Brogan Bunt
The Texture of Actuality:
New Media Documentary
INTRODUCTION
F RESTRICTING ONE’S TECHNICAL
and aesthetic means aids creative
work, then multimedia faces all kinds
of problems. The capacity to provide interactive access to many different types
of media within a single delivery context
means almost anything is possible, and
can also mean that nothing much happens. Interactive documentary provides,
for me, a clear example. It remains less
an established genre than an intractably
emerging sphere of creative possibility. Everybody recognizes the potential,
but all we’ve seen so far are technically
polished, but fairly dull, informational
projects, rivers of streaming linear media, and the odd appealing (if difficult
to navigate) experimental work. There
is little that seems to have realized the
potential of the genre.
I
How can interactive multimedia enable a
sophisticated meditation on real places
and events? What’s needed, in my view,
is an appreciation of the heritage of
linear documentary, an understanding of
the aesthetic possibilities of interactivity,
high-level fluency in the core interactive multimedia technologies, and close
attention to the texture of actuality (the
otherness of the real). It is the combination of these elements that counts.
There are a great deal of nicely designed
digital photo-essays that reveal an
excellent understanding of documentary
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photographic traditions, page layout,
and oral-historical approaches, but that
are weak at the level of interactivity.
Similarly, there are sophisticated database driven sites that provide all kinds of
rich media documentary information, but
that fail to engage with the core aesthetic demands of the documentary genre.
In this article I’ll begin with a general discussion of interactive documentary and
then move on to a discussion of some
specific projects and strategies. This
article was written in the lull between the
completion of one large-scale CD-ROMbased documentary project (Only Fish
Shall Visit) and the start of another one
(a social history of the Midland Railway
Workshops in Perth). My particular
concern is to clarify how the spatial exploratory framework that I developed for
Only Fish Shall Visit can be extended to
enable a stronger temporal dimension,
so that spatial exploration becomes the
basis for the explication of local histories
and personal narratives.
THREE EXAMPLES
It may be useful to consider some
examples of interactive documentary.
I’ll focus on web-based works because
they are readily accessible. So called
‘webumentaries’ are, of course, faced by
far more severe bandwidth constraints
than CD-ROM or DVD-based documentaries, but can nonetheless serve to
illustrate the main challenges confronting the development of an interactive
documentary genre. (see pic 01)
Akakurdistan employs a low bandwidth
and elegantly minimal web documentary
format. It reveals a clear debt to existing
photo-documentary traditions. A time
line of moments/anecdotes/historical
incidents related to the historical
experience of the Kurdish people runs
across the bottom of the page. Clicking on an option provides access to a
specific photo-essay. The essays play
with the relation between images and
text in varied and interesting ways. The
art is centrally one of layout design and
of concise anecdote. The site makes
particularly creative use of horizontal
scrolling, which becomes a mechanism
for visual discovery and narrative unfolding. Interactivity is very limited at the
level of hyper-linked access to information, but has another dimension in that
viewers are invited to contribute their
own stories and images to the site.
The site provides an excellent demonstration of what can be accomplished
with simple means. It is certainly
conceptually very rich. The historical
timeline provides a sense of a historical
sweep (the broad struggle of the Kurdish
people for an independent Kurdistan),
but each moment on the timeline is
actually a fragmentary incident. Rather
than a continuous history, we encounter
The Whoseland site focuses on
major events in the Indigenous
land rights struggle during 2000. It
was funded by the Australian Film
Commission and describes itself
explicitly as an ‘interactive docu-
mentary’. It contains a great deal of
worthwhile and interesting material
but it’s difficult to see how it differs
from any number of informational
web sites. The emphasis is very
much upon standard menu-based
interaction with predominantly textbased accounts of events. Where
rich media is employed (audio and
video), it is arranged as a list of
downloads. (See pic 03)
Whoseland makes the mistake of allowing the underlying data structure
to determine the contours of user
interaction. This would be fine if
the site had no other aim than to
provide structured access to a range
of information concerning Indigenous land rights events in 2000,
but the ‘interactive documentary’
claim suggests otherwise. What’s
TOP-BOTTOM: PIC 03; PIC 02- Whoseland (http://www.whoseland.com/);
PIC 01- Akakurdistan (http://www.akakurdistan.com/)
concrete, discrete, strongly personalized moments. This interplay
of general historical vision and
personal specificity demonstrates
a sophisticated engagement with
film and print-based documentary
traditions. Yet however appealing and effective, there is still the
sense of limited interactivity. The
stories are beautifully presented
tableaux, but there is no means
of moving within them. This
represents less a criticism of the
site than an attempt to pinpoint
precisely how interactivity must be
developed in order to provide more
thorough and compelling options.
It is less a question of rejecting
the kinds of strategies employed
in Akakurdistan than of extending them and bringing them into
dialogue with other conceptual
models. For my purposes, this is
a matter of drawing photography
(and page-based layout) into dialogue with certain aspects of film
(the articulation of space and time)
and with aspects of the first-person interactivity found in computer
games. (See pic 02)
missing, in my view, is any genuine
effort to structure and motivate user
interaction in a compelling, genuinely documentary fashion. The site
contains a set of documents and
an ordered system for accessing
those documents, but this is simply
information delivery—hardly the
same thing as documentary, which
is traditionally about shaping a story
and an argument. Interactive documentary cannot (exclusively) employ
the same linear means as film, yet
surely it needs to engage with the
more complex discursive possibilities of the documentary genre. There
would seem to be a need to shape
and reconstruct events in an engaging manner—one that prompts and
motivates user interaction. There is
need to structure an experience, not
just facilitate access to a variety of
multimedia information.
Perhaps because of the preponderance of the web, multimedia (a
certain multimedia) tends to model
itself closely on the notion of ‘the
page’. Multimedia is conceived as
an electronic publishing medium
(rather than as software that is
programmed, that offers all kinds of
possibilities for structuring interaction). Layout and graphic design
become paramount concerns.
There is an emphasis on interface
design and navigation structure
(between pages). Structure is
typically articulated in hierarchical
terms (a main page provides links
to subsidiary pages, etc.). There is
a need to think beyond this paradigm—not to reject it altogether,
but to extend it and link it to other
conceptual models.
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The initial challenge for multimedia was
to develop technical means to provide access to all sorts of multimedia
information within a common delivery
mechanism. This is essentially a matter
of creating a multimedia data structure
and an end product that can retrieve and
display requested data. It lends itself to
keyword searches and similar hierarchical menu-based models for information
delivery. The current challenge is to
harness this technical understanding in
other ways, to find means to motivate
searching activity and to give it wider
meaning (for instance, narrative sequential meaning). There is a need to find
new metaphors for information access—
to provide different guises for the database style structure (rather than display
it all too explicitly). This demands a look
back at earlier styles of linear documentary, particularly the film tradition, to
learn how narrative motivation and the
like works. It also means considering
how computer games work, because
games are the most sophisticated example of how database style access can
be represented in other terms—arrays of
numbers providing the basis for sophisticated simulations of spatio-temporal
experience. Games manage this through
a tri-level structure:
1. data structure stores binary, text,
and multimedia data (or links to that
data)
2. programming interface (engine)
makes calls on the data structure but
structures the information in other
ways—as an exploratory space, as a
game, etc. This involves an intensive
work of mediation and transposition
3. user interface—the user experiences the interactive structure rather
than the underlying data structure.
Actually, this structure is still evident
within even the most basic web page:
1. data structure: the organized directory of files
2. programming interface: the html
code that provide structured access
to the files
3. user interface: the web page that the
user experiences.
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The problem is less then of lacking
relevant programming interfaces than
of failing to employ them in interesting
and sophisticated ways. Of course, html
provides only the simplest level of interaction, the hyperlink, but this is more
than adequate to develop engaging
systems of interaction. It’s just that the
emphasis has tended to be on representing the user interface in terms of the
paradigm of the typically hierarchically
shaped underlying data structure, rather
than attempting to rearticulate it in more
compelling ways via creative use of the
programming interface. Long term, there
is also the need to explore more sophisticated programming interfaces—generative, intelligent, conditional schemas
that will enable new modes of documentary interaction. Thinking through the
creative possibilities of programming is
vital to the development of the interactive documentary genre. (See pic 04)
The Becoming Human site represents
a more contemporary and technically
advanced example of the web-based
interactive documentary genre. It works
to simulate the look and feel of an
opulent television-style nature documentary. Bandwidth constraints prevent
the use of video, so the site animates full
screen stills to suggest various standard
camera tropes (pans, dissolves, tracking
etc.). There is some simple interactivity (and some more complex learning
games in another section), but the main
emphasis is on lush linear presentation. The use of large photographs and
voice-over audio means that file sizes
are large, leading to long pauses on a
56k modem (even though the audio data
is streamed). Despite the slowness, it is
certainly a technically impressive site. At
an aesthetic/conceptual level, however,
it seems a bit dull. It does little more
than mimic standard televisual idioms
and fails to rigorously explore the possibilities of documentary interactivity.
Becoming Human is hardly positioning itself as aesthetically cutting edge
(more an experiment in alternate delivery
than documentary form). But the clear
referencing of the conventional nature
documentary highlights the shortcomings of a superficial engagement with
the documentary film tradition.
What’s needed is less a mimicking of
motion and standard filmic stylistic
devices, than a deeper consideration
of how interactive documentary can
learn from its linear antecedents (and
cousins). Film has a tremendous capacity, for instance, to summon up other
spaces and times, to make them vivid
and immediate. This is partly due to the
sense of real duration (often artificially
created through careful cutting and the
use of continuous sound). It’s also to
do with a careful work of positioning, of
thinking through how the action can be
framed and articulated in an interesting
and engaging manner. Think of the way
in which O’Rourke records the shark
calling in The Shark Callers of Kontu. We
are positioned within the canoe, but at
the opposite end; viewing as witnesses
rather than as literal participants. Think
also of the witnesses of the Jewish
holocaust in Shoah. We return with them
to the sites of the concentration camps
(now often grassy fields or forests). They
recall the terrible past. We follow along
with them, sometimes at their sides and
sometimes at a distance. Famously,
Lanzmann does not employ any gruesome bits of newsreel footage. Rather
the film remains determinately fixed
on these people’s present moments of
recollection. It is by involving us in this
(estranged) present and by denying
us any shallow access to the past that
the film obtains its power. This work of
positioning, of voicing a parenthetical
present, of enabling both involvement
and reflective distance, is something
that film manages in all sorts of sophisticated ways, and which interactive media
needs to consider more closely.
This also involves thinking through
the aesthetic possibility of the cut—of
the non-seamless transition. Spatial
exploratory multimedia has tended to be
bound by a notion of integrated holistic
space (360 degree spatial experience),
rather than exploring the possibilities
for montage—spatio-temporal disjunction. Participation has been dominated
by the paradigm of 3D kinaesthetic
immersion—very crude in ways—ignoring other levels and modes of participation. You can, it must be acknowledged,
explicitly switch cameras (character
POV, etc.) in contemporary games but
Sound also came to offer new possibilities. Unlike film sound, which
is locked to the vision track, the
sound in Only Fish Shall Visit has
a peculiar autonomy. The ambient
loops and spot sounds are linked
to the images, but in a loose fashion, so that the sound that the user
hears depends upon the pathway
that they follow and the speed
at which they move. I’d originally
regarded sound as secondary. It
was only very late in the production
phase that I realized it’s importance, both in terms of lending
coherence to the spatial experience
and of enabling a musical play of
interactive sound/image juxtaposition.
I’d started out with a set of technical programming concerns and
ended up having to confront vital
ONLY FISH SHALL VISIT
This was something like what I
attempted in Only Fish Shall Visit.
The documentary focuses on a
small town on the banks of the
Euphrates in south eastern Turkey
that was flooded by a large hydroelectrical project. I visited the town
in the months just prior to its flooding. My original aim was simply
to preserve a navigable record of
the place. I was concerned with
the technical problem of building
a Myst-style tour of the town (from
a huge set of nodal photographs).
However, as I was putting the
project together (probably too late),
I began to realize more genuinely
documentary possibilities.
I found, for instance, that the
photographic image gained a different status. It was no longer quite
singular and fragmentary. Each
image connected logically (typically
spatially) to other images. Surprisingly enough, this quickly brought
the photographs into dialogue with
narrative time and with the possibilities of editing. For example,
crossing a river could involve simply clicking on the opposite bank
or it could involve stepping into a
boat and being rowed to the other
side (following a narrative process
rather than just a spatial trajectory).
Moreover, navigation left and right,
forward and back, etc. could provide a diegetically consistent view
or it could enable a sudden switch
from night to day, sunshine to
snow (the experience of montage
rather than continuity). In short,
I’d found a kind of low-bandwidth,
interactively based pathway to the
fundamental problematics of film.
(See pic 05)
TOP-BOTTOM: PIC 05; PIC 04- Becoming Human
(http://www.becominghuman.org)
the action itself remains thoroughly
integrated (perhaps because
integration—the creation of a
compelling/convincing game experience—has always been the prime
technical challenge). It is perhaps
also due to the emphasis on a
very simple-minded notion of the
present in games—they are always
about survival here and now, rather
than about narrative sequence (the
work of linear temporal composition that we find in film). We need
to develop more reflective options—ones that depend less upon
the visceral thrill of 3D immersion
than upon implicating the user in
an intricate spatio-temporal field.
aesthetic questions. The resulting
strategies brought the project into
dialogue with aspects of traditional
linear media and made it seem
much more a work of creative collage than of simple documentation.
It gradually dawned on me that
there were all sorts of opportunities for subtle interplays of space
and time. If I’d realized this earlier,
I might have devoted more time
to following the trajectories of
particular people (characters) rather
than concentrating so exclusively
on spatial paths. I can now imagine
an interactive documentary mode
that discovers in space stories and
in stories space.
Metro Magazine No. 135 ¥ 169
Euphrates (the winding cobbled lanes,
orchards, ramshackle old homes, and
carved limestone caves of Halfeti). (See
pic 06)
This issue of how to deal with people and
people’s stories leads me to a current
project. The Midland Railway Workshops
are a large abandoned industrial complex
on the eastern fringe of Perth. From the
beginning of the last century until 1994
they were a crucial part of the Western
Australian industrial scene, producing all
kinds of rail-related heavy machinery and
parts, providing the State’s main training
ground for blacksmiths, fitters and turners, and the like, and employing several
thousand people. Working with a group
of labour historians, radio producers, and
multimedia students, the aim is to produce
a social documentary on the Workshops.
There is a need (once again) to move
quickly because there are plans to redevelop substantial portions of the site for
apartments, shops, and so on.
The plan is to model the Midlands project
on Only Fish Shall Visit, but to somehow
place greater emphasis on the narrative
historical dimension. Unlike Only Fish Shall
Visit, the present (and the present character of this space) is only interesting in as
much as it provides a portal to the past.
The place is currently a grid of demolished
or largely empty buildings. There are bits
and pieces of old machinery and even
the odd well-preserved workshop space,
but it’s difficult to see how the project
could sustain interest simply at the level
of a spatial tour. It’s nowhere near as
picturesque or as appealing as an ancient
old Turkish town on the banks of the
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TOP-BOTTOM: PIC 06; PIC 07- (Peter
Carty—former Grounds Foreman, Midland
Railway Workshops)
MIDLAND RAILWAY WORKSHOPS
Of course, the derelict state of the
contemporary space also offers possibilities. There is something interesting
about delving beneath this apparent
emptiness to discover the rich history of the place. The large stock of
former workers provides one of the
best means of getting at this history. A
non-descript bit of industrial wasteland
becomes infinitely more interesting
when you hear some old bloke speak
(semi) fondly of the asbestos snowball
fights that were held there, or see him
point out the exact spots where toxic
sludge was dumped. (See pic 07)
The method employed in Only Fish
Shall Visit was to position interview
subjects more or less statically at
particular spatial nodes. The user clicks
on them to access relevant video, etc.
I would really like to attempt something different for the Midland project.
It would be great if the user could
follow the oral witness on pathways
through the place. The user sees, for
instance, an image of a former worker
ducking through a door. The user
can click to follow them or just continue in another direction. Witnesses
would stop here and there to provide
historical information, recount stories,
etc. This would work to both motivate
spatial exploration and to lend a greater
sense of narrative trajectory: following
a witness is also to follow a story and
to develop a character. For all sorts of
good practical reasons, we may not be
able to employ this approach (it involves
making additional demands on the witnesses and requires an extra, potentially
quite complex, layer of coding), but it
has considerable promise as a means
of structuring user interaction in terms
other than plain spatial exploration.
Of course there is no need for spatial exploration to be cast in dull, scrupulously
consistent terms. There are all sorts of
possibilities for spatio-temporal disjunction and juxtaposition. It would be very
easy, for instance, to fill the derelict
present with sounds of the past, so that
as the user tours around an abandoned
workshop they hear worker’s voices and
the sounds of heavy-machinery. Oral
witness anecdotes—tales, for instance,
of ‘Red Square’ (the communist corner
of one workshop)—could also be included. Contemporary and historical views
of particular places may be juxtaposed,
so that navigation forward might obey,
for instance, rules of spatial consistency,
but also involve a large temporal leap
(back to a historical photograph that
was taken from the same position). And
space itself may be treated in a more
flexible, collage-style fashion, so that
movement may at times affirm expectations and at other times offer surprises—
large leaps from one place to another,
or even shifts to other more conceptual
spaces (accounts, for instance, of the
strict policing of time at Midland or of
the various management philosophies
that shaped work practices). There is a
need, overall, to play with (and against)
the potential for diegetic articulation, to
aim for a loose form of spatio-temporal
simulation, rather than one that is utterly
focused on some sense of an immersive
present (as we tend to find in games).
Only Fish Shall Visit provides access
to space via a map. Clicking on map
hotspots provides a very straightforward
means of spatial entry but is very similar
to clicking on a list-style menu. Why
should the user jump in at any particular
place? What is there to motivate their
choice? There is an earlier section that
aims to provide some level of motivation
(a video of the town ferryman rowing
across the Euphrates, a brief explanation of the town’s impending disappearance, and a display of random images of
the town), but none of this seems quite
sufficient. I had toyed with the idea of
enabling a simple time-tunnel style random leap into the town. However, due to
the very large scale of the tour (several
thousand photographs), this was likely
to quickly prove frustrating (much simpler to click on a map hotspot and go directly and predictably where you wanted
to go). The map had to remain then, but
perhaps it needn’t have been positioned
as the primary (and single) point of entry.
Rather than encounter the town first
through an overall abstract representation of the space, why not provide a
random set of concretely determined
portals—town fragments (an image of
some small thing, a bit of sound, perhaps the beginning of a story)—which,
when clicked upon, transport the user
to a specific place. This is certainly an
option that we plan to explore in relation
to the Midland Workshops. The workshops are full of resonant details—a
numbered tag on a large rack indicating
one worker’s place on the shopfloor, a
bit of obscene graffiti, a betting board,
an old camphor-laurel tree where a
former worker had first entered the place
as a child (snuck over the fence by his
father). These kinds of details have the
potential to motivate and lend narrative
significance to spatial exploration.
CONCLUSION
I’ve said nothing about how any of this
gets produced at a technical level. The
basic principles are very simple, but
choreographing the whole thing can
quickly become quite complex. To make
things a bit easier, I developed specialized authoring software (grafted on top
of Macromedia Director) that enabled
tour sections to be assembled in a
quick and straightforward visual manner
(without the need for any programming
expertise). All the media—photographs,
video, audio, and text—is maintained
in external folders and the navigational
data is saved in a series of section-
specific XML files. A final player movie
then loads and displays the completed
tour. Having spent all this time creating
a generic spatial tour engine (dubbed
Magellan), I am interested in exploring its usefulness for other projects.
Of course, it’s always very difficult to
envisage things in adequately generic
terms—each project seems to reveal
new demands. What’s interesting for
me, however, is the dialogue (all too
often internal) that arises between
software design and interactive documentary aesthetic form. I’m not sure
that everybody involved in this kind of
work need trouble themselves with the
intricacies of coding, yet it seems to me
that if new forms are to emerge then a
close engagement with the possibilities
of programming is required. Coding is
not only a matter of technical implementation. More fundamentally, it is a
language for articulating contexts of
interaction. Envisaging and developing engaging contexts for documentary
interaction means bringing into dialogue
an awkwardly distinct set of technical
and aesthetic literacies. In my view, the
current challenge is not only to produce
significant interactive documentary
works, it is also to find effective means
to mediate between the different layers
of interactive documentary practice.
This paper was presented at the
CAMEO Conference: 17–20 April 2002,
University of Canberra
REFERENCES
Brogan Bunt, ‘Imagining Interactive
Documentary’, Culture and Communication, Ankara University, Ankara,
2001.
Brogan Bunt, Only Fish Shall Visit.
Perth International Festival of the
Arts, 2002.
C Lanzmann, Shoah. France, 1985.
http://www.becominghuman.org/
http://www.akakurdistan.com/
http://www.whoseland.com/
Brogan Bunt is a multimedia producer
and the Programme Chair for the Bachelor of Multimedia at Murdoch University.
Metro Magazine No. 135 ¥ 171