#digital documentary

How is digital (and electronic), networked media changing the aesthetic of media forms (that is, the way we arrange sensations/perceptions through media art/design or in everyday life?

To first divulge into thinking about how to possibly answer this question, it'll help to first break down the main components of the question itself.

Aesthetics

According to the lecture, aesthetics in this context can be seen in the way that our perceptions are structured in relation to the way the world affects us. As such, the aesthetic of media form has by and large taken a huge shift; particularly in documentaries.

Documentaries

The shift in documentary making and engagement tells us about shifts in the function of contemporary media.

Documentaries allow us to make sense of the world. The use of different technologies and techniques in documentary tends to make for a different kind of sense-making. All technologies do this and it has a really big affect on the world at large with traditional notions of meaning. The meaning of all that is our world. So things like God, nature, the human, truth freedom.

Documentaries are exemplars of how lived experience is put together. So what counts more in digital documentary is what is called IMMANENT SENSE. So things that we can sense in the immediate world or moment.

The documentary - Bear71 (2012), an interactive documentary where the nature of the human and the nature of animals have been broken down, has almost a mourning undertone to the loss of meaning when it comes to nature as a direct result of the Internet of Things. And yet ironically, it showcases the innumerable pieces of information that is now at hand in order to preserve nature. However, it allows us to make a NEW type of sense of the loss of the meaning of nature. 

It questions technology but also uses the same technology in creating and executing itself. We the viewers are engaged in the documentary and our surveillance gets inserted into it.

In Bear 71, which employed all three of these factors, our narrator says, "Look backward from any single point in time and everything seems to lead up to that moment," a sentence which reminded me of Roland Barthes' The Eiffel Tower. He writes:

[The Eiffel Tower's bird's eye view] corresponds to a new sensibility of vision; in the past, to travel (we may recall certain-admirable, moreover-prome­nades of Rousseau) was to be thrust into the midst of sensa­tion, to perceive only a kind of tidal wave of things; the bird's eye view, on the contrary, represented by our romantic writers as if they had anticipated both the construction of the Tower and the birth of aviation, permits us to transcend sensation and to see things in their structure. (Barthes p. 242)

He goes on to describe how a viewer will "read" the panorama, centering it on the tower and, in turn themselves. Their memories, their understanding of the city, their ideas of how the city should appear and how it aligns with what is actually there. In a way, documentary (and yes, I am disregarding every other form of communication, since they all involve perspectives, it's a basic, shared thing) does much the same thing. Documentary can't be defined as truth or reality but only perspectives on what could be truth or reality; propaganda is, after all, a form of documentary. A documentary can be a dialectic but this still doesn't change the fact that, as a form that can only be played and experience one way, there is a structure that lays itself out to enable its reaching an end point (even if this structure and end point is weak, see John Pilger's Utopia). 

If the point of documentary is to align what we think is there and what is actually there (and I'm not saying it necessarily is) then interactivity, mobility and accessible equipment all move documentary rightfully away from a form that must constantly build itself around and move towards a limited, unchanging end point. Any representation of something is going to hold some trace of its author but if a project can have many authors and a form that allows its audience to curate it, perhaps we'd have a better idea of Paris. It's all a bit rhizomatic, right? (Not rhetorical, I still don't understand this stuff)

I'll call that the end of my blog but if you're not too slammed with marking, you should have a look at M.I.A.'s video for Double Bubble Trouble - 3D printed guns, social-commentary loaded burqas and a guy hotboxing a helmet, it's got everything.

But I thought it was interesting because it uses a lot of low culture in both form and content; it depicts lower socio-economic areas and social minorities in footage that looks like it was shot on lower end devices like phones and handicams (but actually wasn't). Like a lot of hip-hop videos, it has a thread of violence and extravagance but instead of reclaiming high culture brands, the extravagance is in 3D printing, something far more accessible by low culture. As well as the 3D printed guns, there's the use of e-cigarettes, drones, viral internet videos and M.I.A.'s mouthpiece called #mouthjail, of her own design and more akin to a bit or Lecter mask than a grill. The video is a jarring but highly aware mash up of cultural violence, scientific extravagance and an internet-fuelled aesthetic that is yet to make its way into the mainstream (will it ever?). The video reflects the fact that we saw these things coming together but always from a strangely sleek and calm point of view - all our representations of the future were designed by the past. 

Talking to Daniel about it, he noted that

'Gangsters' will be able to sit in their apartment blowing smoke rings and remote-control flying 3D printed drones shooting at other people's drones in the air

and I liked that he brought it back to a kind of virtual war. While the threat of violence hangs over the 3D printed guns, they're never actually used and suddenly the real threat is virtual street gangs.

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