Exploring the empathic potential of 360-degree documentary

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper provides an exploration of the creative and ethical challenges that emerged from producing a 360-degree documentary demo, focusing on two Greek drag artists who live in Athens. It introduces a new approach to understanding empathy at the level of practice and from the perspective of audiences, combining the production of the demo with a reflexive analysis of audience responses to the demo. Emphasis is placed on the potential of 360-degree documentary to develop emotional and cognitive empathy. The demo aimed to capture the drag artists’ performance as a form of resistance, using an innovative technology to portray this under-represented community. A reflexive methodology was deployed for analysing the data, which were collected in the form of 360-degree video and focus groups with participants experiencing the demo. The findings of this study provide insights into the possibility of 360-degree documentary to create change. During the production of the demo, moments of perspective-taking between the researcher and the documentary subjects were rare. The focus groups pointed to aspects which also hindered the empathic potential of the demo, including the diverging expectations of participants and the levels of participants’ familiarity with this technology.