A few years ago on a trip to Paris, we made a point of heading to la Cinémathèque Française in the city’s 12th arrondissement. The film museum is housed in a Frank Gehry-designed building in the Parc de Bercy, and the permanent collection includes sets from films by Georges Méliès and cinematic innovations by the Lumière brothers and Thomas Edison. While the collections intrigued us, a large reason for our visit was the gift shop. Inspired in part by the writings of Johnathan Crary,1 we were hunting for proto-cinematic toys to use as tools in visual communication and media history classes: modern recreations of things like zoetropes or praxinoscopes that were small, inexpensive, and portable.
We didn’t find the modern zoetropes or praxinoscopes we were looking for in the museum’s gift shop. But inside the museum’s exhibit spaces, we watched short “films” on a device far too heavy and burdensome to bring home in our carry-on luggage: the mutoscope. The crank-driven machine flipped through illuminated cards – the subject less important to us than the experience of our physical engagement with the technology and by extension the story. The mutoscope demands interactivity: our physical actions were required to advance the narrative.
The mutoscope is a concrete, physical example of how interactivity is embedded in filmic (and by extension documentary) history. But equally embedded are practices of colonization by documentary filmmakers, of “othering” or silencing groups who do not wield political or social power.2 In this chapter, we argue that the i-doc, as a type of practice-based research (PBR), provides an opportune sphere for decolonization. It offers what can be described as a “shared authority” with narrators, audiences, and filmmakers. Due to the i-doc’s flexible and fungible form, it proves to be an ideal host to increase agency for traditional documentary “subjects” as well as audiences.
The I-doc: A Brief History
While André Almeida and Heitor Alvelos trace the concept of interactive documentary to the 1967 Montreal World Expo3 and the MIT Docubase cites Moss Landing in 1989 as one of the first digital projects to be called an interactive documentary,4 the history of the term in academic scholarship is a bit more recent.5 Carolyn Handler Miller describes – but does not specifically define – interactive documentary projects in her 2004 book on digital storytelling.6 Three years later, Dayna Galloway, Kenneth B. McAlpine, and Paul Harris attempted to define the interactive documentary via four broad categories of interaction:
- Passive Adaptive, where the computer interface makes on-screen changes based upon the viewer’s unconscious responses;
- Active Adaptive, where the user consciously makes choices to story direction via direct input;
- Immersive, or fully participatory formats; and
- Expansive, or community-based documentary experience.7
Similarly, Kate Nash proposed four “dimensions of interactivity”: technology, relationships, audience experience, and, importantly, discourse. She argues, “The discursive dimension asks us to consider the relationship between user actions and the voice of the documentary, exploring user agency and the rhetorical potential of interaction,”8 crucial “to capture the significance of interactivity.”9
At roughly the same time, the Digital Cultures Research Centre at the University of West of England (Bristol) began a series of symposia considering the emerging practices of i-docs. The symposia brought together international scholars in this emerging practice,10 and developed into a website,11 social media presence,12 and, eventually, a book. The open-ended definition the Bristol team uses, requiring merely a grounding in the real and a use of interactivity in digital technologies, is “as much about process as about product.”13 But then Judith Aston, Sandra Gaudenzi, and Mandy Rose, add a crucial caveat: “it is first and foremost about people as opposed to machines.”14
The term, i-doc, is an intentional one, different from “webdoc” which implies a specific platform and audience. Pat Aufderheide notes that while some see the i-doc’s taxonomy as being rooted in user experience, others differentiate between the i-doc, web documentary, and transmedia. In the former, “user participation [is] built into their action and typically features databases as integral to their actions.”15 By contrast, web documentary features “traditionally static material” available online, and transmedia projects use a variety of analog and digital platforms, usually featuring “only a selection of material rather than contributions” and limited interactivity.16 But she also notes that often these boundaries blur, “complicated not only by the level of interactivity but also by the fact that the interactivity takes place, potentially, across so many spaces and platforms in a user’s life.”17 In other words, not all transmedia projects or webdocs may be i-docs, but i-docs may employ transmedia and webdoc strategies. As Siobhan O’Flynn observes, “no single critical,” or disciplinary/theoretical, “practice can adequately address the diverse and idiosyncratic components that each new project may present.”18
Thus, hybridity and interdisciplinarity are at the heart of the practice. It is grounded in co-creation, a collaboration between documentarians, audiences, and subjects. The i-doc is “an open space of thinking,” as Hanna Brasier observes, “a space where maker and user select individual elements, thereby changing and producing multiple relations between these elements.”19 Its form is only limited by the imagination of its co-creators.
Mapping the Interactive Documentary
So, if an i-doc can be anything, what exactly is an i-doc? Aufderheide, citing personal communication with former head of the National Film Board of Canada, Tom Perlmutter, posits the i-doc may be a “new art form.”20 It is tangentially related to Cheryl E. Ball’s model for “new media scholarship,” or a form of interconnected web-based images, video, and hyperlinks that work with the website’s text to create meaning in different ways than the traditional academic journal or book.21 But at the time of our writing, the i-doc remains “a form that still has yet to attain its distinctive shape and attendant expectations” a form that “is a stimulating and creative arena for producers and is equally rich for scholars.”22
Baker Alkarimeh and Eric Boutin propose a model where “interactive technology is employed … to potentially convey an interactive communication with the user.”23 While there is room for user agency in their model, no mention is given to collaboration with narrators. Insook Choi argues that the i-doc is composed of author, user, and contributor, with the assumption that the user will be modifying established paths (in other words, changing the meaning of the content but not necessarily contributing new content or collaborating with the author in content creation).24 These are models of a documentary storytelling form that are mobile, flexible, and public, “characterized by interdeterminancy, community, and risk”25 engaging producers and the public in ways that are fluid and experimental, united only in the digital aspects of the chosen platform.
The i-doc can be a web-based platform, virtual reality, augmented reality, dome-based screenings, or 360° video – or in some cases a transmedia combination of all of the above. In Aston, Gaudenzi, and Rose’s edited collection, live performances, hackathons, and social media stalking on Facebook are also explored as part of the i-doc’s oeuvre.26 In some cases, the interactivity can be tied to traditional media. The Catalan production Guernika, Pintura de Guerra used Windows Media Center technology to embed bonus content within the televised broadcast of the documentary, accessed through the remote control. Other television viewers who had an interactive digital terrestrial television decoder and multimedia home platform could similarly access interactive content.27
The i-doc can also be made up of amateur content, such as the vernacular videos found in places like YouTube, either through curated channels or webcam responses to post provocations.28 YouTube pieces such as The Message (2006) or Life in a Day (2010) as examples of work that is “shaped by the affordances of digital video and participation” where the line between “director” and “audience” is intentionally blurred.29 In Guernika, users were invited to incorporate their own digital artistic additions to the famous Pablo Picasso painting and share it in an online repository.30
For many scholars and practitioners, social media offer a natural sphere for the i-doc. Patrick Kelly says that on Instagram, in particular, “curated moments … are carefully selected by the filmmaker, reimagined as a new creative project, and presented in a way that demonstrates that a critical distance has been observed by the filmmaker.”31 The resulting content is public, demands reactions by the audiences, can be searched via hashtags, and can provide a story or narrative. In one of our projects, Pin Up! The Movie: An Interactive Documentary, we’ve taken this curation one step further, turning the project’s Instagram page over to members of the subculture for collaboration. We place few limits on these guest curators and encourage them to tag themselves in the posts.
During the recent COVID-19 global pandemic, Gaudenzi and Sandra Tabares-Duque created a collaborative Facebook space called “Corona Haikus.” The haikus, three photos and a short piece of text, were initially designed as a way to document time during lockdown. Participants were encouraged to use the photos and text from the site to create their own remixes, shared with the community or posted as pop-up exhibits.32 An open-source collaborative audio project, Corona Diaries, was similarly inspired by the pandemic. It offers occasional content prompts, asking people globally to share their experiences during the pandemic. The testimonies would be then used under a Creative Commons license by journalists, artists, and other creators.33
These examples and others, such as interactive docugames34 or journalistic applications of 360, VR, AR, and interactivity in short-form storytelling,35 point to what we would argue are the exciting potential of the i-doc: its flexibility....
