open to disruptions, the arising disconcertment can draw attention to the asymmetry of power (cf. Fuller and Cramer 2008: 150), which separates and simultaneously draws together human and computational capacities. Such an exercise is beneficial for both, documentary and ethnographic filmmakers. It destabilizes the notion of user agency and, thereby, supports a critical approach towards software and its active participation in creative (research) practices.

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In Search of the Digital: Towards a Framework for Studying Software

The previous chapter highlighted the pivotal but largely undermined part played by “the computer as media machine” (Manovich 2001: 46) in fiction and nonfiction filmmaking. On a basic level, it supports the digitization of film and video and, thus, offers ‘new’ forms of storage, display and distribution. Furthermore, it takes on the role of a technician replacing, automating and extending an array of previously laborious and skill-intensive tasks. Tapping further into its distinct capabilities, a small group of research-/practitioners has also begun recognizing the computer – through the lens of media software – as a collaborator engendering ‘new’ possibilities for producing and engaging with audiovisual work. In order to investigate how, why and under which circumstances software-based technologies can take on such decisive tasks within the creative process, we need to turn to the digital as central term and attribute of modern computer technology. What does digitality actually stand for? What is specific about it and why is it so frequently considered as qualitatively different from prior forms of expression in debates surrounding new media? Which approach is necessary to render its characteristics tangible and operable in the context of a visual anthropological research project interested in software-mediated filmmaking? In search of the digital, the following pages will provide a conceptual foundation on which the ontological and epistemological dimensions of the computer can be drawn out as constitutive of the tensions between established and emerging documentary practices. From cultural pessimism to celebration,1 scholars have debated the nature of the digital more or less explicitly out of different positions and contexts including new media studies and computer science (cf. Manovich 2001), critical code and algorithm studies (e. g. Galloway 2006a, Uricchio 2011; Webmoor 2014; Striphas 2015; Kitchin 2017; Seaver 2017), software (e. g. Mackenzie 2006; Fuller 2008a; Kitchin and Dodge 2011; Manovich 2013; Frabetti 2015), hardware (e. g. 1 Kathrin Passig (2013) offers an interesting synopsis of different reactions to technical innovations.

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Kittler 1993: 225–42), platform (e. g. Montfort and Bogost 2009) and internet studies (e. g. Miller and Slater 2000; Hine 2000; Nakamura 2002) as well as media anthropology (e. g. Ginsburg et al. 2002; Bräuchler and Postill 2010) and digital anthropology (e. g. Boellstorff 2008; Horst and Miller 2012; Pink et al. 2015). Yet, many approaches shy away from addressing the digital directly leaving the term surprisingly underexplored (cf. Dourish 2016: 30). What is striking, however, is the widely spread and ongoing focus on what is supposedly ‘new’ about it. In his introductory chapter to Virtual Society (2002) sociologist of science Steve Woolgar took a critical stance towards the established rationale in academic and public debates that imagines the digital as penetrating the infrastructures of our lifeworld further and further on a profound and unprecedented scale. Used synonymously for the impact of electronics, information technology, or web connectivity, the rhetoric of the ‘digital revolution’ has been holding its ground for over two decades now. Since the initial outline of the Virtual Society research project in 1997 and Woolgar’s self-critical re-evaluation of it four years later, the digital has become mundane in a sense. Yet, technological advancements are moving fast and “digital mysticism” is hard to exorcise (cf. van den Boomen et al. 2009: 8). Why is the digital continuously imagined “as the impetus for radical changes” across a variety of aspects fundamental to society (Woolgar 2002: 1) and what lies behind this “discursive catchall for novelty” (Horst and Miller 2012: 5)? If approached from an etymological standpoint, the digital significantly predates modern computer technology. In his edited collection on Digital Keywords (2016), media scholar Benjamin Peters takes the Latin origin of the term as his starting point for suggesting that already fingers could be understood as digital instruments. Just like fingers, he argues, digits perform three main categories of action: They “count the symbolic, they index the real, and, once combined and coordinated, they manipulate the social imaginary” (2016: 94). Interestingly, Peters’ comparison to fingers hints at two essential but seemingly opposed aspects of the digital, which will be discussed in depth throughout the following chapter : That it is a representational system encoding and decoding something else, yet with material properties that affect its use and experience (cf. Dourish 2016: 32). Nevertheless, as a theoretical principle the digital only comes into vogue retrospectively through the scientific reflection of computer technology in the first half of the 20th century and in contrast to other media formats, appliances and techniques gradually subsumed under the similarly problematic term of the analog.2 The obsessive quest for newness that characterizes early

2 See Jonathan Sterne’s contribution to Digital Keywords (2016), in which he demonstrates how the rise of the analog could only be initiated after the invention of the digital.

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approaches to the computer in media studies must be seen in light of this emerging analog/digital binary. Naturally, ‘new’ representational systems build on previously established ones, although this is often acknowledged only to identify a point of differentiation. In fact, the history of media in Western culture is one of innovation and, consequently, supplementation. Each medium was once new in the sense that it facilitated different conditions for exteriorizing and disseminating experience and information. As a result, literary and media scholar Mark Hansen concludes, the emergence and adoption of media is always surrounded by a fundamental dialectic of gain and loss: “[T]o the extent that new media introduce modes of experience that challenge the familiar, they are bound to occasion anxiety, resistance, even hostility, as they make their way toward cultural acceptance or ‘naturalization’” (2010: 174). This “occasion anxiety” can be witnessed, as will become further evident throughout this book, in the hesitation and resistance documentary filmmakers display in response to possible departures from established concepts and conventions such as that of storytelling. In any case, the problem with theorizations concentrating on the notion of newness lies in their tendency to stress discontinuity (cf. Golumbia 2014: 54) and obfuscate terminological efforts (cf. Rodowick 2007: 97). “These strategies”, film scholar David N. Rodowick critically remarks, involve the metaphor of conquest (the analogical is supplanted by the digital); the presumption of a radical break on the technological time-line, which posits a linear chronology disavowing a relationship to the (analogical) past; and finally, the casting of digital technologies in the form of the forecast (2007: 97).

By denoting a qualitative shift from ‘older’ forms of expression generally associated with analog technologies, these approaches risk overlooking aspects that do not fit neatly into established categories. Just as The Language of New Media (Manovich 2001) influenced and was influenced in intricate ways by the language of film and its affordances,3 New Documentary Ecologies (Nash et al. 2014) are interrelated with cinematic and televisual conceptions, conventions and conditions. Consequently, the principles that come to matter in discussions surrounding interactive documentary look back on established paradigms in the field of film and video-making rather than ahead or sideways to different, computer-specific milieus. Keeping the problematic but nonetheless common dialectic of gain and loss in mind, I still deem it worthwhile to trace the different 3 It is important to note here that throughout the following remarks the term affordance, which has been well-established in design contexts, stands less for presumably stable attributes of physical objects and rather for the conditions perceived and experienced as enabling and constraining creative practices (cf. Moeran 2014: 35–59). As such, affordances need to be understood “in-practice” (Costa 2018).

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localizations of new media’s newness and examine whether or not, as Hansen puts it, “new media can be held to be ‘new’ in a new way” (2010: 181). Critical debates surrounding new media, their principles, dimensions and functions have been instrumental for developing significant theoretical approaches and redrawing disciplinary boundaries (cf. Chun 2006: 2). However, initial positions often hinged on the aforementioned opposition constructed between the analog and the digital, which needs to be reconsidered first.

Reconsidering the Analog/Digital Binary At first glance, the digital and the analog appear to be clearly differentiable as numerical (or discrete) form of representation on the one hand, and physically corresponding (or continuous) on the other.4 What is problematic about this distinction (as is usually the case with binary oppositions), is that it not only oversimplifies a complex relationship but is accompanied by further dichotomization. In order to explain the digital as something new we need to establish a qualitative difference to an imagined counterpart. If the analog is assumed to be in continuity with the flow of the physical world, the digital appears as an intervention to this continuum by means of increased discretization.5 This notion is problematic because, among other things, it implies that a) everything non-digital must be analog6 and b) the ongoing digitization of our lives would involve a gradual distancing from the physical world and eventually result in a nullification of the analog by excluding all that is not quantifiable. Following this line of thought, the analog is closely tied to the material, whereas invoking the virtual, as computer scientist Paul Dourish notes, “is the central discursive move of digitality” (2016: 35). He critiques efforts, which seek to re-connect these concepts because they keep the constructed duality intact instead of recognizing that the digital is and always has been material already (cf. 2016: 30). The complex socio-material infrastructures, objects and organizations required for seemingly mundane activities such as taking a picture and sharing it 4 Alan Turing (1986) introduced the distinction in 1947 to differentiate the functionality of his mainframe computer from other computing machines. 5 Since the computer, as universal media machine, would be capable of mathematically simulating and integrating any previously established sign system, Kittler (cf. 2005: 75) described computer code as the peak of the standardization and formalization processes initiated by the historical development of signs and, thus, culture. 6 Following Sterne, the understanding of analog as everything non-digital mainly arose in response to the emergence of digital technology “as the point of contact with the digital and that which lies entirely outside of it” (2016: 32). Problematic about this notion is, of course, that it expands the analog to encompass not only a specific technical process but also the natural world itself.

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via social media are indicative of the deep entanglements of the analog and the digital. Here, discrete numbers underlie the technical process but only to resemble something else: the mechanics of a camera, the display of visible light on a flat surface, photo albums. Invoking the pioneer of cybernetics Norbert Wiener, Peters refers to the “fundamentally analogic character” (2016: 100) of the digital to conceive the conceptual pair as “non-oppositional modes of indexing the world” (ibid.: 101). Although the computer has led to a qualitative change in the degree, scale and speed of precise counting and copying, Peters concludes that only by inexactly indexing other (continuous) sources would it be possible for digital work to acquire cultural meaning (cf. ibid.: 100). Such an approach can support an understanding of digitality as a sign system exceeding the virtual realm of numbers by pointing elsewhere. Taking a materialist stance, Dourish goes further and reminds us that, ‘[n]umber’ seems like an entirely virtual concept, and yet numbers themselves betray the virtuality of the concept by taking on material forms that shape their use. So too do the representational forms that make up the world of the digital. Digitality is an abstract property, but digital things themselves – and even digits – are not (2016: 31).

For him representational systems including virtual objects such as software are relevant only in conjunction with their material dimension. In principle then, the non-linear movement from one number or tempo-spatially discrete element to another (and the associated potential of manipulating every single part in the process) is not a unique feature of modern computer technology per se. In fact, neither the digital nor the analog originate as properties of distinct technological devices but describe “processes immanent to relationships within and between bodies and things” (Buckley 2014: 8).7 While employing discrete values to process and transmit data, digital computation is still proportional to the flow of the empirical world in the ways it relates to perception, movements, and intensities. As philosopher Baruch Gottlieb puts it, “[a]ll digital data must be converted to analogue form for it to be consumable by human beings” (2018: 79). With the rise of computers and their theoretical reflection during the second half of the 20th century, however, the distinction between digital and analog is initially constructed in rather technical terms. In contrast to the continuous representation enabled by analog machines such as clocks, the digital is increasingly associated with a form of abstraction based on “the binarity of microelectronic data flows” (Roesler and Stiegler 2005: 14; translated by F.W.). On a fundamental level, then, every digital representation is the result of formal7 Among others, Jake Buckley draws on the work by anthropologist Gregory Bateson (1973) who applied the analog/digital distinction to his study of communication as a combination of both, nonverbally continuous (analog) and linguistically discrete (digital) elements.

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ization processes that seek compliance with the on or off state of a circuit, the smallest bit of information leveraging electricity. Building on Alan Turing’s (1936) theory of a universal machine that can be configured with a given set of rules to mimic other machines, “media becomes programmable”, which is the very marker of difference between old and new for Manovich (2001: 27). Yet, for digital media scholar Wendy Hui Kyong Chun programmability as such is not the decisive factor but rather “that what is meant by programming is significantly different. Programming an analog computer is descriptive; programming a digital one is prescriptive” (2008a: 225, emphasis added). Chun defines descriptive computation as a continuous process that takes place at all points of a circuit8 simultaneously and is measured rather than counted; its accuracy being subject to noise sources and the sensitivity of the respective instrument. By contrast, prescriptive programming builds on numerical methods to simulate (all possible) feedback processes iteratively, one step at a time. In this case, the accuracy of the output depends upon the programmability of the machine, meaning the capability of hardware to be structured into discrete units regulated by code (cf. ibid.: 225–6). Programmability, henceforth, is not a marker of difference but of continuity. It indicates an entangled and entangling relationship between digital and analog as well as virtual and material system components. Modern computers are “digital-analog hybrids” (ibid.: 226): They require analog hardware to sample, process and transmit digitally operable data. As a consequence, Chun attests an inherent tension to computational devices, oscillating between internal consistency and external deficiency (ibid.: 227). In their alleged self-sufficiency, that is the ways in which they contain their own “microworld” (Edwards 1990: 108–9) and carry out tasks automatically, computers demand prescription and precision to generate mathematical probabilities. This demand, however, clashes with the unpredictability and fluidity of the ‘outside’ world they seek to approximate, first and foremost, the actions and perceptions of their operators. To software studies scholar Matthew Fuller, “it is this paradox, the ability to mix the formalized with the more messy […] which gives computation its powerful effects” (2008b: 5–6) as part of culture. This paradox resonates with anthropologists Heather Horst’s and David Miller’s observation that “the digital intensifies the dialectical nature of culture” (2012: 3). Although its baseline of two could very well mean we have reached rock bottom in terms of abstraction, it is this very “difference between 0 and 1” (2012: 7), that, in conjunction with the

8 Circuit here refers to what Derek Robinson described at the Software Studies Symposium 2006 in Rotterdam as “systems of circular dependencies where effects are fed back to become the causes of their own causes” (Robinson 2006: np in Chun 2008: 225).

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mess9 of the world, creates the possibility for an ever-expanding proliferation of socio-cultural appropriations. The hybrid quality of computers and the tension that comes with it show that the systems in use nowadays are, to some extent, more-than-Turing-machines: They escape the realm of mathematics and establish connections with the world (cf. Dourish 2016: 41–2). What this insight brings to the study of software-based documentary and ethnographic filmmaking is that the analog and the digital are anything but hierarchically opposed to one another. As in the case of cinematic continuity and the discrete frames it builds on (cf. Manovich 2001: 28), the analog and the digital continually interweave and overlap in complex relationships (cf. Buckley 2014), no matter which imaging technologies are employed. On a similar note, Pink and her colleagues argue for an understanding of the digital and the material as inseparably entangled within the same processes that need to be encountered and followed in their making (cf. 2016: 11–5). Consequently, ‘old’ technologies, their material dimensions and socio-cultural appropriations are not merely replaced by ‘new’ ones but flow into and transform each other in layers of complexity. This explains, for example, why the materialities of film, video, the letterpress or typewriter have gone to impose linear constraints onto digital milieus. Computers, however, are capable of simplifying and amplifying what is, to some degree, always inherent in any creative process – a non-linear way of working (cf. Golumbia 2014: 55). Again, the result is a paradoxical but powerful blend between order and mess.10 To gain an understanding of how film- and software-based practices influence each other in the ways they move and affect bodies and things, it seems documentary makers as well as researchers studying these transformations need to be involved across the entire analog-digital spectrum. Yet, due to their level of abstraction, speed and complexity, the underlying operations of digital computing become increasingly inaccessible to human sense perception. Although they wield powerful “analog effects” (Massumi 2002: 140), a theoretical and practical framework of engagement is needed to connect these effects back all the way through the layers of complexity right to their baseline of zeros and ones.

9 At least since John Law (2004), mess has become an important notion in the social sciences to describe the complex, entangled and emergent character of the world and our engagement within it. As such, it resonates with recent approaches coming out of post-humanism and materialist philosophy that understand the world as “actor-network” (cf. Latour 2005), “mesh” (cf. Ingold 2011; Morton 2013) or “swarm of vitalities” (Bennett 2010: 32). 10 A good example is the messy way I am writing this text, continuously typing, cutting, copying and pasting its discrete elements around until a neatly ordered version of the work emerges that can be printed out and submitted, as it is the standard procedure for a dissertation at a German University, in book form.

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Layered Mediation From a semiotic angle, the digital can be understood as yet another sign system. In its (alpha-)numerical format, it applies semiotic mechanisms to structure the world into clear and distinct units (cf. Winkler 1997: 224–5). Providing the foundation for media programmability, this array of rule-bound numbers (and letters), also known as digital code, discretizes hardware and transmutes experiential slices of the world into fragmentary, machine-readable information. Tightly interwoven with electrical signals, logic boards, and silicon chips, it clearly exceeds the realm of numbers, hybridizing with a wide range of sociomaterialities and oscillating between human and nonhuman points of reference. This process rests on mechanical rigor and precise instructions just as much as it is subject to variation, ambiguity and interpretation. Hence, the discrete quantities that manipulate both hardware and the social imaginary might be thought of but are not necessarily units of meaning (cf. Manovich 2001: 29). Digital code is a complex sign system that takes on many shapes and, following digital literature scholar Mark C. Marino, “means far more than merely what it does” (2014: 64). What it does, in a nutshell, is feeding one instruction at a time to the processor11 (via the computer’s memory), which changes its physical settings accordingly and, thereby, performs basic arithmetic calculations. “These instructions”, Dourish explains, “are simply themselves numbers”, corresponding to the specific capacities of the respective processing unit (2016: 36–7). In contemporary computer technology, this “catalogue of operations” (ibid.: 37) is implemented in the form of machine code and assembly language12 on the lowest level of abstraction and the highest level of complexity (see Fig. 4). Though from a human point of view, this layer appears as most abstract and elusive. Code needs to take on more legible, meaningful shapes to be efficiently read and written by a programmer or software developer. Displayed onto an LCD screen and modified via a source code editor, it becomes increasingly tangible in the form of higher-level programming languages such as C, C++ and Java. Here, numeric notations are translated into symbolic systems where discrete processing steps are conceptually grouped to such an extent that the manipulation of computational mechanisms can shift from a number-oriented to a more creative, problem-solving activity (cf. Chun 2005: 30). Nevertheless, the resulting text needs to be translated back into a format the computer can read and execute. 11 Nowadays, computational devices are increasingly built with multiple central processing units (CPU) and graphics processing units (GPU) operating simultaneously. The resulting performance enhancement is also known as parallel processing. 12 An assembly language is still very close to the computational architecture but makes working with the machine easier for humans because variables and commands can be named, i. e. some numbers can be replaced by letter sequences.

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Nowadays, this translation process is automated with the assistance of other programs including compilers, interpreters and assemblers. Mediated through the layers of system and application software, yet again, neither the language’s syntax and semantics nor the respective sequence of actions taken by the processing unit are accessible to so-called ‘end users’. They only perceive the powerful “analog effects” (Massumi 2002: 140) above the abstraction barrier.13

Fig. 4 Layers of Abstraction and Complexity14

Accordingly, “despite its formality as rule-governed expression”, software studies scholar Adrian Mackenzie describes code as “an unstable volatile material” (2006: 6) because it constantly circulates between and across different scales and frames of reference: What is visible to a programmer working on a piece of software may be almost totally invisible to users, who only see code mediated through an interface or some change in their environment: the elevator arrives, the television changes channels, the telephone rings (ibid.: 13).

To grasp these movements within the computer, the semantic understanding of code common in linguistics, semiotics and philosophy needs to be combined with the syntactical introduced by information theory (cf. Roesler and Stiegler 2005: 45–6). In this way, code emerges as more than a mere representation of 13 On a basic level, the term interface refers to all the points of a system where interaction between a (machine) program and a user is enabled. From denoting the icon-, folder- and menu-based representation of early computer operating systems, the term has been gradually extended to involve other devices apart from the computer screen including touch, voice-operated and tangible (physical object) interfaces (cf. Manovich 2013: 29). The importance of the interface will be elaborated more in depth in chapter 6. 14 This graphic is a highly simplified depiction of contemporary computational architecture and only serves to indicate the varying degrees of abstraction and complexity. Hardware, software and interface layers are, of course, much more interconnected (take, for example, input and output hardware), which is indicated via the use of dashed lines.

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mathematical formulations or hardware configurations. It becomes an inseparable composition of units oscillating between meaning and (bits of) information.15 Employing the notion of layers, Manovich distinguished between the “cultural” and the “computational layer” of new media (2001: 46). The first designates the concepts (for example, the desktop metaphor with its folders, documents and recycle bins) that are translated into computational categories for the latter. To the computer, Manovich claims, new media is “simply a particular type of […] data, something stored in files and databases, retrieved and sorted, run through algorithms and written to the output device” (2001: 47–8). Both of these layers influence each other substantially and undergo constant transformations in the process. Correspondingly, Manovich introduces “transcoding” as one of the defining principles of new media to describe the translation of data files from their computational into a cultural format and vice versa (ibid.: 45–8). In order to incorporate the mutability of code described above, however, Manovich’s analytical framework needs to be extended. In this extended model, the computer layer encompasses numerical instructions and hardware as well as the wider technical infrastructure – basically every component of digital media that is only indirectly coupled to its perceivable output. The cultural layer represents the human point of interaction with computational technology that is enabled by means of abstracting and, thus, obfuscating the specificities of the machine. As a result of higher-level languages, software, and user interfaces, the computational layer appears as participating in what Nigel Thrift (2004) termed the technological unconscious. Subject to strategic “backgrounding” (Mackenzie 2006: 12), it represents a primary source of the enduring “occasion anxiety” (Hansen 2010: 174) related to the digital. As a consequence of the ubiquitous but imperceptible workings of code in our everyday life, narratives of the computer as ‘black box’ come into vogue and a “mystical authority” (Mackenzie 2006: 3) or “wizard status” (Chun 2008b: 312) is ascribed to programmers, engineers, hackers or multinational technology conglomerates who appear to have access all areas. The extended layer model, then, offers us a tool for bringing together syntactical and semantic codes and describing their relationship as an ongoing dialogue between bytes, signs and the empirical reality. Nevertheless, there is something this model cannot capture adequately ; something easily lost in translation. Arguably, reading and writing a program is a different activity from reading and writing any other type of text.16 After all, code is written to be run. Com15 Bit stands for binary digit and refers to a placeholder on a physical device that can only hold one out of two possible state values. On bits as measure for information, cf. Shannon 1948. 16 Subject to much debate, Katherine Hayles (cf. 2005: 50) has argued for the performativity of code to be much stronger than linguistic performativity because of the physical effects it

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puters used to be run, that is configured to act in a specific way, by human operators. Nowadays, they “increasingly read and write without us” (Chun 2005: 27) on a layer embedded within the complexity of everyday objects and infrastructures including phones, household items, buildings, systems of transportation and money. Given the level of abstraction and speed at which source code is automatically compiled or interpreted into lengthy strings of numbers, addressing actual physical settings, the dimension of its enaction has slowly but surely escaped our analytic vision. It only becomes tangible as a change mediated through an interface, when malfunctions occur or public debates are raised. “We simply do not know what our writing does”, as media theorist Friedrich Kittler tellingly notes (1997: 148). Although logically they might express the same value (cf. Galloway 2004: 167), Dourish points out that “different representations can be put to work in different ways” (2016: 31), which is why scholars in the field warn us not to confuse notation and execution. According to Chun, code only becomes “source”, that is written command line or logos, after it is integrated with hardware components such as logic gates and silicon chips: Source code emerges “[b]y converting action into language” (2008: 309). This conversion is anything but trivial. “Code does not always nor automatically do what it says, but does so in a crafty manner” (ibid.: 306). It doubtlessly requires highly specialized skills to break down a process and craft things with code. This skillset has been described as “iteracy” (Berry 2011) or “proceduracy” (Vee 2010). Yet, knowing how to code the (re-)source for execution is not, as widely believed, the ultimate key to the machine. In fact, through their use of software as a means to write other software, programmers have become users themselves (cf. Chun 2005: 38) and are, as such, removed further as ever before from actually operating any system. Similarly, Dourish shows that “‘virtual’ objects of all sorts […] inherently under-specify the phenomena that they putatively represent” (2016: 43, original emphasis). Though detailed, “there is more to what the computer does than what the program directly describes” (ibid.: 32) – aspects that significantly impact the execution of software and its resulting experience including performance speed and other material properties. At the same time, computers, as we know them today, would do nothing at all without that very program (ibid.). In practice, then, the engagement with virtual objects always entails an engagement with components of the system’s

produces. It is, as Galloway puts it, “the only language that is executable” (2004: 165, original emphasis). In her theorization of software, Federica Frabetti examines the textuality of software and asks to what extent it can be understood as a distinctive form of writing that invites a distinctive form of reading (2015: xx–xxi).

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mechanism (cf. ibid.: 43),17 even if this is, in some ways, an imaginary one (cf. Chun 2004: 43). Accordingly, the layer model requires extension not only towards the location but also the specification of what is considered to be the distinguishing feature of digital media. Hansen (cf. 2010: 180), for example, has called for a clearer separation between Manovich’s computational and cultural layer in terms of their distinct functions. Drawing on Bernard Stiegler’s (1998) understanding of technical media’s primary purpose to exteriorize and mediate human experience, Hansen identifies a “new vocation” of digital media that marks the qualitative difference in comparison to previous forms for him: In addition to storing experience, as it has always done, media today mediates the conditions of mediation, which is to say, it brokers the experiential impact of new computational networks that comprise today’s ‘technological unconscious’. Beyond mediating individual user’s stored experience, the transmission of media […] itself mediates the situation of the user in the regime of networked computation. It mediates, in short, the new capacities for making contact that individuals acquire simply by distributing (traces of) themselves on many-to-many computational networks (ibid.: 181, emphasis added).

What Hansen diagnoses here for digital media is, indeed, a dramatic shift from previous forms of representation. Rather than being coupled to its technical form as is the case with books, paintings or photographic film, the surface appearance of media becomes dissociated from its infrastructure. What follows are two interrelated but structurally distinct layers that perform different tasks. The technical infrastructure facilitates an automated dialogue across and between electronic microworlds and the “‘macro’ scale of anthropomorphic empiricism and epistemology” (Gottlieb 2018: 80), which complies with its own principles and increasingly defies our control. On the human end of the scale, the processed data is made to behave according to our lived experience of the world and becomes a category of meaning. Clearly, there is more going on than just a translation between the computational and the cultural layer, runtime and source code. Related to the degree in which code is associated or dissociated from human sense perception, its mutability and ephemerality stem from “the slippage between notation and enaction” (Doursih 2016: 33) that is enabled by higher programming languages and becomes manifest in software. “To see software as merely ‘transcoding’”, Chun deplores, “erases the computation necessary for computers to run” (2005: 46). What is at stake in software-based technologies, then, is not only the ability to simulate and manipulate aesthetic 17 Drawing on the case of emulating software, Dourish claims that the processes of rematerialization involved in creating such virtual machines are, in fact, “inherent in any enaction or expression of the virtual” (2016: 43).

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properties but the fact that computers generate the very conditions needed for these processes. “[H]ow”, asks Gottlieb, “are we to contend with all the information sphere which increasingly takes places beyond conventional human purview” (2018: 80)? How can we cope with the “onto-epistemological rift” (ibid.) of this double-layered mediation?

Suspension of Disbelief Previous research conducted at the intersection of computer science, the (digital) humanities and social sciences has taken great care in examining the technologies enabled by code or the experience of interacting with digital media from the perspective of so-called users. Although we have gained valuable insights from these studies, their focus falls short in addressing the material substance (pre-)mediating computational outputs (cf. Wardrip-Fruin 2009: 2; Kitchin and Dodge 2011: 11–3; Manovich 2013: 9). This is not least due to the fact that the ontological status of code and its effects are a rather controversial issue (cf. Marino 2014: 65).18 Media and communications scholar Alexander Galloway, for example, critically assessed that “to see code as subjectively performative or enunciative is to anthropomorphize it, to project it onto the rubric of psychology, rather than to understand it through its own logic of ‘calculation’ or ‘command’” (2006b: 321). Chun (2008b) goes further and wonders to what extent a consideration of code outside of anthropomorphization is even possible given our strong tendency to associate an action with a source of causality, human or otherwise. In light of the ontological turn towards matter and its agency (cf. Latour 2005), vitality (cf. Bennett 2010) or aliveness (cf. Ingold 2008), the idea of cause and effect is increasingly challenged and digital materiality has come to be seen as process emerging through practice (cf. Pink et al. 2016: 10–3; van den Boomen et al. 2009: 8). If applying this digital-materialist perspective means breaking with the boundaries established between different (human and nonhuman) entities and their specific, possibly opposing qualities, then questions regarding any source of action seem misplaced.

18 In the context of digital anthropology, scholars have taken on a wide range of positions regarding the ontological status of the digital from constructing an online/offline dichotomy to reconsidering the digital as continuous with the material. For a more recent discussion of digital technologies and to what extent it could be beneficial to approach them as ontological formations, cf. Hannah Knox and Antonia Walford’s ‘Theorizing the Contemporary Series’ for Cultural Anthropology, featuring contributors working across anthropology, the digital humanities and STS: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/820-digital-ontology (accessed 28/11/ 2017).

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To engage with the complex relationships between machines, codes and interfaces, new media studies have increasingly turned towards software as the place where computer-readable code takes human-legible and perceivable shapes, different socio-material activities coalesce and the distribution of agency becomes observable. Representatives of the emerging software studies paradigm Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge remark: Software is written by programmers, individually and in teams, within diverse social, political, and economic contexts. The production of software unfolds – programming is performative and negotiated and code is mutable. Software possesses secondary agency that engenders it with high technicity. As such, software needs to be understood as an actant in the world – it augments, supplements, mediates, and regulates our lives and opens up new possibilities – but not in a deterministic way. Rather, software is afforded power by a network of contingencies that allows it to do work in the world (2011: 43–4).

Following Kitchin and Dodge, the present research project understands software “as an actant in the world” that lends itself to the study of digital materiality and its role, use and experience in documentary and ethnographic representations. As indispensable component of computational technologies, software has not only become central to many objects and moments of our time. It also sits inbetween and brings into contact the different formats, frames of reference and types of mediation co-constituting digital media. Composed of code, “the stuff of software” (Fuller 2008b: 1), its electronically stored or cloud-based set of data and instructions read and executed by the computer, is “operative at many scales” (ibid.: 4) and appears in many forms.19 Here, at this central point of intersection, it becomes possible to observe what, how and under which circumstances audiovisual media is computerized. Still, the code-like character of software also renders it elusive to empirical research. As Mackenzie observes, its “circulating, fragile and backgrounded” characteristics position software on the edge of disappearance and prevent it (for better or for worse) from being analyzed as object or as expression of subjective intention. Software dwindles into the interstices of fine-grained syntheses of gestures, laws, property, habits, images, machines, networks, infrastructures and devices (2006: 12). 19 Importantly, software was not always software as we know it today. Throughout the history of computers, the term had shifting meanings starting off as a simple point of differentiation to denote the physical settings of the machine that could be manipulated by human operators. Back in the 1940s this mostly entailed rewiring cables and flipping switches. Only after direct programming changed into ‘autopilot’ and technology companies began unbundling their personal computer packages, software emerged as a commercial product, easing the passage from calculation to media machine (cf. Parikka 2014: 251–2; Neubert 2015; Chun 2011).

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Thus, despite its central position in digital media, software is an instable, opaque and complex object of study that presents scholars coming out of the humanities and social sciences with a range of methodological challenges. Surely, we could follow documentary and media scholar Craig Hight (2017) and pose questions regarding the organization of a particular program – the rules, affordances and constraints provided – in order to come to a better understanding of its underlying conceptual framework. By contrast, sociologists and anthropologists of technology including Lucy Suchman and Randall Trigg advise us to understand technologies in action rather than in their presumably stable and naturalized forms (cf. 1993: 173; Suchman 2005: 381). Such an analysis could help tapping into the unaccounted aspects of digital computation including the relationship between its material and experiential dimensions. It could also uncover the assumptions and values guiding development processes such as the selection and preparation of data sets, which become subject to a program’s algorithm and its operations (cf. Gillespie 2016). Recently, digital humanities scholars have also begun close readings of code to explore it, according to Marino, “not as the essence hidden beneath the interface or a self-sufficient object of study but rather an axis for discussing all that it unites” (2014: 65). On the one hand, software unites cultural concepts, socio-material practices, and discourses with strings of numbers, hardware settings, infrastructures, and services. It unites these elements in such multiple, continuously transforming ways that they can hardly be broken down into pragmatic units of research. On the other hand, software disconnects. It supports the disconnection of instruction and machine (cf. Chun 2005: 30), which makes it anything but an accurate account of enacted code. “The knowledge software offers”, Chun poignantly demonstrated, “is as obfuscatory as it is revealing” (2005: 28). In fact, to render the intangible workings of the machine more tangible by making it less visible is what software development is premised upon (cf. Chun 2008b: 44). As computer engineer and scientist Edsger Dijkstra points out, ‘good’ programming means “shorten[ing] the conceptual gap between static program and dynamic process, to make the correspondence between the program (spread out in text space) and the process (spread out in time) as trivial as possible” (2002: 342). The engagement with software, then, rests on the users’ willingness to suspend their disbelief; they know folders are not really folders but treat them as if they were anyhow (cf. Laurel 1991: xviii). Chun calls this a fetishism only possible because of the “causal pleasure” software perpetuates (2005: 41). This pleasure stems from the unbelievably fast, largely predictable, perceivable results of clicking on a folder or writing a line of code as well as the corresponding

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amplification of the user’s role.20 Yet, the relationship software gives access to – “among code and interface, action and result” – as Chun points out, “is always contingent and always to some extent imagined” (2008b: 300, emphasis added). Placing software at such a central position, then, does not come without risks, among them “the lure of visibility, readability, cause and effect” (Chun 2005: 39). It has been demonstrated above that, although software “perpetuates certain notions of seeing as knowing” (Chun 2005: 27), engaging with the stuff of software means anything but accessing the computer’s hardware core by stripping digital media off its mutable, ephemeral and imagined character. Instead, it presents a scale at which we can grasp these characteristics as essential components of the complex relations between actions and systems of representation in contemporary computing. Engaging with the microworld of software is an important activity because it “acts both as ideology and ideology critique” (Chun 2005: 44). In order to reveal what software conceals, we need to pay close attention to our own actions. It depends “on us manipulating objects in order to see, on us thinking like object-oriented programmers” (ibid: 42). The following case studies will interrogate the kinds of visual knowledge Korsakow perpetuates and how these (re-)structure creative engagements with media technologies in documentary and ethnographic filmmaking. It is pertinent for such a research endeavor, so is my contention, to adopt an approach sensitive to the material and the experiential as they co-constitute each other in-the-making.

20 On the notion of “user amplification”, cf. Manovich’s online article on Generation Flash (2002): http://manovich.net/index.php/projects/generation-flash (accessed 29/10/2018).

Part II: The Korsakow System

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Korsakow Perspective(s) – Rethinking Documentary Knowledge in Digital Multilinear Environments*

Abstract In linear documentary land, we are trained to see stories everywhere we look. Digital media and its materially distinct characteristics encourage reflections on this particular schooling and the power relations it is embedded in. As a result, many artists, filmmakers and scholars advocate interactivity as presumably more ‘authentic’ organizing principle for representing realty. While linear storytelling still prevails as framework for a majority of these interactive works, the documentary apprenticeship observed at the non/fictionLab offers an example for exploring digital materiality beyond the narrative paradigm. Drawing on my ethnographic study of a small group of research-practitioners, this paper analyses media software as part of an emerging counter-practice that challenges story as primary organizing principle and facilitates further investigation of digital environments for the making of documentary. Keywords interactivity, documentary, storytelling, skilled visions, ethnography, Science and Technology Studies

* VIEW Journal of European Television History and Culture Vol. 5, 10, 2016, 110–23; DOI: 10. 18146/2213-0969.2016.jethc116; Publisher : Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision in collaboration with Utrecht University, University of Luxembourg and Royal Holloway University of London; Copyright: The text of this article has been published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Netherlands License; This license does not apply to the media referenced in the article, which is subject to the individual rights owner’s terms.

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Taking Materiality Seriously

While we can observe a foregrounding of ‘non-linearity’ due to recent technical and creative developments, this is certainly not a new phenomenon. By leaving the main text to read its footnotes and follow the references, even a printed academic article embodies some of the main characteristics underlying the notion of hypertextuality and its nonlinear, or rather multilinear,1 experience. However, as we move into electronic hypertext systems2 and networked environments such as the web, these referenced materials become much better available as (multimedia) parts of the texts themselves or as hyperlinks to other online sources. As a result, informal reading practices such as skimming, browsing or task switching are increasingly stimulated.3 Furthermore, authors who produce work in these contexts might explore the materially distinct affordances to develop different styles of writing.4 Drawing towards exploration and expansiveness, hypertext served as an attempt to find forms of representation that would match the associative and inexhaustible workings of the human mind.5 Disrupting the mainstream conventions of narrative linearity, closure and coherence while still emerging out of a literary heritage, however, the novelist Robert Coover already reflected on the challenges that this form posed to writers and readers of fiction in his 1992 essay ‘The End of Books’.6 In the context of nonfiction such as documentary, journalism and academia, literary linearity has clearly left its mark on dominant conventions, not least due to the legacy of analogue media with their particular affordances and constraints. Moreover, as a strong ingredient in particularly Western renderings of the world, linear narrativity also functions as primary mental and social means for orientating ourselves and interpreting complex sensory experiences. Regina 1 As I learned from my conversations with Adrian Miles, the concept of multilinearity emerged from terminological differentiations in hypertext theory to acknowledge that linearity still played a role in the forming of sequences. However, how these sequences are formed is subject to variation. See: http://vogmae.net.au/vlog/2016/02/multilinearity-notes-on-terms/ [Accessed: 9 December 2016]. 2 Cf. HyperCard, the Intermedia system developed at Brown University or Eastgate’s Storyspace. 3 For a recent examination of how digital technology is affecting reading practices, cf. Naomi S. Baron, Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World, Oxford University Press, 2015. 4 The literary hypertext experiments coming out of the ‘Eastgate School’ in the late 1980s and early 1990s in reaction to poststructuralist and postmodern theory are one example. Cf. Scott Retterg, ‘The American Hypertext Novel, and Whatever Became of It?,’ Hartmut Koenitz and Gabriele Ferri et al., eds, Interactive Digital Narrative: History, Theory and Practice, Routledge, 2015, pp. 22–35. 5 Cf. Janet Murray, Hamlet and the Holodeck, The MIT Press, 1998, pp. 90–94. 6 See: http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/27/specials/coover-end.html [Accessed: 9 December 2016].

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Bendix, for instance, has demonstrated how storytelling serves as a “disaster relief” to regain order out of chaos after a catastrophic event.7 These conventions, again, have shaped reading, listening and viewing expectations that can be shattered easily when disruptions occur. To find acceptance within the scientific community, research results, for instance, have to meet certain socio-historically evolved and institutionalised standards, one of them being traceability. Although, we can find some interesting, often meta-reflexive, experiments in nonfiction or “serious hypertext”8, Janet Murray also commented: Most of what is delivered in hypertext format over the World Wide Web, both fiction and nonfiction, is merely linear writing with table-of-contents links in it. Even those documents designed explicitly for digital presentation, both fiction and nonfiction, often require too much superfluous clicking to reach a desirable destination or so much scrolling that readers forget where they are. The conventions of segmentation and navigation have not been established well enough for hypertext in general, let alone for narrative. The separation of the printed book into focused chapters was an important precondition of the modern novel; hypertext fiction is still awaiting the development of formal conventions of organization that will allow the reader/interactor to explore an encyclopedic medium without being overwhelmed.9

In the field of currently evolving documentary practices with which this essay is concerned, we can observe a similar status quo. The internet has become a site for expanding documentary beyond the scope of cinema and television broadcasting. Despite providing content on-demand, web-specific formats have developed to supplement TV programming. Accompanied by converging media conventions and the emergence of new practices and aesthetics,10 the increasing appropriation of digital technology has also led to a diverse palette of documentaries that aims to incorporate computational affordances into the ‘creative treatment of actuality’.11 However, my contention is that narrativity and

7 Regina Bendix, ‘Reflections on Earthquake Narratives’, Western Folklore 49, 4, 1990, 331– 347. 8 As one of the most prominent publishers in the early days of hypertext and developer of the hypertext system Storyspace, Eastgate promotes itself in Robert Coover’s words as “the primary source for serious hypertext”. See: http://www.eastgate.com/ [Accessed: Dec 9, 2016]. For some examples of academic hypertexts cf. David Kolb, Socrates in the Labyrinth: Hypertext, Argument, Philosophy, Eastgate Systems, 1994; Adrian Miles, ‘Realism and a General Economy of the Link’, Currents in Electronic Literacy, 5, Fall, 2001; or Roderick Coover, Cultures in Webs: Working in Hypermedia with the Documentary Image, Eastgate Systems, CD-ROM, 2003. 9 Murray 1998, p. 87. 10 For one of the seminal works that led to an increasing critical interrogation of cultural-digital reconfigurations, cf. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, NYU Press, 2006. 11 John Grierson, ‘The Documentary Producer,’ Cinema Quarterly 2, 1, 1933, 8. http://archive. org/details/cinema02gdro [Accessed: 9 December 2016]. For a historical survey of the cri-

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linearity still prevail as guiding principles for a majority of these practices, while experiments aiming to investigate the logics of digital environments beyond the narrative paradigm remain at the margins. Based on my case study of the Korsakow System, I will demonstrate how the development of a counter-practice challenges the expectations of users, viewers and the interactive documentary community and facilitates critical reflection on the reliance of narrativity and linearity in digital documentary environments.

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An Ethnographic Approach to Materiality

In the following paragraphs, I would like to set out to explore the emerging field of interactive documentary through the lens of a specific technology and the practices that have evolved around it. Originally developed in 2000, the first version of the so-called Korsakow System derived from German media artist and documentary maker Florian Thalhofer’s intention to test the computer’s potential for storytelling in the context of studying human computer interaction at the University of the Arts in Berlin: What I developed was a simple structure that makes sense in terms of telling stories on a computer. It’s not the way that stories are traditionally told of course. It wasn’t my intention to make a point against traditional storytelling at all; I just didn’t come from a traditional background and no one told me how to tell a story properly, so I just came up with a way to do it using a computer.12

Since the release of his first project, The Korsakow-Syndrome – a non-linear and interactive film about alcohol (2000), Thalhofer has produced eight major Korsakow films,13 founded the Korsakow Institut14 and has continuously worked on the software’s redevelopment together with programmer David Reisch and Canadian media scholar Matt Soar.15 Due to international workshops and academic conference presentations, a number of filmmakers, artists and scholars

12 13 14 15

tical discussions on Grierson’s definition of documentary, cf. Brian Winston, Claiming the Real: The Griersonian Documentary and Its Legitimations, BFI, 1995. Kate Nash, ‘An Interview with Florian Thalhofer, Media Artist and Documentary Maker,’ in Kate Nash and Craig Hight et al., eds, New Documentary Ecologies. Emerging Platforms, Practices and Discourses, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, p. 192. Cf. Florian Thalhofer and Mahmoud Hamdy, 7 Sons, 2003; Florian Thalhofer, [LoveStoryProject], 2007; Florian Thalhofer and Berke Bas, Planet Galata: A Bridge in Istanbul, 2010, or Florian Thalhofer, Geld.GR. Money and the Greeks, 2013. See: http://korsakow.tv/ [Accessed: 15 May 2016]. Until recently, Korsakow projects required Adobe’s Flash Player to run. With Apple’s decision not to support Flash on their mobile devices and Google’s decision to block Flash on their Chrome browser by default, Korsakow users were anticipating the software’s move to HTML5. Released in October 2016, Korsakow 6 is now exporting to HTML5.

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have taken notice of Korsakow and appropriated its affordances (and constraints) for authoring media files such as image, video, sound and text assets in a way that they share multiple links.16 While ‘some of the most distinguished current productions’ in the field are ‘tailor-made solutions’ that are ‘created by whole teams of creative and technical staff ’, Soar argues that accessible off-theshelf authoring tools such as Korsakow, Klynt or Racontr17 enable filmmakers without programming skills to create interactive documentaries on a low-budget scale.18 Among this expanding range of what Lev Manovich called ‘media software’, inclusive of ‘programs that are used to create and interact with media objects and environments’,19 Korsakow occupies a special position. It is the aim of this essay to elaborate on its distinctive features and the role it plays in the discourse on interactive documentary. How can we go about studying software? Previous scholarship primarily coming out of media studies has focused on the analysis of works authored in Korsakow. According to Sandra Gaudenzi, for instance, Thalhofer’s [LoveStoryProject]20 falls under the ‘hypertext mode’, which invites users to browse a closed database depending on the possible paths created by the authors.21 Contrasting Gaudenzi, Paolo Favero argues, ‘Korsakow is based on the principle that it is the viewers who are in charge of the construction of the narrative’.22 In his discussion on Korsakow as a ‘complex, operative techno-human ecology’,23 Adrian Miles has gone further and offered a thorough description of the software’s material specificity and its enabling of ‘generative, associative patterns to emerge amongst its parts while the work is being authored and played’.24 Keeping these theorisations in mind, my propositions stem from an ethnographic angle that seeks to provide a case study of Korsakow as part of a situated practice. Informed by a new materialist perspective, this approach allows me to examine what is distinct about the object of investigation in its participation 16 For the most prominent examples of Korsakow films, see: http://korsakow.com/ [Accessed: 9 December 2016]. 17 See: http://www.klynt.net/ and https://racontr.com/ [Accessed 9 December 2016]. 18 Matt Soar, ‘Making (with) the Korsakow System: Database Documentaries as Articulation and Assemblage,’ in Kate Nash and Craig Hight et al., eds, New Documentary Ecologies. Emerging Platforms, Practices and Discourses, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 154–157. 19 Lev Manovich, Software Takes Command, Bloomsbury, 2013, p. 38. 20 Florian Thalhofer, [LoveStoryProject], 2007. 21 Sandra Gaudenzi, The Living Documentary : From Representing Reality to Co-Creating Reality in Digital Interactive Documentary, Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2013, p. 101. 22 Paolo Favero, ‘Getting Our Hands Dirty (Again): Interactive Documentaries and the Meaning of Images in the Digital Age,’ Journal of Material Culture, 18, 3, 264. 23 Adrian Miles, ‘Materialism and Interactive Documentary : Sketch Notes,’ Studies in Documentary Film, 8, 3, 2014, 207. 24 Ibid., p. 214.

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within a specific practice by focusing on the unfolding of situated actions rather than on their hermeneutical dimension. During six months of fieldwork at the non/fictionLab – an Australian research centre located in RMIT University’s School of Media and Communication ‘exist[ing] to explore and articulate the value of new creative work’25 – my intention was to understand the ways in which a small academic community produces documentary knowledge through cultivating a creative practice with Korsakow. Building on the anthropology of practice26 and the anthropology of the senses,27 Cristina Grasseni’s concept of ‘skilled visions’28 enables me to explore the ways vision is trained, perception is oriented and understanding is structured within this particular ‘community of practice’.29 Rather than analysing ready-made works produced with Korsakow, the praxeographic method adopted here will focus on the interrelations of visual enskilment specific to the documentary apprenticeship I observed at the non/ fictionLab from 2015 to 2016. Shifting between observer and participant, I attended workshops, supervision sessions and staff meetings to study ‘the role played by peer-to-peer negotiation, hierarchical relations and the management of relevant contexts, narratives and artefacts in the social construction of skilled visions’.30 I used a camera to film guided interviews and analyse routines with Korsakow. I also started authoring material in the software myself. At the same time, I shared the footage and reflections on my research blog,31 co-organized the Docuverse Symposium32 with some of my research participants and gave several presentations to facilitate transparency and discussion.

25 See: http://nonfictionlab.net.au/about/ [Accessed: 9 December 2016]. 26 Cf. Seth Chaiklin and Jean Lave, eds, Understanding Practice: Perspectives on Activity and Context, Cambridge University Press, 1993; Theodore R. Schatzki and Karin Knorr Cetina et al., eds, The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, Routledge, 2001. 27 Cf. Lydia Arantes and Lisa Rieger, eds, Ethnographie der Sinne, transcript, 2014; Sarah Pink, Doing Sensory Ethnography, Sage, 2009; Regina Bendix, ‘Introduction: Ear to Ear, Nose to Nose, Skin to Skin: The Senses in Comparative Ethnographic Perspective,‘ Etnofoor, 18, 1, 2005, 3–14; David Howes, Sensual Relations. Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory, The University of Michigan Press, 2003. 28 Cristina Grasseni, Skilled Visions. Between Apprenticeship and Standards, Berghahn Books, 2007. 29 ‘Community of practice’ is a concept that was first developed by cognitive anthropologist Jean Lave and educational theorist Etienne Wenger to describe how members of an interest group develop a shared knowledge practice through a common repertoire of resources, tools, experiences and stories (Cf. Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, Situated Learning. Legitimate Peripheral Participation, Cambridge University Press, 1991.). 30 Grasseni 2007, 4. 31 https://korsakow.hypotheses.org/ [Accessed: 1 July 2016]. 32 See: http://nonfictionlab.net.au/docuverse-a-symposium-for-expanded-documentary-prac tices/ [Accessed: 1 July 2016].

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As we have established already, there are multiple ways of engaging with Korsakow’s materiality, and even within the non/fictionLab, approaches vary. These multiple versions are not solely the result of the software’s ongoing redevelopment. They also come into being through different traditional ‘prisms used in media and cinema studies […] characterized as relying on either textual, institutional or audience specific approaches’33 as well as differently ‘skilled engagements’.34 However, there is still something quite specific about Korsakow’s role in the documentary training observed at the non/fictionLab. Grouped around the current co-director Adrian Miles, the research-practitioners under study exhibited a particular view on documentary through their use of Korsakow that I will refer to as the ‘Korsakow perspective’. What is specific about this perspective in relation to the particular environment in and people by which it is enacted? What kind of documentary knowledge are they producing in the process, and how does this relate to the wider field of contemporary documentary practices? In attempting to answer these questions, this text will probably not do without a certain degree of linear storytelling and perhaps it does not need to. Against the backdrop of a brief survey of the current climate in interactive documentary, I will turn to the stories collected in my fieldwork diary and use them as tools to render the experiential dimension of people’s encounters with Korsakow (including my own) and make the perspective(s) more graspable. Fragments of filmed material will complement the line(s) of argument and continue the dialogue with my research participants.35 Between local apprenticeship and global standards, my case study of the Korsakow System will demonstrate how the emergence of this particular Korsakow perspective as an academically situated documentary ‘schooling of the eye’36 challenges other, more established, documentary enskilments and related cognitive processes.37

33 Miles 2014, 207. 34 Cristina Grasseni and Florian Walter, eds, ‘Digital Visual Engagements,’ AnthroVision: Vaneasa Online Journal, 2, 2, 2014. 35 The participants have agreed to be filmed and stated that the material could be published for research purposes as part of my PhD project. 36 Cristina Grasseni, ‘Skilled Visions. Toward an Ecology of Visual Inscriptions,’ in Marcus Banks and Jay Ruby, eds, Made to Be Seen. Perspectives on the History of Visual Anthropology, University of Chicago Press, 2011, p. 20. 37 To stress the importance of artefacts and their context for mediating skill, Grasseni refers to anthropological research on cognition and its development towards a study of situated action (Grasseni 2007, pp. 5–6).

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New Ways to Understand the World: the Field of Interactive Documentary

Documentary is a troubled genre that encompasses a long and complicated history of diverse theories and practices. Frequently scrutinised for its ambiguous relation to reality, truth and evidence, some scholars have gone so far as to deny its very existence. Following Trinh T. Minh-ha, for instance, ‘[t]here is no such thing as documentary – whether the term designates a category of material, a genre, an approach, or a set of techniques’.38 On a more positive note, Christian Huck and Jens Kiefer pointed to the genre’s double bind that ‘it is not like fiction and it is like fiction’ as a source for both irritation and inspiration.39 In its inbetween state, transgeneric and transmedia hybridisations have occurred that deliberately turn towards what Heinz B. Heller conceived as the ‘transitory’ of documentary in order to explore other, more experiential, modes for engaging with the world.40 As we progress further into the spaces of electronic and networked environments, the blurred boundaries between narrative forms and the affordances of digital media are becoming another crucial site for creative experimentation. However, reflecting on the series of database documentaries produced in the context of her ‘Labyrinth Project’ at the University of Southern California since 1997, Marsha Kinder notes that interactive narrative did not begin in cyberspace. It has deep, tangled roots in an array of earlier forms – ritual, theater, poetry, novel, dance, music, radio, cinema, television, performance art, and dreams. But new digital media provoke us to redefine these two concepts – narrative and interactivity – in productive ways.41

One approach towards investigating digital environments as tools for storytelling is to thoroughly consider their distinct characteristics. Janet Murray, for instance, already pointedly demonstrated the need for developing new narrative forms alongside the computer’s procedural, participatory, spatial and encyclopedic logic to fully exploit its potential for literary renderings of human experience.42 In the context of interactive cinema, Graheme Weinbren drew attention 38 Trinh T. Minh-ha, ‘Documentary Is/Not a Name,’ October, 52, Spring, 1990, 76. 39 Christian Huck and Jens Kiefer, ‘Documentary Films and the Creative Treatment of Actuality,’ Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies, 18, 2, 2007, 103. 40 Heinz B. Heller, ‘Dokumentarfilm als transitorisches Genre,’ in Ursula Keitz and Kay Hoffmann Kay, eds, Die Einübung des dokumentarischen Blicks. Fiction Film und Non Fiction Film zwischen Wahrheitsanspruch und expressiver Sachlichkeit 1895–1945, Schüren Verlag, 2001, p. 24. 41 Marsha Kinder, ‘Honoring the Past and Creating the Future in Cyberspace: New Technologies and Cultural Specificity,’ The Contemporary Pacific, 15, 1, Spring, 2003, 97. 42 Murray 1998, pp. 71–93.

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to the opportunities opened up by new media for rethinking the notion of narrative linearity that had been adopted by cinema from 19th century literature and has ‘continued to rule vast regions of media territory ever since’.43 As two of the early contributors to and initiators of the current academic discourse on interactive documentary (i-Docs),44 Judith Aston and Sandra Gaudenzi also emphasise these opportunities: The focus of the i-Docs symposia was not to be about debating the merits of linear versus interactive formats, but more about understanding the new opportunities that were being opened up by the development of interactive technologies within a twentyfirst century context.45

In the unfolding plentitude of different approaches to understand and shape the world through digital technology, Patricia Zimmermann and Helen De Michiel regard documentary to be ‘redefining itself as a fluid, collaborative, shapeshifting, responsive environment for encounters [they] call open space documentary’.46 From enabling users to navigate a database to generating their own content or stepping into a virtual reality, the spaces created in these works differ significantly. However, they share an increased focus on actively engaging the viewers in the documentary process. Digital interactivity47 in its different modes48 and dimensions49 appears to be at the heart of these developments, both structurally and theoretically, to reshape the relations between viewers, the documentary and the re-presented reality. As mentioned in the introduction, Sandra Gaudenzi developed a typology of interactivity in which she draws on Thalhofer’s [LoveStoryProject]50 authored in 43 Graheme Weinbren, ‘Ocean, Database, Recut,’ in Victoria Vesna, ed, Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow, University of Minnesota Press, 2007. 44 See: http://i-docs.org/ [Accessed: July 1, 2016]. 45 Judith Aston and Sandra Gaudenzi, ‘Interactive Documentary. Setting the Field,’ Studies in Documentary Film, 6, 2, 2012, 129. 46 Helen De Michiel and Patricia Zimmerman, ‘Documentary as Open Space,’ in Brian Winston, ed, The Documentary Film Book, BFI, 2013, p. 355. 47 Due to the limiting scope of a journal paper, I am not going to offer a critical account or a definition of ‘interactivity’ at this point. Accordingly, I will adhere to an outline of the leading scholars in the field and their conceptualisations. For a historical survey of the concept’s genesis in the studies of Human Computer Interaction and its adoption into literary studies, cf. Hyon-Joo Yoo, Text, Hypertext, Hypermedia: Ästhetische Möglichkeiten der digitalen Literatur mittels Intertextualität, Interaktivität und Intermedialität, Königshausen & Neumann, 2007, 74–110. Within the documentary discourse, cf. Kate Nash, ‘Clicking on the World: Documentary Representation and Interactivity,’ in Kate Nash and Craig Hight et al., eds, New Documentary Ecologies. Emerging Platforms, Practices and Discourses, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 50–66. 48 Gaudenzi 2013, pp. 39–67; 93–240. 49 Nash 2014, pp. 52–60. 50 Florian Thalhofer, [LoveStoryProject], 2007.

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Korsakow as an example for her ‘hypertext mode’, which follows the assumption that ‘our world is pre-determined, although full of options, and that our power lies in choosing our path, not in creating or changing such world’.51 In contrast, the ‘participatory mode’52 supposedly facilitates the co-creation of reality with the help of the viewers by ‘contributing to a constantly evolving whole, that might never be finished’.53 Depending on the mode of interactivity, accordingly, different dynamics evolve to attribute viewers with an active role in the negotiation of a certain notion of reality : In this sense, each form of i-doc seems to negotiate reality far beyond Stella Bruzzi’s vision of documentaries as ‘performative acts whose truth comes into being only at the moment of filming’ because the ‘moment of truth’ is now also placed into the actions and decisions of the user/participant. We see this way of thinking about i-docs as offering a tool as much for the co-creation of reality as for its representation.54

Letting the viewers become participants in a dialogue rather than confronting them with an authorial and fixed point of view about the world constitutes a presumably more ‘authentic’ organising principle for re-presenting realty. While this perspective still echoes the notion of truth as the main reference point, it clearly signals a shift from representing to negotiating individual experiences. However, these performative opportunities of sense-making through interactivity are bound to the specific structures, rules and framings of the invoked spaces.55 While most of the latest productions indeed display efforts to incorporate multiple perspectives and facilitate choice or chance for user engagement and contribution, they still operate in rather fixed frameworks and linear conventions of storytelling. At the 22nd iteration of Visible Evidence – an international conference on documentary film and media, Adrian Miles critically commented on this development: Observations about multilinearity in interactive documentary are commonplace, with a litany of celebratory arguments about empowered users, innovative narratives and radical forms. It seems though that story, as a particularly reified form of narrative, 51 52 53 54

Gaudenzi 2013, p. 53. Ibid., pp. 54–62; 176–240. Ibid., p. 62. Aston/Gaudenzi 2012, 128; quoting Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary : A Critical Introduction, Routledge, 2000, p. 7. 55 As audience studies indicate, the anticipated engagement in interactive documentary is difficult to measure and viewers often lack skill or knowledge in order to play their expected part. Kate Nash has conducted several case studies in which she explores user engagement in interactive documentary with varying results (cf. Kate Nash, ‘Strategies of Interaction, Questions of Meaning: An Audience Study of the NFBs Bear 71’, Studies in Documentary Film, 8, 3, 2014, 221– 234). In response to Jon Dovey’s keynote at the i-Docs symposium 2016, she also highlighted that “engagement” needed to be further differentiated to analyse what viewers actually do and to what extent they engage with narrative, ludic and other elements of the documentary.

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remains an unquestioned, almost invisible centre, with all the hallmarks of what we once would have called an ideology.56

Returning to Heller’s notion of exploring documentary’s experiential dimension, Bettina Frankham, for instance, has drawn on Bill Nichols’ poetic mode of documentary57 to conceive it ‘not as a replication of the world but as an aesthetic experience in its own right’.58 On that note, it would be interesting to further investigate what the essential properties of digital environments (including but not limited to interactivity) might offer documentary beyond the narrative paradigm.

4

Multiple Stories, Multiple Practices, Multiple Korsakows

Throughout the many attempts to advertise Korsakow as ‘the future of storytelling’59 on his websites and during interviews, workshops and presentations,60 Thalhofer has repeatedly stressed the software’s potential for rethinking the structure of storytelling: Korsakow is just a tool and you could use it to create all kinds of stories. You could use it to make a traditional, linear documentary if you wanted to. But at the same time, it does invite people to think about the structure of storytelling and it does encourage openness in terms of the structure of stories.61

These structures can be linear or multilinear, simple or complex; they can be built on loops and repetitions to create rhythms and patterns. If, by design, Korsakow affords such an openness, it hardly comes as a surprise that there are multiple stories, practices and versions of Korsakow.

56 Adrian Miles, What Is It For, If Not Story? Visible Evidence XXII, Toronto, 2015, p. 4. 57 Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, 2nd Ed., Indiana University Press, 2010, pp. 142– 171. 58 Bettina Frankham, ‘Space-Time-Engagement,’ in Adrian Miles, ed, The Aesthetics of Documentary Interactivity. A Pamphlet that Emerged from a Curated Panel at Visible Evidence XXII, Toronto, 2015, 2016, pp. 31–33. 59 See: Korsakow Official Website, http://korsakow.com/ [Accessed: 9 December 2016]. 60 Read more on and listen to Florian’s stories of Korsakow here: http://thalhofer.com/news/ [Accessed: 9 December 2016]; here: http://korsakow. tv/category/podcast/ [Accessed: 1 July 2016] or here: http://korsakow.tv/category/videos/ [Accessed: 1 July 2016]. 61 Thalhofer in Nash 2014, p. 192, emphasis added.

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Video 1 Korsakow – A Tool for … What? Interview excerpts from my fieldwork at the non/ fictionLab. Please visit the online version of the article to watch the video (https://vimeo.com/ 154801485).

This short video sequence is the result of a series of interviews I recorded with media scholars at RMIT University’s non/fictionLab. As we can learn from these excerpts, they have adopted Korsakow in various ways within their practicebased research. Following attempts in social studies of science to describe the fluidity of objects as they wander from one context to another,62 Korsakow becomes tangible only if we circle around its many configurations through specific perspectives. From the graphic user interface of a work produced with Korsakow, it is often difficult to understand what is going on behind its surface. When looking at Hannah Brasier’s PhD project that she is in the process of completing under the supervision of Adrian Miles at the non/fictionLab, Korsakow presented itself to me as a still (uninformed) viewer in the shape of a website offering different video clips and still images.

62 Cf. Marianne de Laet and Annemarie Mol’s description of a water pumping device as a fluid technology. Marianne de Laet and Annemarie Mol, ‘The Zimbabwe Bush Pump: Mechanics of a Fluid Technology,’ Social Studies of Science, 30, 2, 2000, 225–263.

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Fig. 5 Screenshot from Hannah Brasier, Sometimes I See Palm Trees. Last Night, 2016, http:// projects.hannahbrasier. com/lastnight/ [Accessed: Dec. 10, 2016].

On the far left hand side of the screen, I see an edited video sequence of what appears to be short impressions of live music events accompanied by a women’s voice making sounds. As I move my cursor over the three still images next to it, they turn into videos, but the audio stays mute. Not sure what is expected of me, I click on the image on the far right depicting pink bunnies. Straightaway, a new interface loads presenting a new video clip on the left displaying a collection of pink things. The female voice is reading a list entitled ‘indecisive floral decisions’ including ‘pink flowers, pink ball gown, […] finding friends, losing friends, bumping into people, […] waiting, leaving walking’. With every click, the chosen clip wanders to the left and a new set of preceding images is generated. After spending about five minutes on watching and clicking, I close the browser. Without any clue of how far I have progressed within the ‘film’, I am irritated. Instead of a documentary story, I encountered fragmented video clips that appeared to play randomly.

‘This minimalism in interface design, a graphic navigation surface that is reduced to the most basic features’, is one of the aspects for Anna Wiehl that sets Korsakow films apart from other emerging interactive practices.63 At first glance, this minimalism might appear banal to people who have not been trained to use or view it. As Florian notes, ‘[…] people find it boring. They say it is a boring experience’.64 However, after looking over Hannah’s shoulder and behind the graphic user interface, I gradually begin to learn that every viewing of the ‘same’ work is a different experience altogether. What I see is different from what you see, and making sense of these generative and associative poetics requires skill, repetition and risk.

63 Anna Wiehl, ‘Database Aesthetics, Modular Storytelling, and the Intimate Small Worlds of Korsakow Documentaries,’ Necsus: European Journal of Media Studies, Spring, 2016. 64 Thalhofer in Nash 2014, p. 195.

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A Maker’s Perspective: Korsakow Wants to Let Things Float

Video 2 First Interview with Hannah Brasier : First Encounter with Korsakow. Please visit the online version of the article to watch the video (https://vimeo.com/172710134).

It is quiet in the big open space of the Higher Degree Research Lab at RMIT’s School of Media and Communication on this Tuesday afternoon. Everyone is sitting in front of their computers deeply absorbed in the flickering screens. Hannah’s rhythmical clicking and typing is periodically interrupted by long pauses of what seems to be nothing but staring at the monitor. Her desk is covered in books on new media, affect theory and documentary. A quote by James Benning is dangling from the shelf: ‘I have a very simple definition of an artist. The artist is someone who pays attention and reports back’. Next to a photograph of a palm tree, schematic diagrams are mounted on the wall of the little cubicle depicting the connection between ‘multi-linearity’, ‘aesthetic noticing’ and the ‘messiness of the world’. Hannah’s journal lies open in front of her. Every entry is highlighted by a red headline: ‘Art Party, Not Party’, followed by a list of what appears to be random associations: ‘indecisive floral decision, pink flowers, pink ball gown […]’ Although clearly irritated by my presence, Hannah nevertheless follows her routine with Korsakow while I am standing behind her observing the action with my camera. With another click, she opens the application on her computer and starts importing eleven square formatted static video clips. After the program shuts down due to a system error, Hannah laughs and restarts the process in an experienced fashion until the clips appear as a list in Korsakow’s main interface. Resembling a table, the first row indicates the names of the clips that correspond with the written lists in her journal. She double-clicks on the first video file and another window opens on her screen entitled ‘SNU editor’. Out of the different attributes that she could additionally attach here to the video clip depicting ‘pink flowers’, she only turns her attention to two. At first, she types the number ‘1’ into the text fields named

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‘IN-Keywords’ and ‘OUT-Keywords’. After that, she clicks on the drop-down menu ‘Lives’ and assigns ‘1’… Puzzled by Hannah’s process with Korsakow, I ask her to explain what she is doing:

Video 3 First Interview with Hannah Brasier : Noticing Patterns. Please visit the online version of the article to watch the video (https://vimeo.com/172763825).

One of Korsakow’s fundamental principles is working with keywords to choreograph the multiple relations that can occur among the media assets imported into the system. Keywords are strings of texts that can be content-driven, abstract and multiple. There are two different types of keywords: IN-Keywords specify the respective clip while OUT-Keywords define possible relations to other clips. Thus, ‘keywording’ can be understood as a form of tagging or rule making that creates multiple simultaneous links between different parts. When Hannah exports her project into a web-ready HTML-package, Korsakow’s runtime engine performs searches based on the given keywords. After assigning each video clip the same IN- and OUT-Keyword (1), consequently, the clips play randomly as they are all connected in equal measure. Observing the still images displayed on a black interface in her web-browser, Hannah moves the cursor over the first and it comes to life: a short, edited sequence of various blue skies starts playing. She moves over to the next image. Different forms of shadows falling onto grey walls join in. Hannah watches the two clips carefully as they play simultaneously, and her eyes are fixed on the screen. Deeply absorbed, nothing appears to be happening for a long time. Suddenly, she grabs her black pen and scribbles a note in her book: ‘light’. A little bit later, another one follows: ‘colour’. She returns to the Korsakow program and doubleclicks on the first video file until the SNU editor opens once again. She deletes the number ‘1’ she had previously typed into the text fields and replaces it with ‘light’ as the IN-Keyword

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and ‘colour’ as the OUT-Keyword. Continuing in the same manner, Hannah systematically returns to each of her clips. Sometimes she drags ‘light’ from the keyword database and drops it in the IN-Keyword and places ‘colour’ in the OUT-Keyword field of the SNU editor ; sometimes vice versa. The project is exported again and the clips appear in the internet browser, though now in a slightly different arrangement leading to more clicking, observing and note taking …

Hannah will repeat this process numerous times. In fact, ‘the programmatic dance that is Korsakow’65 has just begun to inspire how her keyword-design will evolve throughout her film project and which video clips Hannah is going to shoot next.

Video 4 First Interview with Hannah Brasier : Recursive Process. Please visit the online version of the article to watch the video (https://vimeo.com/172723437).

Why is Hannah doing what she is doing? For Hannah, Korsakow’s keywording principle fits in well with her creative research practices of list-making and aesthetic noticing66 to build associations around a particular observation from her everyday life: ‘[K]eywording is kind of listing; it’s associating a clip with a certain amount of keywords and that is kind of building this database of lists’.67 Within the recursive process she is describing, the keywords that are at first 65 Miles 2014, 214. 66 In an email-interview, she explains that she has developed this method of listing to notice following John Mason, Researching Your Own Practice: The Discipline of Noticing, RoutledgeFalmer, 2002; and Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology. Or What It’s Like to Be a Thing, University of Minnesota Press, 2012: ‘Put together in a practice of making K-Films noticing allows me to capture things, while listing allows these things to remain self-contained’ (Accessed: 1 July 2016). 67 Hannah Brasier, First Interview, 13 November 2015.

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connecting the collected clips randomly reveal aspects within the material that she was not aware of at the moment of shooting. By discovering the relationships between the clips, she gradually elaborates the keyword-design until different thematic clusters begin to emerge. However, Korsakow’s keywording principle does not only inform the ‘editing’ process:68 I start by simply taking my phone on walks, capturing anything that seems to distinguish itself from other things. I film with the Vine video app on my phone because it restrains a filmed moment to 6 seconds. […]From this process of simply wandering and noticing I collect lots of 6 second pieces of footage that I then watch after about a month or so […] I then start a second phase of noticing by watching each piece of footage I have collected thus far. When I watch these Vines I write lists of everything that I notice in each clip. […] I am then expanding each clip into all of its components. I then use these written lists to prompt further filming and noticing, building quite a large collection of Vine videos. I then start editing together sequences that bring together similar things […] and it is these sequences that become my SNUs, or what I call clips, to import into Korsakow.69

Hannah has moved away from professional equipment to the built-in camera of her mobile phone. For capturing snapshots of the everyday, she makes use of the smartphone’s portability and shoots videos within the social media application Vine70 to explore the world around her more freely but at the same time under certain restrictions. Thus, different levels of noticing through listing (or keywording) shape the content and form of her entire (potentially never-ending) project. As she confirms, ‘Korsakow influences each step of how I make my multilinear documentaries, as I am particularly interested in how we can make documentaries with Korsakow as opposed to translating already conceived of projects through Korsakow’.71 Another function that Hannah has attributed to the individual videos within the editor is the number of lives that refers to the amount of times each clip can be viewed. From one to five or infinite, Hannah chooses ‘1’. Thus, the edited sequence of blue skies will appear as often as the generative system finds a connection from the currently playing clip’s OUT-Keyword to the blue skies’ INKeyword. If Hannah had chosen ‘1’, each clip could have only been watched once before it disappears from the K-film. Since it is Hannah’s objective to find 68 Matt Soar has identified three different stages of editing when working with Korsakow : (1) selecting and cutting raw material into sequences that become SNU’s in Korsakow, (2) algorithmic editing or ‘SNUifying’ (assigning keywords, lives and other attributes in the SNU editor) and (3) viewing, i. e. selecting SNU’s and ‘thereby creating a final, non-definitive version of the film in that specific encounter’ (Soar 2014, pp. 162–163). 69 Email interview with Hannah Brasier, 1 July 2016. 70 See: https://vine.co/ [Accessed: July 1, 2016]. 71 Email interview with Hannah Brasier, 1 July 2016.

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possible connections amongst her material, it is crucial for her practice to allow the occurrence of loops and repetitions so that rhythms and patterns can emerge. In her practice-based PhD project on ‘Negotiating Mess – Towards a Multilinear Engagement with Complexity in Interactive Documentary’,72 Hannah follows John Law, Ross Gibson and Lev Manovich’s conceptualisation of the world as messy to underline its ever-growing complexity.73 In our joint presentation at the Docuverse Symposium,74 citing Matt Soar, Hannah argues that in contrast to linear documentaries, which generally necessitate the corralling of footage into a singular narrative arc with a beginning, middle, and end, involving a compelling main character or characters, a problem to be solved or an adversity to be overcome, topped off with a memorable denouement,75

Korsakow’s variability and openness would allow for engaging with complexity by arranging audiovisual material through the keywording principle in a multilinear way. In our interview, Hannah told me about the sense of freedom and surprise she associates with her first encounter with Korsakow. The software did not require her to craft a story ; in fact, it proved to be quite difficult to do so. On the contrary, as a rule-maker and choreographer in Korsakow, Hannah feels liberated from the rigid structures of her documentary training. Now empowered to define the terms of what she is making and to refine her creative practice in the process of her PhD, Korsakow has become a constitutive participant for making multilinear documentaries that, from her point of view, have a better connection to the world:

72 Follow Hannah’s research on her blog: http://hannahbrasier.com/ [Accessed: 30 June 2016]. 73 Cf. John Law, After Method: Mess in Social Science Research, Routledge, 2004, p. 15; Ross Gibson, ‘The Known World,’ Text, 8, 2010, 7; Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, MIT Press, 2001, p. 219. 74 See: https://vimeo.com/164573237 [Accessed: June 30, 2016]. 75 Soar 2014, p. 167.

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Video 5 First Interview with Hannah Brasier : No Need to Tell Stories. Please visit the online version of the article to watch the video (https://vimeo.com/172723744).

6

A Teacher’s Perspective: Coping with Openness

Gathering around her laptop computer, I film Hannah as she presents the sequences she has been editing together from a collection of Vine video clips for her next Korsakow project to Adrian Miles and Wil Polson during a supervision session in December 2015. Each sequence represents a list of clips that expands on one idea or theme taken from her written lists, she explains. We watch the first video, a collection of pink things: Several close-ups of pink flowers are followed by drawings of pink bunnies, pink phone booths and pink fabric. After a series of other videos, Adrian and Wil comment on Hannah’s practice of list making and noticing in relation to the way she has edited the sequences. Was it one moment she had noticed or rather a study of one subject throughout different situations? Why not think about the rhythms of a Korsakow film in order to make the ‘Vine-lists’ less flat and more variable? Not everything you notice has an equal impact; not every word in a list is of the same length. The world is messy, they agree …

What ‘works well’ and ‘looks good’ in Korsakow is not just dependent on Hannah’s own preferences of making poetic and personal documentaries that let the viewer wander within their loose organisation.76 Hannah’s visual practice is highly influenced by Korsakow’s materiality just as much as it is embedded in the social dimension of the local documentary apprenticeship. She is based in the non/fictionLab and supervised by Adrian Miles, one of Korsakow’s strongest academic advocates who uses the software for theorising and teaching inter76 Hannah Brasier, First Interview, 13 November 2015.

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active documentary. As a research centre situated within RMIT University’s School of Media and Communication, the non/fictionLab converges a wide spectrum of interdisciplinary approaches to fiction and nonfiction mediamaking under a single roof. Within the documentary strand, through practicebased research with film, photography, performance, poetry and other forms of writing, different tools are employed to explore different ways of engaging with the world. The specific research culture and creative atmosphere of the lab, then, has a strong impact on Hannah’s work. Within the broader context of new media nonfiction, diverging from established norms and conventions is not only accepted but also encouraged by this community of research-practitioners. In response to my request, Adrian has organised a ‘Korsakow Interactive Video Workshop’. Shortly before the Christmas break, six students, mostly associated with the non/fictionLab, have turned up on this warm Wednesday midday to make and discuss interactive documentary works with Korsakow, among them is Hannah Brasier. After the participants have made some remarks on their motivation for attending, the day kicks off with a thirtyminute-long presentation by Adrian, who introduces Korsakow and its main principles. His first slide is projected onto the wall of the Honour’s Lab. Under the headline ‘what it is for’, three points are listed: ‘making associative & generative interactive video works that use a web browser’, ‘less useful for menu based “informational” interactive video’ and ‘well suited to documentary’. After explaining the keyword principle and the recursive workflow, Adrian highlights the meaning of lives for creating rhythmic structures with Korsakow …

Video 6 Korsakow Workshop with Adrian Miles: Introducing Lives. Please visit the online version of the article to watch the video (https://vimeo.com/172763826).

In this example, Adrian stresses the software’s generativity and compares making an interactive documentary in Korsakow with the mode of composition in music or poetry. In order to find the rhythms of the work, he encourages the

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students to make use of Korsakow’s ‘hypertextuality’: its ability to let you work within a specific material environment that supports aleatory methods. By assigning every clip at least two lives, for instance, loops and repetitions would help to recognise the following: [Y]ou do not ‘return’ to the same clip as its repetition means it is and cannot be identical to its first appearance. The structure, therefore, of this return is musical more than narrativist, it is verse and chorus rather than the literary’s normative embrace of time’s arrow, and what clips come to mean change because of, not in spite of, their reocccurence.77

By bringing his hypertext research back into a new media studies program and through the lens of new materialist theories, Adrian’s specific approach to Korsakow is informed by his notion of interactive documentary as ‘the enabling, discovery and choreography of […] relations’.78 As a result, he has conceptualised Korsakow as a ‘deeply entangled interconnected system’79 that could facilitate a ‘proactive engagement with the world’80 as an ‘implicitly multi-causal, messy’ place where ‘multiple agents with multiple facets […] interact with each other’.81 Repetition, then, would allow viewers to realise that their decisions change the shape of the K-film. If only people could ‘cope with its openness’:

Video 7 First Interview with Adrian Miles: Reactions to Korsakow. Please visit the online version of the article to watch the video (https://vimeo.com/172763830). 77 78 79 80 81

Miles 2014, 218. Adrian Miles, ‘I’m Not a Story,’ i-Docs Symposium, Bristol, 4 March 2016. Adrian Miles, First Interview, 26 October 2015. Grasseni 2011, p. 19. Adrian Miles, First Interview, 26 October 2015.

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Story as Default

3rd of March 2016. It is the evening of day two at the fourth i-Docs symposium. Bristol’s weather feels like a shock compared to summerly Melbourne. Yesterday, Florian gave his keynote on Korsakow, which was not exactly on Korsakow but rather on the overall issue of linear storytelling. I still don’t understand why he was invited, again. Adrian told me he thinks the initial response to Korsakow was dismissive because people misunderstood what it does and that the regained interest was a response to his and Matt’s publications advocating Korsakow and explaining what it is and how it works. The first day was indeed dominated by critical discussions surrounding the all-pervasive need to storify, as if it was intentionally programmed that way. Alisa Lebow’s keynote on her project ‘Filming Revolution’ already addressed the idea of moving away from storytelling when representing research outcomes in interactive spaces. Observing Florian’s reaction in the audience and informally chatting to him over dinner last night, I could tell that he was thrilled by the idea that people finally picked up on what he had been preaching for almost a decade. Adrian, however, displayed a more critical reading of what was going on at the symposium …

Video 8 Interview with Adrian Miles and Florian Thalhofer at i-Docs 2016: The Need to Storify. Please visit the online version of the article to watch the video (https://vimeo.com/172763834).

Why is there so much resistance? Why do people feel that need to storify their interactive projects even though research participants and even makers themselves claim that they are not stories? What we can derive from the co-constitution of Korsakow’s specific materiality and the different stories surrounding it, is that what is referred to as Korsakow’s potential in the experimental space of new media practitioner-researchers at the non/fictionLab (and within the wider Korsakow community) dissolves in disappointment and resistance to embrace its openness. There is something disconcerting about Korsakow in that it

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challenges highly conventionalised linear schoolings of the eye which permeate the discourse of interactive documentary but also film production, reception and related cognitive processes more broadly. While teaching Korsakow in the context of the local Master programme in Cultural Anthropology with an emphasis on Visual Anthropology (CVA) at Göttingen University,82 I was confronted with exactly these challenges. During our first session in which I asked the students to individually engage with Thalhofer’s Planet Galata83 and reflect on their experience, the majority of them expressed frustration and stress. They felt overwhelmed by the K-film’s information (over)supply, small-sized and multimodal arrangement, lack of structure, tension and closure. ‘The collective experience of cinema, eating popcorn and leaning backwards is what makes film special to me’, commented one of the students. Another one noted that the need for active selection was a distraction from the individual clips and that there was no real agency in choosing which protagonists to follow. Among other things, their sense of disappointment and reluctance to enjoy the unusual experience was clearly stemming from their background in and knowledge of linear documentary. Thus, the criteria they utilised to view and evaluate the K-film turned out to be misleading. The discussion also revealed that it was perhaps the viewers’ missing of literacy for understanding the format: How do we watch these films? How can we evaluate and talk about them? Can we refer to them as ‘films’ at all?

8

Narrativity versus Messiness: Different Schoolings of the Documentary Eye

While it is important to acknowledge narratives as a ‘means of patterning and interpreting the meaning of all sensory input and “objects of knowledge”’,84 it is of equal importance to reflect critically on the central role stories play as ‘colonisers’ of the world, and, accordingly, as interactive documentary.85 This is not to deny the range of narrative styles and structures that emerged from creative experimentation. However, the distinct characteristics of digital environments also lend themselves to non-literary creation. Although Thalhofer originally conceived Korsakow as a tool to explore storytelling computationally, my case 82 Informed by a long tradition in making and theorising ethnographic film in Göttingen, CVA predominantly aims at using audio-visual material for representing anthropological knowledge. Key characteristics include clearly separated field phases, continued sequential editing and the crafting of a narrative dramaturgy. 83 Florian Thalhofer, Planet Galata, 2010. 84 Kinder 2003, p. 97. 85 Miles 2015.

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study of the Korsakow System has demonstrated how the openness of the software’s design has invited documentary research-practitioners to rethink their practices beyond narratives: The generative, procedural possibilities that interactive documentary offers have affinities to the world that make it distinct from those that story and narrative and representation offers. It is not that we should not use stories in interactive documentary, but that we are colonisers of interactive documentary via story. I am not sure I know how to say this simply or clearly, however, if the world is made of things with agency in their own right, and, if particular ways of making procedural, generative multilinear works also allow things to retain their agency, then we have a possible nonfiction practice and form that adopts, at least to some extent, the points of view of the world.86

The recursive process with Korsakow observed at the non/fictionLab allows for a more in-depth and expanded analysis of the complex relations that can occur among the captured aspects of the world. Thus, a skilled engagement with Korsakow’s generative algorithm lets its users consider the different facets of their material in various constellations through repeated noticing, clicking and keywording. As Grasseni remarks, the construction of knowledge is only rendered meaningful if certain local, situated and contextual conditions apply.87 In order to cope with Korsakow’s openness, it requires specific training and an environment that facilitates a multisensory attunement to the complexity of the world through a mode of documentary-making in which surrendering authorial control becomes a necessity and redundancy is welcomed. By closely analysing Hannah Brasier’s documentary practice in its socio-material constellation of knowledge production, I was able to emphasise the importance of specific local ‘exercises of vision’88 that often involve a certain degree of defamiliarisation with other institutionalised trainings and their embedded ideologies. Thus, what is defined as ‘good’ work in this setting is highly dependent on and structured by the respective training. Moreover, it might be challenged by standard or default professional conventions as well as by socio-cultural hegemonies. In line with documentary’s experiential qualities, the skilled visions emerging around Korsakow are but one example for taking computational materiality seriously and exploring its potential for performing patterns of experience that defy narrative renderings. In this sense, Korsakow occupies a special role among other authoring tools for interactive documentary because it wants the generative algorithm to retain and demonstrate its agency. As a counter-practice to 86 Ibid., p. 3. 87 Grasseni 2007, p. 11. 88 Grasseni 2011, p. 22.

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the dominant discourse in interactive documentary, the Korsakow schooling developed in the non/fictionLab can help us to reimagine what documentary could become in multilinear digital environments. Anna Wiehl, for instance, has considered Korsakow documentaries ‘as affective tools for thought, as poetic miniatures zooming into the very small details of everyday life in a contemplative way’,89 and Sharon Daniel has argued for mapping sites of social dissensus through interface design and polyvocality as a counter-strategy to narrative persuasion.90 However, it is not my aim to favour generative multilinearity over narrative forms of representation. Storytelling holds specific benefits for nonfiction practices as an aid for orientation, order and emotional engagement. If Korsakow allows for a dwelling in a liminal, somewhat disorderly state and if learning how to use Korsakow is crucial to understanding what it does, can we consider it a useful tool for representation? Where does it leave the viewers if I ask them to become practitioners themselves? On a more analytical level, Korsakow certainly offers an interesting proposition for the making of documentary knowledge that deserves further attention. Whether or not it will find acceptance within a wider community of practitioners and audiences remains to be seen. Biography Franziska Weidle is a PhD candidate at Göttingen University’s Department of Cultural Anthropology, Germany and a research fellow at the Research Training Group “Literature and Dissemination of Literature in the Digital Age”. She is interested in exhibition, installation, filmmaking and photography as forms of documentary and ethnographic knowledge production and dissemination. Since commencing her PhD on digital technology and documentary practices in 2014, Franziska has presented her work at the Digital Cultures Research Centre, the European Association of Social Anthropologists and Visible Evidence. From 2015 to 2016, she was a visiting scholar at RMIT University’s non/fictionLab where she co-founded the Docuverse Group.

89 Wiehl, 2016. 90 Sharon Daniel, ‘On Politics and Aesthetics: A Case Study of “Public Secrets” and “Blood Sugar”,’ Studies in Documentary Film, 6, 2, 2012, 215–227.

4

Software as Co-Teacher – How Korsakow Disrupted an Ethnographic Film Program*

Abstracts When new technologies are introduced to an established film program, not only students but also teachers face a series of chances and challenges. In the masters course Curriculum Visual Anthropology (CVA) of 2015–17 at Göttingen’s Department of Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology, it was the Korsakow System with its particular affordances and constraints that stirred things up significantly. The premise of this paper is to reflect critically on the co-constitution of technology and practice within the student research project’s particular “materiality of learning” (Sørensen 2009). As a result of disrupting the “skilled visions” (Grasseni 2010) of ethnographic filmmaking, we argue, implicit conventions and inscribed ideologies of institutionalized trainings are brought to the surface. Quand les nouvelles technologies sont introduites dans un programme institutionnalis8 d’enseignement du film, ce sont tant les 8lHves que les professeurs qui doivent faire face aux nouvelles opportunit8s ainsi qu’aux nouveaux d8fis offerts par ces technologies. A l’universit8 de Göttingen, entre 2015–2017 dans le cours de ma%trise d8di8 / l’anthropologie visuelle, au sein du d8partement d’anthropologie culturelle et d’ethnologie europ8enne, ce fut les potentialit8s et les contraintes sp8cifiques du systHme Korsakow qui ont clairement fait bouger la situation. Le but de cet article vise / apporter une r8flexion critique sur la coconstitution d’une technique et d’une pratique avec le projet de recherche des 8tudiants consacr8 / la « mat8rialit8 de l’apprentissage » (Sørensen 2009). Comme le r8sultat fut de perturber « les visions experts » (Grasseni 2010) du film ethnographique, nous d8montrons que les conventions implicites et les id8ologies sous jacentes aux formations institutionnalis8es se sont r8v8l8es. Cuando se introducen nuevas tecnolog&as en un programa de cine ya establecido, no sjlo los estudiantes sino tambi8n los profesores se enfrentan a una serie de oportunidades y retos. En el curso de master de Antropolog&a Visual (CVA) de 2015–17 del Departamento de Antropolog&a Cultural / Etnolog&a Europea de Göttingen, fue el Sistema Korsakow –con sus particularidades y limitaciones– que puso estas cuestiones sobre la mesa de manera significativa. La premisa de este art&culo es reflexionar cr&ticamente sobre la co-constitucijn de la tecnolog&a y la pr#ctica dentro de la “materialidad del aprendizaje” particular * with Torsten Näser, Anthrovision Vol. 5, 1, 2017; URL: http://journals.openedition.org/an throvision/2507; DOI: 10.4000/anthrovision.2507.

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del proyecto de investigacijn del estudiante (Sørensen 2009). Argumentamos que, con la interrupcijn de las “visiones entrenadas” (Grasseni 2010) del cine etnogr#fico las convenciones impl&citas y las ideolog&as inscriptas de los procesos de aprendizaje institucionalizados salen a la superficie. Index Keywords: ethnographic film, digital media, teaching methodology, Korsakow Mots-cl8s: film ethnographic, m8dia num8rique, m8thode d’enseignement, Korsakow Palabras claves: cine etnogr#fico, media digital, enseÇar metodolog&a, Korsakow Acknowledgements We would like to thank our colleague Frauke Paech, who co-taught the project with us as well as the students of CVA 2015–17 for their trust and continuous involvement even after the project’s official completion.

Introduction (Franziska Weidle) It is the first session of the academic year. The students have gathered around the big table in our conference room. The aim of this session, we announce, is to become acquainted with the Korsakow software from a viewer’s perspective. Their task is to engage with Florian Thalhofer’s Planet Galata (Turkey 2010),1 an interactive online documentary authored in Korsakow, and critically reflect on their viewing experience based on a given set of questions. After some initial confusion and voiced opposition, the screens begin to flicker and the room becomes silent. About 30 minutes later, we switch the lights back on and start collecting the students’ reactions and evaluations on the whiteboard. The lefthand side of the mind map quickly fills up with negative aspects color-coded in blue. Stress, boredom, distraction, repetition and small-format are among the problems they identify. Above all, the main irritation appears to stem from the lack of structure, navigation and literacy. “Where does this film end?” and “Is this a film at all?” are questions that keep coming up during the ensuing discussion. It is only after providing further context on recent academic scholarship in the field of interactive documentary as well as reminding them of our discipline’s long debate on the issue of representation that the students gradually shift their attitudes towards what they have seen. Documentary video formats published on the internet are often subject to a direct comparison with their cinematic counterparts, implying a hierarchical relationship between the two. In fact, new forms of expression are configured by previous technologies and their accompanying production and viewing conventions just as much as they facilitate different possibilities. In the contemporary 1 See: http://www.planetgalata.com/ (accessed 27 September 2017).

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Fig. 6 Translated graphic depicting the students’ mind map of their initial encounter with a work authored in Korsakow, 17 May 2016. Graphic by Franziska Weidle.

discourse on interactive documentary (i-docs), scholars and practitioners of the field primarily highlight the potential of interactivity as distinguishing affordance2 of digital media “to reconfigure the relationship between media producer, subject and audience at the heart of documentary”, as recently suggested by Mandy Rose (2017:7). On the same note, Sandra Gaudenzi and Judith Aston previously remarked that “interactivity is seen as means through which the viewer is positioned within the artefact itself, demanding him, or her, to play an active role in the negotiation of the ‘reality’ being conveyed through the i-doc” (2012:126). Whether it is an interactive user interface, hypertextuality or algorithmic processing, producing documentary content in and with computational logics puts filmmakers in an odd position. They might find it liberating to mix the languages of documentary and computational media and divert from the pressures of cinematic conventions such as narrative or expository coherence. At the same time, however, this also requires them to depart from their sometimes implicit documentary schooling, including successive production phases and the notion of a single-authored, fixed outcome. In her analysis of current i-doc productions, Gaudenzi, for instance, pointed to the methodological tensions of merging design and storytelling workflows, which “go[es] beyond the practical adoption of new processes touching upon core beliefs of individual responsibilities and power structures” within multidisciplinary teams (2017:118). Accommodating diverse perspectives and negotiating reality collaboratively as part of its representation is not just at the heart of i-docs but also resonates with some of the key points frequently discussed in cultural, social and visual 2 Coined by Donald Norman, affordance refers to “the relationship between the properties of an object and the agent’s capacity to determine how the object could possibly be used” (Norman 2013:10).

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anthropology. While the linearity of film and the types of montage it permits are doubtlessly helpful tools to structure complex encounters with socio-cultural phenomena, they are foreign constructs imposed on epistemic practices, which are characterized by a complex interplay of proximity and distance, the simultaneous experience of participation and observation (cf. Hess and Schwertl 2013:15). During the master course Curriculum Visual Anthropology (CVA) of 2015–17 at the Department of Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology in Göttingen, together with our colleague Frauke Paech we conceived our research project as an experiment to test the suitability of more open media practices for bridging the gap between fieldwork experience and interpretation. Thus, we integrated Korsakow – a “media software” (Manovich 2013:38) for authoring generative multilinear3 audio-/visual works – into our ethnographic research project Bilder machen (making images) (2017).4

Fig. 7 Project homepage. CVA 2015–17, Dept. of Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology, University of Goettingen.

3 In contrast to film and its linear time-based sequence of images, hypertextual systems enable tempo-spatial connections that are multi- or nonlinear. In the context of hypertext theory, the term nonlinearity has been scrutinized primarily because it negates the role of linearity in hypertext (cf. Landow 1992; Aarseth 1997). Since temporal continuity is still a significant aspect of the way a work is perceived, we will adopt Seth Keen’s definition of multilinearity to describe structures “made in a system that facilitates multiple relations between separate granules. The system and the audience can link these separate granules, in the form of shots and sequences, into different combinations” (Keen 2014:11). 4 See: http://bildermachen.uni-goettingen.de/ (accessed 27 September 2017).

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As exemplified by the classroom situation described at the beginning of this paper, mixing the language of documentary films with that of computational media is, hence, often challenging not only to makers but also to viewers of such works (cf. Gantier and Labour 2017:101). Multimedia online productions “transform how users engage with materials” (Coover 2011:617): They require heightened attention, a different skill set and a new form of engagement with which documentary audiences might struggle. We can also observe a curious tension stemming from documentary and, in this context, ethnographic films’ ambiguous position among the conventions and demands of mainstream media culture on the one hand, and the long-term in-depth anthropological research that lies behind their often low-budgeted production, on the other. In this context, Roderick Coover critically remarks that “[…] non-fiction visual research projects often take a lot of time and attention to make, and they often take plenty of time and attention to view as well. Many cannot be viewed in a single sitting, while others may require a combination of viewing, reading and/or other intellectual activity. As media converge, it therefore may be necessary to establish conditions by which once differing media are framed for reception and engagement” (2012:212).

While resistance, frustration and disappointment were at the forefront of our students’ initial reception experience, finding an appropriate framework for reception and engagement was only one of the challenges we faced as teachers and students of Korsakow over the course of our project. Based on unsystematic fieldwork, this paper critically reflects on the lessons learned from bringing together established and emerging media technologies in the context of an ethnographic film program. Central questions include: Which conflicts emerged in the process and what does the careful examination of this specific sociotechnical constellation tell us about the standards, values and ideologies underpinning representation strategies in ethnography? In relation to current debates on interactive documentary, practice theory and (audio-)visual research methods, this contribution explores the ongoing requirement of responding to the development of new technologies and the resulting redefinition of appropriate media forms such as ethnographic film. In the space between contemporary theoretical perspectives on ethnographic filmmaking and the specific hopes held by students that motivated them to choose this career path, we can observe considerable discrepancies. By supplementing often deductive and positing discourses with a position that is sensitive to situated media production and its cultural embedding, we seek to emphasize further the significance of such inconsistencies. Searching for a suitable written format, we opted for an approach that might interrupt the conventional flow and style of academic texts in favor of repre-

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senting the fragmented and polyvocal genesis of this project and paper. Thus, we will switch between our individual voices as teachers of CVA and complement this experiential dimension with discursive reflections from a more distanced point of view on ethnographic filmmaking as academics in the field. With this approach, we hope to excavate gradually the implicit conventions and habitus inscribed in this institutionalized media training and offer a methodology for how to engage productively with socio-material disruptions as epistemological points of friction.

CVA and Its Institutional Memory (Torsten Näser) “This is a particularly challenging moment to work with images”, begins visual anthropologist Paolo Favero in one of his recent publications, and demonstrates how the multimodal, material and relational character of digital images can “become constitutive of new relations, engagements and knowledge” in the context of image-based ethnographic work (2017:275–276). Similarly, the more than thirty-year-old master program at the Department of Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology in Göttingen mirrors shifting notions of imagemaking practices and their discursive and material entanglements. Moreover, the topic of image-making was also at the heart of the Korsakow project to be discussed in this paper, which is why we will dedicate the following paragraphs to a reflection upon CVA’s institutional memory as context and catalyst for the conception of this project and the challenges we encountered with Korsakow. Co-initiated by Edmund Ballhaus, one of the most prominent critics of the time,5 CVA was founded as a counter draft to the dominant discourse surrounding images within the German-speaking visual anthropology of the mid1980s. In response to the positivist notion of science and, following that, the restricted use of film postulated by IWF, the local Institute for Scientific Film, Ballhaus advocated for a conceptualization of film as analytical research outcome rather than as method for empirical data collection (1987:126). In addition, he saw films as independent scholarly endeavors that emerge out of and, as Ballhaus reified several years later, after the completion of an intensive phase of fieldwork (1995:25). These notions shaped CVA’s direction for years to come. Many CVA productions have combined observational methods with a shooting schedule approach and included interviews and forms of montage that depart from the naturalistic gesture of direct or observational cinema. Most of them have followed the ethos of the self-responsible anthropologist (cf. Rouch 2003, 5 Among others, Hans-Ulrich Schlumpf also took a critical position towards the Göttingenbased Institute for Scientific Film (Institut für den wissenschaftlichen Film, IWF). (1987).

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Ballhaus 1995) who autonomously conceptualizes, shoots, edits and supports the public screening of his or her film in a cinema-like setting. Nowadays, the study program consists of a three-semester project dedicated to the theory and practice of ethnographic filmmaking. Students attending the program are also invited to do audiovisual work as an integral part of their master thesis. Participation in CVA is free of charge and addresses students who are interested in gaining basic methodological experiences in audiovisual anthropology.6 Without a doubt, CVA has changed since Ballhaus’ retirement in 2009. The strict demarcation between fieldwork and shooting has been transformed into a case dependent integrative methodology. The primacy of narrative monographic films conceptualized for the big screen has also been mitigated for the benefits of working with video more diversely.7 A discourse space rather than a “school”, CVA still functions as a “field of possibilities” (Foucault 2005:256). Against a mixed background of implicit knowledge and the aim of responding to dynamic and diversified international discourses, it still stands for a particular filmic and representational tradition within visual anthropology and its history is a significant part of its institutional memory today. For some time now, it has become common practice to determine a specific topic for each CVA iteration. Following the iconic turn (cf. Bachmann-Medick 2006:329–330) and contemporary perspectives on visual media (cf. Favero 2017), CVA 2015–17 was dedicated to the investigation of image creation processes in their broadened and increasingly diversifying ontologies and epistemologies. The purpose of this open approach was to tease out the different cultural and historical stratifications (cf. Bruhn 2009:12) as well as the resulting ambiguities inherent in the concept. Our aim was to combine equally established understandings of imagery as they are in connection with analog photography for instance, and digital forms, which often lack physical attachment to the empirical world (Belting 2001:38;39) and “ask us to approach them beyond representation and indexicality” (Favero 2017:276). The CVA project from 2015 to 2017, however, preset not only the topic of image-making but also a specific perspective. According to contemporary approaches in visual studies (cf. Prinz and Reckwitz 2012), image productions are located within “complex, contextual, connotative entanglements and couplings of media, material and processes of production and mediation” (Leimgruber et al. 2013:253) (translated by T.N.). In 6 The CVA program is complemented by several practical and theoretical courses of the Department’s BA and MA curricula. See: http://www.kaee.uni-goettingen.de/cva/ (accessed 12 Jan. 2017). 7 One example was the CVA project of 2011–13 during which the students screened their films not only in a cinema but also in the local art center and other public spaces as integrated part of an artistic exhibition; see http://www.movements-of-migration.org/cms/ (accessed 14 Jan. 2017); and Näser (2015).

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line with anthropologist Cristina Grasseni and her concept of “skilled visions” (2010; 2011), we assumed that visions and the ways they take shape are influenced by situated processes of learning and training, which are embedded in multisensory practices (Grasseni 2010:4). Understood as situated practices following specific and local rules of validity, the students formed groups of three to gather video material on different methods of image-making. In line with this overarching topic and perspective, they found protagonists that fitted the project’s conception well: a blind painter, solar system researchers producing graphics of the sun, an enamel artist or a fully automated apparatus for biometric photos. Rather than producing standalone ethnographic films, however, we asked them to experiment with an alternative audiovisual format that would incorporate hundreds of short video clips within one platform to mark coherences and differences among the various field sites. It was precisely this point when Korsakow entered the scene.

The Materiality of CVA 2015–17 – Introducing Korsakow (Franziska Weidle) Although there is a considerable amount of research that examines technology as “means to social, psychological, or pedagogic ends”, Estrid Sørensen identifies a blind spot in these often still human-centered studies of education towards the “diverse other ways in which materials take part in social interaction” (2009:6). From the perspective of Actor-Network-Theory (ANT),8 materiality plays a central role in social processes such as the production of knowledge (cf. Latour and Woolgar 1986; Knorr Cetina 1999). Transferring this way of thinking to the educational research field, Sørensen regards learning “as a result of a symmetric interplay of humans and materials” (2009:5) and advocates for a “minimal methodology, which does not a priori define the role of technology in practice” (2009:28). On the contrary, this approach asks us to consider how learning materials participate in an unfolding situation, and what is achieved through this 8 As a central approach in empirical studies of science, technology and society (known as Science and Technology Studies), ANT rests on the principle of general symmetry, i. e. the notion that the world consists of ever shifting networks of relations between human and nonhuman, material and semiotic agencies (cf. Latour 1999:174–215; Callon and Law 1997). Rather than providing a coherent explanatory framework or perspective, this concept (or non-theory) functions as a theoretical and methodological repertoire that aims at mapping and describing these relations. As such, it has been influential in promoting a view on materiality that seeks to underline its agency, not only as an equally important participant in the constitution of scientific knowledge but in a variety of empirical fields including educational practices. For a critical retrospection on the genesis of ANT, cf. Mol 2010.

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particular socio-material constellation in the process. In the same vein, ANT teaches us to study technology and its heterogeneous components in their continual and often conflicting states of becoming (cf. Law 2004; Venturini 2010). In the case of our student project, the Korsakow System came to disrupt and was disrupted by its introduction into the educational environment of CVA. As “relatively flexible system” (Sørensen 2009: 86) however, Korsakow defies simple definition. In some circumstances, it is a computer program for authoring interactive documentaries, commonly known as K-films. However, the works produced with Korsakow are anything but fixed and stable. Every K-film is unique from another but also in itself changes from one play-through to the next. Embedded in a web-based environment, every click repeatedly rearranges the given set of video shots and sequences, so-called “SNUs” (Smallest Narrative Units). Moreover, K-films differ notably in the various ways and contexts in which they have been conceived. Gradually diverging from what its inventor Florian Thalhofer originally had in mind, different practitioners have adopted different strategies to approach Korsakow’s constantly redeveloping affordances and constraints. Thus, offering an account of a default usage or stereotypical viewing experience would be unfruitful here. As described elsewhere (Weidle 2016), there are multiple perspectives on this rather “fluid technology” (de Laet and Mol 2000:225) and we can only learn to understand what it is by studying what it does within a situated practice. Following Korsakow and its participation in the context of CVA, a number of factors had to fall into place before the object could become associated with this learning environment. After turning Korsakow into the primary object of my doctorate in 2014, the conceptualization of CVA 2015–17 was deeply affected by my research interests and the fieldwork conducted at the non/fictionLab, a research center located in the Media and Communications Department at RMIT University in Melbourne. Six months of participant observation, interviews and camera-ethnography had led to the realization that “keywords are the heart of what makes relations amongst the clips in Korsakow” (Miles, Korsakow Workshop, 16 December 2015) and their design demands distinct workflows. In a recursive back and forth of gathering material (often captured with the built-in camera of smartphones) and importing it into the application, my research participants would start by assigning simple keywords to their clips. When exporting projects into web-ready HTML-packages, Korsakow’s generative algorithm performs search inquiries based on these keywords. Each click organizes the otherwise disparate SNUs into different combinations, a process Seth Keen described as “connecting granules of video together into a web of relations” (2014:26). Watching the clips as they formed complex, multiple and variable assemblages on screen, then, would reveal rhythms and patterns that

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prompted further filming and gradually refined my participants’ keyword designs.9 Thus, what came to matter about Korsakow in the context of CVA was preconfigured by this context just as much as it was shaped by the study program’s structure and conceptualization outlined above. When planning the project, Torsten and I were particularly interested in questions around knowledge representation in cultural and social anthropology. Following John Law’s notion of heterogeneous engineering (1989),10 this interest formed one of the central connecting points between Korsakow’s technological features and our social activities. In line with the primary demands for more self-reflexive, polyphonic and evocative modes of representation, Korsakow’s “simultaneous multiplicity” (Miles 2014:209) appeared to offer an alternative to linear continuity and narrative coherence as default organizing principles of audiovisual media. We hoped that the interplay between the author as rule-maker, the algorithmic processing of the program and the viewers as interactors11 would allow for a multilinear arrangement of footage that could retain traces of its complicated origins. Furthermore, we believed Korsakow to be a suitable tool for our praxeographical approach on image-making in that it could accommodate large quantities of empirical data and, similar to computer-based qualitative data analysis, would enable us to code our material and find correspondences, themes and motifs among the disparate media assets. Finally yet importantly, as an off-the-shelf and low-cost authoring tool it made interactive media production easily accessible to ethnographic filmmakers who might lack sufficient web-design and programming skills. Proceeding from this three-fold constellation of discursive, empirical and pragmatic concerns, many adjustments were necessary to turn Korsakow into a useful tool for our project. Most importantly, it involved the willingness to divert from these initial assumptions about Korsakow and its role. Besides rather foreseeable disconcertments, however, we did not anticipate that Korsakow would turn into a co-teacher for making, teaching and viewing ethnographic film. In the following paragraphs, we will trace the mutual co-constitution of

9 For further reading on the specific practice with Korsakow at the non/fictionLab cf. Miles 2017; Brasier 2017 and Weidle 2016. 10 According to Law, technology can be described as a result of continuously aligning and realigning social activities and interests with technological features until they are connected in a relatively stable way. 11 A number of terminologies refer to the recipients of i-docs. Since “user” can denote both, the software user as well as the user of the work, we call the viewers “interactors” (Gifreu-Castells 2011; Murray 2012) to differentiate the two but also to highlight the dual role of the audience as assembling and simultaneously viewing an interactive work.

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Korsakow and our CVA project as it emerged in and through symmetrical interrelations of human, non-human, social and technical elements.

Conflicts (Torsten Näser) and Strategies (Franziska Weidle) Between Tradition and Innovation From our students’ initial reactions described in the beginning of this paper, a long and intense process of negotiation and modification was required before we could agree on a research design that promised to be fruitful. Not only Korsakow but the pre-determined framework of research perspective and topic had created constraints and inconsistencies from the outset of the project. In a back and forth movement similar to the workflow inspired by Korsakow, we will review central points of disruption throughout the course of the project that resulted in a modified filmmaking and teaching practice. While Torsten Näser will outline conflicts that arose from introducing Korsakow to the particular socio-material constellation of CVA (displayed in normal type), Franziska Weidle will discuss the respective coping strategy deployed (displayed in italics).

Becoming Flexible The structure of the 3-semester-CVA program traditionally follows an idealized filming process to familiarize beginners with the steps needed to produce a film. By teaching basic concepts of ethnographic filmmaking such as the conventions of film language or the continuity system12 at the beginning of the course, we draw on a linear understanding of film without necessarily rendering it explicit. In this way, study programs and specifically those that have a long history and are taught regularly, reach a status of apparent naturalization even if continuously re-adjusted. As repeated speech acts, they have become embedded in discursive constellations of power (cf. Bublitz 2003:60–61). Ingrained in the organization of the program, their normalizations are reproduced in lectures, teaching materials, technical equipment and publications and, hence, cannot be deconstructed easily. Ballhaus’ paper on film and fieldwork (1995) has been especially influential for CVA’s institutional memory. In this contribution, he critically examines the 12 Moreover, media scholars Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, for instance, show how the continuity system – a concept encompassing many of the conventional forms of filmic expression – correlates closely with a linear unfolding of the relations between sites and movements in film (2007:113–114).

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specificities of the fieldwork situation in relation to making a film and advocates for the completion of the research process before beginning to shoot (1995:25). Over the years, this postulation has given way to a case-by-case approach, which also led to a gradual interweaving of the previously separated field phases (cf. Eckardt and Näser 2014:280, 286). Nevertheless, the framework for making a film in the context of CVA is still a consecutive one, which Korsakow urged us to rethink. During one of his Korsakow workshops at the non/fictionLab in 2015, new media scholar Adrian Miles pointed out common mistakes people would make when using the software. As a generative system, he cautioned the participants not to confuse it with a tool for building searchable databases characterized by navigational, branching tree structures. If you map out what the machine is going to do, he argued, there is no point in using the machine. In our filmed interview as well as in his teaching he emphasized the importance of developing the structure of a particular work with and through the respective tools:

Video 9 Interview with Adrian Miles: Common Mistakes (https://vimeo.com/korsakowres earch/commonmistakes.

As a generative system, the structure of a K-film co-emerges through the algorithmic processing of the tool. Accordingly, we encouraged our students to move from a linear process of filmmaking towards a recursive one. This implied dissolving the clear demarcation between different production stages (fieldwork, shooting and editing) even further and advocating for an early introduction of the camera in the field. Through repeatedly importing, indexing and exporting rushes, we hoped students would use Korsakow’s keyword (or rule-) based procedurality for analyzing footage, generating new research questions and, thus, prompting further camera-led research.

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We could not superimpose the recursive workflow studied at the non/fictionLab on the linearly structured film curriculum in Göttingen without further modification. Many students felt overwhelmed by the prospect of taking their camera equipment into the field without having outlined a proper shooting schedule before. Some also displayed hesitation because they feared the relationship to their protagonists was not established well enough. Another source for our students’ uncertainty and resistance stemmed from the concern that we would neglect the teaching of filmmaking skills the lesson plan had prominently identified as crucial. Thus, the majority of students still followed a rather traditional film production process delaying our actual work with Korsakow to the postproduction stage. As a general strategy to counter these discrepancies, we remained flexible throughout the entire process. In addition to the broad range of image-making practices they could select, we facilitated a greater range of possibilities for working with audiovisual media. While it was our goal to realize a collective large-scale Korsakow project, we kept its structure open and, in addition, offered students the chance to use the same material for making short film portraits that could accompany the online platform. On a temporary basis, this prospect appeared to cater for the students’ ambition to author a linear narrative film suitable for festival submission in order to gain symbolic capital and establish themselves in the field. In practice, however, the workload and intensity of the Korsakow project quickly pushed this option into the background for most of them.

A Question of Perspective CVA has traditionally favored linguistic and semiotic approaches, which is why not only the cultural phenomena under study but also the films about them are typically seen as texts (cf. Ballhaus 1995:17, 25, 26). Here, Clifford Geertz’s concept of thick description as contextual interpretation of social events and processes (1973:14–15) has become a key reference point for focusing on cultural expressions (cf. Näser 2014:124–125) and their mediations as “writing” (Herzfeld 2001:25). Films that follow this cultural theory are understood as results of “processes of constructing meaning” (Ballhaus 2013:234–235; translated by T.N.). “As an academic product”, Ballhaus remarked, films “should explore a topic according to aspects selected in advance […], in order to reveal the sense and function of actions and events as well as their underlying values and social meanings” (2013:261; translated by T.N.). In response to the IWF and its preferences on material culture, focusing on human beings became one of the central claims, which, since then, has been reiterated emphatically (cf. Ballhaus 2013:238) as constitutive for the films produced in the framework of CVA.

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Inspired by ANT, the praxeological perspective adopted for our Korsakow project on the contrary makes no significant difference between human beings and other material actors in a network and thus treats the interconnection of discursive and material components symmetrically (Knecht 2013:97). By placing emphasis on modes of observation and description (Knecht 2013:98), the praxeological approach, furthermore, “is clearly opposed to situating sociality and culture within the ‘inner life’ of the collective soul and its interpretation as a pure ‘system of representation’” (Reckwitz 2003:288, translated by T.N.). Outlined in this way, the expectations held by students regarding the, at least implicitly, prefigured mode of practice with film ran contrary to the conception of the project. The anticipated change in perspective could only be accomplished rather slowly. This became evident, for instance, in written elaborations where some of our students utilized biographical or psychoanalytical argumentation to refer repeatedly back to analytical concepts that go directly against the praxeological approach. In order to reduce reservations regarding the project’s approach we decided to render it explicit within teaching units and their didactical conception. Rather than dedicating the collective viewing and discussion of footage, for instance, to one group at a time as is the usual practice in CVA, we reconceived these meetings as laboratory sessions where all of our students were asked to show short clips that responded to a specific assignment. In highly focused sessions as the one depicted in the photograph below, students could demonstrate their growing expertise for their individual fields whilst pursuing a collective aim by comparatively discussing the fragmentary video material in its praxeological dimensions. Following methods such as the principle of trial and error, which are typical for laboratorylike atmospheres, we analyzed the video material in connection with pre-established categories and were, thus, able to strengthen, differentiate, transform, generate or dismiss them in the process. In addition, we discussed our filming approaches with regard to the question whether or not they were corresponding to these categories. As a methodology common in the area of software industry and collaborative experience design (cf. Gaudenzi 2017:120; Linington 2017:137), lab models encourage an iterative project approach from the start, which helped us to further facilitate the recursive workflow inspired by Korsakow. In the context of ethnographic fieldwork, visual anthropologist Elisabeth Mohn also emphasized that the potentials of such visual labs would lie in the ascription of new meaning to video material: “A precondition of such an approach is to subordinate the material to the respective analytical strategy rather than stylizing it as an untouchable document of situation” (2002:185, translated by F.W.). It was exactly this shift in focus, which was grounded in our praxeological approach, that advanced from an initial source of conflict to a productive space for the experimentation with different media and modes of knowledge-making within a laboratory-like atmosphere.

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Fig. 8 Visual lab session. Photo by Rüdiger Brandis.

Organizing Randomness CVA’s understanding of ethnographic film has, for a long time, referred to the individuality of the filmmaker and his or her crucial role within this interpretative approach. By classifying his cultural analysis as “an elaborate venture” (1973:6), Geertz also configured and supported the widely referenced notion of (audio visual) ethnographers as actors capable of coping with this task.13 The conception of our project was opposed to this accentuation of the filmmaker’s individuality. When pursuing a praxeological approach (Knecht 2013:99), researchers and the reflexivity of their involvement in the field play a minor role. Moreover, it is also Korsakow and its affordances which suggest shifting the focus away from the filmmaker and his or her authorial control. One of the discrepancies between ethnographic film and web-based media production our students struggled with the most is the tension between open and fixed structures. In Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film Carl Plantinga drew attention to the fact that “no film can avoid formal structure all together” (1997:145). In contrast to expository or narrative structures, however, “open structures” would be “more episodic, meandering, 13 Summarizing all of the texts discussing the filmmaker’s person and her or his influence on the filmic process would exceed this article’s capacity. Referring to the most obvious concepts such as the autonomously filming anthropologist as well as the debates on reflexivity (cf. Husmann 1983:102–103; Ballhaus 1995:14; Ruby 2000:151–152; Rouch 2003:87; MacDougall 2006:26–27) should be sufficient to illustrate the vast extent this field of argumentation has reached.

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and idiosyncratic than their formal counterparts” (1997:145). Since it does not need to adhere to specific requirements of conventions, Plantinga argues, an “[o]pen structure may be motivated in various ways, by the filmmaker’s associations while filming, by an anthropological experiment or a journey, or by pure chance” (1997:146). As a system facilitating multilinear media arrangements, Korsakow offered an alternative approach to editing footage into a causal storyline with a beginning, middle and end. At the same time, however, its invitation to openness also presented us with a major challenge. How could we free ourselves from a coherent ordering of events and still fulfill our role as interpretative researchers?

While the reasons for the resistance displayed by our students remained ambiguous at first, the significance of the filmmaker was revealed when initiating a roundtable discussion where some students had to play the role of Korsakow advocates and others that of critics. Central to the arguments of the latter group was the question of authorial responsibility, which would be undermined by Korsakow’s open- or “randomness”. Since the clips imported into the system are primarily characterized by briefness and fragmentation they can hardly be thought of as individual works. Combined in a shared pool of footage, these SNUs have no credits – a feature that normally indicates authorship (cf. Bruns 2012). Moreover, the aleatory associations enabled by Korsakow’s generative algorithm collided with the habitual field of the autonomous anthropologist cultivated in the CVA environment. By “posing a threat to the construction of epistemological authority in the voice of the [filming] ethnographer” (Favero 2017:285), the students struggled to surrender control in favor of facilitating multiple interpretations. An accessible approach often utilized by Thalhofer and Miles for visualizing basic structures and developing keyword designs in Korsakow is the concept of clouds. A cloud is a cluster consisting of different videos and/or images that share the same IN- and OUTkeywords. In accordance with the logic of procedural rulemaking or “indexing”, i. e. “using the storage capacity of computers to classify video for access and retrieval” (Keen 2014:16), keywords direct the algorithmic search. Following the “Korsakow Manual”, IN-keywords “can be thought of as ‘I am…’ statements” and OUT-keywords as “‘I am looking for…’ statements” (2015).14 Consequently, when editing clips in Korsakow’s SNU Editor, we assigned IN-keywords to specify the respective video content and OUT-keywords to define possible relations to other clips. As the graphic above indicates, at least one clip is required to have a different OUT-keyword that matches the IN-keyword of clips forming another cloud and, thus, functioning as “connector clip” to bridge the different clusters.

14 See: http://korsakow5.korsakow.org/learn/manual/ (accessed 15 March 2017).

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Fig. 9 Basic Structure of a work authored in Korsakow. Adrian Miles, Korsakow Workshop, 16 December 2015.

Thinking in clouds made Korsakow more manageable because it offered a middle ground between absolute randomness on the one hand and linear sequentiality on the other. Based on a common repertoire of terminologies and concepts derived from the preceding literature review, we began organizing our clips in a classificatory way.15 Starting from the more general dimensions of image-making practices, we deductively devised a list of categories ranging from image technology and carrier to atmospheres, bodies and skilled visions. We now shared an analytical grid for observing, filming and comparing different imagemaking practices. By merging these categories with the notion of keywording, we developed an online keyword log that was accessible to everyone during fieldwork. We encouraged students to examine a minimum of three categories that they deemed most significant. Since the keyword log also featured a category that focused on “subjects”, special emphasis could be placed on humans as image creators if necessary. Based on our students’ observations, the keyword log gradually developed further and ultimately facilitated a greater interweaving of inductive and deductive approaches, which also responded to the need of attending to the particularities of each field site more flexibly.

15 This approach is linked closely to grounded theory and its method of theoretical coding. Due to the focus on pedagogy here, a more in depth comparison between Korsakow and software for qualitative data analysis such as atlas.ti or MAXQDA will be the topic of another paper. As an example for other ethnographic approaches to Korsakow’s keywording principle, cf. Walter (2014) and his co-authored film On the Road with Maruch (2008), which he turned into an interactive multimedia installation with the help of Korsakow. For an example in the documentary context, cf. Seth Keen (2014) who utilized classification and indexing processes for structuring material in his PhD project.

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Although students delayed their actual work with Korsakow, the software’s distinctive materiality still unfolded agency over the course of filming by inspiring us to think through keywords, i. e. local concepts, as reference points for comparing different image-making practices with one another. Thus, in taking a comparative perspective, the log reintroduced an interpretative moment, which we then translated into a cloud-based structure for the collectively authored Korsakow project.

Fig. 10 Building clouds by translating categories into keywords. Screenshot by Franziska Weidle.

While clouds themselves would follow a linear logic, a recurring home page was introduced to ensure an open and thematically driven entry point. Drawing on Bordwell and Thompson’s categorical and associational non-narrative form (2010), our process of classification allowed us to act in a structured way. At the same time, this very structure was still open enough for Korsakow’s algorithm to unfold its agency over the arrangement of clouds and sub-clouds. In visual lab sessions during which we collectively viewed SNUs and testclouds for certain categories, new cross-comparisons, juxtapositions and unexpected relations emerged that continuously drew our attention to the many similarities and differences between the image-making practices. (see Fig. 10)

Our creative activity is not only a combination of theory and practice but also a synthesis of cinematic conventions and computational affordances. Coping with the tensions stemming from these, to some extent dialectically opposed, modes of knowledge-making resulted in a permanent balancing act. While thinking in clouds offered us a way to create categorical or rule-based coherence, which we combined

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with other Korsakow-specific affordances such as sound and interface design, the clips that became SNUs in the system were shot with professional camera equipment and had to be prepared outside of Korsakow with established video editing software. Via these clips, cinematic conventions re-entered our project. Since the behaviour of SNUs was supposed to mirror our praxeological perspective, we encouraged close-ups and static, mainly single-shot, short clips as the main editing strategy. Interlinked in thematic sub-clouds, these would facilitate direct comparisons between practices while provoking curiosity by raising more questions than providing answers. However, in line with our interpretative role as ethnographers, we also agreed on other SNU formats: utilizing narrative coherence, longer sequences and trailers would contextualize the shorter clips and offer interpretations. These different organizing devices cross-fertilized each other. At the same time, they also presented a didactic strategy to respond to the students’ needs of acquiring basic filmmaking skills and rendering individual authorships more transparent. Nevertheless, they also generated new challenges such as the necessary standardization of different SNU types and the focus on a set of keywords for which enough students needed to produce content to create a useful basis of comparison.

Becoming an Ethnographic Curator Although CVA has been experimenting for some time with alternative screening venues for its productions (cf. Näser 2013), the cinema is still the traditional choice for presenting films to an interested public. At the same time, this convention nurtures expectations of students attending courses in ethnographic filmmaking. As a place of imagination, the cinema is also closely tied to other implicit understandings such as screenings at festivals, which together form part of the dissemination arena of ethnographic films. In this constellation, the habitus of the documentary field as it has been outlined by Jacob Gross (2013) is realized paradigmatically. With their “individual handwritings” and “intellectual discourses” (Gross 2013:405, translated by T.N.), documentaries serve as objectified cultural capital, which can be accumulated at festivals (Gross 2013:402–405). Here, filmmakers play a significant role as authors of their works. Especially in the context of Q& A sessions, which are obligatory at many festivals, they can enact the conventionalized self-concept as educator and critic of the dominant political system (Gross 2013:403). CVA 2015–17 contradicted this field logic. Instead of linear documentary films with an individual handwriting, we asked our students to produce SNUs – short clips allowing no authorial reference. Instead of working on formats closely associated with film festivals, the students were confronted with Korsakow and its presentation on computer, tablet or smartphone screens. The frictions discussed in this paper must be seen in light of these different formats of

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knowledge as well as their varying social embeddings. Due to our aim of taking a new perspective on ethnographic filmmaking, it is possible that students interpreted our approach as an affront to a format’s identity, which led them to Göttingen in the first place. Similar to their own initial reception experience described at the beginning of this paper, questions of dissemination and user engagement re-occurred frequently throughout the course of our project. To what extent could we frame our Korsakow work in a way that it could still be understood as an authorial and meaningful ethnographic film? Strategies regarding a framework for reception and engagement involved the design of an appropriate website as well as the planned presentation of the project in the context of an interactive live event. The latter responds to our students’ aspiration for appearing as filmmakers in a cinema-like screening of the project. Designing plays a significant role when making web-based documentaries (cf. O’Flynn 2012:156; Keen 2014:33). Due to their unfixed nature and embeddedness in computational and hybrid “media ecologies” (Horst et al. 2010), Keen advocates for “the development of a different set of skills and knowledge compared to linear editing for television broadcast” (2014:76). Exploring the possibilities of “spatial montage” (Manovich 2001) as a way of utilizing the distinct affordances of computer screens and their Graphic User Interfaces is only one of many aspects that requires further investigation.16 Besides experimenting with different interface designs such as the ones for facilitating cross-comparisons (see Fig. 11) and narration (see Fig. 12), other methods included prototyping and beta-testing to improve gradually the structural, narrative and graphic design of our project. In the process of collaborating with potential interactors and their experience of our project, we broadened our understanding of filmmakers and viewers of digital ethnographic media. Following Kate Nash, the potential of a “categorical webdoc” does not so much lie in “the temporal ordering of elements” but rather in “the comparisons and associations the user is invited to make between the documentary’s elements” (2012:205). Facilitating such invitations and making them appealing and accessible to the interactors required us to work beyond the means of film language. In line with Favero’s recent observation, we had to become ethnographic curators: “In today’s digital landscapes, where multimodality and the incorporation of the viewing and co-authoring strategies of the spectators generate a set of innovative relations […], the role, intentions and authoriality of the ethnographer assume new meaning. No longer directors or authors, ethnographers must start viewing themselves as curators of ethnographic content” (2017:284). Through engaging with Korsakow and its affordances, questions of user experience design empowered the students in a novel way but also confronted them with a different set of requirements and responsibilities. While exploring the possibilities of classification and navigation, it was never certain whether or not interactors would and should become aware of the cloud-based logics behind the interface and, thus, the author’s’ choices. 16 For a discussion of the potential of “scrolling environments” in documentary representations, see Coover 2011. For spatial montage in the context of ethnography, see Aston 2010.

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Fig. 11 Interface for short SNUs. CVA 2015–17, Dept. of Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology, University of Goettingen.

Fig. 12 Interface for narrative SNUs. CVA 2015–17, Dept. of Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology, University of Goettingen.

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Concluding Remarks (Torsten Näser and Franziska Weidle) Implicit forms of usage and milieu-specific standards evolve around every media format. Ethnographic film is no exception (cf. Crawford 1993, Näser 2014). As we move into educational institutions, such norms become clearly visible. In the case of teaching ethnographic filmmaking in an academic context, the respective media (or knowledge) format is likely to be reduced to the “common sense” of that particular social milieu. While students are frequently confronted with standardized methods and episteme, outside of university at film festivals, conferences or in publications experienced representatives of the discipline advocate for project-based and flexible usages of the format. One reason for placing special emphasis on the identity of ethnographic film might be seen in the ongoing need for justifying its existence. In terms of modularized courses which, generally, follow a rigid time plan, are fixed in study regulations and formulated in curricula, it appears rather likely that specific hegemonic and, thus, sedimented understandings of filmmaking in anthropology are continuously reproduced. These fixations occur in every institutionalized training course (cf. Berger and Luckmann 1997:56–57), no matter which school of thought, trend or paradigm they follow. Whether intentional or not, changing the socio-technological constellation within a particular institutionalization can function as a disruptive “breaching experiment” (Garfinkel 2008) that reveals such underlying notions and related standardizations. In the case of CVA, which is historically oriented towards linear narrative films, our software-based approach to multilinear online documentary led to the depicted exposure of skilled practice. The master program’s conceptualization but also its socio-material reproduction was brought to the surface. Korsakow and its affordances as well as the research perspective it suggested created the necessary requirements to repeatedly put up for negotiation the way ethnographic film is regularly taught in Göttingen. Since the project outlined in this paper initially proceeded according to the standard routine, situations of conflict at first appeared as more or less usual disruptions of seminars. Gradually recognizing and reflecting these situations as epistemological points of friction, however, enabled us to develop project-oriented solutions and take a metaperspective on ethnographic film as medium of dissemination with specific formatting practices. Moreover, Korsakow encouraged us to scrutinize aspects of filmmaking that are rarely addressed in depth in methodological discussions such as social expectations associated with the media format ranging from specific practices and styles, to the autonomous filmmaker as dominant role model or specific contexts of presentation including film festivals that promise an appropriate display of oeuvre and author.

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Based on these experiences, we recommend subjecting routinized processes of institutionalized film programs to disruptions. We regard it an important aspect of teaching to interrogate habitual procedures. This includes exposing curricula to influences that go beyond the usual methodological and epistemological adjustments but rather stimulate fundamental uncertainties in the production of knowledge. In our opinion, it is imperative to address these questions for an ongoing dialogue, “a central element of a reciprocal process which challenges existing norms, institutionalized practices and forms of knowledge” (Berkin and Kaltmeier 2012:13, translated by F.W.). Since dialogues require different positions, it is necessary to recreate continuously such experiences of difference. In the context of (audio-)visual methodologies in anthropological research, our experiment with Korsakow has demonstrated the value of digital and web specific affordances within the intricate processes of interpreting and translating cultural experience. From narrative to rule-based coherence, clearly every topic requires a specific presentation format, which, again, produces different kinds of knowledge. As an analytical tool in the context of a praxeographical approach, Korsakow’s generative algorithm has proved to be a fruitful way of organizing empirical data and creating different pathways through the material. By retaining this multilinear arrangement, the software also made it possible to involve an interested public in open-ended associative evocations and multiple interpretations of the same content. The primary challenge was to develop a methodology that integrated different modes of expression in a way that we could live up to our role as interpretative researchers without undermining the algorithm’s agency. While online environments are always hybrid ones, ethnographers will need to advance their skills into different directions in order to tap the full potential of coexisting media forms and modes of representation.

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O’Flynn, Siobhan. 2012. Documentary’s Metamorphic Form: Webdoc, Interactive, Transmedia, Participatory and Beyond. Studies in Documentary Film 6(2):141–157. Prinz, Sophia and Reckwitz, Andreas. 2012. Visual Studies. In (ed.) Stephan Moebius, Kultur. Von den Cultural Studies bis zu den Visual Studies, pp. 176–195. Bielefeld: Transcript. Reckwitz, Andreas. 2003. Grundelemente einer Theorie sozialer Praktiken. Eine sozialtheoretische Perspektive. Zeitschrift für Soziologie. 32(4):282–301. Rose, Mandy. 2017. Co-Creation Preface. In (eds) Judith Aston, Sandra Gaudenzi and Mandy Rose, i-docs. The Evolving Practices of Interactive Documentary, pp. 7–8. New York: Columbia University Press. Rouch, Jean. 2003. The Camera and Man. In (ed.) Paul Hockings, Principles of Visual Anthropology, pp. 79–98. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Ruby, Jay. 2000. Picturing Culture. Explorations of Film and Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schlumpf, Hans-Ulrich. 1987. Warum mich das Graspfeilspiel der Eipo langweilt. Gedanken zur Wissenschaftlichkeit ethnologischer Filme. In (ed.) Rolf Husmann, Mit der Kamera in fremden Kulturen. Aspekte des Films in Ethnologie und Volkskunde, pp. 49– 65. Emsdetten: Andreas Gehling. Sørensen, Estrid. 2009. The Materiality of Learning: Technology and Knowledge in Educational Practice. New York: Cambridge University Press. Venturini, Tommaso. 2010. Diving in Magma: How to Explore Controversies with ActorNetwork Theory. Public Understanding of Science 19(3):258–273. Walter, Florian. 2014. Kollaborative Feld- und Filmforschung. Gleichberechtugte Formen der Kommunikation und transkulturelle Verstehensprozesse. Berliner Blätter 67:56– 67. Weidle, Franziska. 2016. Korsakow Perspective(s): Rethinking Documentary Knowledge in Digital Multilinear Environments. VIEW Journal of European Television History & Culture 5(10):110–123. http://viewjournal.eu/non-fiction-transmedia/korsakow-per spectives/.

Films Thalhofer, Florian, dir. 2010. Planet Galata. http://www.planetgalata.com/ (accessed 11 January 2017). Walter, Florian and Maruch de la Crfflz P8rez, dir. 2008. On the Road with Maruch. Göttingen. 45 min.

Websites Planet Galata. http://www.planetgalata.com/ (accessed 27 September 2017). Bilder Machen – Investigation on Image Creation Processes. http://bildermachen.unigoettingen.de/ (accessed 27 September 2017).

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Curriculum Visuelle Anthropologie, Universität Göttingen. http://www.kaee.uni-goettin gen.de/cva/ (accessed 12 Jan. 2017). Movements of Migration – Ein Wissensarchiv. http://www.movements-of-migration.org/ cms/ (accessed 14 Jan. 2017). Torsten Näser University of Goettingen, Dept. of Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology Dr. Torsten Näser is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Department of Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology at the University of Goettingen in Germany, where he coordinates and teaches the CVA masters program. Furthermore, he is the spokesperson of the working group “Film and Audio Visual Anthropology” within the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Volkskunde (dgv) and member of GIEFF e.V., an association that organizes an ethnographic film festival every two years. His PhD project focused on the discursive differences between written and filmic ethnographic practices. His research interests and courses comprise various aspects of (ethnographic) film, photography, media anthropology and visual studies. [email protected] Franziska Weidle University of Goettingen, Dept. of Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology Franziska Weidle is a PhD candidate at the Department of Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology at the University of Goettingen in Germany. Furthermore, she is a research fellow at the German Research Foundation (DFG) Training Group “Literature and Dissemination of Literature in the Digital Age”. Her research interests involve installation, filmmaking, photography and new media as forms of ethnographic knowledge production and dissemination. In her PhD project, she focuses on the role of software in contemporary documentary practices. From 2015 to 2016, she was a visiting research scholar at RMIT University’s non/fictionLab where she co-founded the Docuverse Group (http://non fictionlab.net.au/t/docuverse/). [email protected]

5

Gaining Control over the Loss of It – Software as Focusing Media in Digital Visual Ethnography*

Abstracts Guiding and transforming our creative practices, this paper argues for a critical investigation of the techno-material affordances at play in doing visual research with digital media. It interrogates how software and skill might interact to mediate creative engagements with digital materialities. Drawing on two ethnographic case studies of and with the Korsakow System – an authoring system for creating generative multiple links between media assets – I show how software combined with other imaging technologies can (re-)focus attention and action towards the intangible workings of digital code. Three exercises will demonstrate how a skilled mediation with relational media systems challenges and complements ethnographic filmmaking through the adoption of iterative software and design methodologies. Rather than gaining control over code, the aim is to gain control over the loss of it in the field and in front of the screen. In the context of an advancing digital visual ethnography, such a skilled mediation affords an experiential and responsive mode of knowledge production sensitising us to the complexly layered affordances and constraints of digital materialities and the dynamic density of relations in which they are entangled. Reprendre le contrile de la ma%trise perdue. Des logiciels en tant que supports de focalisation au sein de l’ethnographie visuelle num8rique Informant et transformant nos pratiques de cr8ation, cet article plaide pour une analyse critique des moyens techno-mat8riels en jeu dans les recherches visuelles bas8es sur des supports digitaux. Plus pr8cis8ment, l’article interroge la maniHre dont les logiciels et les comp8tences multim8dias interagiraient pour permettre de n8gocier des engagements cr8atifs avec des mat8rialit8s num8riques. f partir d’une 8tude de cas du systHme Korsakow – un outil de cr8ation g8n8rant de liens multiples entre des ressources multim8dias – mon analyse met en 8vidence la faÅon dont les logiciels associ8s / d’autres technologies multim8dias fonctionnent comme des « supports de focalization » pour apprendre / voir et / s’engager adroitement avec l’ « immat8rialit8 num8rique ». S’appuyant sur du travail de terrain et d’exp8rimentations ethnographiques, trois exercices mettent en lumiHre la maniHre dont une m8diation habile se servant de logiciels met en cause et * Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale Vol. 27, 1, 2019, 17–32; DOI: 10.1111/1469–86 76.12553; Copyright: 2019 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

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complHte le travail ethnographique film8 / travers l’utilisation de logiciels it8ratifs et de m8thodologies de conception. Dans le contexte de l’ethnographie visuelle num8rique 8volutive, en quÞte d’une « correspondence » avec le monde, une m8diation habile avec des logiciels 8mergents offre un mode de connaissance exp8rientiel qui nous sensibilise / l’action des mat8rialit8s num8riques. Par ailleurs, il pourrait contribuer / la co-conception de visualisations qui saisissent la densit8 dynamique des relations dans lesquelles elles se trouvent empÞtr8es. Index Keywords: software, digital visual ethnography, enskilment, creativity, ethnographic film Mots-cl8s: logiciel, ethnographie visuelle num8rique, acquisition de comp8tences, film ethnographique, cr8ativit8

lntroduction In the context of contemporary documentary film production, Craig Hight repeatedly pointed out that the digitalisation of creative practices ‘has involved a widespread but still poorly understood transformation of the act of creative endeavour itself ’ (2014: 221). Following the emerging software studies paradigm (Fuller 2008; Kitchin and Dodge 2011; Manovich 2013), he calls for an investigation of content creation, authoring and accessing applications as cultural artefacts that perform complex roles in an increasingly networked media environment: When we look at a specific application, we need to analyse the ways in which it encourages particular ways of working through creative practices; the manner in which its design is informing and shaping how we imagine the creative possibilities for using that application. (Hight 2017: 84)

There is a similar interest in visual ethnography to engage with and think through the creative possibilities of media technologies from photography, film and video to computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS), CD-ROM and web-based hypermedia. As early as 1988, Alan Howard already anticipated ‘the emergence of a new perspective’ within the anthropological community through the use of hypermedia that ‘will be rooted in agreement with regard to how to cope with inevitable complexity’ (1988: 314). Given the pervasiveness of the digital, it is about time to review Howard’s prognosis and, drawing on Hight, reassess the technology-mediated transformation of creative practices in digital (audio-)visual ethnography. Such a review was set in motion by Cristina Grasseni and Florian Walter, who invited fellow anthropologists to critically engage with digital forms of visual exploration that ‘allow us to challenge cinematic conventions or habitual understandings of the spatio-temporal arrangements of both ethnographic narrative and analytic insight’ (2014: np).

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The contribution at hand continues this conversation about methodological experimentation and ponders the yet-to-be-explored potentials ‘of using multisensory, multi-linear and multi-format media’ (Grasseni and Walter 2014: np). Examining the role of technical devices in the production of knowledge is, of course, a central concern in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). Adopting the analytical and empirical perspective common in the social anthropological branch of STS, knowledge and technology can be understood and studied as emerging through situated practices in which agency and creativity are distributed among different actors – human as well as non-human (cf. Beck et al. 2012: 39–40). In digitally-mediated ‘ethnographic film-work’ (Grasseni 2014), this praxeographic, more-than-human perspective gives rise to an interesting set of questions: What is the creative agency of the digital in audiovisual research? Which aspects of visual ethnography are becoming programmable and how does digital mediation affect the ways ethnographers – as visual practitioners – perceive and creatively engage with the sound-, sight- and virtualscapes they encounter (cf. Grasseni and Walter 2014)? While visual anthropologists have, indeed, paid considerable attention to the creative possibilities of hyper- or interactive media (cf. Howard 1988; Biella 1993; Pink 2003; Dicks et al. 2005; Aston 2010; Coover 2011; Favero 2013; Ramella 2014), not enough empirical research has been carried out on ‘media software’ (2013: 38), as Lev Manovich termed it, and the multiple roles it plays in creating, editing and organising audio-visual records.1 The present paper responds to this desideratum by taking a specific media software as its case example to analyse the digital as part of situated ethnographic film-work. The Korsakow System is an authoring program that, since its inception in 2000, has been used and discussed frequently in the evolving field of interactive documentary (cf. Aston and Gaudenzi 2012; Favero 2013; Miles 2014; Soar 2014; Hight 2017; Brasier 2017) but is also gradually finding its way into anthropological scholarship (cf. Wilson 2009).2 It works with the notion of ‘smallest narrative units’ (SNUs) – video clips that are culled from filmed (or found) footage and tagged with keywords. When a user interacts with the exported HTML package in a browser, s/he triggers an algorithmic search based on these keywords. Rather than creating a pre-defined fixed output (such as a linear film 1 Exceptions include Grasseni’s self-reflexive development of the Worktop software for video annotation (2014) as well as considerations regarding the use of predominantly word-driven tools for data analysis and visualisation (cf. Dicks et al. 2005). Yet, despite their prominent role in transforming ethnographic film production and visual anthropology more broadly, the common use of digital non-linear editing software and hardware bundled with applications such as DSLR or smartphone cameras remains largely unexamined. 2 See also Jennifer Cool’s post on CASTAC’s Platypus blog (2013): http://blog.castac.org/2013/ 05/teaching-with-warez-korsakow-and-the-database-documentary/ (accessed 11 Oct. 2018).

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sequence), the organisation of SNUs is semi-automated in real-time. In this way, as I will argue, Korsakow’s algorithm disentangles the thickness of filmic accounts, allowing users ‘to explore the pleasures of engaging with the combinatorial possibilities of audiovisual documents’ (Hight 2017: 88). Whether these engagements are indeed experienced as ‘pleasurable’ lacks empirical evidence, but, as my ethnographic data suggests, is dependent on a specific capacity for coping with complexity acquired through a recursive making and viewing practice. Given this particular technical and epistemological arrangement, Korsakow is ideally suited to pursue questions of media enskilment addressed in this special section. Building on previous publications (Weidle 2016; Näser and Weidle 2017), I will retrace my steps and those of research participants and students in enacting a particular relation with digital technologies we could call skilled mediation. In the manner of ‘focusing media’ (Grasseni and Gieser in this special section), Korsakow supported a learning process helping us to see and skilfully engage with digital materialities and their programmability as core feature of contemporary ‘media ecologies’ (Fuller 2005) more broadly.3 By combining principles of filmmaking and (visual) programming, the resulting media enskilment not only challenges but complements ‘skilled visions’ (Grasseni 2007) in documentary and ethnographic media production. The empirical material selected for this methodological meditation is drawn from two ethnographic case studies undertaken in the context of my postgraduate research project. On the one hand, it stems from fieldwork conducted at RMIT University’s non/fictionLab between 2015 and 2017, where a group of research-practitioners adopted the Korsakow software into their documentary making, thinking and teaching environment. On the other, the data gained from camera-led participant observations and guided interviews at RMIT informed the conception of a student research project carried out between 2015 and 2017 at the University of Goettingen. Together with the Masters students in visual anthropology, my colleagues, Torsten Näser and Frauke Paech, and I sought to test Korsakow’s potential for analysing and arranging audio-visual research material in a dynamic multilinear way.4 Overtly framed as methodological experiment, the project also functioned as a rich site for unsystematic fieldwork to

3 The widely referenced ecology framework positions media objects within complex and dynamic media environments. In the context of interactive documentary, the concept has been deployed to ‘foreground the interdependent relationships between media’ (Nash et al. 2014: 3; original emphasis). Returning to software, the concept also draws attention to the, often invisible, infrastructures that need to run and be kept running, from services, hardware and regulating processes to institutions and coding practices (cf. Neubert 2015). 4 Available at http://www.bildermachen.uni-goettingen.de/index.html (accessed 14 June 2018).

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‘examine precisely the role and place of the programming language in the knowledge production process’ (Remillet and Wanono 2014: np). Reflexively engaging with a concrete experience such as the learning process involved in using and thinking with Korsakow draws attention to the relational and situated dynamics at play between makers and materials in creative practice (cf. Ingold 2011). More precisely, the creative frictions triggered by Korsakow provided access to the materiality of engagement that can be challenging to grasp empirically. Computer code is a particular case in point because, ‘at least to the untrained eye’, it ‘tends to recede from immediate attention into infrastructural systems’ as Timothy Webmoor puts it (2014: 22) with reference to Nigel Thrift (2004). Throughout a series of exercises, this contribution exemplifies how working with Korsakow can support a disentanglement of audio-visual thickness in favour of what I will call a dynamic density of relations. Such an aesthetic, as we will see, offers a visual counterpart to the invisible workings of code that can foster a way of coping with the ‘inevitable complexity’ (Howard 1988: 314) of sociotechnical phenomena such as digital media ecologies. Moreover, it provides methodological propositions on skilled mediation as key asset for an advancing digital visual ethnography that seeks progressive refinement (cf. Ho ward 1988: 312), multi-dimensionality (cf. Grasseni and Walter 2014) and, following the emerging paradigm of an ‘anthropology-by-means-of-design’, a ‘correspondence’ with the world (Gatt and Ingold 2013).

Learning with Korsakow: acquiring software literacy In his investigation of creative industries, Brian Moeran states, ‘creativity itself is a meaningless concept unless considered in tandem with the enabling and constraining conditions under which it operates’ (2014: 35). These conditions come into view when looking at the ‘circuits of affordances’5 (2014: 35–59; emphasis added) that frame creative practices and guide decision-making. Due to its techno-materially afforded (Moeran 2014: 39) openness and in conjunction with situated social, economic, representational, temporal and spatial affordances, Korsakow is entangled in various circuits of creative media practices (cf. Weidle 2016; Näser and Weidle 2017). For Hight, ‘Korsakow demands a programming approach which prioritises the agency of the final (software) project’ (2017: 87–8). Similar to digital video-editing software, it operates with a 5 Based on Gibson (1977) and coined by Norman (1998), the concept refers to ‘an action possibility or an offering’ attributed, for instance, to a particular soft- or hardware (McGrenere and Ho 2000: 184).

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collection of different media assets, mostly video clips. However, it does not provide a media making but an authoring environment. Hence, if a media-maker wants to edit the clips beforehand, s/he has to prepare them in a program such as Adobe Premiere or Apple’s Final Cut. Once imported into Korsakow, these clips become smallest narrative units (SNUs). Usually, these SNUs are single shots or short edited sequences. Although their name implies a narrative coherence, they might constitute meaning poetically, categorically or associatively. What is important is that they are stand-alone fragments, which can be combined in myriad ways to form generative webs of relations. In Korsakow, these relations are not created with the help of timelines or storyboards but keywords. They direct the algorithmic search. As taught in numerous workshops by Florian Thalhofer, the inventor of the system, or Adrian Miles, former new media lecturer at RMIT, it is this ‘continuing multiplicity of variations between the available clips’ (Miles 2014: 216; emphasis added) that sets Korsakow apart from other media software. Based on the camera-ethnography conducted at RMIT, I have studied the ways in which a specific community of media scholars and documentary researchpractitioners trains and is trained to work with Korsakow’s affordances (and constraints). By applying Grasseni’s ‘skilled visions’ concept (2007), I demonstrated that, combined with other tools such as smartphone cameras and apps, the guided looking through and with this media software promotes a sensory attunement to and creative engagement with complexity (Weidle 2016). In contrast to digital non-linear video editing where a complex encounter is ultimately simplified to the linear structure of a sequential media format (cf. Howard 1988: 305, 312) – as is the case for writing this paper in Microsoft Word to be published in print – my research participants expressed a sense of liberation upon their introduction to Korsakow. Due to its generative algorithm, they were able to create rule-based linkages between media files, interactively accessible online. Set within a lab-like and (Post-)Actor-Network-informed workplace, to these artist-scholars Korsakow’s affordances presented an ideal field for creative experimentation with non-literary and non-representational (cf. Vannini 2015) forms of expression that aim to adopt ‘the point of view of the world’6 through open-ended explorations of non-/human entanglements. In the case of co-teaching the Masters research project at the University of Goettingen, we set out to study image-making practices in the widest sense – from street art and biometrical photography to theatre performances and dream representations. Contrary to the necessary ‘corralling of footage into a singular 6 This expression is taken from Miles’ presentation entitled ‘What Is It For, If Not Story?’ held at the Visible Evidence conference in Toronto 2015. See: https://www.academia.edu/15099940/ What_is_ it_for_if_not_story (accessed 29 May 2017).

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narrative arc’ (Soar 2014:167) that is involved in producing a linear film, we decided to use Korsakow for a multi-sequential arrangement of our audio-visual material. This approach, so was our contention, would allow for a richer ethnographic account7 that emphasises interconnectivity among data sets, accommodates multiple perspectives and enables comparison. Nevertheless, as shown elsewhere (Näser and Weidle 2017), incorporating Korsakow into our research design also urged us to scrutinise our own milieu-specific, highly stabilised image-making practices of looking through and thinking with the camera, editing software, screening formats and other teaching materials. On the one hand, Korsakow’s rule-based visualisations challenged affordances of representation canonised in our discipline and, by implication, our ‘skilled visions’ (Grasseni 2007) as documentary and ethnographic film viewers, makers, students and teachers. Due to the semi-automated SNU arrangement, it required us to surrender (or at least suspend) some authorial control and rethink the notion of a stable and finished research output. On the other, it necessitated a modified workflow : from the linear process of researching-shooting-editingscreening, we shifted into an iterative back and forth between field and screen. Still, Korsakow primarily operates with filmed footage that must be prepared outside of the software. Thus, combining Korsakow’s affordances with that of a camera, a smartphone or a digital video editor merges not only different technical features but also different conventions of thinking, seeing and creating. In that respect, Korsakow advanced from a tool for representation to ‘focusing media’ (see Grasseni and Gieser in this special section): It facilitated a critical reflection of the circuits of affordances at work in producing ethnographic audio-visual knowledge. The exercises outlined below will demonstrate the steps relevant for gaining control over the loss of it. Moreover, they serve as examples for thinking through processes of digital-visual mediation as skillful balancing acts between cinematographic linearity and hypermedia openness.

Exercise 1: Exploring situations through camera-based improvisation At first, appropriate media assets are needed to create a database for Korsakow. Appropriate, in this case, refers to material that goes well together with Korsakow’s keywording principle, which ‘deliberately fosters, and even demands, a distinctive conceptual approach [… ] that moves us away from linear narrative 7 For the concept of richness in ethnography, cf. Fischer and Zeitlyn’s Experience Rich Anthropology Project at the University of Kent, 1996–1999 (http://www.era.anthropology.ac.uk/ (accessed 15 June 2018)).

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form’ (Hight 2017: 91). While the ethnographic films produced in the context of the Masters programme in Goettingen usually draw on a shooting schedule approach (cf. Näser and Weidle 2017), the orchestrating of a ‘continuing multiplicity’ of relations with Korsakow requires a different strategy. Adopting Geertz’s concept of ‘thick description’ (1987), Bina Elisabeth Mohn outlines her take on camera ethnography as ‘a “thick depiction” of social phenomena in their variability and potential relationships’ (cited in Mohn 2007: 174).8 As will be shown, Mohn’s methodology serves as a suitable starting point for producing SNUs that disentangle the thickness of a filmed situation while maintaining its dynamic density of variability and relationality. The students are presenting their first SNUs. The task was to edit three short sequences on the atmospheres surrounding image-making practices and cut them up again into single shots. We see light breaking through a canopy of leaves while instruments are being tuned, colourful walls in an abandoned building, sweat dripping down a girl’s face. After watching the clips, the students start raising questions and concerns. Some express disconcert about taking the camera into their fields in such an explorative way. It would be too early to confront the protagonists with the camera, too early to know what to film. The vague nature of the task makes them feel uncomfortable. In view of importing the SNUs into Korsakow, a long discussion breaks out about the lack of dramaturgic possibilities. How will the viewers be able to differentiate between the field sites and protagonists without proper contextualisation? How can we close the gaps? How to guarantee coherence? Torsten and I respond by inviting the students to think about the connections between their clips. What can we learn from the relations of these short impressions about the role of atmospheres in image-making practices? (Weidle, field diary, 12 December 2016)

This excerpt from my field diary contains a variety of creative frictions I could pick up on. Bearing in mind the particular circuit of affordances at work in the more than 30-year-old ethnographic film programme (cf. Näser and Weidle 2017), it is the relation between the students’ reactions and that of a notion of filmmaking as a linear and author-driven undertaking that is important here. To counteract their initial concerns stemming from this framework of engagement, specific exercises were necessary for moving them into a different, to some extent design-like, headspace. Repeating the task described above in slight variations was one of them. Gradually, their disconcertment evolved into a ‘productive uncertainty’ (Mohn 2007: 180), which foregrounded playful improvisation and iterative sketching as guiding principles for our camera and editing work.9 In contrast to the production of cinematic or televisual repre8 This and the following quotations from Mohn’s paper are my own translations from the German original. 9 Initially suffering from inexperience when preparing his pottery exhibition, Brian Moeran reflects on how the lack of technical skills eventually ‘brought out a spontaneity and playful

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sentations, we engaged with ‘open situations’ that, following Mohn, lend themselves to ‘thick depictions’ (2007: 174). Since it remained uncertain whether or not (and if so, what kind of) narratives would emerge, we needed to take an open stance towards what was happening in front of the ‘uninformed camera’ (Mohn 2007: 178). Without a script or preconceived vision, the students had to improvise and repeatedly test different angles, shots and movements to gather their fragments for Korsakow. By looking closely through the viewfinder, continuously (re-)focusing and selecting what to include in (and exclude from) the frame, attached to the bodies of the students the Korsakow-driven camera focused their action and perception, guiding them through the thickness of a situation.10 As a result of giving up stable positions (physically and theoretically) and using the viewfinder as window for a searching gaze, the students were able to zoom and tune in on the manifold, often tacit, aspects of image production. From a praxeological perspective, our camera-based improvisation brought the different, in this case atmospheric, elements that constitute situated image-making into view. On a meta-level, reflecting on our own audio-visual engagements also helped us to conceive the shooting of footage for Korsakow as a specific entanglement of technologies and bodies that can develop into a relatively open, detailed and improvised exploration of situated emergence.

Exercise 2: Gaining control over the loss of it One of my research participants, Seth Keen, remarked in our interview on his approach towards making and teaching with Korsakow that it is ‘basically evolving out of improvisation, evolving out of sketching, playing around, getting a sense of how you might record the material, how you might put the material together’ (Interview 19 January 2016). Thus, the collection and pre-editing of sketch-like and fragmentary video footage that comes out of an exploration with the camera as the one outlined above is well-fitted for working with Korsakow. In fact, importing video clips into Korsakow extends the process of productive uncertainty from being in the field to sitting in front of the screen. What follows

improvisation that worked against the grain of established representational ideals’ (2014: 83). Improvising and sketching around frictions, constraints and uncertainty are, of course, crucial for design work in general and, thus, also become pertinent in the context of design anthropology (cf. Ingold and Hallam 2007; Gunn and Donovan 2012; Otto and Smith 2013). 10 Mohn notes that the images emerging from such an approach also embody a sense of the researcher and his or her relation to other actors in the field. This so-called ‘body-camera’ encapsulates traces of a searching gaze (2007: 178–81).

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is a type of improvised sketching around the question: Which affinities emerge between the different parts of the material? Similar to CAQDAS, as for instance ATLAS.ti or MAXQDA, we can think of Korsakow’s keywording principle as a form of coding. In her approach to ATLAS.ti, Susanne Friese remarks: The term code [...] is a technical device provided by the software. The software cannot distinguish between different levels of codes. Thus a code at some point needs to be turned into a methodological device by the researcher and it is the researcher that turns a code into a category or a sub category or a dimension by way of naming it in a specific way and by defining it. (2011: np)

In Korsakow, coding is done by assigning multiple, time-based IN- and OUTkeywords to the media assets in the SNU Editor. These keywords, then, become programmatic rules to execute a ‘logical series of steps for organizing and acting on a body of data’ (Gillespie 2016: 19).11 Drawing on his experience of working with Korsakow in the classroom, R. Scott Wilson notes: ‘Authors use keywords to create an algorithm that automates the probability of links that are most likely to be offered during the viewing of a specific segment’ (2009: 45; original emphasis). Although there are many different ways of developing keywords into methodological devices in qualitative data analysis, an inductive and open approach is particularly apt for performing relationality.12 Moreover, Korsakow combines the notion of keywording (or coding) with that of editing. Segmenting footage into small, often narrative, units is not a new method in film and video production, nor is the procedure of coding in qualitative data analysis. What might be new (at least to ethnographic filmmakers) is combining these two routines for semi-automating a more or less dense and coordinated mesh of relations in real-time. While the first routine strives towards creating a linear structure, meaning a shot (or media asset more broadly) shares a fixed relationship with the one preceding and the one succeeding it, the latter aims at a multilinear linking. Due to the ‘algorithmic editing’ (Soar 2014: 163) Korsakow facilitates, structure is not only multilinear but also generative. This means a shot or data segment retains the sum of all possible relations it might share with others even after the work is distributed, supporting a ‘future11 It is, as pointed out repeatedly by software studies scholars, one of the main characteristics of digital code to constantly change its form as it circulates across different scales and frames of reference, from ‘the discretization (or disciplining) of hardware’ (Chun 2008: 225–6) to ‘a programmer working on a piece of software [...] to users, who only see code mediated through an interface’ (Mackenzie 2006: 13). 12 According to SaldaÇa, open coding is a process that involves segmenting data into discrete parts and comparing them in terms of their similarities and differences (cf. 2003: 81). However, codes can be developed inductively or deductively and might follow different strategies depending on the respective research question.

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oriented’ rather than a ‘backward-looking hermeneutics’ (Interview with Miles, 26 October 2015). In order to bring these two routines together and merge them into a new one, it is necessary to surrender some control. The idea of surrendering authorial control to the computer, however, is often a major challenge for filmmakers and visual anthropologists (cf. Gaudenzi 2017; Favero 2017: 285). As indicated in the following interview excerpt, Florian Thalhofer utilises specific exercises in his Korsakow workshops to tackle this challenge: FT: You should start from the perspective […] of knowing how the thing works and then consciously loosen the reins. I’m opening up the whole thing so that Korsakow shows me the consequences of my thinking. If I start with a loose connection, I won’t get there, I think. FW: So your approach is to pre-think all of the possible pathways beforehand? FT: No, we never do anything where all of the pathways have been pre-thought, except for that exercise example – ‘Circle of Life’. That is scripted, so to speak. But here we also have that openness where you know exactly what is going to happen but still can’t predict which clip will be shown at which point in time. This is to demonstrate that […] I can create one-to-one connections, one-to-many connections or randomness. But randomness is a rule that I can make use of. It is a spice I can add to my soup, but I have to know when and learn not to overuse it. (Interview 4 February 2017, translated by F.W.)

Thus, the decisions involved in preparing SNUs and assigning rules to determine their behaviour do not imply a loss of authorial control. Rather, they afford a ‘suspension of control’ to use Thrift’s expression (2004: 187),13 which needs to be trained ‘through repeated and socially shared acts of guided looking’ (Grasseni 2014: np) in order to make informed choices about how to choreograph the ‘dance of possible connections’ (Miles 2014: 214). Such sensitivity to rule-based emergence can be practiced with a scripted example to which the students make changes and carefully examine the results. An alternative approach would be to start from a state of absolute randomness. During a workshop by Miles I attended as part of my fieldwork in 2015, he encouraged students to advance from a minimalist keyword design to an elaborate one by attaching the same keyword to all of the imported clips and then gradually introducing more in response to an attentive monitoring of the unfolding patterns. In the case of the student research project in Goettingen, our first keyword was atmosphere. Through repeatedly shooting, editing and coding SNUs, and discussing the resulting 13 Thrift refers to ‘the oblique control system of emergent software’ as we know it from game engines such as Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which ‘depends on a kind of sensitivity to – and sensibility of – emergence’; a tolerance for ‘exploring the world of the game and the rules of the game at the same time’ (2004: 186–7).

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prototypes in the group, we progressively refined this analytical category into sub-categories including sound, light, time and weather. Proceeding in such a way generated an interactive media assemblage that enables categorical crossreferencing among the many facets of different image-making practices. Given a database of material that stems from a camera-based improvisation as the one outlined in the first exercise, Korsakow can serve a second focusing that fosters an open and progressive approach to theory and practice through keyword-based improvisation. More specifically, by assigning keywords inductively and carefully observing the consequences they entail in collaborative workshops and lab-like settings, the software’s affordances can direct attention towards making intuitive, often unexpected, connections. In our student project, the recursive workflow between camera- and code-work not only dissolved a clear demarcation between ‘descriptions and processes of describing’ (Gunn 2009). It also raised awareness for the control structures used in programming languages and the values and assumptions underlying (semi-)automated formalisations.

Exercise 3: Exploring instability through dynamic density Investigating the co-existence of video aesthetics and computational affordances is one of the key themes in Keen’s practice-based PhD (2014).14 He stressed in our interview that Korsakow correlates with some of the web-native characteristics of the internet and combines these affordances with those of video. As components of the software’s ecology, filming, editing and coding mutually influence the structure of a Korsakow work, giving authors an ample scope of control over the production, aestheticisation and tempo-spatial arrangement of their material. However, by leaving room for the agencies of other actors involved, including the software’s algorithm as well as potential viewers, collaborators and research participants, they lose total control over how the outcome is finally assembled. According to the system’s co-developer, Matt Soar, this unique property of Korsakow is perhaps best illustrated by the lack of a timeline in the application interface: ‘This is a definitive reminder that, in a Korsakow film, story elements are not triggered based on a fixed “master” sequence, but by hidden, iterative, keyword searches’ (2014: 162). As one result of the learning process outlined above, the viewing experience of an exported project is enriched by a particular insight – that of knowing the rules behind this partly aleatory, partly determined choreography. Still, coincidental relations occur that potentially lead to interesting discoveries and stimulate creativity, which takes us back to the notion of 14 Available at: http://www.sethkeen.net/phd/sethkeenPhD.pdf (accessed 3 March 2017).

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productive uncertainty, or rather instability. While cutting SNUs and attaching keywords means breaking down the thickness of the footage into discrete parts, interacting with the emerging connections via the browser interface establishes a sense of dense depiction. Both of these activities – disentangling thickness and orchestrating dynamic density – support yet another focusing: a retracing of the multiple components of situated practices and their emerging, relatively un-/ stable, relationships. In contrast to creating and engaging with hierarchical, narrative or argumentative forms of representation as this paper, an ethnographic Korsakow project can invite its viewers to attune their senses to the provisional, accidental and spontaneous interplay of heterogeneous actors emerging from situated practices (cf. Barad 1999). This meant for our students that by appropriating design methodologies such as prototyping and beta-testing they could repeatedly examine their own interactions with exported versions and let these observations guide further filming, editing and keywording decisions. For uninformed viewers who neither see this missing ‘master sequence’ nor the rules behind the choreography, however, the engagement might be a frustrating one. This was implicated by interviewing test viewers but also surfaced in the students’ own enduring skepticism towards the competence and willingness of a potential audience to become aware of the choices that inform the shape(s) of the work. A strategy we developed in response to this skepticism was to reintroduce elements that function as cohesive devices such as music, click sounds or narratively edited SNUs. We also presented an early version of the project to a test audience. Based on their feedback, we produced different iterations, some of which featured more accessible and learning-oriented framings such as the transparency of keywords on the browser interface. ‘Is it more fun to make Korsakow than to watch it?’ asked Korsakow user and research participant Kim Munro, when reporting on her viewing experience of Korsakow films made by others (Interview 15 March 2016). As demonstrated in exercise 2, a combination of making and viewing is essential to understand what a work authored in such an environment actually does and, in turn, what it might mean. Indeed, many of the Korsakow practitioners I interviewed admitted they were not the most avid viewers of Korsakow, or interactive documentaries in general. Thalhofer repeatedly expressed his frustration with low viewing figures, whereas for Miles, who used Korsakow primarily for testing theoretical ideas, actual viewers seemed less important than hypothetical ones. With these aspects in mind, there is good reason to scrutinise the potential of Korsakow as a suitable form for representing ethnographic knowledge.

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Towards a skilled mediation in digital visual ethnography Dale Hudson and Patricia Zimmermann note that ‘[w]e often think through digital media without much awareness about how it affects us’ (2015: 7; original emphasis). In fact, the networked infrastructures of digital mediation with their ‘ecology of users, designers, maintainers, as well as organizations and physical facilities that must be kept running’ (Erickson and Kelty 2015: 43) are built to escape our vision.15 Still, being an integral part of our lifeworld, digital technologies change the ways we produce knowledge about it: ‘Doing research with, through and in an environment partially constituted by digital media has led to the development of new and innovative methods and challenged existing conceptual and analytical categories’ (Pink et al. 2016: 2). As a response, this paper has argued for developing methodologies that are more conscious of the technomaterial relations mediating and, thus, co-producing our objects of study through the creative practices we employ. Drawing on STS and software studies, digital code can be conceptualised as a ‘fluid’ (de Laet and Mol 2000: 225) or relatively ‘unstable volatile material’ (Mackenzie 2006: 6) due to the ways it shifts shapes, states and functions across and throughout the different layers of its networks. Considered in its various and liminal states of becoming a nonhuman participant within situated actions, it is no surprise that specific skills are needed to craft things with code. Although there has been a recent shift towards unpacking computational ‘black boxes’ ethnographically, Webmoor critically remarks that often ‘such studies scale out from code, from a consideration of its performative role in generating computerized outputs, to discuss the identity and social practices of code workers’ (2014: 22). While the social mechanisms of digitisation are clearly crucial, they are by far not the only ones transforming bits of the world into bits of data. However, the non-indexical relation of code to the outputs it produces can appear as a source of boredom, at least to an ‘untrained eye’ as Webmoor claims (2014: 22). He needed to see the visual counterparts in order to understand what his research participants were doing with and through code.16 Webmoor’s need for visual counterparts resonates with Pink and her colleagues’ appraisal of visual methods and digital dissemination, which hold enormous potential for ‘evoking the feelings, relationships, materialities, activities and configurations of these things that formed part of the research process’ (Pink et al. 2016: 13). Firmly established in a variety of disciplines, 15 Cf. Mackenzie on strategic ‘backgrounding’ (2006: 12). 16 Often developed for and used in learning-oriented environments, visual programming as it is afforded by Blocky, Scratch or BYOB builds on visualisations to make the act of coding tangible and, hence, more intuitive.

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visual methods and methodologies have turned into constitutive tools for new approaches to qualitative data analysis, presentation and contextualisation (cf. Knoblauch et al. 2008; Margolis and Pauwels 2011; Schönhuth et al. 2013). Especially as digital methods, visual anthropology and sensory anthropology move closer together, we need to investigate further how these tools could evoke the ‘digital intangible’ to arrive at research designs that are open to the influences of ‘the relationship between digital, sensory, atmospheric and material elements of our world’ (Pink et al. 2016: 7–13). The experiments undertaken with Korsakow can be regarded as a step towards testing the theoretical implications of a skilled ‘co–creation with software’ (Hight 2017: 88). Due to the continuing multiplicity it affords, Korsakow challenges the rhythm of ‘the page and the frame as the only two viable spatiotemporal arrangements for the flow of epistemic and ethnographic engagements’ (Grasseni and Walter 2014: np). Skilled in this sense refers to a trained sensitivity for emergence; a suspension of control so that the low-level workings of code, which have been buried by software, can become tangible subjects to scrutiny again (cf. Chun 2005: 44). The result is a balancing act between coding and filmmaking principles in which the self-reflexive practitioner repeatedly interrogates the different video clips (and potentially other media assets) in and of themselves as well as in the possible ways they might form a collection. Rather than ‘selecting one path through the material and dramatizing its significance’ (Howard 1988: 305), s/he orchestrates a forward-looking dynamic density of relations, semi-automating probability and triggering ever new associations. As users of our own designs, we experienced the flow of epistemic engagement in the unfolding space between coding prototypes and interacting with their visual counterparts. Through such a recursive ‘reflection-in-action’ (cf. Schön 1987) common in design anthropology (cf. Otto and Smith 2013: 10), Korsakow functioned as ‘focusing media’ (see Grasseni and Gieser in this special section) sensitising me and my research participants to the materialities of the digital and the evocative role they might play in nurturing generative and embodied forms of knowing. Similar to Webmoor’s observation that programming is a creative and skilled craft ‘learned on the job’ (2014: 30), a skilled mediation with computational mechanisms only derives from a practice-led approach to theoretical processes and products – an experiential approach that is responsive to the slippery and processual of socio-material relations constituting research experiences with, through and on digital media.

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Conclusion Since visual anthropologists might not possess the necessary ‘education of attention’ (cf. Gibson 1979; Ingold 2000; Grasseni 2007), one of the major challenges for an advancing digital visual ethnography is to become proficient in the poetics and politics of digital media (from interface design to coding and beyond). More important, however, is to attend closely to the lived experience of enskilment, which is the very substance of fieldwork itself.17 The provided exercises with Korsakow demonstrate the process of developing a type of literacy that disrupted the ‘skilled visions’ (Grasseni 2007) in ethnographic filmmaking through the adoption of iterative software and design methodologies. The goal of this learning process, however, was not to gain control over software code but to gain control over the suspension of it, behind the (uninformed) camera as well as in front of the (obscuring) screen. If skilled mediation means thinking with the material relations and letting them speak along the recursive process of data collection, analysis and interpretation, then it will also come closer to the dynamics of ethnographic knowledge, which does not linearly emerge after the fact but is constantly evolving and renegotiated. Every re-focusing provides a new set of possibilities and propositions. In that respect we might think of media software and digital imaging technologies more broadly – as ‘focusing media’ that can direct attention and reconfigure affordances, habitus and hexis (see Grasseni and Gieser in this special section). However, in order to utilise their catalytic potentials for an evolving digital visual ethnography neither ‘limit[ing] itself to the ethnographic situation’ (Grasseni 2014: np; original emphasis) nor to filmmaking as the only ‘of many representational actions and refractions’ (Grasseni and Walter 2014: np), it is necessary to let theory and practice co-emerge in a learning process that embraces uncertainty and is attentive to disconcertment as productive moment when technologies display their agency. Whether or not the visualisations produced with Korsakow will indeed stand the test in academia as suitable representations of ethnographic knowledge is yet to be determined. In fact, such forward-looking, ‘apodictic’ (Remillet and Wanono 2014) and ‘kaleidoscopic’ (Grasseni 2014; Fortun et al. 2017: 19) configurations are still rare and often marginalised by the conventions of anthropological scholarship (cf. Wilson 2009: 44). Nevertheless, ‘using the Korsakow software is certainly “good to think with’” as Wilson concludes (2009: 47). Besides attuning our senses to digital affordances and constraints as active, but often normalised, components of research and representation, these semi-au17 See the conversation on ‘Proficiency’ I co–convened with Andr8s Garc&a Molina in June 2017: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1138-proficiency (accessed 21 June 2018).

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tomated visualisations can also ‘capture the emergent character of the present’ (Otto and Smith 2013: 17) and enact the ‘multiple and diverse potentials of what knowledge can become’ after ethnographic description (Vannini 2015: 12). As such, they might contribute to a movement in visual anthropology, social anthropological STS and design anthropology from authority-driven representations to computational correspondences with the world that are co–created with the human and nonhuman participants of our research. Most importantly, however, a skilled mediation with emergent software systems affords an experiential mode of knowing, sensitising us to the complex socio-technological (net- and mesh-)work18 underneath the hood.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to my supervisor Regina Bendix, my fellow colleagues and PhD students at the Department of Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology at the University of Goettingen, as well as the co-editors of this special section who provided critical comments and useful suggestions on an earlier version of this paper. Special thanks go to the late Adrian Miles for sharing his knowledge with me and supporting my research.

References Aston, J. 2010. ‘Spatial montage and multimedia ethnography : using computers to visualize aspects of migration and social division among a displaced community’, Forum Qualitative Social Research 11(2): art. 36. Aston, J. and S. Gaudenzi 2012. ‘Interactive documentary. Setting the field’, Studies in Documentary Film 6: 125–39. Barad, K. 1999. Agential realism. Feminist interventions in understanding scientific practices, in M. Biagioli (ed.), The science studies reader, 1–11. New York: Routledge. Beck, S., J. Niewöhner and E. Sørensen (eds.) 2012. Science and technology studies. Eine sozialanthropologische Einführung. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Biella, P. 1993. Beyond ethnographic film: hypermedia and scholarship, in J. R. Rollwagen (ed.), Anthropological film and video in the 1990s, 131–76. Brockport, NY: The Institute Inc. Brasier, H. 2017. ‘A networked voice: speculative transformations of essayistic subjectivity in online environments’, Studies in Documentary Film 11: 28–44. Chun, W. H. K. 2005. ‘On software, or the persistence of visual knowledge’, Grey Room 18 (Winter): 26–51. 18 For the notion of meshwork, cf. Morton (2013).

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Chun, W. H. K. 2008. Programmability, in M. Fuller (ed.), Software studies. A lexicon, 224– 8. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Coover, R. 2011. Interactive media representation, in E. Margolis and L. Pauwels (eds.), The SAGE handbook of visual research methods, 617–37. London: Sage. De Laet, M. and A. Mol 2000. ‘The Zimbabwe bush pump: mechanics of a fluid technology’, Social Studies of Science 30: 225–63. Dicks, B., B. Mason, A. Coffey and P. A. Atkinson (eds.) 2005. Qualitative research and hypermedia: ethnography for the digital age. London: Sage. Erickson, S. and C. M. Kelty 2015. The durability of software, in I. Kaldrack and M. Leeker (eds.), There is no software, there are just services, 39–55. Lüneburg: Meson Press. Favero, P. 2013. ‘Getting our hands dirty (again): interactive documentaries and the meaning of images in the digital age’, Journal of Material Culture 18: 259–77. Favero, P. 2017. Curating and exhibiting ethnographic evidence: reflections on teaching and displaying with the help of emerging technologies, in L. Hjorth, H. Horst, A. Galloway and G. Bell (eds.), The Routledge companion to digital ethnography, 275–87. New York: Routledge. Fortun, M., K. Fortun and G. E. Marcus 2017. Computers in/and anthropology : the poetics and politics of digitization, in L. Hjorth, H. Horst, A. Galloway and G. Bell (eds.), The Routledge companion to digital ethnography, 11–20. New York: Routledge. Friese, S. 2011. ‘Using ATLAS.ti for analyzing the financial crisis data’, Forum Qualitative Social Research 12(1): art. 39. Fuller, M. (ed.) 2005. Media ecologies: materialist energies in art and architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Fuller, M. (ed.) 2008. Software studies: a lexicon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gatt, C. and T. Ingold 2013. From description to correspondence: anthropology in real time, in W. Gunn, T. Otto and R. C. Smith (eds.), Design anthropology : theory and practice, 139–58. London: Bloomsbury. Gaudenzi, S. 2017. User experience versus author experience. Lessons learned from the UX series, in J. Aston, S. Gaudenzi and M. Rose (eds.), i-Docs: the evolving practices of interactive documentary, 117–28. New York: Columbia University Press. Geertz, C. 1987. Dichte Beschreibung. Beiträge zum Verstehen kultureller Systeme. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Gibson, J. J. 1977. The theory of affordances, in R. Shaw and J. Bransford (eds.), Perceiving, acting and knowing, 67–82. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Gibson, J. J. 1979. The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Gillespie, T. 2016. Algorithm, in B. Peters (ed.), Digital keywords: a vocabulary of information society and culture, 18–30. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Grasseni, C. (ed.) 2007. Skilled visions: between apprenticeship and standards. New York: Berghahn Books. Grasseni, C. 2014. ‘The atlas and the film: collective storytelling through soundscapes, sightscapes, and virtualscapes’, ANTHROVISION Vaneasa Online Journal 2(2). Grasseni, C. and F. Walter 2014. ‘Introduction. Digital visual engagements’, ANTHROVISION Vaneasa Online Journal 2(2). Grasseni, C. and T. Gieser 2019. ‘Introduction: Skilled mediations’, Social Anthropology 27(1): 6–16.

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Nash, K., C. Hight and C. Summerhayes (eds.) 2014. New documentary ecologies: emerging platforms, practices and discourses. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Neubert, C. 2015. ‘The tail on the hardware dog’: historical articulations of computing machinery, software and services, in I. Kaldrack and M. Leeker (eds.), There is no software , there are just services, 21–37. Lüneburg: Meson Press. Norman, D. 1998. The design of everyday things. New York: Basic Book. Otto, T. and R. C. Smith 2013. Design anthropology : a distinct style of knowing, in W. Gunn, T. Otto and R. C. Smith (eds.), Design anthropology : theory and practice, 1–32. London: Bloomsbury. Pink, S. 2003. ‘Representing the sensory home: ethnographic experience and anthropological hypermedia’, Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice 47: 46–63. Pink, S., H. Horst, J. Postill, L. Hjorth, T. Lewis and J. Tacchi (eds.) 2016. Digital ethnography : principles and practice. Los Angeles [i.a.]: Sage. Ramella, A. L. 2014. ‘De-hierarchization, trans-linearity and intersubjective participation in ethnographic research through interactive media representations: www.laviedurail.net’, ANTHROVISION Vaneasa Online Journal 2(2). Remillet, G. and N. Wanono 2014. ‘Collaborative and interactive presentation: Cracks of a discipline evolution’, ANTHROVISION Vaneasa Online Journal 2(2). SaldaÇa, J. 2003. Longitudinal qualitative research: analyzing change through time. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Schön, D. A. 1987. Educating the reflective practitioner: toward a new design for teaching and learning in the professions. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Schönhuth, M., M. Gamper, M. Kronenwett and M. Stark (eds.) 2013. Visuelle Netzwerkforschung. Qualitative, quantitative und partizipative Zugänge. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Soar, M. 2014. Making (with) the Korsakow system: database documentaries as articulation and assemblage, in K. Nash, C. Hight and C. Summerhayes (eds.), New documentary ecologies: emerging platforms, practices and discourses, 154–73. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Thrift, N. 2004. ‘Remembering the technological unconscious by foregrounding knowledges of position’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22: 175–90. Vannini, P. (ed.) 2015. Non-representational methodologies: re-envisioning research. New York: Routledge. Webmoor, T. 2014. Algorithmic alchemy, or the work of code in the age of computerized visualization, in A. Carusi, A. Sissel Hoel, T. Webmoor and S. Woolgar (eds.), Visualization in the age of computerization, 19–39. New York: Routledge. Weidle, F. 2016. ‘Korsakow perspective(s): rethinking documentary knowledge in digital multilinear environments’, VIEW Journal of European Television History & Culture 5: 110–23. Wilson, R. S. 2009. ‘K-films in the classroom: exploring new media ethnography using the Korsakow system’, Practicing Anthropology 31: 43–8.

Part III: Conclusion

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Software-Mediated Visions: Between Mapping Trees and Sketching Clouds

The main objective driving this doctoral research project was to gain a better understanding of the material and experiential dimensions co-constituting the media ecologies filmmakers work in, through and with today. More precisely, the intention was to shed light on the central but largely neglected roles played by software-based technologies within contemporary documentary and ethnographic film practices. Following this agenda, key questions focused on the ways in which software – “as an actant in the world” (Kitchin and Dodge 2011: 44) – is entangled in acts of creative expression. Dealing with digital materiality is more than just “about the way that we handle a physical or virtual device” by means of “algorithms, formal logic, precise reasoning and problem solving” (Shapiro 2014: np). To what extent, then, is its influence becoming manifest in the development of a new understanding, use and style of coded audiovisuality? And what are the implications of such software-mediated visions for the crisis of representation touched upon at the outset of this dissertation? My work with and about the Korsakow System has allowed me to observe some of the multiple roles software plays in the context of nonfiction film practices. On the one hand, it can contribute to the maintenance of already established regimes of mediation, advancing their naturalization further. This is evidenced in the degree to which Hollywood style cinematic storytelling has conquered the field of interactive documentary. On the other hand, it is also capable of stirring things up. Especially for nonfiction filmmakers, who are driven by a “sense of dissatisfaction” (Ocak 2012: 960) to find more suitable forms for representing reality, the challenges new technologies pose can function as catalyst. Significantly, interventions emerge from and within this multitude of perspectives software assembles: “[T]he practice of any technology in the world is never quite as simple, straightforward, or idealized as it is imagined to be” (Dourish and Bell 2011: 4). Korsakow is more than a tool that can be described in terms of its particular affordances and constraints. Rather, it is an unruly thing (cf. Michael 2016). Every tempo-spatial enaction gathers a different set of relations that involves varying frames and scales of reference. What arises

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from this unruliness is friction. While some might understand the web as a powerful site for building giant trees and delivering more or less linear narratives, to others this might feel “like using the new technology against its grain” (Thalhofer, Aston and Odorico 2018: 111). Below, I will delve further into these moments of tension and their importance for stimulating creative experimentation as well as for studying software itself. Both, the re-imagination and the study of software rely on an approach attentive to the lived experience of enskilment (and deskilment). The epilog will explain in more detail what it might mean for anthropological ethnographers to envision a new role for software-based technologies within their research and representation endeavors. For now, I will turn to the interface as the component of software that is most significant for the ways creative practitioners perceive computer-driven technologies and their possibilities within them.

The Diegesis of the Interface1 One of the leading assumptions in (new) media studies is that the computer – as frequently invoked metamedium (cf. Kay & Goldberg 1977: 40; Manovich 2013: 105) – supports a radical break with and transformation of conventions previously established. After all, to cite Manovich again, “we do expect computer narratives to showcase new aesthetic possibilities that did not exist before” (2001: 237). Without a doubt, the now widespread adoption of software packages including digital nonlinear editing systems (DNLE) led to significant redefinitions of audiovisual practice itself (cf. Khoo et al. 2017: 21). Among other things, such tools facilitated a re-distribution of skills as well as a gradual reorganization of production workflows (cf. Caldwell 2011: 293). Moreover, the brief overview of the emerging field of interactive documentary provided in this volume’s introduction indicated that creative media projects, particularly coming out of the nonfiction domain, do indeed stretch film as a concept. Most notably, they open it up for the poetics and politics traditionally associated with other formats such as games and live performances. While the lines between different media genres and conventions might be blurring, so far these developments have not given rise to a broader scrutiny of the hegemony of storytelling itself. Computational narratives might incorporate ludic or performative elements. Yet, the very fact that computers are used to follow narrative principles more or less vehemently is hardly called into question. This is partly due to the ways software interfaces direct creative imaginations and engagements. Looking at standard DNLE and authoring software, 1 Cf. Chun 2008: 320.

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their layout and terminologies build upon existing practices and, thereby, largely maintain aesthetic possibilities consistent with the physical properties of earlier media objects and devices (cf. Miles 2008: 10; Khoo et al. 2017: 18). In particular, the templates and metaphors they utilize are strongly informed by the aim to create cinematic continuity, temporal coherence and causal structures through the sequential succession of individual shots. The “temptation to use the digital medium as means of duplicating the appearance and behavior of legacy media” (Murray 2011: 43) stems, to a great extent, from the ease familiar concepts offer in uncharted territory. Take, for example, the invention of operating systems responding to user inputs in real time, which significantly paved the way for personal computers to be adopted by a wider public in the 1970s and 80s. Since then, mouse-driven graphical user interfaces (GUI) and their desktop conventions have become the default for mediating underlying machine functions (cf. Kirschenbaum 2004: 525).2 It is this ease and pace by which normative conditions are imposed on technical innovations that mark one of the most surprising aspects of digital culture for anthropologists Heather Horst and Daniel Miller (cf. 2012: 28). Although contested, user-friendliness is an aspired ideal when it comes to the development of software that ought to simplify laborious, time-consuming and sophisticated tasks by means of automation. Especially in areas of media production that continue to be associated with a high level of skill, software design continuously strives towards lowering the threshold for novice practitioners (cf. Hight 2014: 238). Increased efficiency makes computerization attractive for a variety of (socio-)cultural practices including the manipulation of image and sound files. Yet, the chain of translations necessary for hiding automatized processes behind familiar metaphors and manually controlled objects such as windows, buttons, paint brushes and timelines also bears a significant risk. “The more effective the digital technology”, Horst and Miller highlight, the more we tend to lose our consciousness of the digital as a material and mechanical process, evidenced in the degree to which we become almost violently aware of such background mechanics only when they break down and fail us (2012: 25).

After all, “computers are unique”, as digital humanities and culture scholar Matthew Kirschenbaum states, “in that they present us with a premeditated material environment built and engineered to propagate an illusion of immateriality” (2008: 135, emphasis added). Paradoxically, this illusion of immate2 With the rapid changes in hardware, these desktop conventions are increasingly perceived as constrictive, paving the way for so-called post-WIMP interfaces that provide more fluid manual interactions beyond the metaphors of windows, icons, menus and pointers (cf. Jacob et al. 2008).

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riality is accompanied by a foregrounding of visibility, access and a more or less strongly pronounced sense of user agency. It does not come as a surprise, then, that film editors nowadays still use ‘razors’ to ‘cut’ ‘footage’ into clips, which they arrange in multilayered ‘sequences’ on ‘timelines’ that are eventually finalized as a fixed audio-visual object.3 In contrast to earlier editing practices which “entailed a destructive assembly process, where a film strip was literally cut into pieces and reassembled until there was agreement on the final edit”, the “cut, copy and paste approach” facilitated by DNLE systems “allow[s] for the random access retrieval of digital material” (Khoo 2017: 16, original emphasis). By building sequences virtually, filmmakers can recut and recombine their shots as often as they like without being confined to the former technical barriers.4 However, the visual metaphors utilized in such “intuitive interfaces” (Murray 2011: 10) do not necessarily reflect a new approach to the construction of moving images and the ways of thinking that lie behind them remain largely unquestioned.5 On a related note, Berga and his colleagues point out: Mainstream software such as AVID, Adobe Premiere or Apple FinalCut allow to easily understand the principles of editing in real life analog mechanics. However, expert computer users lack the possibilities of using coding in those interfaces, and native computer users find that most of the icons they use have no references to real life elements. A new logic to the computational context is needed to fully take advantage of this environment (2016: 309).

A computational editing logic would not require organizing the multiple components and layers of data structures into linear, time-based media containers. The random access retrieval of information from digital databases renders the final cut obsolete. Still, crossing the boundaries set by film stock, flatbeds, reels and projectors is impeded, in part, due to the conceptual comfort zones leading and, to some extent inhibiting, the design of current media software (cf. Murray 2011: 5). With only a few professional editing systems competing in the market, “innovation became secondary to standardization”, which is, according to Elaine Khoo and her colleagues, “most evident in the emergence of the now 3 For an overview of the key elements of contemporary DNLE systems, cf. Ohanian 1998: 52–6. 4 This structural possibility afforded by (but not limited to) computational and network properties is also crucial for the rise of remix culture. Beyond re-combining video granules, the term stands in for a range of creative (micro-)practices that seek to systematically rework or extend a source and, thereby, subvert traditional roles of author-, owner- and viewership (cf. Angello 2014; Lessig 2008; Manovich 2007). 5 Often unconsciously, the use of metaphors greatly affects the ways we perceive, think about and act in the world. They establish different types of coherence and meaning, which was demonstrated, among others, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980) in the context of language.

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familiar template for editing interfaces” (2017: 18).6 Moreover, efforts to combine ‘legacy’ conventions with the specifics of programmatic environments are challenging. Often, they stall rather than fertilize advancements in the field. This became apparent in the reservations (interactive) documentary makers displayed during my fieldwork in moving from the familiar and practical towards digitally ‘native’ media applications and practices. The characteristics of code-driven, software-based technologies in all their layered, mutable and ephemeral complexity are hard to pin down. Their very baseline – “everything that has been developed by, or can be reduced to, the binary” (Horst and Miller 2012: 5) – escapes anthropocentric perceptions and understandings of the world. “Computers compute, of course, but computers today, from most users’ point of view, are not so much engines of computation as venues of representation” (Kirschenbaum 2004: 525, original emphasis). We usually do not perceive digital media in their fragmentary or generalized quality because industries are working hard to simulate sensory events as closely as possible to our lived experience (cf. Gottlieb 2018: 79). In that respect, the mediation of machine functions plays a similarly crucial role as the actual computational procedures themselves. Whether more or less complex, software interfaces represent lower level computing in an accessible and appealing way, not least due to the visual metaphors they employ. These, however, follow certain logics and, thereby, “impose and enhance particular workflows, thought modes, and modes of interaction” (Fuller and Cramer 2008: 151). Since interfaces are all too often “designed to dissimulate their functions as interfaces” (ibid.: 152), it is increasingly necessary to actively break their “diegesis” (Chun 2008: 320). Assisting, extending and disciplining creative imaginations and practices, this is the place “where representation and its attendant ideologies are most conspicuous to our critical eyes” (Kirschenbaum 2004: 525). Yet, the (outward) appearance of software is more than a mere form of abstraction. According to Marianne van den Boomen, metaphors nestle themselves not only in the representation of the technology and the discourse on its use and functions, but also in the technological objects themselves: the very thingness of digital objects consists of metaphors made material and operational (2014: 188).

Metaphors employed by interfaces are, thus, important heuristic devices (cf. van den Boomen et al. 2009: 10) for exploring the material and experiential dimensions of software-based filmmaking configurations.

6 Interestingly, the global market leaders in DNLE software were all created by the same developer, Randy Ubillos.

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To grasp how the material and the experiential affect each other, this research project has argued for the importance of a micro-analytical, ethnographic and practice-based approach towards media software and its interfaces.7 Broadly defined as “the point of juncture between different bodies, hardware, software, users, and what they connect to or are part of”, user as well as programming interfaces8 “describe, hide, and condition the asymmetry between the elements conjoined” (Fuller and Cramer 2008: 150). In computing, this asymmetry is one of power separating and, at the same time, drawing together human and machine capacities. As an abstraction barrier between user engagements and the growing speed and layered complexity of underlying processes, interfaces tend to articulate this asymmetry in that they comprise elements of both.9 Yet, it is paramount to consider interfaces beyond the sum and hierarchy of affordances they provide. Without the application of the program within a specific situation and the concrete execution of code, relying on various industrial processes as well as a vast and constantly changing network of infrastructures, the creative possibilities of software remain unrealized. Software interfaces (pre-)mediate potentialities for future (inter-)actions. Thus, the empirical undertaking presented here turns towards the micro-contexts where software is performed and experienced (cf. Khoo et al. 2017: 2–3). Here software research can meet the needs of its entangled, variable and multilayered object of investigation. The articles compiled within this volume have treated the Korsakow System as a situated interface-in-action. Depending on the respective human-machine enaction, it can support as well as constrain different ways of working and thinking with software to create audiovisual works of nonfiction. Among other aspects, this approach has led to the scrutiny of the cultural discourses embedded within software code and coded practices. As “means of systematically embodying and often imposing ideology”, their normative frames prescribe default usages and guide design processes (Horst and Miller 2012: 26). Yet, 7 Whether or not software and interface can be seen as conceptually distinct categories has become a controversial issue mirroring the debate in literary studies about the materiality of the book and the role of extra-linguistic elements for generating textual meaning (cf. Kirschenbaum 2004: 532). While they are often treated as separate in the development phase, they become deeply interwoven during concrete applications of the program. 8 To Fuller and Cramer the difference established between so-called ‘user interfaces’ and computer control languages is but an arbitrary one (cf. 2008: 150). This is also linked to the observations outlined in the introduction of this book about the role of symbolic programming languages, which have increasingly removed programmers from actual computational processes and turned them into users themselves. Accordingly, Fuller and Cramer conclude that “the more the deliberate separation between ‘user’ and ‘programming’ interfaces and languages is maintained”, the more important it is to develop appropriate literacies that enable critique and intervention (ibid.: 152). 9 Cf. Fuller’s contribution to the nettime mailing lists on Microsoft Word (2000): http://www. nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0009/msg00040.html (accessed 31/07/2018).

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paying close attention to interfaces-in-action has raised critical awareness for the gap between the, to some extent non-negotiable, logics of hardware, the assumptions about users and their actual (often unintended) appropriation and experience of technologies in situ (cf. Kirschenbaum 2004: 534). There is no such thing as a default usage. Rather, power asymmetries are at work in humanmachine assemblages, which become tangible in the ways the contingency of agency is experienced. As will be elaborated more in depth throughout this conclusion, such an insight can provide the basis for developing appropriate literacies and skillsets. Skills, that aid creative engagements with the disruptive and yet-to-be-realized potentials of “audiovisual computer control languages” (Fuller and Cramer 2008: 152).

Mapping Things Out Although some technologies facilitate critical approaches towards code as creative material more than others, explorations of the computer beyond its capability of simulating already existing media strongly depend on the contexts in and backgrounds from which they are undertaken. Aside from mainstream media practices reliant on the expectations of a consumer-oriented and marketdriven industry, independent, artistic and academic work environments afford more risky attempts.10 The more or less restricted artistic and academic freedom of local expert communities supports and is supported by a different, to some extent more contemporary, approach to software and interface design. As mentioned in the introduction, authoring software developed for and used in nonfiction film and media productions, such as the evolving field of interactive documentary, exhibits conceptual frameworks more in synch with the principles of digital materiality.11 Still, embedded within the framework of documentary theory and practice, approaches to these tools differ significantly. What they have in common, though, is an experience of disruption. Under certain circumstances, this experience can become an invitation to experiment with software and develop innovative forms of creative expression.

10 It is paradigmatic for the digital to become entangled in a contradictory experience of freedom as Horst and Miller point out (cf. 2012: 22). While it is an integral part of technoutopian visions in expert communities, as for example the postmodern resistance to authority in academia, such idealism can easily cause feelings of confusion and exclusion among a less informed majority (cf. Geismar 2012). 11 Hight (2014) mentions social editing tools such as WeVideo (see: https://www.wevideo.com/ (accessed 24/11/2018)) or Vyclone as examples that utilize the networked characteristics of software culture and, thus, pave the way for more software-distinct practices.

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Without a timeline, visual storyboard or source and program window, Korsakow demonstrates a specific case in point. In fact, in our e-mail interview, David Reisch, one of the software’s chief programmers, emphasized: Korsakow is special in that everything in the interface and the way it works is oriented around a non-linear experience. An example of this would be […] the notable lack of a visual representation of all the connections created. This was something we had considered but felt it would lead to people mapping out overly specific experiences (Nov. 12, 2017, emphasis added).

Deliberately lacking a visual representation, Korsakow’s interface is meant to encourage openness and flexibility in terms of structure (cf. Thalhofer in Nash 2014: 192; Thalhofer, Aston and Odorico 2018: 107). Thereby it is antithetical to the templates of mainstream editing and authoring software, which, responding to established industry standards, adhere to the idea of mapping things out. The map and associated metaphors have become effective agents in reproducing a former concept of editing that shapes creative imaginations and engagements with audiovisual media until today. Following this concept, Korsakow provokes unsatisfactory experiences. It signals not only the rejection of a spatial premapping but also that of a temporally sequenced trajectory, which is the very pursuit of the timeline: “[T]he most vivid clue to Korsakow’s uniqueness is that the application interface does not have a timeline (unlike, say, Final Cut Pro, iMovie, After Effects, Flash, Pro Tools, Audacity)” (Soar 2014: 162). Instead of spatially mapping things out on a visual storyboard and fixing them in time in a master sequence, Korsakow’s SNU Editor allows the assignment of rules. Based on these rules, the key building blocks of editing remain more or less loosely connected, even after the work is distributed. With every click on the interface of the exported project, a new set and arrangement of playing SNUs and selectable thumbnails are generated.12 Retaining the combinatory possibilities between clips relies on what Matt Soar, Florian Thalhofer and others have called “SNUifying” (cf. Soar 2014: 163) – an algorithmic approach to editing13 that is encouraged by the metaphors Korsakow’s design employs. These include keywords, SNU rate, and lives. In this way, Miles argues, “Korsakow quietly expands what video can do, and in turn what it then means” in a programmatic environment (2014: 211). This happens “quietly” or “hidden” 12 The flexibility of a work authored with Korsakow also rests on the unspecified duration of engagement. Although there are temporal widgets available in Korsakow’s interface editor, many Korsakow films do not tell their viewers how long they have engaged for or how much more there is to engage with. 13 The notion of “algorithmic editing” has been coined by Manovich (2001) and adopted by Anderson (2004), Enns (2012) and other scholars working in the field of database narrative and cinema to describe “an automated system for combining elements according to prescribed rules” (Anderson 2004: 52).

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(Soar 2014: 162), because the only algorithmic actions viewers of an exported project can witness are the results of a series of operations Korsakow’s runtime engine performs in response to their clicking. Knowingly or unknowingly, they are located at the heart of Korsakow’s ongoing indetermination (cf. Miles 2013: 4)14 and act, to some extent, as editors themselves (cf. Soar 2014: 163). The two case studies presented in the second part of this book indicate that Korsakow’s lack of visual representation and control points to both, its biggest challenge and potential.15 Working with generative systems might not imply a negation of creative intentionality to artists, whereas the circumstances are different for other types of practitioners. Filmmakers, including those coming from the field of interactive documentary, often require authorial control to fulfil (and thereby reinforce) the expectations of funding and distributing bodies as well as audiences (cf. Hight 2017: 90). In documentary and ethnographic contexts, authorship is complicated even further as it involves ethical issues and questions of accountability. To convincingly craft audiovisual stories, filmmakers are trained “to ‘map’ requirements before something is made”, also due to the enormous costs historically associated with “[i]industrial modes of media production” (Miles 2014a: 217). Viewers, on the other hand, are likely to have no knowledge of the missing master sequence or the role they are supposed to play within the work. Drawing on the results obtained from observing and interviewing students and test audiences as part of the Bilder machen project (2017) at the University of Goettingen, engaging with material authored in Korsakow can be experienced as disappointing, confusing and limiting. Nevertheless, for practitioners with an academic background in anthropology, media or cultural studies, “Korsakow’s uniqueness” (Soar 2014: 162) speaks to a different set of metaphors and concepts. They involve the cloud (cf. Thalhofer 201016 in Dovey and Rose 2013), the rhizome (cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1987 in Wilson 2009; Keen 2014), Latourian actor-networks (cf. Miles 2014a: 207), articulation and assemblage (cf. Slack and Wise 2005 in Soar 2014). From this, in some ways non-representational, perspective, generative media works “celebrate complexity and create awareness of the multi-dimensional nature of reality in ways that might in fact be transcending our obsession with story” (Thalhofer, Aston and Odorico 2018: 111). Rather than building on cause and effect, they visualize how things influence each other as they continuously enter 14 Drawing on Deleuze, a “center of indetermination” (1986: 65) for Miles “occurs within all interactive work whenever the user is required to do something to enable the work to continue” (2013: 5). 15 Arguably, Korsakow mirrors on a small scale how the openness facilitated by digital culture can be experienced as both, enabling and restricting (cf. Horst and Miller 2012: 22). 16 Here, Dovey and Rose refer to a talk Thalhofer gave in London at the Documentary Now Conference 2010.

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into new relationships and, thereby, re-distribute power. “For documentary”, Miles concludes, “this proposes a reading and making of the world that is not pre-determined nor fully controllable, for maker, reader, narrator, or the work” (2014: 219). Instead, it invites its participants to follow the steady flow of data and everything it is entangled in as “active constituents of a world-in-formation” (Ingold 2011: 28). What was shown in the third article and will become more evident throughout this conclusion is that because of its missing master sequence, Korsakow’s design fosters a computational logic to editing. In fact, it could be argued that it stimulates a way of thinking related to the style of object-oriented programming (OOP).17 By assigning rules, video clips become computational objects with different states and behavioral scripts upon and around which a given set of possible events can occur. Rather than drawing on syntax-based or mathematical abstractions, an exported Korsakow project represents coded behavioral relations in a dynamic (data-)visualization. This bears traces of integrated development environments used for learning how to code in a more playful way, also known as visual programming languages.18 In Korsakow, the combinatory engine draws on keywords to send messages between media objects so to speak. IN-keywords represent “‘I am…’ statements” and OUT-keywords “‘I am looking for…’ statements”.19 Yet, again, there is no feature to map out object relations. Projects must be exported to be able to test and adjust keyword designs in iterative development cycles. In this way, Korsakow provides an environment that assists practicing a critical engagement with visuality in software and the aspects of digital computation usually obscured by it.

No Branching Trees In the first case study (Weidle 2016), I became an apprentice of Korsakow’s pedagogical interface. Before the commencement of my fieldwork at RMIT’s non/ fictionLab, most of what I had seen and dealt with when it came to Korsakow was 17 The object-oriented paradigm classifies a particular style of computer programming that aims to simulate real-world interaction processes between self-contained entities. By defining not only the data type but also applicable operations, “data structure becomes an object that includes both data and functions. In addition, programmers can create relationships between one object and another” (see: https://www.webopedia.com/TERM/O/object_orien ted_programming_OOP.html (accessed 25/07/2018)). 18 MIT’s Scratch software is a popular example where objects and their relations are represented with the help of blocks and arrows (see: https://scratch.mit.edu/ (accessed 05/10/ 2018)). 19 This is taken from the Korsakow manual, available at: http://korsakow5.korsakow.org/learn/ manual/ (accessed 12/10/2018).

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the many shapes it took in the web browser. Repeatedly filming, looking at and working with the video material obtained from workshops, supervision meetings, conferences, and individual usages eventually trained me to connect my slightly unsatisfactory viewer experience back to what was going on behind the surface. Only then could I begin making sense of the program’s features (and lack thereof) in their capacity to behave as active components in the local schooling of a view running counter to the narrative paradigm prominently invoked in the discourse on interactive documentary. One of the first lessons learnt in this context was about the (dis-)connection between Korsakow’s desktop and web interface. In our first interview, Miles already hinted at the implications of the developers’ design choice to discourage users from mapping things out: For me to compose good work, hypertextually, you must work in hypertext. To compose good interactive video, you must work from the ground up in interactive video. […] Yet, nearly everyone in this field thinks that they have to work outside of their medium and that at the last moment, they somehow translate that into their medium […]. Korsakow sort of solves that because you work inside Korsakow from the beginning and you can’t predict and control the structures (Oct. 26, 2015, emphasis added).

However, it was not until my participation in his workshop two months later that I gained first-hand experience of what it meant, theoretically as well as practically, to embrace Korsakow’s hypertextuality “from the ground up”. Before elaborating on the specific workflow Miles and his colleagues developed in response to the absence of visual control, it is fundamental to address the difference between trees and clouds. Korsakow sets itself apart from other platforms in the way it “largely excludes strict linear sequencing” (Miles 2014a: 213). Nevertheless, by default, as Miles lamented after our joint visit at the i-Docs symposium in Bristol, the majority of people mistakes the generative autonomy of its combinatory engine for branching trees (Interview March 22, 2016). Directly linked to the notion of mapping, a branching tree, or what hypertext scholars might call an “arborescent” structure (cf. Ciccoricco 2007: 5), is a hierarchical form of organization that requires the predefining of multiple yet mutually exclusive pathways. In electronic hypertext and interactive fiction, these pathways are usually alternative storylines branching out from the main text at bifurcating points. Technically speaking, these points (or nodes) are created by interlinking discrete units of text (lexias) and other forms of data. Via mouse clicks, touch or gestures, readers/viewers/users can activate these hyperlinks and navigate the pre-set routes. In her seminal book Hamlet and the Holodeck, Janet Murray already criticized that “most interactive narrative written today still follows a simple branching structure, which limits the interactor’s choices to a selection of alternatives from a fixed menu of some kind” (1998: 78). This type of electronic file

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organization has displayed an immense popularity over the last two decades, which partly stems from its suitability to maintain linear control structures such as that of cause and effect needed to create narrative coherence. “For a hypertext to tell a different story every time, without losing narrative coherence”, literary scholar Marie-Laure Ryan points out, it would have to be organized on a tree structure that prevents loops. Since a tree structure offers only one way to reach a given node, it allows a strict control of the logical relations between lexias. Each branch on the tree can be made to correspond to a different development of events out of a common situation, and interactivity becomes a matter of choice between several predetermined stories (2011: 44).

With Choose Your Own Adventure books as one of its precursors, branching trees are another example of how concepts established in the context of different media practices and milieus have blended with the different layers of computational architecture. Most visible in the shape of sideways trees in the Windows Explorer, they also occur in the single anchor and link model of HTTP, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol that is the current standard in network technologies,20 as well as in algorithmic if/else structures and their branching paths of execution. If a website is assumed to be the distribution platform for a hypertext (just as paper is for text processing software), then its underlying concepts will inform understandings of and approaches to hypertext systems.21 Although “the World Wide Web is widely held to be the largest existing hypertext” (Ensslin 2014: 258), it could support far more complex linking mechanisms than simple point-to-point computation: “The web in relation to hypertext”, Miles remarked in our second interview, is a bit like Klynt in relation to Korsakow. So the web really isn’t what we mean by a proper hypertextual system, […] every link on the web can only have one destination whereas in a hypertext system a link can have as many destinations as it needs (Interview, Jan. 27, 2016).

Among the most common and established organization principles in the field of interactive documentary, the “hypertext mode”, as defined by Sandra Gaudenzi, rests “on the exploration of a finite database” containing interlinked video segments (2013: 93).22 Although typically employing branching trees, this mode also encompasses other mechanisms of pre-determination (ibid.). Accordingly, she groups strictly (human-)authored structures found in Journey to the End of 20 For an analysis of HTTP as an object of protocological manipulations, cf. Galloway (2004). 21 As pointed out by Shapiro (cf. 2006: 518), websites also make use of maps to facilitate easy navigation. 22 Take, for example, the growing number of interactive documentaries authored with the visual storyboard of Klynt I discussed in the introduction: https://www.klynt.net/projects/ (accessed 09/10/2018).

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Coal (2008)23 or The Big Issue (2009)24 under the same category as films coauthored with combinatory engines such as Korsakow’s. Due to its “higher level of autopoietic (self-making) behavior” (ibid), Gaudenzi draws on Thalhofer’s LoveStoryProject (2007)25 as her case study for the hypertext mode in The Living Documentary (2013).26 Appropriating such an algorithmic linking mechanism presupposes that “the author does not want to build a tree of possible narratives but […] associative logics between families of topics or data” (ibid.: 99). Still, she maps out the structure of Thalhofer’s project in striking resemblance to a sideways tree (see Fig. 13). Whether the branching options provided in an interactive documentary support one-to-one or one-to-many connections, she concludes, “essentially they are possible routes between a pre-established structure” (2013: 98, emphasis added). As outlined above, the primary function of keywords in Korsakow is, indeed, to pre-establish structure. More specifically, they pre-establish the conditions of structure. However, “Korsakow authors don’t create paths; instead, they create connections that become active” during the viewing (Thalhofer, Aston and Odorico 2018: 109). Whether the keyword design draws on associative or narrative logics is of secondary concern. Meaning arises not from the keywords themselves but from the relations they trigger.

Fig. 13 Narrative Path and Linking Logic of the LoveStoryProject. T2013 Sandra Gaudenzi (2013: 103).

23 24 25 26

See: http://www.honkytonk.fr/index.php/webdoc/ (accessed 20/07/2018). See: http://www.honkytonk.fr/index.php/thebigissue/ (accessed 20/07/2018). See: http://www.lovestoryproject.com/ (accessed 07/10/2018). Gaudenzi (cf. 2013: 84) introduces the term living documentary to describe interactive documentaries as assemblages that exhibit different levels of autopoietic behavior in the way they change and/or create themselves in response to their environment.

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Thus, pre-establishing the conditions for possible connections creates the basis for what Murray called procedural “enchantment”: The Zork dungeon rooms form a branching structure, but the magical objects within the dungeon each behave according to their own set of rules. And the interactor is given a repertoire of possible behaviors that encourage a feeling of inventive collaboration. The Zork programmers found a procedural technology for creating enchantment (1998: 78).

Contrary to notions of the computer as problem-solving machine (cf. Eberbach, Goldin and Wegner, 2004: 161) and interaction as merely following somebody else’s mental trajectory (cf. Manovich 2001: 74), procedural enchantment points to the unexhausted possibilities of (audio-)visual coding for performing and pondering relationality. Due to its openness, Korsakow stimulates a variety of practices and this variety matters. Some film- or media-makers might work around its constraints and map different pathways out elsewhere before translating them into the program. Video clips might be edited prior to their import to instigate a stronger sense of narrative coherence. On the other end of the spectrum, there is no reason why clips could not be linked in a random, completely unstructured fashion. Nevertheless, if the aim is to create a database system with pre-established storylines or branches of information retrieval, Korsakow is not the ideal tool to use and, consequently, might trigger frustrating experiences for both, makers and viewers.27 According to Miles, there is no need to use a combinatory engine for creating mutually exclusive pathways (Korsakow Workshop, Dec. 16, 2015). What it affords is “the creation of multiple, simultaneous links” (Miles 2014a: 209), which defy manual mapping. On a related note, Thalhofer explains: To be told a straightforward or linear story gives people comfort, because it simplifies the messiness of the world and provides them with the illusion that they know all they need to know. People who want that will not be happy with Korsakow. […] Korsakow is for people who understand that story is an artificial construction, and who are willing to question it on those terms in order to engage with complexity (Thalhofer, Aston and Odorico 2018: 109).

If anything, then, the multitude of meaningful connections Korsakow helps to identify needs to be represented with more flexible metaphors that assist the collaboration with relational media systems. In our interviews, Thalhofer, Miles and Reisch all referred to the cloud as a suitable abstraction for what happens 27 Within the conceptual framework of the database, SNUs become data sets and keywords become metadata. However, as critiqued by Miles, the database analogy is misleading in that it suggests a reading of Korsakow films as informational systems where search is “instrumental, pragmatic, and largely teleological” (2014: 212).

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inside a Korsakow film.28 The concept is frequently used in the field of telecommunications to describe the unpredictable space of data transmission as well as in computing where it denotes web services relying on a shared use of resources. Importantly, the notion of the cloud points to a network of elements that are related and activated via interactions.29 It encapsulates the view of a “flexible world” (Thalhofer, Aston and Odorico 2018: 107) where things repeatedly condense, overlap and evaporate.

A Hermeneutics of Recurrence What does it mean to build from the ground up inside a native hypertextual environment, an environment for authoring works relying on computational processes to be read or viewed back?30 For documentarians it implies going against the grain of customs and concepts relevant for their trade. From a technical standpoint, their very form of creative expression is bound to linearity. At the structural core, all types of filmic works consist of a given number of frames per second. They are assembled through editing into larger parts (cf. Miles 2014b: 69). Whether these larger parts are fixed in a final cut or generated in real time to maintain the multiplicity of other possible cuts, one frame always follows another to create the filmic experience. Market-driven standardizations and industry demands have reinforced the ideal of a fixed, coherently prestructured product; an ideal that effectively directs the design and use of technologies towards normalized ends. Hight (2017), for example, demonstrated how a streamlined concept of editing is necessary to automate certain aspects of practice. In the process, these very aspects become naturalized, also due to transparent interface designs. According to Murray, “a good interface should not call attention to itself, but should let us direct our attention to the task” through “immediate feedback” and the use of “familiar interaction patterns” (2011: 10). Korsakow’s desktop editor calls attention to a task foreign to practitioners with a background in filmmaking. It raises awareness of a more explicit collaboration with automated procedures to create generative outputs, which, in a way, never reach a final cut. As a result, the software’s interface also calls attention to itself and its “unintuitive” design: “There is a certain weird resistance because it looks 28 See: http://pha.de/texte/die-welt-ist-eine-wolke/ (accessed 23/07/2018). 29 Another widespread use involves the visualization of tags in blogs. 30 Following Theodore H. Nelson’s first conceptualization of the term, hypertext (and later hypermedia) in its chunk-style form refers to a body of verbal and nonverbal material that is “interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper” (1965: 96).

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command-liny and it’s a bit like ‘Well, it’s not real software’, or it looks too real” (Interview with Miles, Feb. 16, 2017). My research data indicated that breaking conventional filmmaking habits with Korsakow by (semi-)automating essential components of film authorship is felt to be fruitful and liberating in highly creative and experimental contexts such as that of the non/fictionLab. Here, the software and its, to some extent noncontemporary,31 interface design is embedded in an educational practice that emphatically seeks to grant materials agency over the documentary process and outcome. Miles’ ‘rule of thumb’, which he repeatedly stressed in class and in our interviews, clearly illustrates his radical agenda of working with and through the machine: If you can generate and enable a work without the computer (or any other device for that matter), there is no point in using it in the first place.32 However, in order to grant the system some autonomy and recognize it as a collaborator within creative processes, practitioners at the non/fictionLab had to rewire their mode and mindset as (film-)makers and viewers. Accordingly, Miles urged his students to adopt an open stance towards materiality and form: “Structure emerges through the algorithmic processing of the program, not from a pre-defined structure that you mapped out elsewhere” (Korsakow Workshop, Dec. 16, 2015).33 Similarly, in a studio taught on interactive media production, Seth Keen encouraged his students to start making work in Korsakow from day one: The idea was to get them into the tool working straight away rather than trying to plan the work outside of the tool […]. It’s kind of like you try and learn things through the actual making in the tool and that informs decisions in terms of how you record your material, how you edit your material, how you design your interfaces (Interview with Seth Keen, Jan. 19, 2016).

Although Korsakow deliberately lacks a visual representation, it does consist of two interfaces – the desktop editor as well as the exported project played in a web browser. The missing mapping tool in the desktop editor serves as a material constraint. It is a “design threshold” pointing to a “perceptual threshold” 31 Thalhofer (et al. 2018: 110) and Miles (Interview Feb. 16, 2017) both claimed that a more contemporary and less abstract interface design would be crucial for the future of Korsakow. While it could, indeed, raise the software’s appeal, my contention is that its current ‘unintuitive’ look is closely tied to the ways it disrupts “skilled visions” (Grasseni 2011) in the field and, thereby, stimulates critical and experimental approaches. 32 In exercises not directly related to Korsakow, Adrian highlighted a similar approach to other technical devices. Drawing on Jonathan Harris and his style of creating The Whale Hunt (2007, see: http://thewhalehunt.org/ (accessed 10/10/2018)) and other works, he encouraged the participants of his “posthumanism group” to grant space to material agency and follow its lead rather than instrumentalize its role in favor of story or intent. 33 This agnostic stance is also inspired by Miles’s reading of John Law’s critique of method (cf. 2004: 5) as having its blind spot in rigor, order and structure.

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(Ciccoricco 2007: 50): the gap between human and machine operations. Both interfaces have to be brought into a recursive dialogue. Only by moving back and forth between editor and browser can the digital materiality of Korsakow deliberately influence the process and the power asymmetry between humans and computers becomes tangible. “Structure in a Korsakow film emerges as a consequence of its making, and its making involves the crafting of relations between clips through keywords in concert with the system’s programmatic affordances” (Miles 2014a: 217, emphasis added). This “concert” requires a compositional mode of making that tolerates loops and repetition: A Korsakow film is musical. It relies on choruses and repetition. Most people treat it as cinema, which is like a book, so repetition is a sin and it should just be linear and sequential. So you know the sort of things I use all the time is I’ll say to students, so when you listen to a song and there is a chorus, how many of you stop and go, well, the song’s broken because I already heard this bit? […] It’s a musical form. So even if you start to understand that and then think, well, what might that let you do, you’re already starting to understand how to read these in a very different way […] (Interview with Miles, Feb. 16, 2017).

Miles gave his students specific rules such as to set a default of two lives for every SNU. In that way, already viewed clips could re-occur as part of different arrangements. These rules served as pedagogical means to get filmmakers out of a linear and into a recursive headspace. Engaging with rhythms of recurrence is “an experience that can be mistaken by readers and critics as a vice, a malfunction or at the very least, a frustration” (Ciccoricco 2007: 49). However, in network environments where structural integrity is not self-evident but emerges gradually, repetition is key to orientation, sense- and meaning-making. In his electronic hypertext Chasing our Tails, Mark Bernstein argued, [c]ycles in hypertext create and explain structure. Through measured repetition, we bring order to what might otherwise become an endlessly varied (and thus endlessly monotonous) line of argument (1997: np, emphasis added).34

In contrast to branching trees, interconnected systems build on loops to constitute meaning, yet of a different kind: [S]ince the branches of a tree eventually come to an end, the price to pay for guaranteed narrative coherence is the self-renewing power and the emergent meaning of classical hypertext fiction – for meaning in hypertext does not have to be narrative: relations between lexias can be analogical and lyrical, rather than standing for chronological and causal relations (Ryan 2011: 44).

34 See: https://www.eastgate.com/tails/Welcome.html (accessed 09/10/2018).

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Texts not organized around a main narrative axis can bring other qualities to the fore (cf. Trippi 2001).35 As in the field of gaming, these qualities might be of a non-story, or perhaps non-representational, type including pattern and mood but also presence and performativity to create a sense of meaningful play.36 Whether in his essays, our conversations or in his teaching sessions, Miles emphasized how Korsakow and interactive relational work in general invite their users to ask a series of forward-oriented questions. What happens if I click here? What does the current clip have to do with the choices that have now become available? What are the aspects that spring into notice? Which patterns emerge? Such questions assist Hannah Brasier, for example, in making associations and finding rhythms with the world. By engaging with loops and repetitions, she attunes herself to the unfolding patterns between her collected clips. These patterns, then, go on to inform her keyword design and from that, new patterns emerge. Through this rhythmical, semi-automated, semi-choreographed interplay of humans (as interactors, rule- and meaning-makers) and computers (as runtime engine performing searches and enabling matches), structure takes shape “while the work is being authored and played” (Miles 2014a: 214, emphasis added). Hence, “the need for sense to arise from these patterns applies to makers and users” alike (ibid.: 212). In other words, Korsakow’s two interfaces and the actions they afford (and constrain) need to be treated interdependently. They are constitutive elements of an ongoing loop. “The problem is: How do we deal with multilinearity and multiple relations between parts” when working with what Miles calls “proper hypertextual systems” (Interview, Jan. 27, 2016)? How do we find out exactly which and how many destinations a link needs? There is an urgent demand for learning to cope with digital openness and one way to tackle this problem is to adopt a mindset and workflow more in synch with “the iterative cycle of development” typical for obtaining programming knowledge (Marino 2014: 67). In a learning environment where creative experimentation is encouraged, the gap between Korsakow’s interfaces makes explicit the otherwise often “implicit collaboration between human and machine, or more specifically between human and algorithm” (Hight 2014a: 237). My empirical data has shown that bridging this gap can support a multisensory attunement to the emergent relationality between digital materiality, its use and experience. Embedded within the local apprenticeship of the non/fictionLab, Korsakow’s design threshold functions as prism through which research-practitioners (re-)train their visions, orient their perception and 35 See: http://netvironments.org/2001/09/06/155/ (accessed 23/07/2018). 36 The importance of performative elements is further pronounced in documentaries that build on 3608 and Virtual Reality technology to create immersive situations for conveying embodied forms of knowledge (cf. Weidle 2018).

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structure their understanding towards a recursive production and representation of knowledge beyond documentary’s “normative embrace of time’s arrow” (Miles 2014a: 218). Acquiring the skill to engage with emergent multilinear structures through recursive workflows, compositional modes and shared authorship37 is a significant step towards sensitizing filmmakers (and visual practitioners more broadly) for random access retrieval, feedback mechanisms and other computational logics. On the same note, a disconnection of the two interfaces can easily turn into a source of boredom, frustration and resistance. This tension was at the center of the second case study (cf. Näser and Weidle 2017) and will be elaborated more in depth below.

Enskilling and Deskilling As I have pointed out frequently, usability and convenience are determinative for consumer-oriented technological advancements. Software tools “provide different levels of automation” (Hight 2014: 240) to simplify certain tasks and user interfaces are designed to guarantee easy handling. These developments call for the acquisition of new skills just as much as they lead to a certain degree of deskilling in other areas.38 For novice filmmakers, the once high threshold of editing might have been effectively lowered. Similarly, programmers might feel empowered in the ways higher-level forms of abstraction allow them to read and write source code. Yet, the underlying processes of code interpretation, compilation and execution as well as their disciplining effects often remain hidden, even from their views. Having undergone the previously described learning experience at the non/fictionLab, it became clear to me that understanding the complex roles played by media software within situated documentary filmmaking practices meant attending more closely to the technology-mediated processes of enskilling and deskilling. To get to the bottom of this tension an analytical view on the discourses surrounding interactive documentary did not suffice. Certainly, following Korsakow and the particular perspectives it facili37 In this context, shared authorship refers to the explicit collaboration between humans and machines. With direct reference to Korsakow but in the context of a database documentary framework, Cohen describes the influence of deep remixability (Manovich 2007) provided by software production environments as a shift from authorship to authoring: “The author function is transformed to an authoring one in which the orchestration of software replaces the more traditional content provision” (2012: 333). 38 Platforms for authoring online content such as WordPress, for example, offer a large range of templates to avoid the actual labor of and respective proficiency in coding the layout of blogs and websites. In the context of audiovisual practices, contemporary camera technology builds on automatized processes to allow the production of high-quality still photography and video without having to set the values for aperture, shutter speed, and ISO manually.

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tated within the local apprenticeship of a small community of practitioners and media scholars had allowed me to recognize the fluidity of this technology as it wandered from one context to another (cf. De Laet and Mol 2000). While the Lab provided a fruitful ground for creative experimentation, international conferences and film festivals revealed the challenges Korsakow poses to global standards. Though doubtlessly crucial aspects of being a filmmaker and academic, ‘show and tells’ fall short in providing the experiential depth necessary for retracing how different documentary visions take shape in the first place. In order to gain “consciousness of the digital as a material and mechanical process” (Horst and Miller 2012: 25) co-constituting these visions and their frictions, I became specifically interested in the moments when software fails our expectations. As shown elsewhere, the concept of disconcertment can be “a suitable framework for the analysis of controversies surrounding objects” (Weidle 2017). Disconcertment is an experiential category that emphasizes the habitual, embodied and highly tactile dimensions of engagement with our lifeworld. It focuses on the intersection of humans and nonhumans and is, hence, a useful device for conducting object-oriented ethnographic research.39 It asks how and under which circumstances object qualities emerge as supportive or disruptive of certain standards,40 values and ideologies. According to my collected data, the local apprenticeship at the non/fictionLab builds on a positive experience of the threshold between Korsakow’s interfaces. Rather than perpetuating “causal pleasure” (Chun 2005: 41) by obscuring the machine and how it implements commands, Korsakow amplifies the disconnection between algorithmic and human agency. Crucially, research-practitioners at the Lab perceived this not as a lack but an invitation to attune to and engage with the asymmetry of power conjoined. Such an engagement enables critique on the ideologies structuring editing tools as well as software more broadly. Yet, “[t]his unveiling depends […] on us thinking like object-oriented programmers”, to quote Chun once again (ibid.: 42). Instead of narrative arcs, filmmakers need to work out behavioral rules for data structures. Thus, the mechanics of a Korsakow project are neither easily discernible nor easily applicable without an embodied knowledge of how the two interfaces intersect. The gap between them disrupts established film39 The concept was developed in the context of a summer school held at Ruhr-University Bochum in 2016 organized by Julie Mewes, Josefine Raasch and Estrid Sørensen. The aim was to discuss and experiment with descriptive and analytical approaches to object ethnographies. See: http://ethnographiesofobjects.tumblr.com/ (accessed 14/10/2018). 40 Hight takes Kodak’s Brownie as an example for a disruptive technology, effectively lowering the threshold due to its “You press the button, we do the rest” concept (2014: 239). Another example would be Kodak’s Super 8 film camera which was specifically designed to ease usability for everyday media-makers, particularly families.

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making protocols, practices and literacies and is, thus, likely to produce feelings of discomfort and disappointment. In contrast to cinema and film criticism that can draw on a basic level of technical know-how grown and spread over time, approaches to Korsakow in the wider context of (interactive) documentary still lack sufficient knowledge of software, code and programming. The second case study presented in this book showed how different forms, levels and frameworks of engagement can be at the heart of object-centered controversies. Against the backdrop of its particular institutional memory41 and the expectations held by students, introducing Korsakow to the over thirty-yearold CVA master program at the University of Goettingen confronted us with a number of disconcertments. Tensions arose, primarily, between our students’, by no means groundless, hopes to obtain a repertoire of basic ethnographic filmmaking skills and the project’s aim to create a mutual learning opportunity for rethinking established conventions and exploring new avenues. Only gradually could the participants recognize these tensions as epistemological points of friction between technology-mediated processes of enskilling and deskilling. In hindsight, this setting created the ideal conditions under which the empowering and disciplining effects of Korsakow’s architecture could be critically examined. In fact, subjecting routines in educational environments to technological disruptions proofed to be well-suited for reflecting on the (a)symmetric interrelations between humans and materials (cf. Sørensen 2009: 5) as they become tangible within concrete experiences. Very rarely are these conditions of engagement scrutinized, however, for how they inform particular fixations underlying institutionalized processes of learning and training in ethnographic film. Initial exercises with students were marked by feelings of resistance and disappointment, not least due to the teaching materials used in previous course units that had reproduced an understanding of film Korsakow seemed to jeopardize. Against this, mostly still implicit, framework of cinematic categories and literacies, Korsakow was primarily perceived and critiqued in terms of its lacking structure.42 Based on the conclusions drawn from the fieldwork conducted in Melbourne, it was paramount for the students’ learning experience to connect what they had seen in the browser back to what was going on in the desktop editor. Although the recursive workflow observed at the Lab could be adopted only partially, it still set in motion a defamiliarization with linguistic and sem41 Interestingly, the master course itself was originally designed as an alternative draft to the dominant German-speaking discourse in visual anthropology of the mid 1980s, which stood for a positivistic notion of science and, following that, a restricted use of film (cf. Ballhaus 1987: 108; Näser 2014: 279). 42 Although the nature of the research project was explained in the call for application, responses to the actual work with Korsakow were marked by surprise and, often, resistance.

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iotic approaches traditionally favored by CVA including the notion of film as textual narrative monograph and the interpretative role of the filmmaker. Moreover, the back and forth between noticing, deciding and doing (cf. Miles 2013: np) made us question the suitability of causal-linear schemata for responding to the simultaneous multiplicity of perspectives and activities at work in ethnographic research (cf. Hess and Schwertl 2013). In that way, Korsakow eventually stimulated an intellectual culture, in which our implicit schoolings as documentary and ethnographic filmmakers, viewers, teachers and students surfaced and became subject of debate. As a result of working through these disconcertments we could develop an alternative framework of reception and engagement; a framework beyond linear narrative representation as necessary means to an (ethnographic) end. Throughout this learning process, Korsakow emerged as a co-teacher of ethnographic filmmaking. It equipped us with the tools relevant for gaining consciousness of and reimagining the local, highly stabilized socio-technical knowledge configurations at work when looking through and thinking with the camera, editing software, screening formats and other teaching materials. Amongst Korsakow’s tools are the metaphors of SNUs as discrete building blocks, keywords and clouds. They helped us reconfigure the shooting, editing and organization of footage in a modular, rule-based, flexible, and hence, computational way. As Reisch confirmed in our e-mail interview, “creating a Korsakow [film] is absolutely a form of programming” since, programming isn’t about typing code, it’s about capturing intention and describing behaviour. […] Korsakow users are just doing so at a higher level of abstraction, which is the whole point – if an architect had to worry about how to lay each brick it would be harder for them to concentrate on the overall design (Nov. 12, 2017).

The (audio-)visual abstraction Korsakow provides allowed us to think about the connection between processes and products. It provided the means to explore possible ways of chunking and layering the complex interrelations of processes and products so that patterns emerged from which new insights could arrive. Suddenly, the task of editing explicitly involved aspects of design thinking. It meant “thinking with materials” (Bratteteig 2010: 148) throughout the different layers of concretization so that different solutions could be developed, tested and adjusted. This iterative development cycle also led to a deeper understanding of the research topic. Not only did we draw on methodologies common in user experience design such as rapid prototyping and beta-testing. We also re-conceived our own role as that of a curator, designing spaces where anthropological knowledge could arise. While this shift in framework provided a way of coping with Korsakow’s disruptive openness, it also involved a difficult yet productive balancing act

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between the conventions of programming, designing and filmmaking. After all, the software not only exhibits discontinuities with linear filmmaking but combines different, to some extent opposing, modes of thinking, seeing and creating. Its OOP-like affordances, for example, introduce the idea of rule-based coherence to filmmaking. As computational objects that can be addressed programmatically, video clips form the centre of Korsakow, though not in the obvious sense of just being content nodes but from the point of view of the agency those nodes now gain through the programmatic and processual operations that can occur upon and around them (Miles 2014a: 210).

At the same time, video clips in Korsakow are continuous with cinematic and televisual documentary formats. They are often pre-edited elsewhere and, thus likely, but by no means limited, to display a certain degree of narrative coherence. Beyond its interface(s), Korsakow is part of broader socio-material configurations that encompass other technologies, mediating creative practices with their own “circuit of affordances” (Moeran 2014: 35) and constraints. Balancing these different modes of making prompted a series of combinatorial movements between participation and observation, exploration and representation, randomness and control. As I will elaborate in more detail below, the resulting digital-visual enskilment reframed the computational and anthropological conundrum of order and mess. More specifically, it re-configured this paradox as a highly fertile ground for re-envisioning ethnographic engagements with the world beyond the dividing line of research process and outcome.

Between Order and Mess Based on the results of the two case studies outlined above, the final paper (Weidle 2019) presented a meditation on the ways software-based technology not only mediates but focuses views of and creative engagements with the world. Following anthropologists Cristina Grasseni and Thorsten Gieser (2019), here I argue for the productiveness of approaching software as focusing media guiding ethnographic action and attention in the field as well as in front of the screen. Yet, the ways affordances, habitus and hexis are reconfigured via software remain alarmingly unexamined.43 Whether working within the parameters of word processing, video editing or computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software 43 The discourse surrounding ethnographic hypermedia outlined in the preface to this book presents a notable exception. Yet, the point I am driving at here involves a broader acknowledgement and systematic analysis of tools used within ethnographic research practices beyond their ‘toolness’.

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(CAQDAS), varying degrees of automation support the creation, manipulation and publication of empirical knowledge. While Microsoft Word provides rather subtle interventions such as spell-checking or auto-correction, programs such as Qualrus explicitly promote a high level of automation to ease the laborious task of developing coding systems: “Qualrus learns your coding trends and offers relevant suggestions as you go”.44 For ethnographic filmmakers whose schooling in technical skills is often reduced to a handful of concise but intense course units,45 the proliferation of entry-level media software featuring higher forms of automation described by Hight (2014) can play a significant role. Especially for practitioners with limited programming knowledge or resources, automation can effectively lower the threshold and make online media productions more feasible. However, as has been highlighted earlier, a greater extent of automation goes hand in hand with a greater extent of formalizing and, thus, streamlining underlying conceptions (cf. ibid.: 242–3). The use of professional editing software such as Adobe’s Premiere, Avid’s Film and Media Composer or Apple’s Final Cut is commonplace in the field of ethnographic film- and media-making. If it does not serve the arrangement of an actual final cut, then at least the preparation of video clips that will be incorporated into other platforms. The forms of automation these programs offer “do not feel like an imposition on our creative agency”, states Hight (2014: 240),46 because they are subtle and convey a sense of (manual) control. Yet, by reinforcing user agency “based on familiar modes of control over a wide range of tools” (ibid.), the fact that the system performs tasks at all almost disappears. Here we can see again, “how quickly and easily digital technologies are […] domesticated as normative” and disappear from our consciousness (Horst and Miller 2012: 29). On a relatively implicit level, the editing of ethnographic films draws on and enacts an encoded set of assumptions about how to craft cinematic 44 See: http://www.qualrus.com/ (accessed 31/07/2018). 45 Ethnographic filmmakers are of an ambiguous, in-between status when it comes to their skillsets. Following the BA/MA system, the study program offered in Goettingen, for example, expects its students to finish their master degree within the prescribed timeframe of four semesters whether or not they choose to produce a film as part of their thesis. The emphasis clearly lies on training them in the broader field of anthropology. Besides thematic and methodological seminars compulsory for all master students of cultural anthropology, CVA students have to take on extra courses units. Only a limited amount of sessions can thus be devoted to the introduction to filmmaking theory and practice. If students wish to build a professional career in filmmaking, they are generally advised to enroll in a film school subsequently. Other common formats for teaching filmmaking skills to anthropological students are short but intense summer schools. There, students are closely supervised but mostly gain knowledge by applying the learning-by-doing principle. 46 Susanne Friese points out that part of the reason why qualitative researchers tend to misunderstand CAQDAS rests on the belief that “software would automatically code and analyse the data and thus take away the analysis from the human interpreter” (2006: 311).

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narratives and arguments. These assumptions are based on the ontological claim embodied in technology “that things are constituted in the rational and rulegoverned transposition of preconceived form onto inert substance, rather than in a weaving of, and through, active materials” (Ingold 2011: 212). Since I will come back to this point in the epilog, for now it suffices to say that such a position lends itself to the widely spread routine of pre-mapping filmic engagements by means of shooting schedules, timelines, visual storyboards or navigational structures.47 Whether in the shape of frames per second or words per page, empirical findings are sought to be clearly laid out in academically feasible presentations of knowledge. Such attempts, however, demand the reduction of complex encounters into neatly ordered structures. Moreover, they rest on the problematic proposition that data collection, analysis and representation could be distinguished into separate, well-defined research stages and tasks. Tim Ingold notes that “[i]n the practice of ethnography, observation and description have become disconnected: the ethnographer turns away in order to write” (2011: 179, original emphasis). Ethnographic knowledge, however, does not linearly emerge after the fact but is constantly evolving and re-negotiated before and throughout the immediacy of the fieldwork experience and even after the findings are shared with, discussed by and linked to a larger field of anthropological knowledge.48 According to Sarah Pink and her colleagues, anthropological ethnographers “have always been confronted with this complicated question of how to bring together series of things, processes and even other inexplicable phenomena of different kinds, types, qualities and affordances, to tell coherent and consistent stories” about what is, to some extent, “always contingent on changing sets of circumstances” (2016: 12). This statement implies that analytical work is intimately tied to the dynamics unfolding from our engagements with materials, whether that involves laying thoughts out on paper and revisiting them later or observing and describing the behavior of objects conjoined within networked environments. Knowing emerges through doing and, in the case of participant observation, it gradually evolves by reflecting on the lived experience of learning how to do. Mapping out possible pathways through (audio-visual) research data and crafting coherent storylines 47 This is also evidenced in the increasing use of Klynt among ethnographers to create navigable online presentations of their research findings. For a recent project authored with Klynt, cf. Elderscapes: Ageing in Urban South Asia (2016), http://kjc-sv013.kjc.uni-heidel berg.de/elderscapes/klynt/#Intro (accessed 10/10/2018). 48 For a recent discussion of ethnography in response to Ingold’s provocative essay (2014) see Cultural Anthropology’s Correspondences series on Ethnography with George E. Marcus, Susan MacDougall, Joanna Cook and Andrew Shryock: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/870correspondences-ethnography (accessed 26/07/2018).

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are, in some ways, disaster reliefs (cf. Bendix 1990). These strategies bring structure to chaos and, thereby, assist us in coping with complexity. However, they are also techniques and concepts imposed on epistemic practices characterized by a different tempo-spatial disposition; one that is simultaneous (cf. Hess and Schwertl 2013), circular (cf. Latour 1999: 24–79), and messy (cf. Law 2004). Sociologist of science Zdeneˇk Konop#sek (2007) pointed out how the material practices involved in generating knowledge become well observable in the practical manipulations of digital objects in CAQDAS. ATLAS.ti, for example, allows qualitative researchers to segment, code, interlink and comment on different data facets – from passages (or sequences) to individual words (or shots) and single characters (or frames). Over the course of the research process, more and more data gets assigned to a ‘hermeneutic unit’, code systems are revisited, and new analytical objects49 emerge on the program’s interface (cf. Konop#sek 2007: np). They and the relations that occur between them as a result of this cycle of small tasks, (inter-)actions and translations become subject to our (visual) control. Complex queries50 can be issued. A code can be followed throughout its different material instances. Still, the established connections are (selectively) mapped in the form of hierarchical sideways trees, lists or so-called “network views” (Friese 2018: 184). As a set of graphically displayed nodes and links, the two-dimensional network view in ATLAS.ti supports the display of nearly all of the project’s parts in their various relations to each other. The network editor permits visual links as well as further differentiations between different types of connections. Accordingly, the software “enables researchers to think in a visible way” (Konop#sek 2007: np, original emphasis). Invoking the hope held by early hypertext scholars, Susanne Friese goes further and remarks that “[i]n contrast with linear, sequential representations (e. g. text), presentations of knowledge in networks resemble more closely the way human memory and thought is structured” (2018: 186). Without a doubt, such software-based network views function as focusing media. They support a material praxis of seeing that allows us to create the conditions for exploring and visualizing relevant patterns. We can detect the density of links due to the editor’s auto-color mode or simply by looking at the number of links automatically generated in brackets behind the assigned code. Nevertheless, this focusing is guided by the notion of mapping and, hence, constrains what networked hypertextuality could do and mean for qualitative data analysis and representation. In the network editor objects can be 49 For Konop#sek (2007), these objects are not only marked quotations but also established links and, as we will see, network views, which all contain inscriptions of ourselves through the performed activities. 50 To create more complicated search requests, multiple codes can be linked in different ways (e. g. by Boolean expressions) and combined with different variables.

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moved around freely and connections emerge manually or semi-automatically in response to recursive coding activities. Yet, the relationality produced in and with ATLAS.ti is ultimately frozen. The software is not granted agency beyond aiding the researcher to code his or her data. The dynamic density of relations is confined to pointing arrows, colors, thick or dashed lines. Automation stops where it begins in generative media systems such as Korsakow. While there is software that offers more advanced options to visualize and analyze (actor-)networks, often the logics underlying these affordances reproduce static, (quasi-)hierarchical, logocentric notions of knowledge. Such logics are common because, among other things, they reduce cognitive load (cf. Friese 2018: 186) and “provide […] guidance for readers” (Ensslin 2014: 259). In their research endeavor to map social controversies, Tommaso Venturini and his colleagues pointed towards the need of developing digital methods that more effectively bridge the gap between cinematic linearity and hypertext openness. Linear formats, such as texts or videos, tend to be more suited for narrating stories. Non-linear formats, such as diagrams or websites, do not impose a predetermined path but invite users to explore their richness. The difficulty to overcome the narration/ exploration gap explains why few initiatives have succeed[ed] in combining cinematographic/textual linearity with hypertext openness (2015: 83).

In the context of visual research methods, Florian Straus (cf. 2013: 52) identified a similar dilemma: While ever more complex visualizations are needed, they also have to remain simple enough to ensure what was made visible does not become invisible again. As a possible solution, Straus follows Pfeffer (2010) in his call for more aesthetic creativity on the side of network visualizers, an aspect that is also linked to the set of possibilities given by software. In any case, such an endeavor would be premised upon finding the necessary balance between unfolding the richness of observation (cf. Venturini 2010) and condensing it again (cf. Venturini 2012). The exercises provided with Korsakow show how digital materiality manifests itself in the engagement with relational media systems. More specifically, it becomes tangible in the ways it challenges and complements habitual understandings of how to arrange ethnographic narrative and analytic insight tempospatially (cf. Grasseni and Walter 2014). If embedded within a creative research practice that follows and thinks with materials and processes, working with Korsakow can guide ethnographers towards a recursive back and forth between two conflicting movements. On the one hand, its deep hypertextuality asks us to embrace mess and uncertainty from the ground up – an approach that has been recently postulated by Pink and her colleagues (cf. 2016: 12). The first exercise illustrated how producing media assets for Korsakow involved an improvised camera-work attuned to the unexpected, variable and relational of situated

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emergence. On the other hand, it fostered a movement towards drawing things together, yet not by means of mapping but by actively attending to the power asymmetry between humans and machines. Although, this movement can be one towards narrative coherence it does not have to be. In fact, the dynamic density of relations generated with the system rests on a different type of coherence, a rule-based improvisation that carries the notion of uncertainty further. This was demonstrated in the second exercise, which draws on the material gathered from repeatedly filming, editing and SNUifying stand-alone video clips to orchestrate an instable but dense set of relations. As nodes of a network, empirical data assets are held together by code in a dynamic and relatively loose organization and, thereby, “enlarge the moments and possibilities around a situation, event or milieu (Miles 2013: 4). Through the use of keywords, Korsakow’s combinatory engine permits us to see what different parts do (and mean) depending on the ways they are assembled. These audiovisual actornetworks perform emergent relationality and are, thus, continuous with the thick but unstable multitude of meaningful connections amongst the collected fragments of fieldwork encounters. Engaging with algorithmically generated, combinatorial possibilities requires a particular relation to the digital. It rests on a skilled mediation that understands the “creative treatment of data structures” (Hight 2014: 246) in documentary and ethnographic film- and media-work more broadly as collaboration between humans and machines. Consciously and productively collaborating with software-based technologies presupposes a learning process; one that can be supported by focusing media such as the Korsakow System. Importantly, this training neither involves a taming of the digital nor a surrendering of control as it was feared by our students or, on the contrary, might be intended by the designers of entry-level software.51 The third exercise of this methodological meditation shows how creating and gradually refining keywords involves a variety of skills. It encompasses the deliberate letting go of a master sequence as well as the gaining of control over the loss of it by making executive decisions about how to describe SNU behavior and choreograph the number, density and type of relations. Just as Venturini (et al. 2015) or Straus (2013) remarked, if not condensed again, complex structures are likely to overwhelm and patterns, which are anything but easily discernible in relational media, are threatened to become invisible again.

51 Hight takes the example of Magisto, an editing software that “aims to completely erase the labour of editing” by means of high automation (2014: 243). Fittingly, Jose van Dijck calls the process enabled by such high degrees of automation “human-assisted automatic editing” (2013: 137–9).

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It is my contention that a critical awareness of how contemporary media technologies affect and are affected by our encounters in, with and of the world is paramount for an advancing digital (audio-)visual ethnography. Focusing media like Korsakow can render these aspects more palpable. Here, cinematographic poetics and politics are combined with networked hypertextuality. This combination subjects routines and implicit “schoolings of the eye” (Grasseni 2011: 20) in documentary and ethnographic apprenticeship to productive disruptions. Disconcertment arising from these disruptions can lead research-practitioners from a filmmaking into a programming mindset, which takes us closer to working with the grain of digital computation. Rules, random access retrieval and automation re-focus our attention towards the granularity of film, which moves us into a problem-solving, design-like headspace. Moreover, a recursive approach to Korsakow’s material constraint demonstrates how certain types of control structures are implemented on data sets and covered up by the invitation of software interfaces to suspend disbelief over cause and effect. Resembling object-oriented and visual programming languages, this relational media environment enables a crucial learning experience for today’s media makers and scholars; that of writing (source) code and observing its, to some extent unpredictable, execution. Perhaps, the results of these skilled mediations should not be treated as representations that aim to resemble research findings. Rather, they are sketches, prototypes or probes capturing the ephemeral relationality of the moment, always awaiting the next (inter-)action. In that regard, they are essential components of an embodied thinking-in-action with the present and future.

Epilog: A Computational Correspondence with the World

What does it mean for an advancing digital (audio-)visual ethnography to take the materiality of its research objects and devices seriously? First of all, it implies that visual anthropology moves closer together with digital and design anthropology. Anthropologists interested in contemporary visual culture and/or visual methods need to (re-)gain consciousness of the digital and the material as “entangled elements of the same processes” (Pink et al. 2016: 1). At its very base, the digital describes “a state of material being”: a switch that is either on or off (Horst and Miller 2012: 3). Following Keith Hart (2000, 2005, 2007) and his suggestion to study the digital through the lens of modern systems of money, Heather Horst and Daniel Miller identify this binary baseline as another “twist to the dialectical screw”: At the level of abstraction, there are grounds for thinking we have reached rock bottom; there can be nothing more basic and abstract than binary bits, the difference between 0 and 1. At the other end of the scale, it is already clear that the digital far outstrips mere commoditization in its ability to proliferate difference (2012: 7).

No matter which end of this dialectic is studied, it seems the digital expands our possibilities for abstraction and differentiation, carrying with it similarly contradictory effects to that of money (cf. Zelizer 1994; Hart 2000: 280–7). Interestingly, from an engineering standpoint, the advancement towards greater abstraction is happening on both ends of the scale. Lower layers of abstraction chunk complex problems into smaller blocks, which are ultimately reduced to binary bits as the smallest units of information possible. Higher layers of abstraction mediate technical processes through software interfaces. They magnify the blocks again so that they become manageable and meaningful for human operators. The smoother the mediation between those two poles works, the less it is perceived as an abstraction. In any case, enacting digital (audio-)visualities connects the abstract and the particular in an ongoing flow within complex non-/human entanglements. Whether the digital is located at the center or the

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periphery of a research project, visual ethnographers – as skilled practitioners – participate in these entanglements. Although it seems most of the time we only bear witness to what happens on the level of the interface, material gatherings (Latour 2005) of digital media come into being through different forces of friction. These frictions can be felt. They move, affect and transform us. Materials are vitalized as well through such relational circumstances (cf. Bennett 2010; Ingold 2008; Appadurai 2013). Actor-network theorists would even say “objects too have agency” (Latour 2005: 63–86). However, Tim Ingold (2017) deplored that, at least linguistically, the concept of agency remains trapped in the very cause and effect logic it seeks to escape.1 In his efforts to bring anthropology back to life, he asserts that things can neither be reduced to objects nor to agency : It is not, then, that things have agency ; rather they are actively present in their doing – in their carrying on or perdurance. And as things carry on together, and answer to one another, they do not so much interact as correspond. Interaction is the dynamic of the assemblage, where things are joined up. But correspondence is a joining with; it is not additive but contrapuntal, not ‘and…and…and’ but ‘with…with…with’ (2017: 13, original emphasis).

Accordingly, the constituents of this world do not exist prior to action. They are always becoming together, interweaving in an ongoing forward movement with other forces surrounding them. They generate things of life and life does not stand still. As an example, Ingold takes the wind, which is not an object, nor does it tear at the trees because it is endowed with agency. It is an air current, materials-in-motion. […] And so, too, I am what I am doing. I am not an agent but a hive of activity” (ibid.: 17, original emphasis).

Although Ingold’s idea of correspondence is central for my closing argument, it is also problematic because it dismisses the heuristic values and pragmatic dimensions of making analytic distinctions in the first place. If we cannot separate materials from people by assigning distinct properties to them, how are we supposed to describe the ways they join with and influence each other? One possible solution is to adopt a, to some extent meta-reflective, praxeological perspective on creative processes and products. Whether thought of as agential, forceful or alive, digital (audio-)visuality actively unfolds in correspondence with our doing. So does our knowledge of it. 1 The main problem regarding the concept of agency is that it is closely tied to the idea of intentionality as the initial catalyst for action. While it is a matter of philosophical debate to what extent human actions are indeed caused by intentional behavior, it is even harder to attribute intentions to objects (cf. Ingold 2011: 214; Knappett 2005: 22). Moreover, the concept bears the risk of denying human responsibility for automated machine processes.

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The problem with the digital is that it gradually escapes our sensory capacity. Neither can we keep up with the speed by which computers perform operations nowadays nor are we meant to. If ethnographers seek to generate anthropological knowledge with or about visual practices enacted through digital means, a close attention to the lived experience of enskilment can be productive. This involves re-conceptualizing users as designers (cf. Gunn and Donovan 2012: 2) and understanding their activities as “everyday interventions” in the ongoing flow of a world-in-the-making (Pink et al. 2016: 15). Moreover, it means reflecting on our own correspondences with the world as research-practitioners and how they move us from one state of mind to the next. However, it has been shown in the previous discussion of currently expanding representational practices in documentary and ethnography that, by and large, the digital primarily serves as yet another stage for the so-called hylomorphic model to play out. For Ingold this model stands in for the ontological claim well-established in the Western tradition that things emerge through the projecting of preconceived ideas, designs, workflows and conventions onto inert matter (cf. 2011: 178; 210– 5). Returning to the dialectical principle identified by Horst and Miller, the digital’s current design even intensifies this belief. To visions trained linearly, the computer screen appears as a universal canvas ready for the projection of almost any idea. Not uncommonly, the interface of media software supports this mechanistic and deterministic approach to making by providing appropriate tools to aid the mapping and mastering of media assets and content nodes. Nevertheless, we are no masters and neither are programmers. More and more tasks have been handed over to automated processes that increasingly feed into each other. Acknowledging this can rewire our knowledge-making modes and mindsets and draw attention to the intricate ways things come to-gather through an array of code(d) activities. One of the main arguments the present volume has brought forth is that learning to engage skillfully with generative media systems such as Korsakow can expose filmmakers and viewers to a series of powerful disruptions. Korsakow’s design, Matt Soar notes, “expressly precludes the creation of a ‘master’ (linear) narrative” (2014: 168). Instead, it foregrounds emergent relationality as a guiding principle for listening and answering to digital-material processes in a dynamic audiovisual arrangement. In this sense, Korsakow is similar to visual computer control languages in that it makes the relationship between writing and executing code more tangible. As “a playground for subjective, ironical, and epistemological disruptions, experiments, and critique” (Fuller and Cramer 2008: 152), such environments can break the diegesis of intuitive interface designs (cf. Chun 2008: 320) and challenge the authorial treatment of digital materiality. More explicit collaborations with computational procedures, however, require loosening the reins of representationalism. Emerging interactive media

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forms might be a first step, yet they all too often rest upon a pre-mapping rather than “an improvisatory movement that works things out as it goes along” (Ingold 2011: 178). If creative research practice means following the unfolding ways of the world, finding rhythms with material flows, continuously attuning to uncertainties, responding to and transforming them, then ethnographic efforts need to be reoriented. From being a means to some pre-determined end, their emphasis needs to shift towards method and process as forms of knowledge in their own right. This book has contributed to showing how such a shift in emphasis can be achieved by adopting “designerly ways of thinking and acting” (Otto and Smith 2013: 13) with the materials and devices of our research (cf. Law and Ruppert 2013). Whether this improvisatory movement becomes manifest in a “living language” Ingold proclaims (2015: ix) or in a “living documentary” Sandra Gaudenzi describes (2013), the digital-material with which anthropologists write, capture, edit or distribute their work plays a central role in redefining the purpose and status of representation. Unlike sawing a log, drawing a picture or writing by hand, the raw materials of the digital taskspace are buried underneath layers of mediation and the gestures of clicking, typing or swiping do not inscribe the body as tangibly into its surfaces. Keyboards and cameras, Ingold (cf. 2011: 225) laments, cut the relation between perception, action and its trace. Successions of discrete marks in his view “are nothing compared with the continuous modulations of feeling and form in a simple calligraphic line – a line that registers every nuance of the hand that draws it” (2015: viii). Instead of advocating for a return to handwriting (or an introduction to drawing), I divert from Ingold in my contention that discrete forms of expression can, indeed, lend themselves to a fruitful coupling of action and perception. This coupling is fruitful not despite but because it is built around gaps: the onto-epistemological gap between computational discreteness and empirical continuity, the conceptual gap between static program and dynamic process, the design gap between Korsakow’s desktop editor and its web interface, the material gap between one bit and the next. These gaps beckon a return. Rules and meaningful patterns are constituted not prior but during the course of action. Bridging these gaps, thus, implies a recursive movement between making and viewing, between us and our materials, embodied knowledge and world, abstraction and differentiation, theory and practice. In the process, the unfolding power asymmetry between computers and humans is amplified as they come together to co–create. In line with current tendencies in design anthropology (e. g. Otto and Smith 2013; Gunn and Donovan 2012) and non-representational theory (e. g. Lorimer 2005; Stewart 2007; Thrift 2008; Vannini 2015), a relational view on action and perception can pave the way towards reinvigorating the purpose and orientation of depiction and interpretation. Such a relational view is furthered by a skilled

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mediation with emergent software systems that neither seeks explanation nor representation. One that is not oriented towards creating a final outcome, a sense of wholeness or closure. Making with Korsakow produces descriptions but of an ongoing gathering, which is the very manifestation of creative practice, and of the world, as work-in-progress. It seeks to compose a concert of emergent relationality and, thereby, renders the intrinsic relationship between doing and knowing explicit for maker-viewers, research participants and an interested public. In contrast to the backward-oriented hermeneutics furthered by causallinear approaches to and forms of representation, the questions Korsakow’s gap triggers signal an ontological shift for ethnography : With an awareness of the past, it anchors it “in the present of practice” (Vannini 2015: 4) and opens it up for speculations about the future. There is no reason why (audio-)visual mediawork should continue to exhaust itself in the futile aim to find convenient ways for depicting the things we have encountered. As Michaela Schäuble and other anthropologists interested in the non-referential, evocative potentials of (audio-)visual media have shown, ethnographic inquiry holds a “more-than-representational power” if we take imagination to be one of its fundamental parts and move “beyond and outside an essentially realist and mimetic paradigm” (2016: np). In this sense, (re-)doing digital visual ethnography could mean crafting “active forms of sensory engagement where anthropological knowledge can emerge” (ibid.). The purpose of what I will tentatively call a computational correspondence is to bring the digital materiality of ethnographic representations back to life by reconnecting them with the embodied currents of their production. A “correspondence-thinking”, Ingold states, “necessarily entails a focus on ontogenesis – on the generation of being – and how this, in turn, allows us to imagine a world in which openness, rather than closure, is a fundamental condition of existence” (2017: 9). Hence, the propositions suggested here for designing computational correspondences do not imply a move away from ethnography but one that revitalizes and opens it up towards an anthropology in real time (cf. Ingold and Gatt 2013). Crafting “active forms of sensory engagement” (Schäuble 2016: np) in correspondence with the computer means curating spaces where practitioners, research participants and others can attune themselves to the behavior of things (as computational objects) and how it changes in response to code(d) (inter-)actions. Thereby, they become engaged in an embodied thinking-inaction as it unfolds in and with a digital-material environment. Understanding the dynamic interconnectedness of theoretical processes and products is crucial for making “skilled innovations” according to design anthropologists Wendy Gunn and Jared Donovan (2012: 5–6). By that, they mean the designing of potentials for connecting our lives with that of others instead of creating descriptions of others that begin by looking back. Computational-corre-

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spondence-thinking resonates with the increasing recognition of the world as messy. It captures the dynamic on-flow of being entangled in a socio-digital world and coming to know with one another, human and nonhuman alike. Ingold calls this a shift from the practice of othering to that of “togethering” (2011: 226).2 As means of evocation, provocation, or intervention, I could imagine a variety of possible applications for the generative, forward-oriented and multi-vocal prototypes co-authored with relational media systems. Challenging the line dividing descriptions from processes of describing (cf. Gunn 2009), they are of a liminal state, fixing things provisionally only to let them disperse again. Unlike arborescent structures, clouds make visible the lines of their generation. A cloud is no object, according to Ingold, but rather incoherent, vaporous tumescence that swells and is carried along in the currents of the medium. To observe the clouds is not to view the furniture of the sky but to catch a fleeting glimpse of a sky-in-formation, never the same from one moment to the next (2011: 117).

Such formations could be read as examples of the hybrid genre Phillip Vannini envisions for a hybrid world (cf. 2015: 3) – a genre interested in the experience of things in motion. What the cloud-like sketches co-authored with Korsakow do is disrupt the linear succession of pages and frames as prevailing principles for organizing knowledge. This research project has shown how attending to such moments of disruption can assist documentary as well as ethnographic filmmakers in questioning their routines and re-schooling their visions in accordance with the materialities of digital-visual mediation. Whether in text or film, the role of authorship undergoes significant reconfigurations in the process. Most importantly, it changes gear from assuming control over the shape of an object to decentering human agency in favor of emergent relationality. As a result, research-practitioners are invited to “start considering programming as a language with its own rules, power and capacities” (Remillet and Wanono 2014: np). In times of mobile and ubiquitous computing, we cannot afford leaving it to others to dictate both problems and solutions. Instead, we need to critically interrogate established software regimes and participate in the (re-)shuffling of responsibilities. Regaining control over the loss of it enables such a critique. Moreover, it can be the starting point for re-imagining the design of future technologies; a task increasingly in need of anthropological attention.

2 Importantly, for Ingold the process of togethering is driven by the use of “pen or pencil rather than the camera and keyboard” (2011: 226).

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Epilog Appadurai, Arjun 2013. The Future as Cultural Fact. London: Verso. Bennett, Jane 2010. AVitalist Stopover on the Way to New Materialism, in Diana H. Coole and Samantha Frost (eds.), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, 47–69. Durham/London: Duke University Press.

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Index

Abstraction – and software 145, 154f – and the digital 51–53, 171 – barrier 55, 146 – Levels of 37, 53, 55, 159, 162, 172 Actor-network theory (ANT) 40, 42, 98f, 104, 124, 149, 172 Adobe After Effects 148 Adobe Director 38 Adobe Flash 68, 148 Adobe Premiere 124, 144, 164 Aesthetic noticing 78–81, 88, 162 Affordances 49, 66, 93, 130, 134 – Circuits of 123, 126, 163 – Hierarchy of 146 Aleatory methods 85, 106, 130 Algorithm 56, 61, 122 – Algorithmic editing 81, 128, 148 – and agency 108, 113, 130, 160 – and collaboration 158 – and keywords 128 – and structure 152f, 156 – Generative 20, 88, 99, 106, 113, 124, 168 – studies 47 Aliveness 59, 172 Analog 48, 50f – Analog/digital binary 49–53 – editing 34, 144 – technology 11, 20, 49, 51f, 66, 97 Anthropocene 11 – Anthropocentrism 15, 145

Anthropology – and interpretation 15, 94–7, 103–109, 113, 134, 162, 174f – and reflexivity 29, 45, 100, 105, 121, 123, 133 – Anthropological knowledge 87, 162, 165, 173–175 – Autonomous anthropologist 96f, 105f, 112 – Design 14, 123, 127, 135, 162, 171–174 – Digital 14, 43, 48, 59 – in real time 45f, 175 – Media 14, 48 – Visual 11, 14, 44, 96f, 133, 135, 171 Anthropomorphization 58f Apple Final Cut 124, 148, 164 Apprenticeship (see Teaching/Training, Documentary schooling) Artificial intelligence (AI) 23 Assemblage 99, 130, 147, 149, 153, 172 Assembly 54, 144 Atlas.ti 107, 128, 166f Attunement 45, 88, 124, 131–134, 158f, 160, 167, 175 Audacity 148 Audience (see Viewer) 15, 71–74, 93, 131, 149 Authenticity 27f, 74 Authority 56, 106, 110, 135 Authorship 106, 109, 156 – and ethics 106, 149 – and human agency 41 – as rule-making 100

210 – Authorial control 30, 41, 44f, 88, 105, 125, 129f, 149 – Authoring software 19, 34–36, 69, 88, 100, 120f, 142f, 147f – Authoring strategies 11, 32, 37, 110 – Co-Authorship 110, 153, 176 – Role of 109f, 176 – Shared 159 Automation 20, 143, 159, 164, 167–169 Avid Film and Media Composer 164 Backgrounding 43, 56, 60, 132, 143 Benjamin 23 Beta-testing 110, 131, 162 Bit/binary digit 51f, 56, 132, 145, 171 Blocky 132 Branching tree (see Tree) BYOB 132 Camera – Analog 27–29, 160 – based improvisation 125–130, 167f – Digital 13, 21, 51, 81, 99, 109, 121, 125, 159 – ethnography 40, 42–45, 70, 99, 102f, 121–130, 174 CAQDAS 14, 100, 107, 120, 128, 163–166 Causality 59 – and film 23, 143 – and narrative 106 – and pleasure 46, 61, 160 – Causal-linear schema 31, 162, 175 – Cause and effect 62 Choose Your Own Adventure 152 Cinematic continuity 12, 53, 100f, 143 Cin8ma v8rit8 27 Climate change 11 Cloud 15, 106–110, 149, 151, 154f, 162, 176 Co-Creation 29, 42, 74, 133–135, 174 Code 43, 45, 52, 54–62, 123, 130, 132–134, 145–150, 173 – Close reading of 61 – Coding as keywording 128, 166f – Machine 54 – Ontological status of 59

Index

– Source 57f, 159, 168f – studies 43, 47 Cognitive load 167 Collaborative media 19 Combinatory – engine 150–154, 168 – film 13, 37, 148 Community of practice 44, 70, 84, 160 Compiler 34, 55, 57 Complexity 124 – Coping with 12, 120–123, 166 – Layered 45, 53–57, 145f – Narrative 22 – of the world 38–40, 43, 82, 88, 149, 154 Computer – and anthropology 11f – architecture 54f, 152 – as collaborator 25, 46, 154f, 158f, 168, 173 – as metamedium / universal media machine 19, 24, 50–52, 142 – as technician 21–25, 37, 47 – Computation (see Digital) – Computational correspondence 135, 175 – Computational layer (see Layer model) – Computational logics 33, 93, 159 – Computational nonfiction 42 – Cultural computerization 19 – generated imagery (CGI) 21 – hardware 19, 43, 47, 52, 54–62, 147 – narrative 142 – science 47, 59 – technology 48–62, 143 – Ubiquitous (pervasive) computing 19, 176 Control – Authorial 23, 30, 36, 41, 44, 58, 88, 105f, 125–130, 149, 164–168, 176 – structures 129f, 146f, 152, 169, 173 – Suspension of 45, 129, 133f – Visual 149–151, 166 Controversy 160f, 167 Coping strategies 12, 83–88, 101–108, 120–123, 158, 162, 166

Index

Correspondence 41f, 45, 123, 172f, 175 – Computational 135, 175 Creativity 167, 121–123 – and code 147 – and complexity 124 – and filmmaking 62 – and intentionality 149 – Creative industry 19, 30, 123 – Creative treatment of actuality 27f, 67 – Creative treatment of data structures 168 – Creative engagement with the world 32, 163 – Creative experimentation 11–14, 21– 28, 41, 72, 87, 124, 142, 158, 160 – Creative research practices 44, 80, 167, 174 Curriculum Visual Anthropology (CVA) 45, 87, 94, 96–112, 161–164 Cybernetics 51 Database – and narrative 20, 23, 148 – Digital 22f, 41, 56, 144 – documentary 24, 31, 41, 69, 72f, 80, 102, 152, 154, 159 Data visualization 150, 167 Defamiliarization 88, 161 Design – and anthropology 14, 123, 127, 135, 162, 171–174 – Documentary 32 – Interactive 30 – Interface 31, 34, 46, 77, 89, 109f, 120, 134, 145–147, 155–159, 173 – intervention 14, 42, 173, 176 – Software 36, 44, 143f – thinking 162 – threshold 156, 158, 174 – methodology 14, 30, 93, 127, 131–134, 174 – principles 15, 44–46, 155 – User experience 104, 110, 162 – Web 100, 110

211 Digital – agency 42, 60, 88, 113, 121, 123, 134, 167 – anthropology 14, 43, 48, 59 – camera 13, 21, 51, 81, 99, 109, 121, 125, 159 – code 43, 45, 52, 54–62, 123, 130, 132– 134, 145–150, 159, 168f, 173 – computation 12, 15, 32–34, 46, 51, 61, 150, 169 – computer technology (see Computer) – database 22f, 41, 56, 144 – Digitization 19–21, 47, 50, 132 – environment 20, 68, 72–75, 87–89 – infrastructures 30f, 48, 50f, 56–61, 122f, 132, 146 – intangible 61, 133 – material/materiality 13f, 32f, 42, 45f, 59f, 88, 108, 123, 142, 143, 147, 156–58, 167, 173–175 – methods 133, 167 – native 30f, 130, 144f, 155 – onto-epistemology 43, 59, 174 – Ontological status of 59 – principles 20, 25, 27, 43, 56–58, 147 – visual ethnography 45, 123, 134, 175 Direct Cinema 27 Disconcertment 46, 86, 100, 126, 134, 160–169 Disruption 33, 42–46, 66f, 96, 99, 101, 112f, 134, 147, 160–163, 169, 176 – Epistemological 173 Docubase 24 Documentary – apprenticeship (see schooling) – art 13, 28, 40, 72, 84, 142 – as project 26–31, 41 – cinema and television 21, 24f, 28, 31, 37, 49, 67, 71–73, 87, 92f, 96f, 108–110, 120f, 126f, 141, 157, 161–169 – ecologies 24f, 32, 49 – habitus 28, 96, 109, 134, 163 – knowledge 70f, 89 – Linear 75, 82, 87, 109 – modes 27–32, 75 – poetics and politics 27, 33f

212 – schooling 30, 44, 70f, 83, 86–89, 93, 150f, 158–162, 169, 176 – Software-based 42, 53, 112 – Web-based 30f, 34, 37, 41, 44, 105, 110 – world-building 28, 32 – world-revealing 28, 31f Docuverse 70, 82 Dynamic density of relations 123, 126, 131–133, 167f Eastgate Storyspace 35f, 67 Editing – Algorithmic 82, 128, 148 – Analog 34, 144, 148 – Computational 23, 144, 150 – process and methods 81, 87, 102, 106, 109f, 121–131, 148, 155, 164f – skills 33, 144, 159f, 168 – software 20f, 34, 36f, 45, 109, 121, 123–125, 142, 144f, 148, 162, 164, 168 Education – Didactic role of filmmaker 109 – environment (see Learning) – institution (see Teaching/Training) – of attention 134 – Pedagogical practices 34, 40, 98, 107, 156f – research 98 – Teaching (see Teaching/Training) Eko Studio 34 Embodied – forms of knowing 133, 158, 161, 174 – thinking-in-action 14, 22, 169, 175 Emergence – Emergent Relationality 13, 15, 158, 168, 173, 175f – Situated 127, 167–8 Enskilment (and deskilment) 70f, 122, 134, 142, 159–163, 173 Epistemology – and computers 43, 47, 58, 122 – and friction 96, 112f, 161, 173 – Authority 56, 106, 110, 135 – Onto-epistemology 43, 59, 174 – Practices 13, 94, 97, 133, 166

Index

Ethnography – Action and attention 15, 163 – and improvisation 14, 125–130, 174f – and intervention 14, 40f, 176 – as creative practice 120, 132 – Camera 40, 42–45, 70, 99, 102f, 121– 130, 174 – Description/processes of describing 130, 134f, 165 – Digital visual 45, 123, 134, 175 – Ethnographer as curator 12, 109f, 162, 175 – Fieldwork 40–44, 70f, 94–97, 99, 101– 107, 122, 19, 134, 145, 150f, 161–168 – Film program 95, 113, 126, 164 – Hypertext and hypermedia 12f, 120, 165 – Learning experience 165f – Metaperspective on 112 – Methodology 13f, 44, 96, 112f, 123, 126, 128, 132 – Object-oriented 160 – Ontological shift 175 – Representation 11–13, 17, 44, 60, 175 – Richness 12, 125 – Text 11–13, 53, 66, 95–97, 103, 162, 176 – Visual 13, 105, 120f, 169, 171f Evocation 11, 100, 113, 133, 175f Experience – and documentary 13f, 22, 26f, 30, 44, 74f, 87f, 92–95, 110, 122, 130f – and materiality 43, 48f, 57, 60–62, 141, 145f, 158, 161, 176 – Experiential knowledge 11, 15, 26, 37f, 49, 58, 66, 71f, 94–96, 113, 123, 126, 133–135, 145–151, 157–165 – Learning 39, 134, 159f, 142, 145, 161– 169, 173 Experiment – Breaching 112 – Experimentation 11–14, 21–28, 41– 44, 66–68, 72, 86f, 94, 104, 110–113, 121–124, 133, 142, 147, 156–160, 173

Index

Facebook 39 Fiction 24 Film/-making – Avant-garde 24 – language 101, 110 – Literary heritage of 42 – Material hegemony of 21, 23, 25, 35, 37 – Monographic 97, 162 – Narrative 38, 103, 112 – Role of filmmaker 23, 27–32, 41, 69, 93, 105–112, 128f, 141–149, 157–164, 173, 176 – training (see Teaching/Training) Fly-on-the-wall 28 Focusing media 45, 122, 125, 133f, 163, 166–169 Friction 96, 109, 112f, 123, 126f, 142, 160f, 172f Game 24, 74, 129, 142 Gatherings 43, 172, 175 Generative – algorithm 88, 99, 106, 113, 124 – knowledge 133 – media-/filmmaking 13, 36f, 84, 88f, 94, 124, 149, 156 – systems 46, 69, 81, 102, 128, 149, 151, 167, 173, 176 Granularity 94, 99, 144, 169 Hardware 19, 43, 47, 52–62, 122, 128, 143, 146f Hermeneutics 36, 42, 70, 128f, 175 Heterogeneous engineering 99 HTML/HTML5 31, 68, 79, 99, 121 HTTP 152 Human Computer Interaction 68, 73 Hylomorphic model 41, 173 HyperCard 66 Hyperlink 66, 151 Hypertext and hypermedia – and ethnography 12f, 120, 165 – and the web 152 – experiments 66 – fiction 35f, 67, 151f, 157

213 – Hypertextuality 35, 37, 66, 85, 93, 151, 166–169 – mode 31, 69, 74, 152f – openness 125, 167 – Serious 67 – system 66f, 94, 152, 155–158 – theory 35f, 39, 66, 85, 94, 155 Iconic turn 97 Ideology 25, 32, 62, 74f, 88, 95, 145f, 160 Illusion of immateriality 143–44 Image-making practices 45, 96–103, 107f, 124–130 Imagination 19f, 24, 27, 42–48, 50, 54, 57f, 62, 109, 120, 141–148, 162, 175f Immersion 24, 158 Improvisation – and ethnography 14, 125–130, 174f – Camera-based 125–130, 167f – Rule-based 168, 130 – Sketching 128 Indetermination 149 Indexicality 97, 132 Information – ecology 33, 58f – structure 84, 144, 154 – technology 12, 48f, 51–56, 171 – theory 55f Innovation – Creative 11 – Documentary 28, 31 – Skilled 175 – Technological 21, 25, 27, 47, 49, 143f Instability 61, 130f, 168 Institute for Scientific Film (IWF) 96, 103 Institutional memory 96f, 101, 161 Integrated development environment 150 Interactivity 25f, 31, 39, 42, 72–75, 93, 152 Interactive – cinema 22, 72f – design 30 – event (see Korsakow) – fiction 35f, 67, 151f, 157

214 – media 11, 100, 121, 130, 156, 173 – scrolling environment 13, 110 Interactive documentary 24–27, 33, 41 – discourse 29–32, 42–49, 68, 72–75, 87–89, 92–95, 141–151, 159, 161 – i-Docs 25, 29, 40, 42, 73f, 85–87, 151 – Interactors (see User) – Materiality of 32, 34, 42f, 147 – modes 31–35, 69, 73f, 152f – Multilinear 74f, 81f, 88f, 100, 106, 112f, 122, 128, 159 – Negotiation 25, 29–32, 41, 74, 93 – tools 33f, 37, 39f, 69, 84f, 88, 99, 152 Interface – Asymmetry of power 46, 146, 157, 160, 168, 174 – design 31, 34, 46, 77, 89, 109f, 120, 134, 145–147, 155–159, 173 – Diegesis of 142, 145, 173 – Graphic user (GUI) 76f, 110 – Interface-in-action 146 – Intuitive 46, 155f, 144, 173 – Pedagogical 40, 44, 150 – Post-WIMP 143 Intermediality 21 Internet 28, 31, 47f, 67, 93, 130 Intervention – and documentary 28f, 141 – and ethnography 14, 40f, 176 – Design 14, 42f, 173 Iterative development cycle 150, 162 Keyword (see Korsakow ; Rule) Klynt 34–36, 69, 152, 165 Knowledge – dissemination 12, 14, 42 – Experiential 11, 15, 26, 37f, 49, 58, 66, 71f, 94–96, 113, 123, 126, 133–135, 145– 151, 157–165 – production 12–14, 32, 42, 88, 98, 104, 108, 123, 173 – representation 13, 100 – Visual 62, 125, 132 Korsakow – as co-teacher 45, 100, 162

Index

– as focusing media 45, 122, 125, 133f, 166–169 – as pedagogical interface 40, 44, 150 – IN- and OUT-Keyword 36, 79, 106, 128 – Keyword design 36, 80f, 99f, 106, 129, 150–153, 158 – Keywording 36, 79–82, 88, 107, 125– 128 – Keyword log 107 – K-films 36, 39, 80–87, 99–102 – live event 110 – Lives 78–85, 157 – perspective 71 – SNUifying 81, 148, 168 Laboratory 104, 124, 130 Layer model 56–59 Learning – and disruption 42, 173 – and fieldwork 45, 134, 165f – by doing 164 – environment 45f, 99, 131f, 150, 158 – experience 39, 134, 159f, 142, 145, 161–169, 173 – Materiality of 45, 98 – materials 98, 123 – Situated 98 Liminality 89, 132, 176 Linearity – Causal 23, 31, 85, 106, 143, 157, 162, 175 – Linear-non-linear dichotomy 22f – Linear schooling 87 – Linear sequentiality (see Sequentiality) – Linear storytelling 13, 24–30, 44, 71, 86, 154, 167 Linguistic paradigm 13, 42, 55, 103, 161f Listing 78, 80–83, 166 Living Documentary 25, 153, 174 Logocentrism 167 Loops (see Recurrence) Magisto 20, 168 Mapping 15, 41, 89, 98, 147–168, 173f Massive 21

Index

Materiality – Digital 13f, 32f, 42, 45f, 59f, 88, 108, 123, 142, 143, 147, 156–58, 167, 173–175 – Immateriality 143f – of learning 45, 98 MAXQDA 107, 128 Media – anthropology 14, 48 – deficiency 28, 52 – ecology 110, 122f, 141 – Focusing 45, 122, 125, 133f, 163, 166– 169 – Interactive 11, 100, 121, 130, 156, 173 – Legacy 66, 143, 145 – New (see New media) – Social 19, 24, 45, 51, 81 – software 14, 33, 37, 43–47, 69, 94, 121, 124, 134, 144–146, 159, 164, 173 – technology 11, 21f, 29, 62, 95, 120, 169 – theory 19 Mediation 12, 25–29, 37, 40, 103 – and software 15, 33, 37, 42f, 46f, 59f, 120f, 128, 132, 141–146, 159–163, 171– 174 – Double-layered 54–59 – Immediacy 28, 155, 165 – Regimes of 32, 34, 44, 141 – Remediation 31 – Skilled 45f, 122–125, 133–135, 168f, 174f Mesh 53, 128, 135 Mess 13, 52f, 78, 82–84, 154, 163, 166f, 176 Metaphor – and software 46, 56, 143–149, 154f, 162 Methodology – and ethnography 13f, 44, 96, 112f, 123, 126, 128, 132 – and software 43, 61, 134 – Design 31, 104, 131, 134, 162 – Methodological experimentation 11– 14, 21–28, 41, 72, 87, 121–124, 142, 158, 160 – Methodological meditation 122, 168 – Minimal 98

215 – Non-representational 41 – Participatory 13, 25, 135, 175 – Speculative 42, 175 – Visual 13, 95, 121f, 132f, 165–167, 171 Microsoft Word 124, 146, 164 Modularity 20–25, 43, 162 Money 57, 171 Montage 23, 94, 96 – Spatial 110 Mozilla Popcorn Maker 34 Multilinearity – and hypertext 66, 94, 158 – and interactive documentary 74f, 81f, 88f, 100, 106, 112f, 122, 128, 159 Mysticism 48, 56 Narrative, narrativity – and computers 56, 142 – and exploration 23, 66, 120, 167 – and interactivity 39, 72, 151 – cinema 22–26, 30, 82, 97, 112, 164f – coherence 93, 100, 109, 113, 124, 152– 158, 163, 168 – complexity 22 – Functions of 66f, 87 – Non-narrative forms 27, 41f, 44, 74, 88, 105–108 – paradigm 38, 66–68, 73–75, 151, 162 – persuasion 89 – principles 30, 35, 67f, 82, 100, 124f, 142, 153 – Time-based 21f, 34, 94, 121–124, 128, 144 National Film Board of Canada (NFB) 24, 74 Naturalization 42, 49, 61, 101, 141, 155 Navigation 67, 73, 77, 92, 102, 110, 151f, 165 Negotiation 25, 29–32, 41, 74, 93 Network – computation 58, 144, 146 – environment 31, 66, 72, 120, 132, 147, 152, 157, 165 – hypertextuality 166, 169 – relationality 98 – view 166

216 – visualization 166f New materialism 13, 69, 85 New media – and occasion anxiety 49 – Newness of 50 – principles 56, 58 – studies 19, 43, 47, 60, 85, 142 Nonfiction – Computational 40–42 – Non-narrative 42 Non/fictionLab 40–45, 70f, 76, 83f, 86– 89, 99, 102f, 122, 150, 156–160 Nonhuman 40, 43, 54, 59, 101, 121, 132– 135, 160, 176 Nonlinearity – and filmmaking 22, 33, 37f, 44 – and hypertext 39, 66, 94 – and knowledge 13, 66 – as property of digital systems 11, 25, 33, 38, 51 – as way of working 37f, 53, 148 – Digital non-linear video editing (DNLE) 21, 121, 124, 142 Non-literary 87, 124 Non-representationalism 40f, 124, 149, 158, 174 Numbers 51, 54, 57, 61 Object – centered controversies 160f – oriented ethnography 160 – oriented programming 62, 150, 160, 169 Observational Cinema 28f, 45, 96 Observation richness 122, 167 Occasion anxiety 49, 56 Onto-epistemology 43, 59, 174 Ontogenesis 175 Openness – and closure 42, 175 – and hypertext/hypermedia 125, 167 – and Korsakow 75, 82, 86–88, 106, 123, 129, 148, 154, 162 – Coping with 85 – Digital 149, 158 – Open structure 75, 105f

Index

Othering

176

Parallel processing 54 Participation – as principle of digital media 20, 72 – Participant Observation 28, 44, 70, 94, 99, 122, 163, 165 – Participatory methodology 13, 25, 135, 175 – User 25, 29–34, 74, 150 Patterns 69, 75–79, 82, 87f, 99f, 129, 158– 168, 174 Pedagogy (see Education) – Pedagogical interface 40, 44, 150 Performativity – of code 45, 56–60, 132 – Performative turn 11, 15, 22, 30, 41, 74, 158 Play 11, 126f, 142, 150, 158, 173 Polyvocality 89, 96, 176 Postcolonial theory 11 Posthumanism 156 Postmodern theory 11, 66, 147 Practice – based-research 40, 44, 82, 180 – Community of 44, 70 – Counter 45, 68, 88f, 96, 103, 126, 151 – Praxeography 70, 100, 113, 121, 146 – Situated 45f, 69, 98f, 121, 131 – theory 95 Probability 52, 128, 133 Procedurality/Processuality 20, 41, 72, 88, 102, 106, 133, 163 – Enchantment 154 Programming – and filmmaking 31–33, 37, 44, 69, 100, 122f, 161–164, 169, 176 – as problem-solving activity 60, 133 – interfaces 146 – languages 34, 54–58, 130, 146, 150, 169 – literacy 57, 133, 158 – Object-oriented (OOP) 62, 150, 160, 169 – principles 61 – Programmability 19f, 52, 54, 121f Protocols 152

217

Index

Prototypes 130–133, 169, 176 – Rapid prototyping 110, 131, 162 Qualrus

164

Racontr 34, 69 Randomness 36, 79, 81, 105–107, 129, 154, 163 – Random access 43, 144, 159, 169 Real time 23, 36, 45, 122, 128, 143, 155, 175 Realism 12, 175 Reception 21–27, 87, 95, 110, 162 Recurrence 36, 75, 85, 152–158 – Recursive workflow 80–84, 88, 99– 104, 122, 130–134, 157–169, 174 Reflection-in-action 43, 133 Relationality – and network 98 – and things 13, 15, 169, 172 – as practice 40f, 123, 128, 154, 167f, 174f – Dynamic density of 123, 126, 131–133, 167f – Emergent 13, 15, 158, 168, 173, 175f – Media 40, 154, 158, 167–169, 176 – One-to-many 36, 129, 153 – One-to-one 129, 153 Remediation 31 Remix – culture 33, 144 – Deep remixability 159 Representation – Crisis of 11, 141 – Forms of 58, 66, 89, 131, 175 – More-than-representation 15, 40, 175 – Non-representational 40f, 124, 149, 158, 174 – Representationalism 41, 173 – Systems of 11, 48–51, 62 Resistance 41, 49, 86, 95, 103, 106, 155– 161 Rhizome 149 Richness – and ethnography 12, 125 – Observation 167

Rule – and computers 52, 54f, 61, 102, 106, 124f, 128, 160 – based coherence 108, 113, 162f, 168 – making 28, 31f, 36, 79, 82, 100, 106, 129–131, 148, 150, 158, 174 Schooling (see Teaching/Training; Documentary schooling) – of the eye 44, 71, 87–89, 93, 151, 162, 169, 176 Science and Technology Studies (STS) 15, 32, 98, 121 Scratch 132, 150 Semantics 55f Semiotics 54f, 103 Senses – and anthropology 70, 133 – Experiential knowledge 11, 15, 26, 37f, 49, 58, 66, 71f, 94–96, 113, 123, 126, 133–135, 145–151, 157–165 – Sensory attunement 45, 88, 124, 131– 134, 158f, 160, 167, 175 – Sensory engagement 175 Sequentiality 20, 26, 30, 36, 43, 107, 124f, 143, 151, 157, 166 Shooting schedule 96, 103, 126, 165 Simultaneous multiplicity 13, 100, 162 Sketching 126–128, 169, 176 Skilled visions 33, 44, 70, 88, 98, 122–125, 134 Social media 19, 24, 45, 51, 81 Software – and metaphor 46, 56, 143–149, 154f, 162 – and vision 15, 62, 141 – as actant 59–60 – as collaborator 24–26, 36, 43, 46f, 154–159, 168, 173f – as co-teacher 45, 100, 162 – as critique 62, 173 – as focusing media 45, 122, 125, 133f, 163, 166–169 – as ideology 62, 160 – as pedagogical interface 40, 44, 150

218 – as research object 6, 44, 61f, 132, 146, 160f, 171f – Authoring 19, 34–36, 69, 88, 100, 120f, 142f, 147f – based documentary 42, 53, 112 – based technology 19f, 28, 34, 47, 58f, 141–146, 163–168 – Co-creation with 34, 42, 133–135, 174 – culture 25, 147 – design 36, 44, 143f – Digital nonlinear editing systems (DNLE) 21, 121, 124, 142 – Editing 20f, 34, 36f, 45, 109, 121, 123– 125, 142, 144f, 148, 162, 164, 168 – Fetishistic logic of 44, 61f – history 60 – Layer model 56–59 – literacy 57f, 87, 92, 134, 146 – Media 14, 33, 37, 43–47, 69, 94, 121, 124, 134, 144–146, 159, 164, 173 – mediation 15, 33, 37, 42f, 46f, 59f, 120f, 128, 132, 141–146, 159–163, 171– 174 – regimes 176 – services 19–21, 61, 122 – studies 43, 60, 120, 128, 132 – systems 135, 174f Speculative – methodology 42, 175 – realism 40 Story, storytelling – and causality 106 – and interactive documentary 31, 39, 41f, 68, 75–77, 86–89, 93, 141 – and order 67, 154, 165f – Branching 151–154 – Hegemony of 142 – Linear 13, 22–24, 27, 30, 37, 44, 71– 74, 86 – Obsession with 149 – world 21 Suspension – of control 44f, 125, 129, 133f – of disbelief 44, 59–61, 169

Index

Teaching/Training – environment 88, 99, 106, 122, 161 – Institutionalization of 88, 96f, 112f, 161, 164 – materials 101, 125, 161f – methodology 103f, 109, 112f, 164 – (with) Korsakow 40, 45, 83f, 87, 100– 102, 127, 162 Technology – and education (See Teaching/Training materials; Materiality of learning) – and practice 11, 13, 19–27, 66f, 73, 120, 141f, 154, 159–165 – Computer (see Computer) – Fluid 76, 99, 132, 160 – Science and Technology Studies (STS) 15, 32, 98, 121 – Technological determinism 14, 60, 173f – Technological unconscious 56–58 Thick – Audio-visual thickness 122f, 126f, 131 – depiction 126f – description 103, 126 Things – and agency 88, 172 – and digital objects 145, 175 – and relationality 13, 15, 149, 155, 165 – and research 165 – Digital 51–53, 57, 132 – in motion 15, 173f, 176 – of life 40f, 77, 80–83, 172 Transcoding 20, 56–58 Transmedia – hybridization 72 – nonfiction 24, 30 – story worlds 21 Tree 15, 142, 151, 172 – Arborescent structures 151, 176 – Branching 35, 46, 102, 151–157, 166 – Sideways 152f, 166 Togethering 176 Uncertainty 15, 103, 113, 126f, 131, 134, 167f, 174 Unruliness 13, 141f

219

Index

User – agency 36, 46, 87, 144, 164 – amplification 62 – as designer 173 – as interactor 29, 67, 100, 110, 151, 154, 158 – empowerment 36, 74, 82, 110, 159, 161 – engagement 25f, 74, 110, 146 – experience (UX) 110, 162 – friendliness 143 – interaction 31f, 41, 55f, 131, 145, 154f, 172 – participation 29–34 – Usability 159f Viewer 22–29, 69, 73–76, 85–89, 92–95, 110, 125f, 131, 144, 148–156, 173, 175 – as interactor 100 Vine 81, 83 Virtuality 50–52, 57f – Virtual reality (VR) 24, 73, 158 – Virtualscape 121 Visuality 150, 172 – Skilled visions 33, 44, 70, 88, 98, 122– 125, 134 – Visual anthropology 11, 14, 44, 96f, 133, 135, 171 – Visual culture 171 – Visual knowledge 62, 152, 166 – Visual media/mediation 25, 40, 60, 97, 100, 103, 125, 148, 175f

– Visual practice 83, 142, 159, 173 – Visual programming 122, 132, 150, 169 – Visual research (methods) 13, 95, 121f, 132f, 165–167, 171 – Visualization 45f, 121, 125, 134f, 150, 167 Vitality 53, 59, 172 Vyclone 147 Web – 2.0 19 – and hypertext/hypermedia 120, 152 – authoring 34, 36 – browser interface 34, 36, 79f, 80, 84, 122, 131, 151, 156f, 161, 174 – design 100, 110 – documentary 30f, 34, 37, 41, 44, 105, 110 – native 67, 113, 130 – services 155 – video 31 – Website model 12 – World Wide Web 13, 15, 20, 31, 66f, 142, 152 WeVideo 147 WordPress 159 Writing Culture 11 YouTube

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