My personal interest in new documentary is inspired (that’s the wrong word but this is outlining the historical theoretical episteme’s that inform where I am) by:

• my cinema studies background
• then my discovery of hypertext and electronic books (pre Web), in about 1991, which became
• my interest in using new media to create novel knowledge forms that
• engage with the affordances and possibilities of media as digital distributed networked artefacts
• and the materiality of digital practice
• and what this means for making, and reading such works
• combined with the realisation that a hypertextual link is exactly the same sort of thing as a cinematic edit
• and the rise of blogging as the first indigenous web medium
• that shows how granularity, porousness, and facets are integral
• as is the way in which the network facitliates, enables, and participates in allowing an everyday practice to come to make substantial things
• that become an ongoing practice
• which lets large things be formed from the small scale
• and habitual creativity

Therefore the video nonfiction I’m interested in relies on a system that lets you collect and curate smaller pieces into more sophisticated series of relations. This lets the practice be closer to the everyday life world of makers, can take advantage of ready to hand media technologies, and I also think is closer to what the network is for and adept at. With this sort of epistemological history I also find most of the ‘problems’ that get presented around multilinear narrative are either naive, false, or over stated. I also believe the poetics of an online video nonfiction practice need to look as much to the specificity of networked practice as it does to video, and the majority of work in this space, to date, manifestly fails in this regard.

This also means I approach online video from a strongly ‘textual’ theoretical view rather than cinema studies. I’ve written elsewhere about these differences, and what is in this neck of the humanities forest a ‘two disciplines’ problem (images versus words). Hypertext and its avatars have a longer history, and in many ways, more compelling ways, of thinking through multilinearity, narrative, and audience, than what cinema studies has, to date, been able to offer. Well, that’s what I reckon anyway.

Tags: documentary, network practices, practice, softvideo