Day Two – DNA Symposium
DNA symposium, second day. Wet, colder, out at Loyola campus of Concordia in a nice new academic building (reminds me of home). Rough notes, in situ, below.
Kat Cizek
Discussing and previewing new project “Highrise“. Doc director, ‘how can collaboration nurture innovation” (social, technological, narrative). Working with 6 residents of a single tower, a photo blogging project. To reimagine spaces around them by working with others. Walks us through the process.
1. residents + architects, then tracing paper over photos + animators – animation with oral traces + Mozilla popcorn + web developer + HTML5, WebGL, popcorn.
2. so movement from 6 minute microdoc, to animation, to 3d Web project
3. and residents return this and ideas back to developers, designers, planners.
Michelle Smith
Project with an indigenous group, interactive web based project (Ota Nda Yanaan). Able to reclaim culture through such projects. Celebrates culture, life and stories of this community, and also about their language which is disappearing. Via online could add significant layers to the project, so make a visual relationship between land, story, culture.
To what extent are audiences we are trying to reach able to access such works?
What are the challenges around online media for indigenous communities and what are the strategies we have to overcome these.
Roger Hallas
Still moving, moving still. How do web docs remediate relation of film to photography, and how important is relation to still to moving image in this form? Vertov, used stillness to demonstrate the power of editing, the potential image where it has potential to lie next to any other image.
4 strategies:
cinematic sequencing of photography (the whale hunt)
still as anticipatory image for what is next (eg a k-film)
photography as interface of navigation (eg qtvr navigation/menus)
build seqeunces between integration of still and moving image
last one: each unsettles the other.
How does remediation between photographic and cinematic shape the development of the web documentary.
[Brilliant theoretical ideas in here, particularly like the reappearance of the idea of potentiality.]
Monika Wermuth
Whether a map can be a non linear storytelling navigation that lets us become a storyteller.
Map is a visualisation that gives an overview of a situation. Specific structure – place names, which otherwise means we would be lost, and it lets me find a route. There are multiple routes, and so multiple storylines. And they intersect. The map is history teller, an archive, and offers witness.
Kim, Nancy, Brian
Archiving, digitising medical illustration. Regional not systemic anatomy, hand drawn. Artists labour, somewhere between art and science, liminal images. Need to preserve the drawings, but also to be able to digitise so can examine in enormous detail. Want to embed stories in there too. And how to maintain, record, keep, the lived history of these objects with the objects?
Is anyone out there talking to archivists and archiving?
Will Luers
Struggling to find the story, if find story you get the TV gig, (that’s why the story matters). To choose a single story would eliminate the thick web of relationships that are in this story. Deep contingency, no storyline, no funding. The deep contingency needed to be preserved. Used Scalar, but this does not yet express nuance. Don’t treat your tool as a content management system but as something within which you build and here you discover structure. Have to rethink what writing with video is, and what video writing is. A technique
How do we reinvent the authorial voice in our database narratives?
[Another excellent presentation, sharp, focussed and some compelling points.]
Karen Kocher
Tools of engagement and how to captivate the user. How do we got the users to spend time with the content, and not just the decorations. In linear docs you have a hook, a three act structure, film editing and character driven.
What are the rules tools techniques to consider for online docs to engage our users?
It is an exploratory documentary [think Joyce's exploratory versus constructive hypertext is due for a return to help some frame some of these ideas I think] and so how to encourage exploring in such an environment.
Richard Lachman
Diamond Road Online. Reworked 3 hour tv show into 8 hours of online. All work reedited professionally into 90 second vignettes and uses a spreading activation network to work out relevance between the clips so that the relation between clips drawn from the database have some form of relation there. Uses a ‘meta’ level to help with the story structure, so for example if a clip is found but there should be an intro then the engine intervenes to provide the intro first.
How do we think about the lifespan of our work online (communities, community management, support, mostly die when funding dies).
Widening the audience for such work. So what conventions might be available that operate across forms/stories and so on.
[This is extremely strong work that is one of the most robust examples of database of films into stories that I've seen]
Caitlin Fisher
What future interfaces do we want for the future of storytelling?
Granularity of pieces, SnapDragon software for AR work, or story work (not sure). Uses ‘expressive’ software to make stories without needing to handle a lot of programming. Found objects, popup books. I think the AR stuff is embedding stuff out in the world so that narratives found out there. Then from here into immersive environments and then what can we take from very large dataset visualisations to help us think about making ‘vast’ narratives, where I don’t make the link as the author.
Gail Vanstone and Carolyn Steele
How can the structure of the interface reinfoce or work against content?
Project based on a single nationally funded feminist film. Made an electronic quilt from digitising the material and breaking it into parts. Fragmented linear doc into single concepts and so enabled conversation around these moments. So quilt could be assembled based on what came out of the conversations.
Jean-Claude
Schema lab, Concordia 2006. Exploring hyper cinema from within practice of film making. Augemented by new screens, processing capable, embedded in environment. Screen human scale, open onto parallel universes, narratives. More looking glass than screen. But let the screen do programmatic stuff too. Have developed system, screen + narrative + computing. Aware of human presence and ambient conditions. Use this to control what is presented.
No plot, stemmed simple cinematic lexias. Allow multiple interpretations. Uses a ‘stem’ structure which has ‘pivots’. So a bending stem structure (blimey).
If the experiencer does not know what their input is then is there interaction?
[Well, there is an interaction but not interaction in the sense that interaction means in our context here.]
[Another strong presentation as some very good ideas about the porousness of shots/sequences to each other which needs them to be both stand alone, abstract enough to stand by themselves,
Chris Hanson and Steve Anderson
Scalar.
What really is the point of the digital humanities?
How are we to think about non linear scholarship?
Why isn't scholarship non linear too? Or multi-modal?
Procedural authorship + multimodal scholarship = procedural scholarship.
Lots of tools and resources but most practice is text with illustrations.
[Good presentation, good ideas, feel like I'm at a hypertext conference in 1997, why are we still having these conversations, that's not a criticism of the presentation, but of us as scholars?]
Marit Corneil
When is a web doc a documentary and when is it web journalism?
Can we historicise old and new work and what distinguishes it from online documentary work?
Innovative doco today needs to take on board ethics of representation and the aesthetics of contemporary art. National Film Board has rich history in both of these areas, and so has many excellent examples of what this is. Collaborative, reflexive, longitudinal.
Luis Frias
If multilinear why not multi-sensory? So using bio feedback to augment non linear storytelling. Multi touch, and so on.