The first reading was recent work that discusses what might be different about interactive documentary. We started here as we are working in the area of interactive documentary this semester, though we are more interested in multilinear networked making more specifically and broadly than interactive documentary per se. Interactive doco is what we will make, we will think about it quite a bit, but we’re making these doco’s as much because they let us quickly engage with other things than with just documentary…

So, the second reading. Let’s be explicit here, the subject lets us test ideas, and to explore new things. As was said in formally and informally, that includes the teaching staff. Here we bring in our current research and think, with you, about it. So, the second reading looks very interesting and is something I’ve mentioned in my own work regularly. It is the relation of Astruc’s concept of caméra-stylo and new technologies of making. Astruc wrote a long time ago, but the ideas seem to provide us with ways to think about what is happening now, while also reminding us that while a lot has changed dramatically, some deeper things have not.

Set Reading

Sørenssen, Bjørn. “Digital Video and Alexandre Astruc’s Caméra-Stylo: The New Avant-Garde in Documentary Realized?” Studies in Documentary Film 2.1 (2008): 47–59. EBSCOhost. Web. 19 Sept. 2013. (Get it while it’s hot.)

Supplementary Reading

Sobchack, Vivian. “Nostalgia for a Digital Object: Regrets on the Quickening of QuickTime.” Mille 34.Fall (1999).. (This one’s still warm from the oven too.)

This second reading is interesting because it explores in a positive way what and why video on a computer is, isn’t, could be, and so on. Nice way to approach video online precisely not as wannabe TV or cinema.