Designed Experiences in Interactive Documentaries

Abstract

As media forms, webdocs and i-Docs (interactive documentaries) currently exist at the cutting edge of experimentation in new technologies and platforms. (Note that “i-Docs” is a more expansive term than “webdocs,” denoting interactivity in any medium, with digital, analogue, and material instantiations.) The National Film Board of Canada (NFB/ONF), the Franco-German television channel ARTE, and the French webdoc production company Upian, among others, continue to break new ground in the creation of experiential, game-based, participatory, networked, and in-situ (installation) documentary projects. I-Docs adapt existing disciplinary practices from documentary, and film more generally, but also explore new communicative tools that support documentary makers in connecting with a potentially global audience through the Internet. As webdocs and i-Docs almost always share the goal of communicating a story and/or of providing the “interactor” with an immersive deep dive into a given subject area, the growing taxonomy of platforms, technologies, modes, and media being used has also simultaneously expanded the critical perspectives from which the narrative form of i-Docs can be understood and analyzed, including but not limited to literary studies, cinema and media studies, cultural studies, affect studies, reader response theory, and digital humanities. Critical research and writing on webdocs and i-Docs have developed in rela-tionship with and in response to the emergence of interactive digital documentary making as a new artistic and industry practice over the last decade. Webdocs from the early 2000s are still accessible online (Thalhofer and Soar 2009; Thalhofer and Hamdy 2004), though the audience at that time was small, and these early pretouch-screen, pre-Flash webdocs explored the possibilities of database cinema organized via tagging algorithms and pre-planned narrative paths. The scale, visibility, craft, and innovation of webdoc production changed when the NFB/ONF, ARTE, Upian and other major, often government-funded producers entered the creative space. Social media and Web 2.0 technologies have also radically impactedhow interactive documentaries are designed. As forms have evolved, scholars have been forced to play catch-up with rapidly emerging innovations in the fields of production and exhibition.