“Korsakow documentaries can be considered as affective tools for thought, as poetic miniatures zooming into the very small details of everyday life in a contemplative way. Due to the formal and narrative minimalism they invite authors and users to rethink structures and practices of perception, memory, cognition, and emotional engagement of representation, as well as the essence of concepts such as connectivity and relatedness, also the nuance and complexity of our (not only) digitally-networked world” – Anna Wiehl.

This is how the interactive documentary software Korsakow is described in the article by Anna Wiehl, which I think is a great description of what Korsakow is capable of, as it gets the user to connect a lot more powerful to the content, forming a stronger emotional connection to the documentary piece. My groups project does not focus so much on the interactive capabilities of the program, instead the project will focus much more on this idea of emotional engagement and connecting the work with the audience, forcing them to consider what connects the different elements of the project, and how these different elements effect them emotionally.

The most powerful element of this interactive platform is its ability to immediately shift the audience from passive to active, giving them the role and responsibility to control where the project takes you, making every decision their own. While our project does not fully grapple with the capabilities of this interactivity the same way an interactive narrative would, but I believe we will still be able to make our audience an active one, even if it is more in a contemplative way.

I think this idea of making an audience active by having them contemplate the meaning of the piece of work they are viewing can be very effective, and is a major part in how experimental films operate. One experimental film that Hannah gave to us to explore is the 1977 film News From Home by Dave Chino (below), which is a contemplative look at the city of New York, giving the audience no clear image of why it is they are looking at these images, and so they draw their own meanings and stories from them, which is what we hop to achieve in our work.

“Enjoying art is a personal matter. It’s made up by contemplation, silence, abstraction.” – Renzo Piano