(Source: iloveyourwork.net, screenshot)

Jonathan Harris’ digital documentary, I Love Your Work, tells the story of nine American pornographic actresses through the unbiased documentation and presentation of ten days of their lives. The work is a database, compiling 6hrs worth of footage that tells an impartial and honest narrative of the daily lives of the porn stars. Harris filmed ten seconds of footage every five minutes for ten consecutive days and amassed these into an interactive documentary through film and the interactive capabilities of digital media.

As a narrative, I Love Your Work, is untraditional. The lack of a desired outcome during filming and the almost complete lack of editing mean that the elements of story as outlined by Robert McKee in, The Substance of Story, are based on reality in this work. They are not imagined puzzle pieces that are created with a purpose, a cause and effect toward an ending. This in effect undermines McKees ideas of story completely, the concept that, “A story must build to a final action beyond which the audience cannot imagine another” (McKee, p140) becomes defunct in, I Like Your Work, as there is no build, no climatic event and no resolution.

Generally in a story everything that occurs will drive the plot or story toward something. However, in I Love Your Work, this doesn’t occur. Due to this the story arcs are random, and depend purely on what was captured at what time and in what order the audience chooses to view it. There is no intent other than to portray what truly happened at each moment during filming.

Moreover, there is no protagonist. The audience does bond with the nine characters on a deeper level knowing that their story is true and unfolding before them. Harris also structured the documentary in a way that the viewer can choose to watch videos based on which people appear in them, making it easier to bond with a particular characters and create an alternative story, unified by one character. This is one of many interfaces with which the audience may choose to experience the narrative database.

(Source: iloveyourwork.net/preview.php, screengrab)

This work might be thought of as a database due to the nature of the project. It is a collection of footage, rather than an edited body of works arranged strategically to convey a plot. As an interactive piece, the audience plays more of a role within the story than in a traditional narrative. The videos can be watched in chronological, linear order, through character presences or at random. In effect, this not only means that each viewer’s perception of the story will be different, the actual story that they consume will be different as well depending on the interface chosen by the viewer.

While Harris’ work is perhaps more similar to a database than a traditional narrative, it us up to the viewer to navigate their own through the database and create narrative, this is their imperative. “It is the task that makes the player experience the game as a narrative.” (Manovich, p222) It is the task, the “algorithm-like behavior” that takes the database of film in, I Love Your Work, and constructs it into a narrative.

References:

Manovich, Lev, The Database, Reading Week 2

McKee, Robert, Substance of Story, Reading Week 1

Word count: 522 (not including referencing or title)