Doing Interactive Documentary – Speakers

The recordings of most of the presentations are now available online. Click on the presentation titles to watch the recordings!

Speakers

Abstracts and Bios

Abstract
This talk focuses on the pixelation of images of the current protests in Iran, drawing on historical antecedents of the Green Movement in 2009 and the “Arab Spring” in 2011. Pixelation is thereby understood as an act that conceals, as the view of the content of an image is prevented or impeded, but at the same time always underlines the significance of the pixelated area and thus brings it back into the focus of attention. Pixelation is therefore, according to the thesis, always to be understood performatively, because it stands in a relational affective relationship to its viewers. The talk addresses working processes that raise activist, postcolonial, ethical and artistic questions and makes the concept of circulation productive for a renegotiation in film studies.

Bio
Dr. Alena Strohmaier is scientific project leader of the research project Cinematic Appropriation Processes of Protest Videos from the Middle East and North Africa. Before that she worked as Scientific Coordinator of the research network “Reconfigurations: History, Memory and Transformation Processes in the Middle East and North Africa” (both Philipps-Universität Marburg, funded by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF)). She is also the initiator and editor of the Open Media Studies Blog.

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Abstract 
This talk will consider the different needs and demands of an interactive project designed to the measure of a researcher (be they academic or ‘lay’), rather than for an unspecified audience of the general public. Questions of co-creation as well as immersion take on distinct implications when considering what might be made from and of the encounter of an i-doc with an active researcher, and the features most prized for these purposes may differ, in some cases quite dramatically, from those designed with a generic user in mind. Through the example of my own i-Doc, Filming Revolution (2018), I will discuss the considerations that went into the design, the process of preparing the project for publication with Stanford Digital (a subsidiary of Stanford University Press), the innovations the project implies for film studies research and scholarship, and finally, some of the incompatibilities between the admittedly generative and potentially inexhaustible variations in form, and the needs and habits of, and indeed, the limited resources available to the (scholarly) researcher. 

Bio
Alisa Lebow is Professor of Screen Media at University of Sussex. Her research explores the intersection of the aesthetic and the political in documentary film and related media. She has published numerous book chapters and journal articles, most recently in World Records, Film Quarterly, and The Journal of Visual Anthropology. Her books The Cinema of Me (Wallflower, 2012) and First Person Jewish (University of Minnesota Press, 2008) interrogate the representation of self and subjectivity in first person documentary. She is also the co-editor of A Companion to Contemporary Documentary with Alexandra Juhasz (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), and two journal special issues (Studies in Documentary Film, Vol 15, no. 2, 2020,  and World Records Vol. 5, 2021). She is a filmmaker as well, whose work includes For the Record: The World Tribunal on Iraq (2007), Treyf (1998) and Outlaw (1994). Her interactive project, Filming Revolution, combines her scholarly and practical work: an interactive database meta-documentary about filmmaking in Egypt since the revolution (Stanford Digital, 2018,  http://filmingrevolution.supdigital.org/). In 2020, Lebow was honoured by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies with the Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award. You can find out more about her work by visiting her website: www.alisalebow.net.

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Abstract
Pioneer of interactive documentaries (Prison Valley, Fort McMoney), David Dufresne will look back on his personal experience and the golden period of the genre (2008/2015). What remains of these attempts at truly delinquent, hypertextual and fragmented narratives? In what way do these webdocumentaries, by borrowing codes from cinema, documentary, television, literature, video games, and link culture, propose/have proposed a singular way of telling the world.  

Based on several case studies such as Prison Valley (World Press Photo multimedia, 2010), Fort McMoney, Hanna La Rouge, L’infiltré, Dada Data, or the interactive investigation Hors Jeu, all directed by David Dufresne, the conference will attempt to explain how these works “influence” the director’s current work (“Un pays qui se tien sage”, nominated for a César in 2021, selected for the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes 2020). 

Bio
Writer, director, punk rock, sousveillance and counter-filings, David Dufresne has published two novels “Dernière sommation” (Grasset, 2019), and “19h59” (Grasset, 2022), after a dozen books of investigation. In 2019, he received the Grand Prize of Journalism 2019 at the International Journalism Assizes for his project Allo Place Beauvau on police violence, work recognized by the UN, the Council of Europe and the European Parliament. 

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Abstract
How open source investigation, photomatches, digital modelling, immersive technologies, documentary research, as well as collaboration are used to construct a narrative. This will be spoken about both in the context of “Shiekh Jarrah: Ethnic Cleansing in Jerusalem”, and “Shireen Abu Akleh: The Extrajudicial Killing of a Journalist.” Both projects deploy similar methodologies, however, offer different forms of communication.

In the context of Shiekh Jarrah the project recognises Jerusalem at the epicentre of multiple interlocking systems of colonial oppression that govern Palestinian life under apartheid, Forensic Architecture built a 3D interactive platform that reveals how Israeli colonial practices and apartheid policies mobilise infrastructure and the lived environments to displace Palestinians at the level of the street, the neighbourhood, the city and on the land more broadly. In this project we collaborated with activists and lawyers in Jerusalem.

In the context of the Killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, a joint investigation with Al Haq’s Forensic Architecture Unit, we produced a video and written report. The reports offer a detailed visual audio spatial analysis of the incident that lead to each conclusion of the report.

Bio
Jumanah Bawazir is a researcher at Forensic Architecture as well as a multidisciplinary designer and poet in her own practice. She trained as an architect at the Architectural Association in London.

Her work at Forensic Architecture focuses on the overlay of open source research and digital modelling to produce narratives that confront state violence.

Her own practice focuses on providing tools for exiled communities to narrate their stories. She weaves together storytelling, film, and poetry, as forms of collaboration and communication to confront the spatial politics of exile. She has previously taught at the Architectural Association, worked in architectural practices, as well as in curation and research with Athr Gallery.

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Abstract
The Terrains in Transition project investigates matters of care in two industrialised regions across Germany and the UK which are „sacrifice zones“ (Lerner 2010) for supra-regional energy production. The focus is on comparable sites in Avonmouth on the Severn Estuary and Hartheim on the Upper Rhine, both of which are significantly impacted by energy transitions. 

The project investigates questions around care and future-visions in and across the two sites in “computational correspondence” (Weidle 2020) with Korsakow and other interactive documentary tools. Such a mode of doing interactive documentary implies a movement away from deterministic notions of software as assistant towards software as non-human participant, which supports relational and future-oriented thinking.  

This talk will present initial audiovisual explorations of Hartheim and the net/mash/wastework performed in correspondence with Korsakow and ChatGPT. The prototype set up by Fetzner will be showcased and discussed regarding its potentials for diffracting issues of transformation.

Bio
Franziska Weidle holds a PhD in visual anthropology. In her dissertation „Of Trees and Clouds“ (2020, V&R unipress) she analyzed the influence of media software on the theory and practice of documentary and ethnographic filmmaking. Her academic and creative work focuses on digital knowledge practices including documentary, serious games and learning design. She currently works as a Learning Designer at the Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg and freelances as a change agent for transformative communication and education.

Daniel Fetzner (*1966) holds a W3-Professorship at Offenburg University with the focus on artistic research. He was repeatedly invited as guest artist to the Center for Art and Media ZKM in Karlsruhe (2007 and 2021) as well as the Indian Institute of Science (2014 and 2018). His artistic exploration DE\GLOBALIZE is a media ecological search movement for the terrestrial in the sense of the French philosopher Bruno Latour, with whom he collaborated for the exhibition “Critical Zones”, which is currently shown in Mumbai and Bangalore.
http://metaspace.de

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Abstract 
The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) is a public producer and distributor of Canadian content, a federal cultural agency within the portfolio of the Canadian Heritage Department. In 2018, the NFB has contributed in a partnership with Rhizome to enhance the open source web archiving platform Webrecorder used to collect, store and share interactive captures of web pages.  

The result of this partnership is significant enhancements to Webrecorder such that it becomes an ideal tool to meet the NFB’s needs to preserve more than 100 interactive web-based productions in its collection. Through this project, Canada’s audiovisual legacy is better preserved and safeguarded for generations to come, even in the midst of major changes in web technology such as the discontinuation of support for Adobe Flash Player, has occur in 2020. All users of Webrecorder will be able to benefit from the enhancements made through this collaboration.  

Webrecorder remains the only free-to-use, open-source web archiving platform of its kind and is hosted online at webrecorder.io. Through this partnership, software developers at the NFB and Rhizome has enhanced Webrecorder’s capacity to share fully interactive, high-fidelity archival copies of contemporary and legacy websites through emulation of fixed versions of popular web browsers.  

The NFB has integrated web archives created with Webrecorder in its innovative, state-of-the-art Media Asset Management (MAM) system. Custom built, the MAM manages the NFB’s massive digital-assets collection, comprising six Petabytes of content.  

The NFB’s digitization-plan objective is to ensure sustainability and accessibility of its collection of 100 interactive web projects and 14,000 films, videos and born-digital productions. For both film and interactive web projects, the NFB applies the same preservation strategy on three levels: metadata, source assets and experience. The challenge of preserving the experience of the NFB’s wide variety of interactive web projects initiated the project to enhance the Webrecorder solution. Finding a means of archiving and replaying the interactive experience of a project initially conceived for the web is instrumental in the NFB’s ongoing quest to push the boundaries of new technologies. The NFB R&D team has been working with Rhizome’s Webrecorder team for over a year to achieve its preservation objectives for its entire collection of interactive productions for the web.  

The presentation would demonstrate the NFB’s digitization plan and how the preservation of the interactive web production can fit in this plan. Some samples could be show. Utilisation of the standard WARC (Web Archive) ISO 28500 file format and how it’s integrated in a OAIS (Open Archive Information System). The presentation could also show how the NFB integrated the solution into its infrastructure.  

Bio
Most recently appointed as NFB’s Director General Technologies (CTO) Jimmy Fournier has been the R&D, Engineering and Digital Platforms Manager for eight years. He joined the NFB more than 18 years ago as an engineer. He has a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering and is a member of the OIQ (Ordre des Ingénieurs du Québec), as well as the ad-hoc director of the SMPTE’s Montreal chapter. Jimmy has extensive experience in the audiovisual field, and he played a leading role in conceptualizing and operationalizing the digitization, restoration, accessibility and preservation processes for the NFB’s works. More recently, Jimmy was a key player in choosing and implementing the technology for the NFB’s new headquarters in downtown Montreal and for its conservation and digitization room in Ville St-Laurent. 

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Abstract
Katerina Cizek, Artistic Director, Research Scientist and Co-Founder Co-Creation Studio, will give a keynote presentation. She will outline the practices and philosophies of co-creation, according to the studio’s manifesto, and discuss her own work in Co-Creation through her decades of work on HIGHRISE and Filmmaker-in-Residence. 

Bio
Katerina Cizek is an influential figure in international media, with over 25 years of experience as a Peabody- and Emmy-winning documentarian, author, producer, and senior leader working with collective processes and emergent technologies.

She is the co-founder, executive producer, and artistic director of the Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab. She co-wrote the world’s first comprehensive book on co-creating media, Collective Wisdom, published by MIT Press in 2022. At the studio, she designs and leads innovative incubators, workshops, research projects, delegations, and fellowships fusing art, documentary, and journalism with emergent tech and science.

For over a decade, Cizek worked as a documentary director at the National Film Board of Canada, transforming the organization into a world leader of  digital storytelling with the projects HIGHRISE and Filmmaker-in-Residence. Founded on both community-based and global partnerships, these two long-form digital projects garnered international awards and critical acclaim. Cizek’s earlier human-rights documentary film projects — on subjects ranging from the handycam media revolution to people smuggling and the Rwandan genocide —  instigated criminal investigations, changed United Nations policies, and screened as evidence at an International Criminal Tribunal, as well as on television and at festivals around the world.

Cizek is a member of the inaugural Interactive Board of Jurors for the Peabody Awards,  a member of the Directors’ Guild of Canada, and has advised many media labs, including Sundance, ESoDOC (Italy), and CPH:LAB (Denmark). She is the Executive Producer for Assia Boundaoui’s 2022 Inverse Surveillance Project. Cizek served as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Toronto Metropolitan University and, prior to that, a Visiting Artist at MIT. She is a frequent keynote speaker, panelist, and moderator, and advises on, designs, and facilitates programs around the world.

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Abstract 
What does it mean to be a homeless woman? What are the specific problems and issues a homeless woman can face – from safety to hygiene? Can an interactive documentary serve to share very personal stories, highlight the problems, straighten the bonds, raise awareness, and build collective action? And if so, how? In collaboration with SOMOS MULHERES [We Are Women] – an association for social inclusion organized and run by the women who have been (or still are) homeless, producing an interactive documentary is being used as both, a tool for empowerment, and at the same time, as a part of an outreach strategy aimed at the wider Lisbon public and their cognizance about women’s homelessness. Through this presentation we will discuss the approach and methodology built for the imagined outputs of this interactive project, the importance of the active participation and co-creation, the ethics of collaboration with vulnerable subjects and sensitive topics as well the affordances of interactivity for activist causes. 

Bio 
Marta Fiolić has Master’s degrees in History and Cultural Anthropology from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb. In 2021 she was awarded a FCT grant for her PhD thesis “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised – It Will Be Digitalized: Towards the Analysis of Activism Practices in Contemporary Online Documentary”, at the FCSH – NOVA University of Lisbon, focused on documentary and activism, interactivity and co-creation and the intersection of civic culture and interactive documentary. 

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Abstract
The interactive documentary research project is part of the three-month work of a team of scholars from Germany, Ghana and Togo at the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies 2021 in Ghana. The research team was not only interested in the specific restitution case of around 15 looted royal insignia from Kpando which are currently stored in the Ethnological Museum in Berlin, but rather in the complexity of restitution processes as such. 

The documentary thus shows that the topic of restitution is characterized by a plethora of ambivalent, sometimes even contradictory interests and demands. Through its interactive approach, the film itself avoids an ultimate position. Furthermore, and following the thoughts of Helen Verran on a false »differentialism« or »diversificationism«, the aim is to circumvent dichotomies (e.g. stable “indigenous forms of knowledge” vs. “Western forms”). Instead, the links (in a literal and a figurative sense) between the video clips are intended to promote thinking in terms of fundamental relationships. 
  

BIO
Before his academic career, Martin Doll worked as an editor and producer for public television (ARD). Currently, he is Junior Professor for Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Düsseldorf. His recent research interests include politics and media as well as audiovisual historiography. In fall 2021, he was a Senior Fellow at the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa (MIASA) in Accra, Ghana. 

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Abstract
One expects, or at least hopes, that a well-told story will effect some sort of change within its audience, from minor to major. The science of impact is important, but we’re here to discuss the flip side of the coin: how a story might also leave an imprint on its creator(s). One function of this imprint is to create space for the consideration of process, time, and place. The intent of this short talk is to mix the practical with the theoretical, with a liberal dash of why and how. In order to illustrate these bindings, I would offer a set of case studies, from the analog world of painting and music, from the digital world web-browser based documentaries and world-building in VR. To write and to read, to speak and listen, to draw and look, are not necessarily statements of opposition.

Bio
Mike Robbins is a producer, director, and creative technologist. He studied Visual Arts at York University in Toronto. From 1998 to 2019, as partner at his company Helios Design Labs in Toronto, Mike led pioneering interactive documentary projects such as Highrise, the Quipu Project, Digital Me, After The Storm, and Offshore. For Highrise, his team won Peabody, Emmy, and Canada Screen awards.

Mike founded the Berlin-based studio High Road Stories with director Harmke Heezen in 2018. Together they have many years of experience in award-winning digital and audiovisual documentary work. The studio specialises in high quality immersive experiences and imaginative films.

Exhibition venues worldwide include the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the National Palace Museum in Taiwan, the Stadtpalais in Stuttgart, and the Munch Centre in Norway, and international film festivals like CPH:DOX, IDFA, and the BFI London Film Festival.

Next to his work at High Road Stories, Mike teaches at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg in Ludwigsburg, and Filmuniversität Babelsberg Konrad Wolf.

→ For selected works, see Portfolio and/or www.highroadstories.com