Documentary, Data, Montage
This week’s reading We’re Happy and We Know It: Documentary, Data, Montage explores the significance of data in interactive and web-based documentary.
The classical documentary developed from the development of the revolutionary photochemical image making that allowed individuals to visually document their surroundings. This practice evolved into the idea of traditional documentary acting as an ‘electronic public sphere’. The documentary is thought to ‘to mediate society to itself, to let one part of a society see another, to create a very particular kind of dialogue’ (Dovey, Jon & Rose, 2012).
Documentary in the 20th century evolved into a tool that was considered capable of altering opinions and the world, whilst still observing it. With the increase in internet access, the web is filled with potential documentary content which has allowed the emergence of IDocs. As video is now part part of HTML5 instead of an add on, it allows links to form between video and other online media content.
Access to live social media self-expression information provides the possibility for documentaries to continually emerge as the content is produced moment-by-moment. This can be referred to as ‘living documentary’ (Dovey, Jon & Rose, 2012).
Devices such as smart phones and search engines (browser history) have the ability to record information such as where an individual is going and what they have been doing. This information that is collected through these devices can be used in new and unexpected ways to form engaging content that varies viewer-to-viewer.
‘It is this translation between searchable social media communications, to data (as numbers), to algorithms that predict behaviours and taste, that is the economic driver of Web 2.0’ (Dovey, Jon & Rose, 2012).
There in an endless amount of information that can be collected from ‘…our interactions, searches, likes, uploads, or tweets…’ (Dovey, Jon & Rose, 2012). From this abstracted information ‘…trends, predictions, and recommendations…’ are assumed (Dovey, Jon & Rose, 2012). This economically benefits giant internet companies such as Google, but also benefits culture, the public and education.
Open source tools such as Popcorn Maker utilise links from both pre-existing and emerging media from other sources on the web. Relationships form between the fragments, reinvigorating the media available on the web and transforming it into ‘semantic video’. These films are ‘continually re-contextualised’ as new content it collated into the film (Dovey, Jon & Rose, 2012). These open source tools have been employed for documenting political events as they unfold.
Problems emerge with the huge amount of data that is accessible in a singular film in Popcorn Maker. These problems include the ‘apparent randomness of navigation, with the lack of perspective produced by the excess of millions of documentary video clips, the dominant temporal logic of online communication that tends towards the perpetually unedited present’ (Dovey, Jon & Rose, 2012).
Manovich’s spatial montage as the idea of ‘juxtaposition of images within multiple computer windows’ is particularly relevant to the way in which the open sourced tools are being utilised to create meaning from seemingly random fragments available online.
The combination of images (from Flickr), text (from Twitter), videos (from Youtube) and other accessible media content (from sites such as Creative Commons) evolve into a whole interchanging, unpredictable documentary through taking advantage of meta-tagging and search engines. This technology allow innovative ways to form arguments. There is a need for database documentary montage aesthetics to form, similar to the way in which popular styles developed in traditional cinema.
Utilising the information available on the web allows the formation of ‘relational, contingent, specific and emergent’ films.