A new kind of media to me, interactive documentary initially seemed dull. Our first introduction as a class was to Korsakow (pronounced Kors-ah-kov), a relatively rudimentary program used to collate videos, images, and sound to create a database of media that, through an interface, a user can navigate.

When accessing these online the limitations become apparent immediately; clicking through each link takes a few moments, due to network bandwidth, which makes the piece feel jarring in it’s pacing.

One prescribed reading for the week helped me better understand the potential of the medium though; an essay by Judith Aston, and Sandra Gaudenzi. In it they mention Blast Theory; a group who collaborate and create installations, or rather activities, that present users – or more appropriate, players – with the option to participate in the exploration of the piece.

I’d Hide You puts 3 players into the night time streets equipped with video cameras that stream live over the internet. Each player represents a team, and online players can utilise social networks to help the players find one another in an attempt to ‘capture’ them.

What’s interesting is that while I’d Hide You seems far more like a game than documentary, it offers itself up as a potential form for interactive documentary. It allows for participants – potentially unlimited – to influence directly – through online networks – the exploration of a world – in this case the city streets.

This same concept could be pared down to just one person, a tour guide of sorts, and then allow online participants to suggest where to travel, who to talk to, what to interact with, etc. etc. Where interactive documentary can differ further from the traditional form is the way content is sorted. While traditional documentary forms are dictated by a single director, or democratically in a team, the aforementioned form could be subject to anarchy.

Anarchy has inherent stigmas certainly but this form allows interactive documentary to explore production in a way that traditional documentary hasn’t. Popular twitch.tv channel TwitchPlaysPokemon offers this form to audiences of tens of thousands of people at a time who have the ability to input commands. While there is the option to vote for a majority rules style of input – aptly named Democracy – the majority often rely on the Anarchy style, through which recurring jokes and references have been created.

Despite this being a fiction based example, the potential for a participant driven documentary is there, though I know of none myself it would be amusing to see a travel documentary driven by the suggestions of hundreds of thousands of people.

This post is mirrored on my personal blog, here.