“Documentary and Democracy in Crisis” is the motto of this years Visible Evidence conference. There is not just crisis, there is also Database Documentary and I (Florian Thalhofer) will be on a panel that explores just that.
This years VE conference will take place in Frankfurt and online.
This workshop has been designed to explore the evolving literacies of interactive documentaries (i-docs) and to ask what a polyphonic and multi-perspectival approach can offer to this ongoing discussion.
Polyphonic documentary is a research project initiated by Dr Judith Aston and Dr Stefano Odorico which has developed into a working group composed of currently over 70 people across several continents. This group is exploring the potential of i-docs to create non-linear and interactive means through which to promote intercultural dialogue and exchange, within the general context of increasing polarization and democracy in crisis.
Through this project, we are re-visiting the work of Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin and looking at the relevance of what he wrote about the polyphonic novel to the evolving practices and forms of contemporary i-docs. While polyphony can be clearly found across a number of documentary forms, we are mainly interested in reframing earlier debates within i-docs around narrative/non-narrative/anti-narrative and its relationship to database aesthetics.
The workshop will start with each contributor presenting aspects of the theoretical framework and methodologies developed within the polyphonic documentary working group, including: carnival, heteroglossia and aesthetics. As part of this, it will look at the interactive documentary Question Bridge as a case study which has inspired our method. We will then show how we have used the interactive authoring tool Korsakow to develop our own interactive meta documentary on polyphony.
This meta documentary will be used to elicit further dialogic responses from our audience as part of the Q&A process. Our intention is that these responses will themselves become part of the documentary and that we will reveal, through this process, a set of methods and tools for meaningful engagement with complexity and uncertainty.
