Tag Archives: i-docs

Week 3 Class Notes

Reality:

Must have verisimilitude- it can be verified. It is of this world, and not a world (eg. fiction). In interactive documentary we make claims about reality. Between the user and the artefact, claims are made about reality.

The tools that we use have limitations. Take these limitations and ask ‘what can it do?’ The limitations set the groundwork for what cannot be done, and also help you to understand what it can do. Therefore we enhance our creativity.

Simplicity is best.

It is difficult to negate in film. In some media forms, like film and picture, it is easy to show what something is but not what it is not. In something like a documentary it is possible to negate what something is, thus creating a multi-dimensional point or points of view.

Money and the Greeks, GELD.GR

This Korsakow documentary was mentioned in the lecture and so I decided to watch it.  Adrian, in the lecture at the time that this i-doc was mentioned, was discussing user interaction and the different ways that documentaries interacted with the user. He said that this documentary was  different in user interaction to another documentary that the creator has made. I decided to watch and explore the documentaries in what they do and user interaction and compare two.

The documentary was created by Florian Thalhofer, he is an interesting guy, an artist, film maker and creative who explores the possibilities and limitations of creative technological mediums, he also created Planet Galata, another Kosakow i-doc and I used that to compare to Money for the Greeks.

In terms of design and content, Money for the Greeks, was brilliant. These things contribute to the meaning of the documentary. In terms of what it does, the documentary allows the user to explore different aspects of the economic situation of Greece, in a very personal way, from the voices of 32 protagonists.

It is non-linear, and the pathways are all equally important and the user interacts with the content by deciding what they want to watch next. It is exploratory and the user is external, looking in. They are given options based on relevance and aided in choosing by being shown which demographics of Greek people liked that clip. In the pyramid of user, reality and artefact, the three interact very closely. The artefact, different aspects of money and wealth in Greece are explored in a real way, and are presented by real people in a real setting. The user navigates this content.

In Planet Galata, these specifics are very similar. The user navigates content, it is explorative, and all those specifics etc etc. However the user interaction is different, they options are limited and based on time, and other times the options are always available. It’s just a small change that doesn’t change the specifics of how the user interacts, but it does change the way that the story is told to the user and the ways that the user is able to navigate through the story.

 

 

Notes on the Week 3 Integrated Media Lecture

Here are the most important points that I took from the lecture and my thoughts on them:

Don’t seek to define by what it means, define by what it does

Taxonomy is dangerous. It limits and it doesn’t include variations and options. These days everything is messy, entangled, connected and complicated. The distinctions between different categories and groups and definitions are dissolving with the progression of social media. Adrian used the dissolution of the distinctions between ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ as an example, and it’s a great one.

Increasingly definitions to common terms and ideas are broadening, this is breaking down barriers and limitations and changing the world around us constantly.

This means that increasingly we need to think of things (and in the case of this class, media) as all-encompassing and enormous, and when we seek to understand and define things, we need to look at what they ‘do’ and not what they ‘mean’. So when you go about making something, start with, “What can it do, not what does it mean.”

This I think is a great point, because in life we are taught to seek to categorise and organise things. I in particular am constantly trying to organise things neatly, but I find this difficult because everything is connected, entangled and messy. Attempting to categorise it has so far been too difficult and so perhaps accepting it and working within the world with this knowledge is the most effective way to work, live and create.

In interactive documentaries there is a relationship between reality, the user and the artefact

These are the three main engagers with the project and should be taken into consideration when planning or analysing a project.

The relationship is there and is irrelevant to the category of i-doc, (experiential, participatory etc).

Users are internal or external to the work

Participatory, the user is internal, and this is an ontological work.

Exploratory, the user is external and is an active observer. (Korsakow works are exploratory.)