Digital Interactive Documentary

How do we relate to reality? Does digital interactive media facilitate and push towards more active, dynamic and collaborative documentation of reality than analogue media?

Sandra Gaudenzi, PhD researcher and lecturer at Goldsmiths Interactive Media, looks at documentary making as a dynamic form: "Digital interactive documentaries can be seen as “living systems” that continue to change themselves until collaboration and participation is sustainable, or wished by the users, or by the systems that compose it."

She argues that digital interactive documentary is still an emerging field and it lacks definitions and convincing systems of classification. At present anything from educational CD-ROM material to collaborative editable documentaries on the Internet, passing via art performances, locative games and collaborative communities can be called an interactive documentary, in the sense that they make account of a reality through the use of digital media technology. There is a big difference between browsing content on a CD-Rom,  participating to an internet forum and cycling in a city while communicating to a mobile computer device. The difference is not only the experience of the user (which is normally the concern of User Centred Design) or the clarity of navigation (that is normally the concern of Human Computer Interaction) but it is also how the system  composes and makes itself.

Digital interactive documentary as a genre could open up the documentary to external input, the use of digital technologies and networked media have pushed the documentary maker from an observer to an enactor. Digital collaborative media can put the filmmaker/author at the same level of her audience/users, and the distinction between observer, observed and participant is slowly fading out. An interactive documentary might not use video at all (it can use any media, hence the terminology “multi-media”) so the role of the filmmaker, the use of the camera or the style of editing are not anymore enough to speak about interactive documentary. 

Since digital interactive documentaries is still an emerging field (it barely started thirty years ago), people refer to themselves with various terminologies: new media   documentaries, digital documentaries, interactive film, database narrative etc… Most of the time an interactive documentary is not linked by the industry with the “documentary family” and is called an online forum, a digital art piece, a locative game, and educational product, a 3D world, an emotional map etc… The authors of such artefacts do not define themselves documentary makers but digital artists, interactive designers or games designers.