New documentary ecologies: emerging platforms, practices and discourses (original) (raw)

An Ecocritical Approach to Documentary Interactivity: Spatial Technologies in a Film Studies Frame

Studies in Documentary Film

This essay examines two forms of data visualisation freely available on the web, shark tracking technology and, to a lesser extent, projections of sea level rise. Through a discussion of two websites—the Ocearch Global Shark Tracker and Climate Central’s Surging Seas interface—I explore how, as manifestations of visual media, these websites might contribute to a documentary studies paradigm, and interactive documentary in particular. This essay is concerned with not only the contours and limits of documentary studies but also with how we perceive and engage with the nonhuman environment. Together, the two websites provide an avenue through which to evolve the ecocritical capacities of documentary studies to critique the media forms that shape our experience. This essay elaborates an ecocritical approach to these examples by understanding how they are integrally concerned with the performance and politics of not only space but also time.

Documentary's Expanded Fields: New Media and the Twenty-First-Century Documentary (ToC and Introduction/discount code included)

Oxford University Press, 2022

Documentary's Expanded Fields: New Media and the Twenty-First-Century Documentary offers a theoretical mapping of contemporary non-standard documentary practices enabled by the proliferation of new digital imaging, lightweight and non-operator digital cameras, multiscreen and interactive interfaces, and web 2.0 platforms. These emergent practices encompass digital data visualizations, digital films that experiment with the deliberate manipulation of photographic records, documentaries based on drone cameras, GoPros, and virtual reality (VR) interfaces, documentary installations in the gallery, interactive documentary (i-doc), citizens' vernacular online videos that document scenes of the protests such as the Arab Spring, the Hong Kong Protests, and the Black Lives Matter Movements, and new activist films, videos, and archiving projects that respond to those political upheavals. Building on the interdisciplinary framework of documentary studies, digital media studies, and contemporary art criticism, Jihoon Kim investigates the ways in which these practices both challenge and update the aesthetic, epistemological, political, and ethical assumptions of traditional film-based documentary. Providing a diverse range of case studies that classify and examine these practices, the book argues that the new media technologies and the experiential platforms outside the movie theater, such as the gallery, the world wide web, and social media services, expand five horizons of documentary cinema: image, vision, dispositif, archive, and activism. This reconfiguration of these five horizons demonstrates that documentary cinema in the age of new media and platforms, which Kim labels as the 'twenty-first-century documentary,' dynamically changes its boundaries while also exploring new experiences of reality and history in times of the contemporary crises across the globe, including the COVID-19 pandemic.

Rethinking Documentary in the Digital Age

Cinema Journal, 2006

Rethinking Documentary In the Digital Age by Faye Ginsburg In March 2005 the United Nations inaugurAted a long-awaited program. the Digital SoUdarity Fund. meant to underwrite initiatives that address "the uneven distribution and use of new infonnation and communication technologies' and "enable excluded people and countries to enter the new era of the infonnation society: What this might mean in practice-which digital technologies might make a Significant difference and for whom and with what resources-is still an open and contentious question. Debates about the fund at the first meeting of the World Summit on the Infonnation Society (WSIS) In December 2003 are symptomatic of the complexity of "digital divide" issues that have also been central to the second phase of the infonnation summit held in November 2005 in Tunisia. In this essay I consider the relationship of indigenous people to new media technologies that people in these communities have started to take up-with both ambivalence and enthusiasm-<>ver the last decade. Why are their concerns barely audible in discussions of new media? I would Uke to suggest that part of the problem has to do with the rise of the tenn the "Digital Age" over the last decade and the assumptions that support it. While it initially had the shock of the new. it now 128 Cinema Joumal46. No.1. FaY 2006 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 7. http://www.usmob.(..Om.llu. Uct'essed August 22. 2006. 8. Ibid. Wu Wenguang: An Introduction by Chris Berry "DV: Individual Filmmaking" was written at a watershed moment in the history of recent Chinese documentary. Its author, Wu Wenguang. is one of the most prominent and proUfic independents in the country.' It gives inSights not only into some

Ecologies of Media: Introduction to Ecomedia: Key Issues (2016)

The last 40 years of media's history is one of leaps and bounds. The digital revolution that fuels and drives a network of media production, distribution, and consumption has become so extensively global that many in the US, Europe, Brazil, India, China, and across the world now have access to media experiences that were in the realm of science fiction not so long ago.

Retraining Our Perception: Semiotic Storytelling in Ecocinematic Documentaries

While acknowledging earlier classic environmental documentaries such as The Plough That Broke the Plains, Rain, Nanook of the North and others, eco-cinema, or as it is sometimes referred to in the particular, the eco-doc, is a relatively new sub-genre of the documentary film that is developing its own style as it is so closely related with informing both public and power about issues that impact all of us. In his book Eco-cinema: Theory and Practice, Scott MacDonald describes how eco-cinema uses a new mode of story-telling designed to change the way we perceive cinematic content: “The fundamental job of eco-cinema…is a retraining of perception, as a way of offering an alternative to conventional media spectatorship, like a garden within the machine of modern life.” Another perspective on this mode of perception is offered by Alexa Weik von Mossner in her book, Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, Ecology and Film: “The primary importance of eco-cinema is to affect our automatic, visceral response and emotion...to make (these films) artistically successful, theoretically powerful and culturally influential.” This goal of audience engagement leading to powerful and influential action is what many scholars believe the eco-doc with its perception-altering mode of story-telling make the sub-genre reliably successful in advancing progressive social change, perhaps one of the most effective styles of social issue documentary filmmaking: “(The eco-doc)...has created visible and legible data and insights that inform global discussions on the environment. It becomes particularly prominent in documentary films on climate change in the twenty-first century.” (Helen Hughes, Green Documentary). My own professional relationship with eco-cinema (The Antarctica Challenge: A Global Warning, The Polar Explorer, The Youth Climate Report) will be drawn upon from two perspectives: as a maker of its films and as a conduit between the scientific communities its films represent and the environmental policymakers to whom they speak.

Filming through the milieu. "Becoming extinct" and the Anthropocene

The Anthropocenic Turn. The Interplay between Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Responses to a New Age, 2020

The chapter discusses how film and the Anthropocene are closely entangled. Given that the Anthropocene addresses all realms of life also the aesthetic become eco-political. The paper addresses recent films by German filmmaker and activist Elke Marhöfer. By drawing on the concept of subjectivity beyond human individuals and following philosopher and psychiatrist Félix Guattari the text explores what could be sites of subjectivation rooted in film viewing. New modes of subjectivity are necessary to face major challenges of societies in the active resistance of the contemporary climate regime. Documentary films, as discussed in the text, are able to work far beyond the transmission of information and content but bear the potential to explore new ways of perception, experience and perspective creating the texture of possible ecological subjectivities. Not only nature and culture, but living and nonliving, human and environment need to be thought anew. Film can contribute to this ongoing reconceptualization of subjectivities as humans are searching for new ways of being with the world.

Routledge Handbook of Ecomedia Studies - Intro and chapters 1 & 2

Routledge Handbook of Ecomedia Studies, 2023

Redressing the lack of environmental perspectives in the study of media, The Routledge Handbook of Ecomedia Studies asserts that media are in and about the environment, and environments are socially and materially mediated. The book highlights five critical areas of ecomedia scholarship: ecomedia theory, ecomateriality, political ecology, ecocultures, and eco-affects. This selection features the introductory overview of the volume, Adrián Ivakhiv's and Antonio López's programmatic "When Do Media Become Ecomedia?" and Adrian Ivakhiv's "Three Ecologies: Ecomediality as Ontology." The entire volume is available open access here: https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Handbook-of-Ecomedia-Studies/Lopez-Ivakhiv-Rust-Tola-Chang-Chu/p/book/9781032009421

ASPERA Special Edition Pathways Through Reality: Integration of New Media Formats into Documentary Research

This paper examines the role of social media as a documentary distribution medium, and the fragmentation of documentary into multiple dispersed clips. This significant shift in the context and content of documentary demands a reappraisal of theoretical models. In this environment documentary becomes a collective of interlaced observations that can be navigated by internet users who construct a view of the world by selecting and distributing documentary content.

Editorial: A complicated post-documentary era

Pacific Journalism Review, 2015

SINCE early in the first decade of this century, the concept of documentary—never beyond contestation—has entered into a state of generic uncertainty. Reflecting on these developments, John Corner, in an influential article, dubbed the current context of production as ‘Post-documentary’ (Corner, 2002). In his view, the documentary tradition has always encompassed a range of approaches: 1. Documentary as social commentary seeking to inform audiences as citizens rather than consumers. 2. Documentary as Investigative Reporting, once the most extensive use of documentary methods on television. 3. Documentary as Radical Interrogation and Agit-Prop as found in the practices of independent cinema. 4. Documentary as popular ‘factual’ entertainment driven by ratings and box office.