INTERACTIVE AUDIENCES: viewers\users' engagement in

National Film Board of Canada's interactive documentaries

Patrícia Nogueira da Silva

Doctoral Program in Digital Media

Audiovisual and Interactive Content Creation

Advisor: João Mário Grilo, Full Professor

Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da Universidade Nova de Lisboa

Porto, 2018
 INTERACTIVE AUDIENCES: viewers\users' engagement in

National Film Board of Canada's interactive documentaries

_______________________

A Dissertation

Presented to

The Faculty of Engeneering

Department of Informatics

University of Porto

Porto, Portugal

______________________

In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Doctoral Degree

in Digital Media

_______________________

by

Patrícia Nogueira da Silva

July 2018

 Patrícia Nogueira

Keywords: interactive documentary; National Film Board of Canada, participative audience;

phenomenology; psichoanalysis.
 COMMITTEE MEMBERS

Committee Chair: Eugénio da Costa Oliveira, Ph.D.

Full Professor of the Faculty of Engeneering

University of Porto

Committee Member: Nuno Robalo Correia, Ph.D.

Full Professor of the Faculty of Science and Technology

New University of Lisbon

Committee Member: João Mário Grilo, Ph.D. (supervisor)

Full Professor of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities

New University of Lisbon

Committee Member: Nelson Troca Zagalo, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of the Department of Communication and Arts

University of Aveiro

Committee Member: Mariana Estela Graça, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of the Department of Communication, Arts and Design

University of Algarve

Committee Member: Rui Penha, Ph.D.

Invited Assistant Professor of the Faculty of Engeneering

University of Porto

iii
 ABSTRACT

This thesis explores the audience’s engagement and perceptual experience of interacting
with interactive documentaries. The aim is contributing to a discussion about how interactivity and
new technologies promote new spectatorship performances and subsequently affect the spectator’s
subjectivity.

Through a phenomenological (and post-phenomenological) approach, the investigation

discusses the user’s perceptual and embodied experience of interacting with a corpus of study,
selected from the National Film Board of Canada’s portfolio. The research delves into the
descriptive analysis of interacting with three digital objects, each one of them corresponding to a
different mode of interaction and therefore engaging the audience in a particular way. The
hyperlink interactive documentary Bear 71 is scrutinized as a panopticon of surveillance, merging
linear sound with the interactor’s non-linear navigation through surveillance footage. Fort
McMoney, as a conversational interactive documentary with a rhizomatic and complex structure,
opens the possibility of exploring a spatial narrative and playing with reality. In its turn, A Journal
of Insomnia, with a participative interactive mode, provides a collective portrait while engages the
interactor in a self-reflexive portrait.

Throughout the investigation, I consider the interactor and the digital object as two
interrelated and dependent entities that influence and shape one another. As fragmented,
multilinear and dynamic forms, interactive documentaries provide the audience with the agency
of manipulating and developing the narrative, while conversely engender in the interactors what I
address as ways of affection. I propose eight digitally disrupted and induced sensations, or senses
of, for describing how interactive documentary affects users during the interaction performance.

v
 Considering the self-centered and sometimes self-referential nature of interactive
documentary, its derivative objects also afford a particular way of portraying the Self and
confronting the viewer with her or his self-being. The Lacanian psychoanalytical formulations
provide a framework for analyzing the interactor’s virtual experience and how the audience
observes and is observed within the digital environment. As a mirror, the digital screen reflects
back to the interactor her or his own image and traps her or him into the Digital Gaze, a myse-en-
abyme between the Self and the Same.

vi
 RESUMO

Esta tese explora o envolvimento e experiência percetual da audiência durante a interação

com documentários interativos. Pretende-se contribuir para uma discussão de como a
interatividade e as novas tecnologias promovem novas formas de espectatorialidade e
consequentemente afetam a subjetividade do espectador.

Através de uma abordagem fenomenológica (e pós-fenomenológica), esta investigação

discute a experiência percetiva e incorporada do utilizador ao interagir com um corpus de análise,
selecionado a partir do portfólio do National Film Board of Canada. A pesquisa apresenta a análise
descritiva da experiência de interação com três documentários interativos, em que cada um
corresponde a um modo de interação diferente e, portanto, envolve o público de forma distinta. O
documentário interativo do modo hiperlink Bear 71 é examinado como um panóptico de
vigilância, combinando som linear com a navegação não-linear do interator através de imagens de
vigilância. Fort McMoney, enquanto documentário interativo conversacional com uma estrutura
rizomática e complexa, abre à audiência a possibilidade de explorar uma narrativa espacial e de
jogar/brincar com a realidade. Por sua vez, A Journal of Insomnia, com um modo interativo
participativo, proporciona ao utilizador a participação num retrato coletivo enquanto o envolve
num auto-retrato reflexivo.

Ao longo desta tese o interator e o objeto digital são examinados como duas entidades
inter-relacionadas e inter-dependentes que se influenciam e moldam mutuamente. Enquanto
objetos fragmentados, multilineares e dinâmicos, os documentários interativos proporcionam ao
utilizador a possibilidade de manipular e moldar a narrativa, enquanto inversamente induzem nos
interatores o que eu denomino de ways of affection. São propostas oito sensações ou sentidos
induzidos, denominados senses of, digitalmente disruptivos, para descrever a forma como o
documentário interativo afeta os utilizadores durante a performance de interação.

vii
 Considerando a natureza auto-centrada e por vezes auto-referencial do documentário
interativo, estes objetos digitais também oferecem uma forma particular de retratar o Eu e
confrontar o espectador com seu próprio ser. As formulações psicanalíticas Lacanianas fornecem
um método de análise da experiência virtual do utilizador e permitem considerar a forma como a
audiência observa e é observada dentro do ambiente digital. Tal como um espelho, o ecrã digital
reflete a imagem do espectador e captura-o no Gaze Digital, um myse-en-abyme entre o Eu e o
Mesmo.

viii
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Looking back at my Ph.D.’s journey I realize how much I evolved as an academic by virtue
of all the various experiences, knowledge, and challenges I found along the way. Somehow, this
dissertation tries to sum up the personal growth and evolution, as well as the critical thinking I
achieved during this expedition. Although a Ph.D. is frequently compared to a pilgrimage, despite
all the ups and downs, I must confess the path was more pleasurable than painful. Even during the
writing process, that often becomes a lonely walk, along the road I met many different people, in
a variety of places, who supported and encouraged me.

Firstly, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my advisor Prof. João Mário Grilo,
for the continuous support during my Ph.D. study, for his patience, motivation, and immense
knowledge. His guidance helped me throughout the research and writing process of this thesis and
specially challenged me to expand my theoretical framework. Besides my advisor, I would like to
thank Prof. Gonçalo Leite Velho for his insightful comments and encouragement, but also for the
hard questions which incentive me to widen my research from various perspectives.

I’m profoundly grateful to the National Film Board of Canada, especially to the
Vancouver’s studio producers and creators, for accepting me as a visiting researcher and sharing
their experience and expertise in documentary film. Their creative minds and cutting-edge works
were an insightful contribution to understanding the interactive documentary realm.

My sincere thanks to the University of Texas at Austin, particularly to the Radio,

Television and Film department, for accepting me as a visiting scholar. Inside and outside the
classroom walls I meet many interesting people who helped and inspired me. I’m particularly
grateful to Prof. Sharon Strover, who sponsored my application, to Prof. Andrew Garrison for
accepting me in his documentary production class and notably to Prof. Lalitha Gopalan for the
insightful and meaningful conversations, as well as for introducing me a distinctive way of
“reading” books and moving images.

ix
 I also thank the doctoral program host institutions, both the University of Porto and the
New University of Lisbon, where I found many professors and fellow colleagues who stimulate
discussions and with whom I shared sleepless nights of work.

These acknowledgements would not be complete without mentioning several other people
that, in different ways, contributed for the development of this research, such as Katerina Cizek,
Kate Vollum, Sergiu Raul Suciu, Professor Nuno Correia, and particularly Sara Marques, whose
help in the final phase allowed me respecting the deadline.

Last but not the least, I’m genuinely grateful to Sofia, Rui and my mom for all their support
and understanding regarding my absence and temper over the last four years. They are my life
companions who inspire and challenge me to Think Big. Thanks for believing, even when I
seriously doubted myself.

This research was funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology,
which provided me with a fellowship with the reference number SFRH / BD / 93138 / 2013. I’m
very grateful, and I feel privileged to have been supported by FCT to learn, create and disseminate
new knowledge in Portugal and abroad, in such an emergent topic as it is interactive documentary.

January, the 5th of 2018

Patrícia Nogueira
Porto, Portugal

x
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT .....................................................................................................................................v

RESUMO ...................................................................................................................................... vii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................................................................................. ix

LIST OF TABLES ....................................................................................................................... xiii

LIST OF DIAGRAMS ................................................................................................................. xiii

LIST OF FIGURES ..................................................................................................................... xiv

INTRODUCTION .........................................................................................................................17

PART I ...........................................................................................................................................23

SETTING THE FIELD ..................................................................................................................25

What is documentary film ................................................................................................. 26

What is interactive documentary ...................................................................................... 33

FROM SPECTATORSHIP TO INTERACTIVE AUDIENCES ..................................................47

Watching and Interpreting ................................................................................................ 47

Interrupting the fluidity of narrative ................................................................................. 53

Navigating and interacting ................................................................................................ 55

Towards an Interactive Audience ..................................................................................... 58

FRAMING THE STUDY ..............................................................................................................65

Why the National Film Board of Canada ......................................................................... 72

Corpus of Analysis ........................................................................................................... 75

PART II..........................................................................................................................................81

BEAR 71: a Virtual Panopticon .....................................................................................................83

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 From Linear Sound to Interactive Navigation .................................................................. 87

Bear 71’s Conclusions .................................................................................................... 102

FORT MCMONEY: Playing with reality ....................................................................................107

A Spatial First-Person Interaction ................................................................................... 109

Fort McMoney’s Conclusions ......................................................................................... 121

A JOURNAL OF INSOMNIA: a Collective Portrait ..................................................................127

From Interaction to Participation .................................................................................... 130

A Journal of Insomnia’s Conclusions ............................................................................. 147

WAYS OF AFFECTION .............................................................................................................153

Sense of Control .............................................................................................................. 157

Sense of Presence ............................................................................................................ 159

Sense of Self ................................................................................................................... 163

Sense of Place ................................................................................................................. 165

Sense of Belonging ......................................................................................................... 169

Sense of Almightiness..................................................................................................... 172

Sense of Endlessness....................................................................................................... 174

Sense of Incompleteness ................................................................................................. 176

Conclusions ..................................................................................................................... 178

THE DIGITAL GAZE .................................................................................................................183

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS ......................................................................................................191

REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................197

xii
 LIST OF TABLES

Table 1. correlation between modes (Gaudenzi, 2013), categories (Galloway, 2013) and
categorical structures (Nash, 2012) of interactive documentary. .................................................44

Table 2. Interactive documentaries of the corpus of study and their related ways of affection ...179

LIST OF DIAGRAMS

Diagram 1. Bear 71's timeline .......................................................................................................99

Diagram 2. Bear 71's progression through time and in depth .....................................................100

Diagram 3. Fort McMoney's structure – level 1 ..........................................................................117

Diagram 4. Fort McMoney's structure – level 2 ..........................................................................118

Diagram 5. Fort McMoney's structre – level 3 ............................................................................119

Diagram 6. A Journal of Insomnia's open archive .......................................................................144

Diagram 7. A Journal of Insomnia's closed archive ....................................................................145

xiii
 LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. Bear 71's interface (Allison & Mendes, 2012) ..............................................................77

Figure 2. Fort McMoney's episode 1 (Dufresne, 2013a) ...............................................................78

Figure 3. A journal of Insomnia's interface (Choiniere et al., 2013) .............................................79

Figure 4. Bear 71's opening sentence ............................................................................................83

Figure 5. Bear 71's interactive installation at the Sundance Film Festival (The National Film

Board of Canada) ...........................................................................................................................86

Figure 6. Pop-up window of Bear 71 ............................................................................................90

Figure 7. Full video screen in chapter 4 ........................................................................................92

Figure 8. Subjective travelling shot of the train ............................................................................94

Figure 9. Bear 71 and her cubs in the train rail .............................................................................94

Figure 10. Shot and reverse shot of the train's POV .....................................................................95

Figure 11. black screen interleaved with drop-outs.......................................................................95

Figure 12. Bear 71's interface "grid" .............................................................................................97

Figure 13. user's webcam feed displayed in the interactive documentary ..................................105

Figure 14. Fort McMoney's wireframe ........................................................................................109

Figure 15. Fort McMoney's petrochemical plant (left) and still frame from Il Deserto Rosso

(right) ...........................................................................................................................................110

Figure 16. Walking alongside subjects (front and back) .............................................................113

Figure 17. Fort McMoney’s icy landscape (left) and still frame from Fargo (right) ..................114

Figure 18. Interview with the City Mayor (Dufresne, 2013a) .....................................................114

Figure 19. Fort McMoney's subjects gazing at the camera .........................................................115

Figure 20. Clues scattered over the ground .................................................................................116

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Figure 21. A Journal of Insomnia's interactive installation (National Film Board of Canada) ...129

Figure 22. User's answers projected outside the installation (National Film Board of Canada) .130

Figure 23. Welcome screen, presenting a combination of the four individual portraits of the

protagonists (Choiniere et al., 2013) ............................................................................................132

Figure 24. Inviting the audience for making an appointment .....................................................134

Figure 25. landing page of the e-mail link (Choiniere et al., 2013) ............................................135

Figure 26. Sarah's entry hall (Choiniere et al., 2013) ..................................................................136

Figure 27. Documentary footage with VHS drop-outs ...............................................................137

Figure 28. Fatiah's kaleidoscopic images ....................................................................................138

Figure 29. Tina's ghostly images .................................................................................................139

Figure 30. Dynamic sound wave vector ("the voice") ................................................................140

Figure 31. Participant's digital archive ........................................................................................141

Figure 32. Drawings made by participants for answering questions...........................................142

Figure 33. Identification of user's location within the interface (Allison & Mendes, 2012) .......161

Figure 34. Comparison between Fort McMurray (left) and Fort McMoney (right) transformed by

users. ............................................................................................................................................163

Figure 35. Bear 71's topographical interface ...............................................................................167

Figure 36. Bear 71's grid pointing out the explored and unexplored regions, as well as the

identification of users and animals within the park. ....................................................................168

Figure 37. Fort McMoney's foruns and referendums. .................................................................169

Figure 38. A Journal of Insomnia's participants digital archive ..................................................171

xv
 INTRODUCTION

Since the early days of Cinema, documentary film has been engaging audiences in a
particular way through a re-presentation of the lived world. More than pursuing entertainment as
many fiction films, documentary fosters an artistic and creative form of portraying the encounter
with the so-called “reality”. Sometimes offering observational records, other times imagining
poetic likenesses or envisioning avant-garde essays, in any case, the indexical relation with the
lived reality provides a certain truth, which captures the audience’s attention and interest. Also
relevant, the evolution of documentary film and technology have been tied together and emerged
side by side.

Over time, maybe due to a lack of professional equipment or low production budgets,
documentary film gladly embraced the new equipment available and pushed the development of
new technological devices for providing creative approaches to reality. Overall, the genre managed
to establish inventive ways of portraying the subject matters, relying on a tradition of
experimentation (Nichols, 2001, p. 83), and breaking ideological, aesthetic, and technological
frontiers. Such constant quest for novelty and experimentation allowed non-fiction film to reinvent
itself and presenting a refashioned view of the world. If in the late 1950's the portable 16 mm
cameras with synchronized sound afforded observational approaches, prompting the cinéma vérité
style, after the 1970's the democratization of means with the introduction of the VHS tape,
substantially cheaper than celluloid, allowed that a considerable number of new filmmakers were
able to express themselves. Such democratization also allowed filmmakers giving a voice to civil
movements, like Feminists, LGBT, and Afro-Americans, who found in documentary film a way
of conveying their ideas and thoughts.

17
 At the same time, the Cuban director Julio Garcia Espinosa (1979) predicted “the
possibility for everyone to make films”. In the manifesto “For an Imperfect Cinema” he asks:

What happens if the evolution of film technology (there are already signs in
evidence) makes it possible that this technology ceases being the privilege of a small few?
What happens if the development of videotape solves the problem of inextricably limited
laboratory capacity? (Espinosa, 1979)

By then he was far from imagining DSRL cameras, home editing systems and a distribution
channel available for anyone with a broadband internet connection. Over the last twenty years, the
documentary realm has been subjected to unforeseen reconfigurations. The non-fiction works
spread across platforms and venues, traveling from movie theatres to art galleries, museums and,
noticeable, to the internet. While documentaries produced for more conventional spectatorship
venues, as film festivals and movie theatres, delve into new ways of subjectivity and blur the
boundaries between reality and fiction, new venues and novel media platforms provide fertile
ground for exploring the form, the aesthetic and the agency. By introducing interactivity in this
new media formats the audience is provided with a certain degree of control over the narrative and
the story.

Beyond the production conditions, the true revolution for documentary film lays on the
audience’s new engagement procedures with the filmic object. The expanded practices of
production, distribution, and reception challenge the relationship of the audience with the screen,
and consequently with the object and the filmmaker, and accelerated the emergence of
interactivity, which has been in development since the 1960’s. By introducing interactivity to the
narrative and shifting away from typical viewing experiences, interactive documentary introduces
unpredictability to the form and provides the audience with the opportunity of engaging with the
artwork in active ways. Spectators moved well ahead of their sat place and partially overcame the
gatekeeping constraints impose by linear forms. Audiences are no longer viewers, they become
agents, role-players in the narrative, contributing and actively participating in both the creation
and the fruition of the artworks.

Considering the novelty of the field of study, so far research on interactive documentary
realm has been identifying the broad array of forms, compositions, and aesthetics, and trying to

18
establish a terminology for addressing the malleable digital objects (Almeida & Alvelos, 2010;
Gifreu, 2013; Whitelaw, 2002). Other investigations move a step further by identifying how the
contents are distributed and organized through the documentary’s architecture and trying to
classify categories of interaction based on the structures behind the interface (Galloway,
McAlpine, & Harris, 2007; Gaudenzi, 2014; Nash, 2012). Such studies have been essential as a
fundamental base for framing and clarifying the unsettled realm as well as for classifying and
describing the broad and heterogeneous multimedia objects. Nonetheless, the most profound
transformation in interactive documentary is the audience’s position, insofar as the spectator
achieves the role of an active participant in the construction of the narrative and may be regarded
as an intervener in the process, challenging the author’s sole authority over the artwork.

Surprisingly, as regards the audience’s analysis, few research works have been developed
and published. Beyond the mainstream assumption of claiming the virtues of an active and
autonomous audience, Kate Nash (2014c) undertook an empirical study by observing and inquiring
participants who accepted interacting with a digital documentary and answer her research
questions. However, it is my understanding that the disruptive position of the spectator in
interactive documentary cannot be fully grasped through a self-report testimony. Notwithstanding
such investigation may partially disclose the audience’s behaviors, the emotional engagement
happens mostly at an unconscious level, and the interpretation of the perceptual interactive
experience remains fairly, not to say completely, unexplored. As a sensory and perceptual form,
interactive documentary encompasses conscious and unconscious involvement and places the
interactive spectator between an experience of disembodiment, through what Don Ihde (2002)
considers an “extended body"1, and a body that is nevertheless dependent and subjected to a
mediated experience. Furthermore, the interactive documentary’s experience remains
phenomenologically and philosophically undertheorized, insofar as the spectator and the digital
artifact are considered individually, as separated entities from one another.

1
For Don Ihde (2002) the "extended body" is a form of bodily experience, mainly perceived in online
environments, where not only the human body acts through technological devices but also signifies itself through that
same mediated experience.

19
 Therefore, my motivation for undertaking this research was to understand how such
revolution in the documentary genre affects the reception conditions; particularly, how the
audience engages with interactive documentary and how interactivity influences the viewing and
interacting experiences in documentary film. Consequently, arises as the primary objective of this
research investigating the audience's perceptual and sensory experience when interplaying with
interactive documentaries. To achieve such goals, I intend to go behind the back of the spectator
for grasping the multidimensionality of experiences and perceiving how the audience and the
interactive documentary shape one another. Equally crucial for the comprehension of the
audience's unconscious felt experience is analyzing the interactive latent meaning behind both the
multimedia object and the interactive actions. As interactive documentary is a self-centered
experience, psychoanalysis may serve as an appropriate consideration for investigating the
audience’s position within the interaction process. Concretely, it may help perceiving how
technology shapes our lived first-person experience. Furthermore, delving into concepts such as
Subjectivity, which has been crucial for the documentary’s critical theory, the Self and the Gaze
may contribute for enlightening the viewers’ identification onward the procedural interaction
experience.

This research unfolds through three parts, each one of them devoted to a crucial element of
investigation for accomplishing the research goals:

First, the dissertation introduces and examines the relevant background for explaining the
topic approached. I start, in chapter 1, by presenting a general overview of the documentary film
realm, exploring the fundamentals of documentary and the evolution of its interactive form. As a
fuzzy and novel field, we must define what we understand for interactive documentary within this
research, avoiding misunderstandings and assuring a common base for discussion. In chapter 2 I
present a theoretical unpacking of spectatorship theories for unveiling possible approaches and
present previous research work developed. Outlining an account of spectatorship theories, both
from typical film viewing and interactive experiences, not only provides an understanding of how
the spectator has been portrayed over time, as also sustains the discussion about the complex and
disruptive position of the new form of spectating documentary. Furthermore, the genealogy of
approaches to spectatorship and specifically to interactors of digital documentaries, supported by
a historical contextualization, provides further insight into the field of study. After establishing the

20
basis for discussion, within chapter 3 I establish the corpus of study and determine the methods for
analyzing it. Following Sandra Gaudenzi’s taxonomy for differentiating modes of interactive
documentary (Aston & Gaudenzi, 2012), three digital objects were chosen, each one of them
corresponding to one mode of interaction. I also define the theoretical approach for accomplishing
the research goals, specifying phenomenology, and post-phenomenology, as well as
psychoanalysis as the combination of meta-critical theories that serve the purposes of this
investigation.

Second, the dissertation is devoted to recounting the descriptive experience of interacting

with the documentaries selected as the corpus of study, with a detailed and nonetheless broad
examination of three interactive documentaries selected accordingly with its mode of interaction,
as well as reasoning the significance of such interaction. In chapter 4, the hyperlink interactive
documentary Bear 71 (Allison & Mendes, 2012) is analyzed through the lenses of a panopticon
digital object. The documentary is a combination of a linear soundscape with a non-linear
navigation structure, compounded mostly by images captured by surveillance cameras. It also
explores the intersection between wildlife, humans, and technology, raising awareness about the
pervasiveness of technology in our daily lives. Chapter 5 describes the experience of interacting
with the conversational interactive documentary Fort McMoney (Dufresne, 2013b). As a game-
based documentary, the artwork provides a first-person point-of-view of an explorer who searches
solutions for the sustainable development of the Canadian region of Fort McMurray. The complex
and rhizomatic interactive structure allows a multidimensional analysis of the interaction process
with semantic meaning. Chapter 6 is devoted to the participative interactive documentary A
Journal of Insomnia (Choiniere, Lambert, Duverneix, Braun, & NFB, 2013), where the spectators
have the opportunity of becoming participants in the narrative by including their contents. Besides
four stories produced by the National Film Board of Canada, A Journal of Insomnia comprises a
digital and expansive database with the testimonies of all the participants, allowing not only a self-
centered interactive experience but also an identification with the Self-depicted on screen.

Third, the dissertation demonstrates how the technological mediation of interacting with
documentary compels the audience towards a sensory and affective, nevertheless illusory,
experience and even influences the interactor's subjectivity. Through a phenomenological

21
(Merleau-Ponty, 2002; 2 Sobchack, 2004, 2016) and post-phenomenological (Ihde, 1990, 2002)
investigation, in chapter 7 I focus my attention in the microperceptions (Ihde, 1990), as structures
of sensory perception in the bodily dimensions of experience, translated as senses. I argue the
objects of interaction affect the viewers by inducing them bodily felt sensations and shaping their
subjectivity. As so, the sensuous encounter between the interactor and the digital documentary
provides a virtual gratification for the spectator’s performance. I identify and describe such
sensations and propose a taxonomy for addressing the felt experience of interacting in digital
environments. In chapter 8 I delve into a psychoanalytical examination of the audience’s
subjectivity, suggesting and scrutinizing the concept of Digital Gaze.

Hopefully, this research will contribute to encouraging more significant and substantive
discussion around the audience’s experience in interactive documentary and opening new venues
of research within the procedural experience of interacting in digital environments. Although new
research continually emerges focused upon new forms of documentary, the investigation of these
innovative and still relatively uncharted artifacts is a challenge that needs to be addressed at all the
multiple levels of their construction and reception. This dissertation further expands the efforts by
approaching more critically the audience’s engagement and interpretation in interactive
documentary through a philosophical reasoning. Also demonstrates that a greater understanding
and analysis of the audience’s perceptual embodied experience in digital environments may
contribute to opening new lines of investigation within digital media.

2
Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception was originally published as Phénoménologie de la
perception, in 1945 by Édition Gallimard, Paris.

22
 PART I

BACKGROUND AND FRAMEWORK

 CHAPTER 1

SETTING THE FIELD

In order to talk about interactive documentary, one must define what it means this core
concept, before move on analyzing the genre and its field of study. As regards interactive
documentary, some research and theories have been published over the last years (since the
beginnings of 2000’s, to be precise), undertaken by scholars with various backgrounds, from social
sciences to a more technological field of study and, of course, cinema. Each one of these
researchers, depending on their field of study, is necessarily approaching the subject matter from
different perspectives. Therefore, we find a miscellaneous of definitions and understandings about
what is interactive documentary.

Taking advantage of the jumbling and novel field of study, some scholars tend to enclose
several multimedia works that, although have an interactive component and represent the world,
consist in mere conglomerations of media in a digital platform. Whereas Whitelaw (2002) states
that "true stories may be the crucial ‘content’ that makes for a compelling new media experience”
he also stresses that most of the interactive documentaries (at least back in 2002) are mere
“remediations”3 of documentary film language, using new media platforms as a mechanism for
delivering chunks of traditional documentary. Instead of reproducing the conventions of the
traditional, linear, documentary, interactive documentary should “offers its own ways of playing
with reality”.

3
Bolter and Grusin (1998) define “remediation” as the appropriation of content, form or aesthetics of one
medium into another. Remediation is a distinctive characteristic of new digital media, since they are constantly
remediating its predecessors, like internet which borrows its contents and formats from video, photography and print.
Likewise, interactive documentary becomes a “remediation” of both documentary film and internet by borrowing the
aesthetics and form of non-interactive documentary and interactivity from the internet.

25
 With a cinema background, in documentary film to be precise, I’m approaching interactive
documentary as a cinematic event shaped by technology. I do not consider interactive documentary
as the single and only evolution from linear documentary, but more as a transfiguration, a change
in outward form and appearance. Whereas I acknowledge there are substantial differences between
linear documentary film and interactive documentary, I must argue that some documentary
features must remain in the interactive works to consider them documentaries. I mean, interactive
documentaries are substantially different from linear film and technology plays a crucial role in
this emergent field, but the allure for new technologies and all its potentials have been garbling
documentary film. As Almeida and Alvelos (2010) point out, the word "documentary" has been
used abusively to describe any multimedia piece with video features, regardless its nature,
aesthetics, approach and authorial perspective.

In order to consider the use of interactivity in a documentary work, foremost we must

understand if the subject matter is suitable for interact with and secondly what will the interaction
strategy add to the documentary’s concept. Therefore, in the following pages, I investigate
interactive documentary recovering what substantiates documentary film unique. Foremost, I
begin by accounting the historical essence of documentary film and then will move on discussing
how interactive documentary is framed in this dissertation.

What is documentary film

"Dear John Grierson, thanks for the word documentary."

The opening sentence of Mark Cousins’s postscript documentary (Cousins, 2015) in “The
Story of Film: An Odyssey” assigns the authorship of the word “documentary” directly to the
mythical film theorist and producer John Grierson. In 1926, addressing the film Moana, by Robert
Flaherty, Grierson, under the pen name The Moviegoer, wrote: “Of course Moana, being a visual
account of events in the daily life of a Polynesian youth and his family, has documentary value”
(Grierson, 1926, p. 25). Jack Ellis and Betsy McLane believe that Grierson was thinking of Moana
as a factual and authentic record that could serve as evidence of a certain reality, and perhaps

26
“thinking of the French use of documentaire to distinguish serious travelogues from other sorts of
films including mere scenic views” (Ellis & McLane, 2005, p. 3).

By the time, Grierson used the word documentary as an adjective and only later, in the
“First Principles of Documentary” (Grierson, 1934), he adopted the term to address a genre,
arguing that documentary should have an indexical relation with reality, while presenting a socio-
political perspective, and it should make use of dramatic fiction techniques to engage the audience
throughout the film. The two fundamentals defined by Grierson may be considered as conflicting
with each other, but documentary film’s vitality profoundly relies on the tension between these
two foundations.

The tension between a representation of reality and the filmmaker’s subjectivity

encompasses several debates, engaging practitioners and theorists. Philippe Dubois, for instance,
addressing the representation produced by photography and drawing on Baudelaire’s writings,
states that a work of art can’t be simultaneously artistic and documentary, since art is defined as a
way of evading from reality (Dubois, 1983, p. 33). Carl Plantinga tries to narrow the Grierson’s
definition, proposing a characterization of the genre, as an “asserted veridical representation, that
is, as an extended treatment of a subject in one of the moving-image media, most often in narrative,
rhetorical, categorical, or associative form, in which the film’s makers openly signal their
intention” (Plantinga, 2005, p. 114). This pursuit of a certain "truth", claimed by Plantinga, is
contested by other authors, as it is too restrictive and leaves aside films like Nanook of the North
(Flaherty, 1922) since the Flaherty's movie reenacts most of the scenes and even though is
considered the first documentary film in history. Brian Winston considers acceptable a "sincere
and justified reconstruction" (Winston, 2005, p. 182) in documentary, as the camera produces a
mediated reproduction of truth anyway. Winston also highlights that “the issue of such ‘actual’ or
‘pure’ (as it were) is morally uninteresting” and that documentarians are allowed to be “creative”
although must behave ethically (Winston, 2005, p. 181).

Ethical issues are of major significance in documentary film. Bill Nichols (2001, pp. 1–19)
underlines this concern, not only in respect to the social actors who perform in the films, but also
as a commitment with the audience, who expects to be given "true stories" when watching a
documentary and, therefore, believe in the representation on the screen. Unlike fiction films, in

27
documentary, we assume the characters and events exist elsewhere, and our engagement within
the narrative depends on this implied contract we establish with the filmmaker. Therefore, more
than a pursuit of the truth, documentary should present an honest re-presentation of the subjects
(both the social actors and the topic).

However, we can’t ignore the importance of authorship in documentary film practice. The
authorial perspective about the subject matter is the key element for distinguishing the
documentary genre from other forms of non-fiction films, such as journalism newsreel, homemade
family movies, and scientific descriptive records. Although documentary film is deeply rooted in
the concept of indexicality, very often portraying life events, Bill Nichols notices that documentary
“is not a reproduction of reality, it is a representation of the world we already occupy” and, more
importantly, “it stands for a particular view of the world” (Nichols, 2001, p. 20). Also, Michael
Renov points out that documentary form is “the more or less artful reshaping of the world”,
struggling “to find its place within the supposed conflict between truth and beauty” (Renov, 1993,
p. 11).

Grierson acknowledges that “Documentary is a clumsy description” (Grierson, 1934, p.

19) and Bill Nichols struggles to work in a definition, addressing the word as a “fuzzy concept”
(Nichols, 2001, p. 21). Nevertheless, most theorists express their agreement, quoting John Grierson
when he states that documentary film is “the creative treatment of actuality” (Hardy, 1946, p. 13).
What is exciting about documentary film is that the genre is not looking for truthiness or a faithful
representation, but pursuing an artistic perspective of the world, engaging the audience in the
authorial point of view, and achieving its voice:

The fact that documentaries are not a reproduction of reality gives them a voice on
their own. They are a representation of the world, and this representation stands for a
particular view of the world. The voice of documentary, then, is the means by which this
particular point of view or perspective becomes known to us. (Nichols, 2001, p. 43)

The artistic and creative freedom of the authors may bring to the table a “clumsy” and
“fuzzy” concept, but the genre has always been evolving, and documentarians have been
approaching "reality" in multiple perspectives, contributing for a diverse and broad array of
viewpoints and aesthetics. Documentary film seems to be more inclusive, embracing the

28
differences, than ruling out the heterogeneity. Over time, different theorists have been presenting
frameworks to analyze and categorize the multiplicity of subjectivities alive within the
documentary practice.

While other authors, as Erik Barnouw (1993)4 and Michael Renov (1993), present
categorizations of the filmmaker’s subjectivity, Bill Nichols (2001) proposes the most
acknowledged framework to identify documentary films, with six modes of documentary,
according to the film’s styles and approaches.

Nichols follows the chronological development of documentary’s aesthetics, starting in the

1920’s with abstract films, overflowing the avant-garde experimental styles entangled in the
surrealist and modernist movements. These Poetic Mode documentaries are produced mostly with
images framed in strong compositions, mixed, juxtaposed and overlaid, with a rhythmic and
appealing montage, creating visual metaphors and seductively engaging spectators through
emotional figurations of the surrounding world. Such approach allows the film creating a unique
imagery, either through the induction of a reality or exclusively through the form. Far enough from
an emphatic representation of a photographic record, films such as Regen (1929) and The Bridge
(1928), by Joris Ivens, Paris qui Dort (1924), by René Clair, and Le Retour à la Raison (1923), by
Man Ray, play with the poetic experimentation potentials of filmmaking.

With the rise of political tensions in Europe, during the pre II World War period, and the
transition from silent to sound film, documentary was capture in social propaganda, pursuing the
aim of “educating” the audience through disseminating information and persuasion. Diverging
distinctly from the poetic aesthetics, the documentary films framed within the Expository Mode
present a logic and linear structure, typically with a voice-over narration to conveying arguments
about a given reality.

Within such approach, the spoken word prevails over the imagery, and the shots are often
merely illustrative of the rhetorical discourses, rather than allowing the potential of scenes
composed of image fragments, edited for reaching the ultimate exponent of the cinematic narrative.
Works such as the documentary series Why We Fight (Capra, 1952) and the film The Plot That

4
Documentary: a history of the non-fiction film was originally published in 1974 by Oxford University Press.

29
Broke the Plains (Lorentz, 1936) seek, foremost, maintaining narrative continuity based on the
oral argument, through the omnipresent and omniscient “voice of God” commentary to persuade
the audience (Nichols, 2001, p. 105). Other examples of this documentary mode may be found in
Night Mail (Smith, 1935), produced by the John Grierson’s film unit GPO, and Blood of the Beasts
(1949), by Georges Franju, as well as in the National Geographic’s style and BBC’s Wildlife
Specials (ongoing since 1995).

In 1958, Michel Brault and Gilles Groulx directed for the National Film Board of Canada
the film Les Raquetteurs (1958), inaugurating a new and very particular aesthetic approach. A
fluid camera work combined with mostly direct sync sound, without any voice-over neither
interviews, conveyed in the audience the feeling of no interference, as the authors were attempting
to refuse any "imposed truth." In the following years, the technological development of the 16 mm
portable cameras and the Nagra sound recorders allowed new ways of subjectivity. Films like
Primary (1960), by Robert Drew and Richard Leacok, and Lonely Boy (1963), by Wolf Koenig
and Roman Kroitor, as well as Frederick Wiseman’s documentaries, can be framed within the
Observational Mode. Such documentaries tend to simply observe, as a “fly on the wall”, portraying
the subjects in long sequence shots, with only a few cuts, trying to respect the duration of the lived
reality, and, therefore, providing the viewers with the feeling of being "transported" to the place
where the film takes place and of witnessing the events first hand, without the camera and the
director’s mediation.

Bill Nichols raises several ethical issues regarding the observational mode, as the
documentary films that follow such approach are as crafted and constructed as the ones framed
under different modes and, furthermore, provide the audience with a false feeling of an unbiased
account. Partly to resist the myth of no intervention, documentarians embraced social sciences
methods to accomplish what they considered a more honest representation of subjects.
Participatory Mode documentaries actively engage with the subjects in their environment for
extended periods for allowing the filmmaker "going native", and openly present the filmmaker's
role in the filming process. The author Bill Nichols considers that such approach induce in the
audience “the sense of bodily presence, rather than absence”, locating the filmmaker “on the
screen” (Nichols, 2001, p. 116). The documentary becomes not a representation of a particular
world, but a portrait of the encounter between the film crew and the subjects represented.

30
 Stressing this idea of representing the encounter between the filmmaker and the film’s
subjects, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin filmed several talks with Parisian friends and
acquaintances, provoking reactions and including these moments in the film. Cronique d’Un Été
(1961) not only captured what seems to be unmediated moments of reality in the streets, like a
flâneur, as also inquires the documentary form itself. With such approach, unveiling the director’s
interventions, Jean Rouch believed to attain a more truthful representation of the world, which he
entitled of Cinéma Vérité.

Moving on further with this idea of unveiling the cinematic apparatus in the film itself, the
Reflexive Mode turns the focus of the documentary to the film's construction process, interrogating
the cinematic representation. The filmmaker draws attention to the intervention operated during
the filming process, using reflexive techniques to approach the subject. Reflexive mode
documentaries contradict the classical “suspension of disbelief” (Coleridge, 2009)5, by focusing
on the cinematic dispositive and raising the viewer's awareness for the fact that he/she is watching
a film and, therefore, a constructed reality. Bill Nichols mentions as examples certain sequences
of The Man with a Movie Camera (1929), when Dziga Vertov reveals the camera operator filming
and when his wife, Elizaveta Svilova, cuts and edits film strips. We may also consider
documentaries as …No Lies (1973), by Mitchell Block, and Santiago (2007), directed by João
Moreira Salles, as framed within Reflexive Mode.

Whereas Participatory Mode focuses on the subjects and in the Reflexive Mode the director
turns to the audience, Performative Mode highlights the filmmaker’s experience, through a
combination of poetic and rhetoric arguments. The director’s thoughts and experiences become
the core of the subjectivity, underlining the complexity of our knowledge of the world, and
featuring its subjective and affective dimensions. The documentarians also merge real events and
scenarios with imaginary situations, blurring the boundaries between fiction and documentary
film. Issues as past experiences and memories, emotional engagement, values, and beliefs are all
topics at stake in the stylistic construction of the Performative Mode documentaries.

5
The term “suspension of disbelief” was originally coined by the poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor
Coleridge in 1817, to address the state or willingness to suspend one's critical faculties and believe in something
surreal.

31
 By holding a more personal perspective, the Performative Mode was quickly embraced by
minorities, like LGBT, Feminists and Black artists, who found in the documentary, pushed by the
fast-paced technological democratization, a way to reach the audience and questioning the
mainstream political and social conventions, advocating their ideas. The film Tongues Untied
(1989) is a documentary using the director’s Marlon Riggs narration, as a semi-biographical essay,
reciting poems and enacting scenes to address the audience about the black, gay identity. A
significant number of Performative documentaries are also self-representation works, as they
emplace the director’s life (present and past events) and experience at the core of the narrative.
Patricia Aufderheide (1997) entitles these films of self-investigation as “first-person
documentaries”, since they present the first-person voice in testimonial mood, as essayistic diaries,
and engage the viewer into the world of the filmmaker.

The modes proposed by Bill Nichols are not consensual and have been criticized, especially
by Stella Bruzzi (2000) who considers them too rigid. For Bruzzi, the main problem of Nichols'
"family tree" is imposing a false chronological evolution on what is essentially a theoretical
paradigm. Also, Bruzzi considers the recent documentaries are predominantly hybrid and eclectic,
more introspective and subjective, and undermine any effort of compartmentalizing these
documentaries.

But as Nichols himself notes “not all documentaries exhibit a single set of shared
characteristics. Documentary film practice is a realm where the aesthetics have been changing over
time. Alternative approaches are constantly attempted and then adopted by others or abandoned”
(Nichols, 2001, p. 21). Specifically, the most recent documentaries present a fluidity between
modes and even if one of the modes is prominent in a particular documentary, it becomes common
that each film may incorporate characteristics of more than one mode. Moreover, although a mode
of documentary film may be related to a specific period, documentarians may keep expressing
themselves using the same aesthetics and approaches over time.

While the documentary’s narratives will keep evolving in new forms and approaches,
following the triad’s filmmaker – film – audience paradigm described by Nichols (2001, pp. 25–
41), non-fiction stories also drifted from movie theatres and television sets to digital, virtual, media
and found new ways of interacting with the audience. The process of digitization not only allowed

32
the migration of some documentaries from analog media to digital platforms, as lead to the
fragmentation of film and provided the audience the ability for shaping the narrative, organizing a
personalized story, or even contributing with contents for the ultimate documentary work. In short,
we may identify two parallel evolution lines for documentary film: on one hand linear
documentary will keep evolving and finding new ways of subjectivity in movie theatres, on the
other hand by merging documentary film and interactivity we establish new means of
communicating with the audience, providing the viewer with new and different experiences.

What is interactive documentary

If the documentary film realm doesn't collect consensus among scholars, interactive
documentary presents itself even more unsettled, not only because has a relatively short lifespan
but also by its malleable configuration. Add on interactivity to documentary introduces complexity
to the critical discussion around the genre, beginning with the semantics itself. "Web
documentary", "locative documentary", "docu-game" "transmedia documentary", are all catchy
expressions used to identify the genre, with their nuances regarding specific aspects of the digital
works.

Kate Nash, for instance, addresses the field as “webdocumentary” and “webdoc” (Nash,
2012), considering works that are multimedia, interactive, and sometimes cross-platform. Nash
also points out three aspects of interactivity that may be relevant for the audience, when we
implement an interactive component into a documentary: "control over content, the ability to
contribute and the framing of user contributions and, finally, the ability to form relationships and
present one’s case” (Nash, 2012, p. 200).

However, in my perspective, although internet is intrinsically related with the expansion of

documentary film to an interactive form, interactive non-fiction works are not necessarily web-
based. Notwithstanding the importance of medium specificity, interactive documentary should be
regarded as a genre, with its form and aesthetics, regardless of the platform where the work is
distributed. We should take into consideration works as Immemory (1997), by Chris Marker, as an
example of an interactive documentary that is not hosted on the World Wide Web. Exploring the

33
personal and collective memory, the avant-garde French director presents a collection of
documentary still images, videos, paintings and extra features, gathering the contents in a CD Rom.
The viewer is allowed exploring, navigating, choosing and overlaying materials, providing the
feeling of a tour through memory in the apparent disorder of the imaginary, stressing the
importance of memory and oblivion in the digital age.

Therefore, within this dissertation, the core field of study will be addressed as "interactive
documentary", following Mitchell Whitelaw (2002), and considering it's the most proper term to
describe the digital interactive works we analyze within this dissertation. As interactive
documentary we understand a non-fiction work that is a re-presentation of the world we inhabit,
with an indexical relation with the subjects represented, conveying an authorial perspective about
the subject matter and, such as Galloway highlights, “that uses interactivity as a core part
of its delivery mechanism” (2007, pp. 330–331).

Mitchell Whitelaw (2002) describes interactive documentaries as works that open up the
narrative’s structure, which is at the core of non-interactive documentary, and challenge the
principle of narrative coherence. Instead of providing a single unfolding prolonged path to fruition,
interactive documentary presents a multilinear structure of divergent and alternative routes,
encompassing an array of choices. Such structures may be compared to a maze (Eco, 1984, pp.
80–81), a multicursal labyrinth, with several navigable branching paths and multiple possible
pathways in which it can be transversed. In the case of a more complex and less centralized
navigation architecture the analogy can be a network or, as Deleuze and Guattari call it, a Rhizome
(2000)6 of multiple non-hierarchical nodes with no beginning and no end. In a rhizomatic design,
information (or contents) is always in between, as an assemblage of items instead of a causal-effect
organization of episodes, resisting to a chronological progression.

While the structure of a film is determined by the sequence of its elements, in an interactive
documentary, moving towards postmodernism, the story is fragmented in dispersed pieces to allow

6
Rhizome is a term originally used by Deleuze and Guattari in 1974, later revised in A Thousand Plateaus,
addressing a multiple, non-hierarchical and non-centralized entry and exit points in data representation and
interpretation.

34
the manipulation and navigation through the segments. Interactive documentary disrupts the
narrative logic and follows the Lev Manovich’s concept of database:

As a cultural form, database represents the world as a list of items, and it refuses
to order this list. In contrast, a narrative creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly
unordered items (events). Therefore, database and narrative are natural enemies.
Competing for the same territory of human culture, each claims an exclusive right to make
meaning out of the world. (Manovich, 2001, p. 199)

In order to allow the navigation through a multilinear story, the interactive documentary's
creator must divide the film into small pieces, fragment the story and disrupt the linear unfolding
narrative. This postmodern form of documentary film presents some critical problems, namely
questions as "granularity" (Miles, 2014) and "temporality."

Since interactive documentary is compound of discrete elements, the granularity (Miles,

2014) of the digital object may interfere in a cohesive meaning. In other words, "if we explode and
open the structure, how can we be sure that the story is being conveyed” (Whitelaw, 2002) and
that the pieces will create a significant meaning? Filmmakers must understand “how things that
are fragmentary wholes can be presented and related to each other in a way that enables the
production of a new and comprehensible whole” (Miles, 2014, p. 71). That is, the navigation
throughout the non-linear structure still needs to convey a story and the intended point-of-view.

Furthermore, as Adrian Miles points out, the granularity of interactive documentary may
comprehend self-contained parts “to the extent that they make sense by themselves as is” (Miles,
2014, p. 74) providing their closure. Therefore, an interactive non-fiction story may comprehend
a combination of fragments with a fixed duration while allows the navigation through contents,
creating a malleable and personalized temporality. Whereas each viewer is free to interact with the
documentary’s contents, manipulating the documentary’s flow and altering the length of the
narrative, in most interactive documentary works still watches some linear segments throughout
the experience.

Consequently, interactive documentaries blur the boundaries between linear and non-linear
narratives, “heterochrone” and “homochrone” experiences (Gaudreault, Marion, & Barnard,

35
2015), within the same artwork. Instead of presenting themselves under the “heterochrone thesis”,
in which the time of reception is independent from the medium and determined by the media
utterance itself, or the “homochrone antithesis”, in which the media program a fixed duration of
reception, these new media objects moved forward “to reach a synthesis we might describe as
polychrone” (Gaudreault et al., 2015, p. 79). The temporality of the narrative becomes malleable
and manipulated in the moment of reception, comprising various rhythms which intrude in time
instead of succeeding one another in space.

By introducing interactivity to documentary, we are providing to audiences greater power

and autonomy, since these artworks demand from the public a physical action to activate all the
features available. This is, in fact, a consequence of the emergence of new technologies, according
to Jenkins (2006b). No longer confined to watching and interpreting, the viewers are allowed to
modify, interact with, choose from and contribute to the creation of a different narrative, a narrative
that is rebuilt each time it is accessed. Interactive documentaries may be compared to what
Umberto Eco coined as “open works” (1989). Addressing the aesthetics of some literature and
music performances in the 1960’s, Umberto Eco states that the poetics of openness marks a
profound shift in the relationship between artist and public, requiring of the audience a higher
degree of collaboration and involvement than had ever been required by traditional art (Eco, 1989,
pp. 1–23).

Not only “the viewers themselves can be given the opportunity of choosing what material
to see and in what order” (Miller, 2004, p. 345) as they can manipulate, re-arrange and contribute
with contents for the documentary. More than an “emancipated spectator” (Rancière, 2014)7, in
interactive non-fiction films we face a participatory audience who shares an intersubjective process
of meaning-making since the interactive works combine multiple perspectives into a shared point-
of-view. In interactive documentary realm, we are closer to what Laura Mulvey considers a
"possessive spectator", who holds power to select his favorite scenes, retaining on the moment to
possess it (Mulvey, 2007, pp. 161–180). Since nowadays the spectator may interfere in the film’s

7
The “emancipated spectator” was first published as Le spectateur émancipé, in 2008 by Edition La Fabrique.

36
flow, discontinuing its straight development in non-linear courses, and freezing the movement in
image, for Mulvey the viewer achieves the domination of the film’s narrative (Mulvey, 2012).

Albeit we are moving on from a narrative domination to an experience generation, by

eliminating a fixed sequence of events, interactive documentary doesn’t eliminate narrative. The
alignment of fragments still grants the perception of a time-based sequential experience and affords
the audience with "cinematic ways of seeing the world, of structuring time, of narrating a story,
and of linking one experience to the next" (Manovich, 2001, pp. 78–79). In interactive
documentary, when the user navigates throughout the contents it is also constructing an ephemeral
narrative with a beginning, a middle and an end, creating a sense of continuity. In such structures,
as Jewitt argues, “there is no internal grammar to be broken — there is no essential ‘wrong order’
because there is no prior reading path” (Jewitt, 2004, p. 187). In an interactive documentary, the
viewer enjoys several paths and possibilities of access, fostering a process of participatory
meaning-making.

Overall, Interactive documentary presents us with new relationships between audience and
text, as it disturbs the established paradigm of authorship that has been fundamental for the
documentary realm, according to several theorists (Barnouw, 1993; Ellis & McLane, 2005;
Nichols, 2001; Renov, 1993). Not only interactive documentary intrudes into the production
practices and stresses the filmmaker considering and conceptualizing the artwork from a different
perspective, as interactivity refashions the articulation between director and spectator. Thus, the
role of the spectator is changing in unprecedented ways, and since the audience's interpretation is
the aim of this dissertation, we will proceed to explore the theme in the following chapters.

Such as Lev Manovich notes “by passing these choices to the user, the author also passes
the responsibility to represent the world and the human condition in it" (Manovich, 2001, p. 44).
Notwithstanding the director may be partly giving up the control over her or his artwork, passing
onto the viewers the ability to shape the narrative and including their own contents, we must
acknowledge the creator still is an essential element in the communication process. It’s up to the
author defining the theme and the reality represented, setting the rules for the interaction
experience, designing patterns and roadmaps, and providing the platform for the interaction. After

37
all, the filmmaker becomes a curator who settles the guidelines for participation and only allows
audience to interfere in certain aspects of the work.
In the case of these new digital artifacts, we must make a distinction between the narrative,
which represents the virtual path followed by audiences to access the content, and the content
itself. As most multimedia works, interactive documentaries tend to combine still with moving
images, diegetic and non-diegetic sound, graphics, text, data visualization and animation, all in the
same documentary, and sometimes displayed simultaneously. When such juxtaposition of images
occurs, we encounter what Lev Manovich has called the "spatial montage” (2001, pp. 322–326).
Instead of an unfolding sequence of shots presented on the screen one at a time, interactive non-
fiction works place several frames or layers of media contiguously or overlapping as “an
alternative to traditional cinematic temporal montage, replacing traditional sequential mode with
a spatial one” (Manovich, 2001, p. 322).

More than a convergence of media (Jenkins, 2006a), interactive documentary plays with
the combination of media languages, which provides the intermediality of the interactive
experience. The work becomes a combination of different types of media, merged to culminate in
intermedial cinema, layering images and sounds as a process of transfiguration of both the medium
and the language. The audience is encouraged to interplay between media as may interchange
among the juxtaposition of several layers of textual and non-textual meaning which overlap during
the interaction and interpretation processes. Drawing upon Ágnes Pethő’s writings on
intermediality (2011), the viewer navigates in the “heterotopia” space in-between the border zone
across media, as a passageway from one media towards another (2011, pp. 42–43). Although Pethő
describes “heterotopia” as an impossible place, the intermediality across media may be brought to
the audience's consciousness employing self-reflexive practices, which raises the awareness for
the media language itself.

The wide variety of forms within interactive documentary, just as previously described,
has allowed the genre to develop new modes of subjectivity, new approaches to its subject matter
and new relationships with the audience. The works produced over the last 15 years present an
array of aesthetics challenging practitioners and scholars to identify styles and patterns across the
genre. The emergence, changeful and uncertain form of interactive documentary compelled some

38
attempts to make sense of this field of study, as well as to define it, proposing taxonomies to
classify its nuances.

Drawing on McMillan’s “traditions of interactivity” (McMillan, 2002), Dayna Galloway

(Galloway et al., 2007) proposes four categories considering the communication between audience
and interface in interactive documentary: the passive-adaptive, the active-adaptive, the immersive
and the expansive categories. Within the “passive-adaptive category” (Galloway et al., 2007, pp.
331–333) the documentary’s content is constantly changing and adapting to unconscious responses
from the users, such as biometric levels. For Galloway, such category “would be heavily reliant
on technology that is capable of acquiring and constructing useable data based on the viewer’s
physical reactions to the narrative” (Galloway et al., 2007, p. 331). Although the passive-adaptive
category apparently demands an insanely amount of documentary segments, the development of
Artificial Intelligence could create an evolving model, generating content “on the fly” throughout
the experience.

On its hand, the “active-adaptive category” (Galloway et al., 2007, p. 333) presents a
collection of contents and demands from the user a physical action to input her or his choices, to
display the documentary's contents. While physically interacting with the documentary, the
audience can “both exploit and achieve an informed awareness of the procedures for exploring,
altering and experiencing content” (Galloway et al., 2007, p. 333). Although such category may
also include an Artificial Intelligence component, the number of options is typically limited to a
range of contents available.

As for the “immersive category” (Galloway et al., 2007, pp. 333–334) is regarded, the
audience is placed into the world represented and is absorbed into the narrative, achieving a state
of “suspension of disbelief” (Coleridge, 2009). Nevertheless, for Galloway, while the user forgets
about the “real” world, he is also “empowered with the ability to navigate and interact with the
environment through actual physical interactions” (Galloway et al., 2007, p. 334). In order to
enhance a sensorial immersiveness, it is suggested the use of immersive technologies, as Virtual
Reality and Augmented Reality. The author also considers the immersive category is the pinnacle
of engagement of the four proposed.

39
 Finally, comparing the interaction model with Wikipedia, Galloway proposes the
“expansive category” (Galloway et al., 2007, pp. 334–336). Within the expansive systems, the
audience is invited to contribute with contents for a collective documentary, with varying degrees
of collaboration, from manipulating and re-arranging the contents to uploading user-generated
content. The most significant feature of the expansive category is that the system “is driven by its
users, with rules, content and potential methods for interaction emerging from the community”
(Galloway et al., 2007, p. 335), and fostering a multiplicity of subjectivities about a determined
subject.

On her turn, Kate Nash (Nash, 2012) approaches interactive documentary’s specificities
by analyzing the different categorical structures, looking for patterns across several web-based
documentaries and categorizing the interactive works under the following taxonomy: narrative
webdoc, categorical webdoc and collaborative webdoc. For Nash, “narrative webdocs” (2012, pp.
203–204) are stories structured in a multilinear way, struggling to combine non-linearity with the
director’s control of narrative. The interactive documentaries under this category, while present a
non-linear chronology of events, allowing the audience to select documentary's segments, also
include central key contents to guide the users through a specific story and create a causal effect
throughout the experience. In the author's words, "the narrative webdoc is structured so as to
facilitate narrativization" (Nash, 2012, p. 203), similar to what happens in non-interactive
documentaries. The narrative webdoc’s structure can be found in interactive stories supported in a
journey’s strategy in which the users embody the character’s role and follow a sequence of events
to achieve a final purpose, such as The Whale Hunt (Harris, 2007) and Prison Valley (Dufresne &
Brault, 2010).

Whereas narrative webdocs try to hold control of a particular narrative's sequence,

“categorical webdocs” (Nash, 2012, pp. 204–206) are collections of contents with no intention of
telling a story. “In the categorical webdoc the temporal ordering of elements is less important than
the comparisons and associations the user is invited to make between the documentary’s elements”
(Nash, 2012, p. 205). Usually, the items are compounded by theme, location, subject, or another
filter, and the users dive in the digital archive until they exhaust their curiosity. Documentaries as
Out My Window (Cizek, 2010a) and Waterlife (McMahon, 2009) may illustrate the categorical
webdoc group. Both the narrative webdocs and the categorial webdocs may be framed under the

40
"active-adaptive category" proposed by Galloway since the two Nash's models demand an action
from the audience to input an order and get an answer from the system.

Third and finally, the collaborative webdocs (Nash, 2012, pp. 206–207), such as the name
highlights, gather user's contributions in various forms about a pre-determined theme, fostering an
intersubjective perspective about the subject matter. The audience may be called to contribute with
video and photography contents, testimonials, and even in the editing process. In these works, the
director or team of creators provide a platform for the documentary and establish the rules for
participation, and the community offers the contents to feed an evolving archive, similar to the
“expansive category” suggested by Galloway. “The meaning of the documentary for those who
participate is bound up with the relationships that form through their contributions” (Nash, 2012,
p. 207). The Goa Hippy Tribe (Devas, 2011), an interactive documentary using the social media
platform Facebook for assembling contributions through the internet, is the main example quoted
by Nash to represent the collaborative webdocs.

Lastly, just as Bill Nichols (2001) defined the fundamental modes of documentary for
traditional non-fiction films according to their aesthetic approach to reality, Sandra Gaudenzi
(2012) proposes her own modes for classifying interactive documentaries, taking into
consideration the kind of interactive strategy behind each digital work, such as the “conversational
mode”, the “hypertext mode”, the “participative mode” and the “experiential mode”.

Gaudenzi frames under the “conversational mode” (2012, p. 126) any documentary that
establishes a “dialogue” between user and computer, creating the feeling of an endless
conversation. Such as in some video-games, the audience is placed in a virtual world and has the
illusion of navigating freely through an environment of infinite contents. This kind of
documentaries is based on Human-Computer-Interaction and inspired by Andy Lippman's concept
of interactivity. As stated in his interview with Stewart Brand (1987), Lippman considers that
interactivity should be grounded in five fundamental principles: (i) interruptibility, i.e., the action
can be interrupted at any time by the user; (ii) graceful degradation, i.e., an unanswered question
should lead to a smooth transition; (iii) limited look-ahead, i.e., the platform should respond in real
time to the user's orders; (iv) no default, i.e., the conversation must seem unpredictable and not

41
based on formatted responses; and (v) impression of infinite database, i.e., the interaction must
seem endless, to cause a perception in the user that possibilities extend to infinity.

Although the “conversational mode” proposed by Gaudenzi implies an external input to

activate the navigation through the contents, the kind of interactive system involved in such mode
is similar to the category suggested by Galloway as passive-adaptive.

According to Gaudenzi, the most common interactive strategy for documentary is the
“hypertext mode” (2012, p. 127). In this type of works, audiences are invited to trace their path
through multiple narrative choices, triggering hyperlinks to jump from one content to the other.
Similar to a CD or DVD menu structure, audiences can access a pre-existing archive of videos and
other content in the order of their choice, navigating through the options available in a pre-existing
database. Gaudenzi traces this kind of interactivity to the project Moss Landing (Florin, 1989)
when Apple Multimedia Lab gathered videos from the Moss Landing town (California) in a CD-
Rom. Both the narrative and the categorical webdoc’s structures, suggested by Nash (2012), as
well as the active-adaptive category by Galloway (2007) share similarities with the hypertext mode
described by Sandra Gaudenzi.

“With the increasing popularity of Web 2.0 platforms, documentary makers are
increasingly inviting content created by fans” (O’Flynn, 2012, p. 142) allowing audiences to
participate in the documentary’s narrative, adding opinions, stories and even uploading video
content. The documentaries that hold the possibility of gathering multiple inputs were defined by
Gaudenzi as operating in a “participative mode” (2012, p. 127). Fed by Glorianna Davenport’s
concept of “Evolving Documentary” (Davenport & Murtaugh, 1995), Gaudenzi considers multiple
possible ways for participation when the user is called “to create an open and evolving database”
(Aston & Gaudenzi, 2012, p. 127). In essence, the participative mode is outlined in the “expansive
category” (Galloway et al., 2007, pp. 334–336) as well as in the “collaborative webdoc”(Nash,
2012, pp. 206–207).

Another mode of interactive documentary proposed by Gaudenzi is the “experiential

mode” (2012, pp. 127–128). Such works base their interaction strategy on the emerging
geolocation technologies that offer personalized information and content according to the
audience’s geographic location, also known as locative media. These digital documentaries place

42
the user in a physical place, between the virtual and the physical, triggering in the users an affective
relationship with surrounding environment and creating “an experience that challenges their senses
and their enacted perception of the world” (Aston & Gaudenzi, 2012, p. 128). Although the
"immersive category" proposed by Galloway comprises the use of virtual and augmented reality
to interact with the documentary's content and the "experiential mode", proposed by Gaudenzi,
doesn’t, both categorizations present a mediated interaction with the real world, using technology
to enhance the audience’s ability to experience the space.

Albeit the three taxonomies proposed by Dayna Galloway, Kate Nash and Sandra Gaudenzi
are not equivalent, we may draw a parallel regarding their similarities:

43
Table 1. correlation between modes (Gaudenzi, 2013), categories (Galloway, 2013) and categorical structures (Nash,
2012) of interactive documentary.

Modes of documentary Categories of documentary Categorical structures

by Sandra Gaudenzi by Dayna Galloway by Kate Nash

Conversational mode Passive-adaptive category

Narrative webdoc
Hypertext mode Active-adaptive category
Categorical webdoc

Participative mode Expansive category Collaborative webdoc

Experiential mode Immersive category

Whereas Sandra Gaudenzi and Dayna Galloway frame their studies through an interaction
perspective, encompassing both the navigation structure and the process of interacting with the
audience, Kate Nash presents a categorization based on the arrangement of contents within the
interactive documentaries resulting in a more restricted analysis.

In spite of the conversational mode and the passive-adaptive category diverge in the sort
of agency provided to the viewer, since Gaudenzi’s mode implies a physical action for displaying
the documentary’s contents and Galloway’s category is based in unconscious inputs, as bio-
feedback, both definitions are supported by a Human-Computer-Interaction design and comprise
an evolving structure generated in real-time by the computer, fostering in the audience the feeling
of endless contents.

As regards the hypertext mode, the active-adaptive category and the narrative and
categorical webdocs are concerned, all the interactive documentaries outlined within these
categories present a digital archive of contents, providing the audience a multilinear navigation,
regardless the non-linear architecture model that supports each work. In any of these four
classifications, the documentary’s creator offers a platform with a closed database of contents and

44
allows the audience to interact with the artwork, following pathways using triggering hyperlinks
to activate his choices.

The participative mode, the expansive category and the collaborative webdocs may be
considered the same form. The three terminologies proposed by their authors correspond to a
collaborative work in which the viewers are invited to contribute with contents for an interactive
documentary’s evolving database.

Lastly, the experiential mode presents some variations when compared with the immersive
category. While Sandra Gaudenzi considers as experiential interactive documentaries the artworks
that place the user physically in a certain geographical space, allowing him an interaction with the
surrounding environment, Dayna Galloway includes within the immersive category documentaries
that use virtual reality and augmented reality devices to enhance in the audience the feeling of
presence in the world represented in the documentary. Nonetheless, the documentaries framed
within both categories explore the relationship of audience with a space whether the viewer is
displaced for a physical environment or to a virtual world. Also, both definitions infer the audience
uses technology in order to interact with the space and activate events within the experience.

The three studies present an evolution, following the development of interactive

documentaries form, and may be regarded as complementing each other. Notwithstanding the
importance and contribution of each one of them, within this dissertation, we will address the
interactive non-fiction works using predominantly Sandra Gaudenzi’s classification, i.e., the
modes of interactive documentary, since we understand this taxonomy is the one that allows a
closer reading of the audience’s interaction with the digital works.

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 CHAPTER 2

FROM SPECTATORSHIP TO INTERACTIVE AUDIENCES

Sitting at my desk, using the mouse to click on the computer screen; curled up on the couch,
swiping my finger across the tablet; bent over the cell phone at the subway station, listening to the
soundtrack on my headphones. These are the natural environments for merging with interactive
documentary. It’s quite a different description from the one that Roland Barthes shared in his essay
“Leaving the Movie Theatre” (1975). In the office, in the waiting room, in the subway, there’s no
“twilight reverie”, there’s no “darkness”, no state of “hypnosis”, as Barthes describes his theatrical
experience (1975, p. 419).

Not only does Interactive Documentary change the spectator’s role, by providing her or him
the chance to interact with the contents and participate in the narrative construction, it disrupts the
cinematic experience itself. We must acknowledge that different modes of exhibition shape the
spectator’s perception and interpretation of the film. When we sit in a movie theatre, as spectators,
we are absorbed by the world represented on the screen, and accept the rules of engaging
emotionally with the images and sounds projected. On the other hand, in interactive documentary
the spectator is surrounded by non-related film stimulus and is frequently requested to take an
action within the narrative, interrupting a certain state of “suspension of disbelief” (Coleridge,
2009).

Watching and Interpreting

While the audience in interactive documentary has been portrayed as active rather than
passive due to the form demanding a physical action from the viewer, more conventional
spectatorship theories of non-interactive cinema never considered audiences as completely passive

47
either. Judith Mayne, for instance, believes that “spectatorship is not only the act of watching a
film, but also the ways one takes pleasure in the experience, or not” (1993, p. 1). Meanwhile, Edgar
Morin (2005)8 states that the spectator projects him or herself onto and identifies with what is
being seen, and thus charges it with an entirely personal value. In watching a film, a second movie
rises in the mind of a spectator; and the number of films can be multiplied by the number of
spectators. Therefore, “the issue of spectatorship is particularly pertinent and problematic for
discussion of the cinema and its apparatus since motion pictures depend upon so many
technological, industrial and perceptual factors” (Cook & Bernink, 1999, p. 323).

However it was only after the 1970s that moviegoers become central to the study of film and
its effects. The cinematic spectator deals simultaneously with both audio and visual content,
processing and interpreting the film both at conscious and at unconscious levels and embracing
processes of perception, meaning, and attention. Researchers have considered audiences from
manifold perspectives, including social, economic, geographic and psychological conditions. The
subject, or spectator, emerged as a fundamental element to film theory when Althusser’s notion of
“interpellation” (1971) was adopted. This notion leads to an understanding of the viewer as subject
responding to a pre-existing structure, i.e. a film, which “interpellates the spectator, so constituting
him or her as a subject” (Lapsley & Westlake, 1988, p. 12). In a political perspective,9 the viewer
becomes a subject shaped by and responding to cinematic devices, constituting the viewers as
ideological subjects.

From a structuralist perspective, films were considered as structures with self-contained

meaning, autonomous from the spectator’s perspective and from the reception conditions. Drawing
upon Ferdinand Saussure’s language model for analyzing the textual structure of narrative Roland
Barthes (1970) analyzed the short story “Sarrasine”, by Honoré de Balzac. Barthes distinguishes
how the author engages the readers in specific ways, organizing the story’s meaning and driving
the receptors throughout the narrative. Additionally, Barthes proposed five different codes of
meaning, producing an innovative analytical model that refused a single unifying thematic

8
Edgar Morin’s book The Imaginary Man first appeared in 1956, when the moviegoing experience was
generally neglected for scholarly consideration.
9
Althusser drew his concept of “interpellation” in the Marxist theories which look at the subjects as an
ideological result of state control.

48
meaning within the filmic narrative and introduced a return to a more structuralist form of
narratology. For Barthes, the narrative presents a plurality of coded connotations and, turning his
attention to the reader, Barthes acknowledges that the receptor of the narrative entails the
subjectivity of a “plurality of other texts, of codes which are infinite or, more precisely, lost”
(Wolfreys, 1999, p. 34).

Moving beyond structuralism, Barthes wrote a personal statement as moviegoer, describing

his feelings and thoughts during and after the cinematic experience, recorded in “Leaving the
Movie Theatre” (Barthes, 1975). In it he describes a state of hypnosis, in the psychoanalytical
sense,10 when he sees himself in the darkness of the theatre between anonymous bodies:

I am confined with the image as if I were held in that famous dual relation which
establishes the image-repertoire. The image is there, in front of me, for me: coalescent (its
signified and its signifier, melted together), analogical, total, pregnant; it is a perfect lure.
(Barthes, 1975, pp. 347–8)

Glued to the screen, “lost, in the engulfing mirror” (Barthes, 1975, p. 349), Barthes confesses
his fascination with the narcissistic cinematic experience which exceeds the image projected.

Although the parallel between film and language is broadly accepted among structuralist
authors, there are those who debate its synthesis. Christian Metz (1991)11 also analyzed film under
the language framework of semiology, as a communication process which organizes its codes
according to a set of cultural rules. However, Metz would not establish an equivalence between
words and moving-images. He argued that, unlike a language in the strict linguistic sense, Cinema
cannot be broken down and analyzed shot by shot to uncover rigorous grammar and syntax rules.
Instead, cinema should be investigated as a langage12; films construct their own meaning systems

10
Whereas Roland Barthes always had an ambiguous relation with psychoanalysis, his text “Leaving the
Movie Theatre” (1975) is imbued with psychoanalytical concepts, especially Lacanian terminology, as the “state of
hypnosis”, the trio of “RSI (Real-Symbolic-Imaginary)” and the “mirror stage”.
11
Christian Metz’s book Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema is a translation from his work Essais sur
la signification au cinema, originally published in 1968 by Klincksieck, Paris.
12
Christian Metz draws this distinction upon the concepts developed by the linguistic Ferdinand Saussure,
who distinguishes langue, the individual utterance of the linguistic and grammar rules, from langage, the meaningful

49
through the articulation of sequences of shots and the organization of images into a narrative
structure. Metz proposed a filmic syntax to analyze and classify segments of the narrative, with a
taxonomical scheme of binary oppositions (Metz, 1991, pp. 119–146) that quickly became a
landmark for film analysis. He called this work the “grande syntagmatique”.

After the mid 1970s, film criticism adopted the post-structuralist view of the subject (as
understood through the writings of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (2006)), and turned its
attention from the cinematic text to analyzing the encounter between the text and the viewer, as
well as trying to understanding the subsequent effects of movie going. Judith Mayne (1993)
establishes a parallel between this shift in focus of film and literary criticism towards the reader,
and the similar trend in philosophy towards the subject. Mayne also states that “the move from
structuralism to post-structuralism is generally seen as one of the most significant shifts in
contemporary critical theory” (Mayne, 1993, p. 17).

Christian Metz was one of the authors who adopted a post-structuralist approach after his
“grande syntagmatique”, along with Jean-Louis Baudry and Laura Mulvey. Drawing upon
psychoanalytical theories, these three film theorists turned their attention to the cinematic
institution and its apparatus, investigating how the spectators create meaning during the film-
watching experience. For them it is the subject, or spectator, who gives meaning to the object, i.e.
the film, while experiencing nuances of pleasure, such as fantasy, desire and dream. Central to
psychoanalytic theories of spectator is the “mirror stage”13. This is the psychological stage, as
described by Jacques Lacan (2006), in which a child recognizes her or himself in the mirror and
creates an identification with its own image, developing the notion of Ego. In the psychoanalytic
theory of the spectator, this stage is compared to the concept of screen-mirror14 in which the
spectator identifies oneself with the movie screen.

use of the language to communicate a message. For Metz (1991), film may be analyzed as a discourse, towards a
“language of art”, which produces meaning for the spectator through a filmic discourse.
13
The concept of the “mirror stage” was firstly outlined by Lacan at the Fourteenth International
Psychoanalytical Congress at Marienbad in 1936. Whereas by the time he considered the mirror stage as a moment in
the life of the infant, in the early 1950’s he argued that such moment represents a permanent structure of subjectivity.
14
The concept of ‘screen-mirror’ elaborates around how the spectator identifies oneself within the movie,
either with the camera (primary identification), with the screen or with the characters. Nonetheless, this concept is

50
 From this perspective, the meaning of the text is not something contained within the text that
needs to be uncovered; instead, it must be constructed by the spectator from cues provided by the
text. Jean-Louis Baudry (1974) states that, while facing the cinema screen the spectator returns to
a childish moment, projecting an ideal self in the mirrored image. However, Baudry does not
establish a direct correlation between screen and mirror, since the screen reflects images but not
“reality” (1974, p. 41). For him, the screen-mirror creates a filmic “ego” through which the
spectator projects the Self in the film world. Likewise, Christian Metz (1982) believes that
identification is the “primal form” of recognition for the spectator in the film diegetic world and
that this regressive state to an early age may help the viewer dealing with the formation of his own
subjectivity, as proposed in the Imaginary Signifier (Metz, 1982). However, for Metz, the
spectator’s identification also lies outside the screen-mirror, allowing the viewer a certain degree
of freedom to find her or his space within the world represented on screen.

Laura Mulvey (1975, pp. 6–18) extends the identification process by considering that during
the watching process the spectator interplays “the matrix of the imaginary, of
recognition/misrecognition and identification, and hence of the first articulation of the ‘I’, of
subjectivity” (Mulvey, 1975, p. 836). Mulvey also devoted her research to female representation
in film.15 By analyzing classic Hollywood movies, she identified the female bodies on the screen
as objects of desire for the voyeuristic masculine pleasure, activating in the spectator what she has
coined as the “male gaze”.

In this subject-apparatus spectatorship theory the viewer is analyzed as producing meaning

at an unconscious level, framing the individuals under a structure of the spectator’s
“subjectification”. However, Judith Mayne (1993) refuses labeling the spectator as a subject, a
unified audience constructed by the film. Mayne underlines the difference between “subject” and
“viewer”, as she believes that subjects are not real people who attend movies, but rather a position

central for the psychoanalytic theories of spectatorship which believes the spectator is provided with the illusion of
power and control over the screen images, positively contributing for a coherent and omnipotent Ego.
15
Laura Mulvey’s essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), originally published in 1975 in the
influential journal Screen, is widely accepted as one of the foundational texts in feminist film theory.

51
constructed by the institutions of cinema. Therefore, “spectatorship occurs at precisely those
spaces where ‘subjects’ and ‘viewers’ rub against each other” (Mayne, 1993, p. 37).

Emerging as a reaction against the psychoanalytic-semiotic theoretical paradigm, the 1980s

saw cognitivist scholars look at spectators as individuals capable of producing meaning at a
conscious level. Combining and empirical approach and flourishing interdisciplinary research,
these scholars drew upon cognitive science, as well as literary studies, philosophy, linguistics,
anthropology and even neuroscience to present multifarious studies instead of a unified theory.
Cognitivism was introduced in film studies by David Bordwell with Narration in the Fiction Film
(Bordwell, 1985). Avoiding the term “Cognitivist Science”, Bordwell (1989) prefers describing
his work as drawing upon a “Cognitivist approach” in which the spectator uses cognitive processes
of perception such as memory, recognition, comprehension, and inference-making, to construct a
representation of the world. According to the cognitivist theory, during the film viewing process
the moviegoer uses both innate capacities and acquired skills, building upon natural sensory
processes and cultural knowledge to interpret the film.

Likewise following a cognitivist approach instead of drawing upon a psychoanalytic concept

of identification, Noël Carroll prefers talking about recognizability (1988). For Carroll, the
spectator possesses the inherent capacity of recognizing the mimetic world represented on screen,
through spectatorial processes of perception and comprehension. According to the cognitivist
theorists, spectators make meaning out of a film through a combination of their objective
experiences of the world and embracing their previous experiences of movie-going to identify
patterns such as film continuity, diegetic, and non-diegetic sound, thereby managing a response to
the film’s stimulus each and every moment, at a conscious level.

Merleau-Ponty (2002) takes a phenomenological viewpoint, where the issue of spectatorship

is not so much a matter of consciousness as it is of perception. During the film viewing process
the spectator receives sensory information that speaks to all the senses at once and shapes the
perception of the film, working just like our own perception of “reality”. As a sensory experience,
film is perceived within a complex structure of consciousness, such as concepts of attention,
temporal and spatial awareness, and even self-awareness. As being part of the world, the spectator

52
is an embodied being and the Self plays different roles during the film, as viewing and listening,
interpreting, thinking, acting, all of them contributing for a sense of subjectivity.

Vivian Sobchack (1992) argues that the spectator receives the film not only through the eyes
but by feeling the experience flowing through the entire body. Specifically addressing the
experience of documentary film, Sobchack (1999) introduces a phenomenological model of
cinematic identification that she calls documentary consciousness (p. 241). Drawing upon both
Merleau-Ponty’s filmologie and Jean-Pierre Meunier’s modes of spectatorial consciousness,
Vivian Sobchack (1999) considers the viewer’s identification with the narrative highly subjective
and dependent on prior knowledge and predispositions. However, she believes that in documentary
film the spectator sees through the screen and is capable of focusing on the world represented, due
to the indexical relation of the images with what we understand as “reality”. The spectator is aware
the people and events in the film exist elsewhere and thus, “in the documentary experience, our
consciousness is more necessarily tied to and determined by the specificity of images given on
screen and the increased attention that must be paid them” (Sobchack, 1999, p. 244).

Following the progression of these spectatorship theories, the spectator has been portrayed
as increasingly more and more conscious, integral and capable of decision-making while watching
a film. Also, scholars have been enhancing the degree of complexity in the research of
spectatorship, encompassing diverse fields of study and investigating beyond behavioral
approaches. Far from passive, the spectator perceives, identifies, interprets and fills in the gaps as
a film unfolds and "works actively on many levels simultaneously, consciously and unconsciously,
processing visual and audio cues" (Cook & Bernink, 1999, p. 323).

Interrupting the fluidity of narrative

With the introduction of VCR, DVD players and digital technologies, cinema became a
“heterochrone” experience (Gaudreault et al., 2015),16 manipulated by a “fetishistic spectator”

16
Gaudreault and Barnard (2015) define as “heterochrone” media the ones in which the time of reception is
determined and manipulable by the audience, as opposed to a “homochrone” situation in which the temporality is
incooporated in the medium utterance.

53
(Mulvey, 2007) who holds the power of changing the cinematic temporality and the film’s
sequence. When watching a film from a videocassette, the spectator becomes able to manipulate
the narrative and profoundly transforms her or his own cinematic experience:

in the sense of what is being seen, when the projected images are no longer bigger
than life and are manipulable through fast-forward, freeze-frame, and every kind of
fingertip control. Such viewing is no longer an occasion to which you must adjust your
attention. With it, cinema culture comes to be on tap, manipulable at will. The videocassette
provides a different psychic framework for the film. (Heim, 1986, p. 118)

Although this manipulation fulfills a certain fetishistic desire and pleasure in the spectator,
the compulsion for delaying the film, extracting specific scenes or images from the flow of the
story and freezing the frames in order to possess them, may be considered an act of violence against
the cohesion of the narrative (Mulvey, 2007). The viewer infringes the normative forms of cinema
to take pleasure out of the experience, becoming what Laura Mulvey (2007) describes as a
“possessive spectator”:

(…) this form of spectatorship may work perversely against the grain of the film, but
it is also a process of discovery, a fetishistic form of textual analysis. When narrative
fragments, and its protagonists are transformed into still, posed images to which movement
can be restored, the rhythm of a movie changes. (Mulvey, 2007, p. 166)

The difference between heterochrone experiences and interactive documentaries is that the
former were created to be watched sequentially, even if the viewers manipulate and transgress the
original purpose of the film watching, while interactive digital objects are conceived and created
à priori to be manipulated and re-arranged. While the “possessive spectator” is able to manipulate
the film’s sequence and disrupt its temporality, it is only with interactive cinema that the spectator
achieves the condition of user, selecting and appropriating the information that interested heror
him most, which does not necessarily meet the director’s choices.

More precisely, in the interactive documentary realm the artifacts are created under the
concept of “work in movement” (Eco, 1989), opening up the possibility of including several
different personal interventions from viewers in order to complete the work. The audience is now

54
included within the process of creating the work of art, playing with specific rules established by
the documentary author. The artwork becomes a platform for collaboration between spectator and
filmmaker, a space of encounter between multiple viewpoints which complete each other in a
single cohesive work. This collaboration demands a distinct endeavor from the author, consistent
with what Pierre Lévy describes as a creation process in the contemporary society:

Rather than distribute a message to recipients who are outside the process of creation
and invited to give meaning to a work of art belatedly, the artist now attempts to construct
an environment, a system of communication and production, a collective event that implies
its recipients, transforms interpreters into actors, enables interpretation to enter the loop
with collective action. (Lévy, 1997, p. 123)

Furthermore, by providing the audience with the power of interacting with the
documentary’s segments and contributing with contents for the narrative, the author is also partly
giving up their control over telling a specific story in a certain sequence. The new artforms of the
digital age blur the boundaries between filmmaker and audience, insofar as “in this emerging
media system, what might traditionally be understood as media producers and consumers are
transformed into participants who are expected to interact with each other according to a new set
of rules which none of us fully understands” (Jenkins, 2006a, p. 3).

Navigating and interacting

We are far from fully understanding the significant changes in the audience’s interaction and
interpretation within the realm of interactive documentary, however, some research developed
during recent years may shed some light on core concepts relating to the encounter between the
viewer and the digital object. In interactive documentary, the spectator loses the immersion in the
darkness of the theatrical experience but acquires new levels of agency, 17 which, according with
Janet Murray (1998), grant us the “power to take meaningful action and see the results of our

17
Agency is used by J. Murray (1998, pp. 126–153), as a corrective to the inexact use of “interactive”. Murray
considers that the term “agency” is both the exploitation of a virtual environment and the aesthetic experience that the
interactor takes from the dynamic of a responsive world.

55
decisions and choices” (p. 126). Rather than merely looking at the screen, interactive audiences
also experience a “sense of doing”, which produces “a more intimate, direct and active relationship
with the apparatus itself and, consequently, with the deployment of realism” (Odorico, 2011, p.
243).

The rhizomatic nature of interactive documentary opens up several branches; it allows the
audience to navigate through a decentralized network of contents, providing the viewers multiple
possibilities for selecting the contents of their choice as well as participating in the documentary’s
construction. Therefore, digital non-fiction works require from the viewer a physical action in
arranging the narrative, as noted by Sandra Gaudenzi and Judith Aston, as well as demanding “an
active role in the negotiation with the ‘reality’” (Aston & Gaudenzi, 2012, p. 126). Instead of
witnessing a certain mediated event as experienced in traditional documentary form, the audience
of interactive documentary assumes the role of reconstructing the dramatic narrative of reality.

Henry Jenkins considers this process of making connections between dispersed media
content as a form of “convergence” (Jenkins, 2006a), 18
which occurs within the brains of
consumers but nevertheless contributes to an individual interpretation to make sense out of the
world. It is also undeniable that without the audience’s physical participation these new digital
objects are incomplete and become useless. No longer confined to watching and interpreting,
spectators are allowed and even requested to modify, interact with, choose from and contribute to
the creation of a different narrative, a narrative that is rebuilt each time it is accessed.
Consequently, the fluidity of the interactive documentary’s narrative not only introduces
unpredictability to the story but also adds complexity to the audience’s analysis because when the
audience shapes and recombines the documentary contents, in Hudson’s words, “meaning is
subjected to endless recombination” (2008, p. 90).

In an interactive documentary, the viewer enjoys several paths and possibilities of access,
fostering a process of participatory meaning-making. Instead of enclosing the meaning in a single,

The term “convergence” was established by Henry Jenkins (2006a) to address the merging of traditional
18

and new media in a single platform, operated through five different processes (Technological Convergence, Economic
Convergence, Social Convergence, Cultural Convergence and Global Convergence) that together compound the
“Convergence Culture”.

56
specific way, this multimodal structure opens the possibility of overlapping narrative
developments, providing the expansion and redirection of semantic meaning. The audience must
interact with and search for fragmented, dispersed and sometimes scattered connotations,
organized in several degrees of extent and deepness. The process of navigating through the choices
becomes the pursuit for meaning (Murray, 1998, p. 30), while also encouraging in the audience a
fascination with surrendering to the experience itself.

As a consequence of interactive documentary allowing the viewer to navigate back and forth
through the contents, there is no guarantee that she or he will reach a term, leaving unfulfilled the
desire to know how the story ends. On this regard, it is important to highlight that we have grown
up in a time-based media environment and the cultural experience of sequencing elements has
provided us with “cinematic ways of seeing the world, of structuring time, of narrating a story, and
of linking one experience to the next” (Manovich, 2001, pp. 78–79) and consequently, finding the
narrative’s closure. Thus, whereas the navigation process may fulfil a certain pleasure in the
audience, the story’s denouement remains an important moment of the documentary experience,
as it contributes to releasing tension and anxiety and works as a catharsis opportunity. Ultimately,
in a rhizomatic structure, the closure of the narrative may be ulterior or remain undisclosed,
keeping the viewers disoriented and frustrated:

Closure and cohering strategies are the sine qua non component that enables the deep,
cognitive, affective and sensual rewarding engagement of spectators in narrative cinema.
Conversely, non-closure and de-centeredness, when posited by postmodern textual
theorists as a text’s basic premise, frustrate the reader’s strive for coherence and often lead
to distraction and loss of interest. In a sense, the whole notion of narration is meaningless
if the viewer’s aspiration for closure is frustrated to begin with. (Ben Shaul, 2008, p. 21)

After navigating, interacting and/or contributing, the viewer must achieve the denouement
of the narrative as a reward for her or his participation in the development of the story. Although
the open narrative trajectories disclose multiple pathways and nourish the pleasure for uncertainty,
the closure of the structure remains as a gratification for the audience’s performance.

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Towards an Interactive Audience

Arnau Gifreu (2013) considers interactive documentary to represent a radical shift from a
passive spectator to an active user-interactor-participant-contributor. On his view, in interactive
documentary the active interactor acquires “presence” and “identification”, insofar as the
interaction process contributes to engendering the system and provides a subjective sense of the
world represented (Gifreu, 2013, p. 309). By acquiring the ability to produce, change and control
the new media objects, the spectator becomes a “hyper-spectator” (Cohen, 2001), capable of
accessing online contents as well as surfing from one segment to the next. Cohen (2001) portrays
the hyper-spectator as empowered and capable of emplacing several positions and escaping from
normative identity. In his view, the spectator is no longer the one manipulated by the film instead
becoming the one that manipulates the work. However, how much freedom do the user achieves
in interactive documentary? Besides the ability of re-arranging the fragments, is the audience truly
conscious of its decisions or is still affected by the audiovisual experience?

Looking at the modes of interactive documentary proposed by Sandra Gaudenzi (2013)

and described in the previous chapter, we find that each mode of interactivity provides the audience
with a different level of agency. Considering that hypertext mode documentaries have a closed
database of content and allow the audience to click, choose contents and navigate in a non-linear
narrative, Gaudenzi frames them as having a low level of interactivity, when compared with the
three other modes (2013, p. 247). As regards the conversational mode, Gaudenzi believes the
audience is allowed to freely explore the story world, navigating through unpredictable options.
For her, “the interface affords a freedom that is not possible in the hypertext mode where the
interface is more static” (Gaudenzi, 2013, p. 244).

She goes on to describe experiential mode as interactive documentaries that demand not only
a physical action such as clicking and navigating, but also require a physical displacement in a
topographical space in order to activate location-based content. The interactive documentary
dislocates the user from a digital into a living environment, emphasizing “body movement and
real-time decisions in a constantly changing and unpredictable environment” (Gaudenzi, 2013, p.
249). In what Gaudenzi considers the highest level of agency we find the participative (or
participatory) mode, especially boosted by the proliferation of Web 2.0. The author considers this
mode to be pushing the interactive documentary form to its limits, inviting the audience into a

58
crowdsourced documentary that can be translated in different ways of participation, but that in any
case the audience becomes co-author and achieves the power of collaborating in constructing a
multilayered point-of-view with a substantial impact on the documentary’s structure (Gaudenzi,
2013, pp. 250–251). In summary:

If hypertext documentaries offer multiple ways to engage with a pre-authored set of

ideas and points of view, conversational documentaries make it possible to experience and
rehearse ethical decisions, or distant realities. Experiential documentaries can add layers to
the felt perception of reality, and open an embodied enactor to a new affective space, while
participative documentaries fundamentally question the role we want to have in society,
allowing levels of activism that can shape parts of our world. (Gaudenzi, 2013, p. 252)

Following an empirical approach, Kate Nash (2014b) tries to disclose the audience’s
behavior during the experience of interaction with NFB’s digital documentary Bear 71, as well as
understanding how users structure their interactions and take pleasure (or not) from their agency.
She captured the interactions of 23 participants in an artificial setting, combined with observation,
and then conducted interviews enquiring the participants about the experience. Whilst the sample
may be considered limited, Kate Nash (2014b) believes “control, immersion and narrative” (p.
232) are the reasons why audiences find interactive documentary pleasurable. Patricia Aufderheide
(2015) analyzed five interactive documentaries of the hypertext mode and, scrutinizing the data
from the user’s interactions, came to the conclusion that the viewers are likely explore these works
because of a prior interest “in the content or an interest in how people are using the form, rather
than in pursuit of a media experience in itself” (p. 77).

My issue with the majority of the researches on audience in interactive documentary

developed so far is that they assume a binary position of looking at the typical spectator as
completely passive as opposed to an active user, describing the latter as free of any constraints and
completely autonomous. I would argue against such polarity since, as previously outlined through
spectatorship theories, the spectator was never completely passive. Furthermore, in interactive
documentary the spectator is not only interacting with the digital object but also experiencing the
media content in the manner practiced in typical film viewing: watching, listening, interpreting,
making sense of and identifying with the film. The participation in interactive documentary

59
becomes a combination of traditional and interactive practices, of real and virtual experiences, an
interplay where the old and new spectatorship forms collide.

In the book The Emancipated Spectator, Jacques Rancière (2014) also questions the division
between passivity and activity in the audience, asking “if it is not precisely the desire to abolish
the distance that creates it” (2014, p. 12). The French philosopher argues that the audience’s
“emancipation begins when we challenge the opposition between viewing and acting: when we
understand that the self-evident facts that structure the relations between saying, seeing and doing
themselves belong to the structure of domination and subjection” (Rancière, 2014, p. 13).
Therefore, the emancipation happens when the spectator is critically aware of her or his choices,
conscious of her or his own subjectivity, regardless the physical action of manipulating the work
of art.

While the freedom of selecting contents and choosing pathways may seem exciting to the
audience, we must inquire if the viewers actually aspire to having an active role in the creation of
the narrative or, on the other hand, if they simply enjoy to be told a story. It’s relevant to highlight
that while interactive documentary grants a certain level of decision and power to the viewer, this
change in placing in the audience’s hands a degree of decision may not be appealing to all kinds
of viewers. Comparing the videogame Brothers in Arms (Software, 2005) with the namesake two-
hour documentary (Gomes, Kanew, & Kennedy, 2006) from the History Channel which featured
recreated scenarios and subject matter from the videogame graphics, Dayna Galloway (2013)
suggests that “certain audiences may have a favored method for experiencing factual content and
perhaps through choosing certain technologies or procedures for experience, potential consumers
may be alienated” (p. 57).

With the increasingly ubiquitous presence of the personal computer through the 1990s, the
user of technological products started to be portrayed as an active intervener. However, according
with Crary the concession of certain interaction demands a continuous capturing of attention and
conceals a specific purpose:

The interactive possibilities of these new tools was touted as empowering, and as
intrinsically democratic and anti-hierarchical – although much of the force of these myths
has since been deflated. What was celebrated as interactivity was more accurately the

60
 mobilization and habituation of the individual to an open-ended set of tasks and routines.
(Crary, 2013, p. 83)

Establishing a parallel between new media audiences and fandom culture, Henry Jenkins
(2006b) also questions to what extent we are facing “interactive audiences”. Where critical studies
have been struggling to present contemporary audiences as active and critically aware, they still
behave under a structure of power. Jenkins refuses to view users as “either totally autonomous
from or totally vulnerable to the cultural industries” (Jenkins, 2006b, p. 136), as he believes that
in a near future the distinction between authors and audience, creators and spectators will blend
into a continuum. So, it is not because the spectator of interactive documentary has the power to
choose from a collection of contents, interacting with the segments, and sending her or his own
contents that she or he experiences a full emancipation.

Even Kate Nash, despite her relative enthusiasm for an active audience, in the book New
Documentary Ecologies (2014a) expresses some skepticism about the views that take for granted
the audience’s engagement in interactive documentary based on self-report of the viewer’s
personal experiences:

It is widely assumed for instance that interactive documentary audiences are more
active and engaged than film and television documentary audiences. While widely
proclaimed, such a view has no empirical foundation. It is just as likely that the interactive
experience – the need to click, decide or move – might detract from narrative engagement.
(Nash, 2014a, pp. 57–58)

The truth is the form of these non-fiction digital objects introduces unfamiliar procedures
and unsettled conventions that demand a critical position towards the audience’s investigation.
Additionally, whereas in non-interactive documentary the viewer is able to not only see the screen
but also through it and thus experience an embodied identification (Sobchack, 1999), interactive
documentaries are what Bolter and Grusin (1998) defined as objects of “hypermediacy”, constantly
reminding the viewers of the medium itself, by means of the interface and of the required action,
and making them hyper-conscious of the act of seeing, or gazing.

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 Addressing the new media audiences, Mariagrazia Fanchi (2005) believes that spectatorship
comprises at least three modalities of vision: gazing, glance, and multi-centered look (Fanchi,
2005, pp. 39–43). Gazing she describes as an immersive experience, fixed on the screen, where
the film becomes the central and only object of contemplation and voyeuristic pleasure while the
Glance is a superficial look, when the film competes with other stimuli, leading the spectator to
alternate and juxtapose the focus of attention between the screen and the surrounding environment.
Considering the multi-centered look, probably the most common among spectators of interactive
documentary, Fanchi describes an attentive but at the same time dispersive look, when the
spectator interchanges between several elements in equal ways, instead of focusing on a single
media experience.

Jonathan Crary (2001) would diverge from this capacity for paying attention to multiple
stimuli simultaneously. He argues that in Western societies the audience is constantly in a state of
distraction, as increasing stimuli in everyday life demand individuals to define and shape
themselves in terms of a capacity for “paying attention”19. Crary believes that beholders are subject
to questions that surpass the practice of viewing and looking, that go beyond concepts of the
subject as spectator, of the gaze. He rather addresses the issue through the term “perception”; a
way of seeing, but also of hearing and touching and as a means of access to self-presence (Crary,
2001, pp. 2–5).

The questions around interactive documentary, however, are not just a matter of looking,
paying attention or interpreting, but also the ways in which the spectator is engaging with the work
and, by extension, with the screen. The emotional and physical embodiment in interactive
documentary must consider that the screen devices differ from the movie screens “not only in
terms of size, location or use but, above all, in the different approach that the user/viewer has with
it” (Odorico, 2011, p. 242). The form of interactive documentary demands from the viewer an
interaction with the artefacts, as well as introduces different venues and reception conditions that

19
In the book Suspensions of Perception, Jonathan Crary (2001) examines the volatile human attention in
modern Western culture through a perceptual approach. Within a historical study from 1880 to the technological
culture, Crary focuses on modern attention as a crucial element for subjectivity, individual freedom and creativity.

62
requires investigating how spectators are experiencing the interaction with the new digital
documentaries.

Furthermore, for Vivian Sobchack (2016) the disruption of the temporality as well as the
random navigation across dispersed pieces introduces a phenomenological problem; electronic
media has changed our modes of perception and embodiment, and consequently our sense of
presence in the world, provided by the traditional cinematic experience. Sobchack considers that
electronic media constitutes a system of simulation20 based on superficial images incapable of
providing the spectator/user with a connection between the original referent of the “real” and its
signification. However, she also acknowledges that documentary “tends not to ‘play’ in the fields
of simulation” (Sobchack, 2004, p. 242).

Likewise, in interactive documentary the indexicality is assured by both the subject matter,
portraying life events and social characters, and the imagery, usually captured from reality.
Notwithstanding that some interactive documentaries are built with computer-generated images or
3D compositions, most of the works still make use of footage and photographic images to create
the world represented. Morevover, Janet Murray (1998) contradicts Sobchack’s skepticism by
arguing that it is precisely the act of navigating through the network of contents that evoke in the
spectator a sense of bodily presence. While navigating through the choices the interactors are
constructing the narrative and therefore can trace their location within the story, accomplishing,
for Murray, a sense of presence in the digital world (Murray, 1998, p. 80).

By outlining the research on spectatorship and interactive audience we find that the issue of
participatory meaning-making is far more complex than simply providing the viewers several
degrees of agency. Interacting with these new digital documentaries entails further than clicking,
navigating and sending contents. It involves new exhibition venues and conditions, it involves an
individual experience and requires an investigation of how subjectivity is shaped while the
audience is constructing an ephemeral and malleable narrative. The notion of subjectivity, a
fundamental feature of traditional documentary film, doesn’t involve only the filmmaker’s choices

20
Sobchack (2016) argues that electronic images construct a metaworld built upon copies with no ‘real’
referent and with the single purpose of the representation-in-itself.

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but also addresses the spectator’s position towards the film. Moreover, by leaving to the audience
part of the documentary’s construction, the personal desires, the unconscious decisions and the
notion of “subjective individual” becomes even more pertinent for the film spectatorship study.

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 CHAPTER 3

FRAMING THE STUDY

The larger framework of spectatorship studies, previously outlined in chapter 2, is crucial

to contextualizing and further understanding that different theoretical approaches will necessarily
lead the researcher through different paths for analyzing the spectator’s subjectivity and
identification within the interactive documentary. In order to deeply understand the phenomenon
of audience’s subjectivity in interactive documentary and how the spectator/user interacts with the
digital objects and embodies the cinematic object, I used: i) a combination of interdisciplinary
methodological approaches including observation and immersion in the phenomenon; ii) a close,
but also broad, reading of different interactive documentaries, comprising form, content, and
interaction; iii) an analysis focuses on a metacritical perspective on theories of cinema
spectatorship. My aim is understanding how the spectator embodies the film experience and what
are the sensations conveyed to the viewer while she or he interplays with the interactive
documentaries. My focus is also upon the identification of the spectator with the digital object:
how concepts of looking, seeing, hearing influence the audience's perception and may shape the
spectators' subjectivity throughout the mediated experience, introducing a development in the
psychoanalytical concept of the gaze.

Researching and thinking through subjectivity such as in film theory will allow analyzing
specific interactive documentaries, with its particularities and specificities, which in turn will
unveil the complexity of the spectator's self-inscription in the artwork and consequent
identification in a broader sense. Considering the malleable and expansive configurations of
interactive documentary, instead of establishing a pre-conceived framework for analyzing the
digital objects as case studies, which could limit and subjugate the documentaries to a scheme,
contrariwise I propose a wide and unsealed approach comprising multiple dimensions of inquiry

65
and responding accordingly to each interactive documentary’s structure. Moreover, whereas in a
case study approach the research would develop a theory and then apply it to the documentaries
selected, by considering the units of study in a comprehensive analysis, I do expect, through a
cumulative reasoning, to extract meaning from the interactive documentaries,as well as understand
processes of subjectivity and identification within the interaction experience with the non-fiction
digital objects.

Following a phenomenological approach, grounded primarily but not exclusively in

Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological philosophy (2012)21, I aim to deeply understand the "lived
experience" of the interactive documentary phenomenon. As Vivian Sobchack notes “for Husserl,
all knowledge of the world arises in experience and emerges as a mediated relation between
consciousness and the phenomena” (Sobchack, 1992, p. 32). As a holistic approach,
phenomenology allows a descriptive analysis of the experience as lived by the subject through
what Husserl (2012) defines as “structures of consciousness”, carried on “in the first person”, from
the human “natural standpoint” (2012, p. 51) of imagining, thinking, feeling (i.e. emotion),
desiring, willing and acting. Such perspective of the interactive documentary experience highlights
how the subject perceives the form of the conscious procedural interaction. Conceptualizing and
understanding how the interactor deals with the interactive documentary will define the meaning
of that same object in the interactor’s experience. Therefore, the Husserlian phenomenology
provides a study of meaning in a broad sense that goes beyond the digital object interpretations
through language.

Furthermore, in my perspective, phenomenology presents extended advantages as a

method by clarifying and rationally disclosing the complexities of the interactive documentary
experience. Avoiding the metaphysical limitation of intuition, I will critically analyze how the
audience's experience follows patterns in the structures of consciousness, by providing a
description based in the subjective experience of interacting with the digital objects, which
hopefully will provide a shared basis for discussion. My aim is not to propose a phenomenological
theory to analyze interactive documentary but using phenomenology as a mean to understand the

21
Edmund Husserl’s writing Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology was firstly published in
1931 by The Macmillan Co., New York.

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perceptual embodiment of film, turning my attention towards the experience of interacting with
the objects of analysis. Thinking through the ontological and aesthetical questions encompasses
matters of embodiment, subjectivity, intersubjectivity, projected senses, and identification in a
diversity of paradigmatic and interrelated digital documentaries. My interpretations draw upon
from specific examples of digital non-fiction objects which unveil and highlight particular aspects
of subjectivity, as understood by film phenomenology and psychoanalysis.

Analyzing the interactive documentaries through the phenomenological structures of

embodied existence means regarding the digital works as possessing intelligibility, insofar as the
artifacts convey meaning to the viewer, who can communicatively understand its signification.
Fostering Vivian Sobchack’s responsively dialogical model of the cinema experience, I will
address the interactive documentary realm by interpreting the structures of communication as they
appear in the structures of being:

The focus here will center on the radical origin of such logic in lived-body
experience, that is, in the activity of embodied consciousness realizing itself in the world
and with others as both visual and visible, as both sense-making and sensible. The
entailment of incarnate consciousness and the "flesh" of the world of which it is a part will
be described as the basis for the origination of the general structures of cinematic
signification, structures that are themselves produced in the performance of specific modes
of existential and embodied communication in the film experience. (Sobchack, 1992, p. 7)

Sobchack’s proposed approach of looking at cinema as an embodied experience may

highlight consistent analogies with the act of interplaying with interactive documentary, insofar as
the digital objects are spaces of encounter between the spectator and the lived world, mediated by
the technological apparatus. Not only may the viewers access the indexical re-presentation of the
world through the technological device, as also they are allowed to interact with and shape the
dynamic, mutable and reconfigurable objects. This line of thought follows Vivian Sobchack’s
perspective in which both the viewer/user and the digital objects are seen as “viewing subjects” as
well as “visible objects” (Sobchack, 1992, p. 23), in a dialectical engagement of embodied
existence in the world.

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 As an embodied experience, such perception immediately produces an affect within the
spectator’s body. Deleuze and Guattari use this concept of affect for delving into the aesthetic
experience, since for the authors art is "a bloc of sensations, that is to say, a compound of percepts
and affects" (1994, p. 163). They conceive the notions of affect/affection elaborating on Spinoza’s
concept of affectus, who considers such state as an encounter between the affected body and a
second, affecting, body, by adding a quantitative dimension of intensity to the human experience.
In the foreword of A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), Brian Massumi describes
affection as a “prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of
the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act”
(1987, p. xvi). In this perspective, the interactive object, or second body, provides sensations and
affections to the interactor’s body, intensifying the interactive experience and eliciting the
spectator to interact with the digital documentary.

Instead of looking at the interactor and the digital documentary as separate entities, with
independent existence, I will consider both the subject and the object with an intentional relation
between them, mediated by technology. Grounding this perspective on Don Ihde’s concept of
“mutual constitution” (Ihde, 1990) since the subject and the object are constituted in their
interrelation. Don Ihde’s postphenomenological theories extend the philosophical phenomenology
and Martin Heidegger's approach to technology and argue that technological instruments transform
the subject's perception and, in a broader sense, dramatically impact the human existential
condition, specifically in how we perceive ourselves in the world (Ihde, 1983). In such
“mediation”22 perspective, both the audience and the interactive documentary engage in a
reciprocal relationship, insofar as they mutually shape one another within an interconnected
relation and, therefore, both become the result of the interaction practice.

More precisely, the relationship between audience and interactive documentary is mediated
by technology and such mediation co-shapes both subjectivity and objectivity. In this sense, there
isn't a pre-conceived subject or a pre-conceived group of objects, mediated by technology; instead,

22
this concept of mediation can be understood as used by Don Ihde (1990), who addresses the technological
mediation of visual perception through technofacts such as the telescope, the microscope, and the camera. Ihde, upon
whose Sobchack stands, considers that a phenomenological perception “always takes as its primitive the relationality
of the human experience to the field of experience” (Ihde, 1990, p. 25).

68
the mediation becomes the origin that shapes human subjectivity and the objectivity of the world
(Rosenberger & Verbeek, 2015). Thus, the particular moment of interaction opens a significant
opportunity for analyzing the audience's subjectivity in interactive documentary, as space in-
between the spectator and the digital artifact.

Drawing upon specific interactive objects of analysis, I will investigate the audience’s
micro and macroperceptions23, as understood by Don Ihde:

What is usually taken as a sensory perception (what is immediate and focused

bodily in actual seeing, hearing, etc.) I [Ihde] shall call microperception. But there is also
what might be called a cultural, or hermeneutic, perception, which I shall call
macroperception. Both belong equally to the “lifeworld”. And both dimensions of
perception are closely linked and intertwined. There is no microperception (sensory-
bodily) without its location within a field of macroperception and no macroperception
without its microperceptual foci. (Ihde, 1990, p. 29)

Whereas microperception’s analysis will allow unveiling the sensory-bodily dimension of

the interactive practice, i.e. how the audience perceives and sees interactive documentary
experience through senses, macroperception’s study will disclose a reasoning dimension over the
experience, i. e. how the audience understands and interprets the interactive practice on the basis
of that sensory felt experience.

Such perceptual experience mediated by new technologies reconfigures the notion of

subject in a fundamental way. Besides the experience grounded in the consciousness of interacting
with the digital documentaries, the interaction practice also engages the audience through
unconscious processes. As an embodied and self-centered experience, interactive documentary
instigates the viewer's identification with both the interactive object and the virtual environment,
an identification largely constructed by the interaction practice, which offers a central perspectivity
for a self-referential identification. The digital environment becomes a simulation space where the

23
Don Ihde (1991) explores the concepts of micro and macroperception drawing upon Maurice Merleau-
Ponty’s "lifeworlds”. In The Visible and the Invisible (1968) Merleau-Ponty introduces the basis of microphenomenon
and macrophenomenon of perception for the subsequent development of the concepts and its interaction.

69
interactor, or the subject, sees oneself reflected, either in a figurative sense, through the
embodiment of the self-centered experience, or in the literal sense by being confronted with her or
his contents included in the interactive narrative. Therefore, the psychoanalytical theory (Copjec,
2000; Lacan, 1977; Metz, 1982) provides a dynamic method for investigating how the interactors
identify themselves with their embodied position on screen within the act of interacting, and how
the pleasure of interaction triggers the audience’s unconscious desire while contributes for their
selfhood.

Drawing upon the Freudian psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan (2006) developed the theory of
the mirror stage where children between six and eighteen months of age misrecognize themselves
through their image reflected in the mirror. Lacan considers this vital step of development as a
misrecognition since the children identify themselves with an illusory image of their fragmented
body by perceiving it as a whole. It is through this misrecognition, indeed a specular image, that
the children develop a sense of self-identity and form their Ego. When beholds the mirror the child
becomes alienated from her or himself and is introduced into the imaginary order. Authors as Jean
Louis Baudry (1974), Christian Metz (1982) and Laura Mulvey (1975) found in Lacan’s ideas
fertile ground for film theory. They establish an analogy between the Lacanian mirror and the film
screen, where spectators identify themselves with the camera or with characters on screen and feel
a sense of unlimited power over the image and, by extent, over the diegetic world.

Besides the writings on the mirror stage, the Lacanian concept of the gaze is also crucial
for understanding how the interactor sees oneself within the digital environment. In the 1990’s
Joan Copjec presented a radical new approach to psychoanalytic film theory, arguing the earlier
authors elaborated around a misunderstanding of Lacan's concept of the gaze, based on the mirror
stage. Alternatively, Copjec turned her attention to the seminar XI, entitled The Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (Lacan, 1977). Instead of comparing the film screen
with a mirror in which the spectators can project and identify themselves, creating an illusion of
visual omnipotence, Copjec (2000) argues the screen is the precise site of the gaze, an object of
the spectator's desire. As the film image presents limits of visibility, the spectator tries to overcome
the flatness of the image and see beyond the surface of the screen. Such as Lacan considers desire
is triggered by an absence, a missing object, so Copjec thinks the spectator's desire relays on the
limits of the image's visibility.

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 After having a significant impact on film theories of the 1970's and 80's, psychoanalysis as
methodology deployed onwards and took emotions (such as pleasure and desire) and embodiment
out of its traditional interrogations. While the writings of Jacques Lacan on the Mirror Stage (2006)
and the Gaze (1977) are central for the discussion going on in this dissertation, I wish to go beyond
the notion of the audience’s identification and delve into the concept of subject as constituted
through the interaction experience. In this sense, psychoanalysis will allow looking behind
appearances and find the concealed mechanisms that empower the interactors while has the
potential of contributing to understanding the formation of the interactive audience’s subjectivity.

Also greatly inspired by Jacques Lacan, Sherry Turkle (1995, 2005) explores how the
concept of the Self is reconfigured within the experience of cyberspace. The MIT researcher argues
that psychoanalysis can play an exciting role to unveiling the consequences of people's
communication with each other through machines, insofar as new technologies challenge our
capacity and experience of self-reflection (Turkle, Essig, & Russell, 2017). Thus, psychoanalytical
theory contributes to a critical and appropriate approach for inquiring the disruptive position of the
audience in the new interactive non-fiction films. Specifically, this dissertation employs a
framework which combines meta-critical theories in analyzing three interactive documentaries and
scrutinizing form and content as well as the interaction process, as a lived experience that shapes
the audience’s subjectivity, and where “the gaze” emerges as a key concept.

The combination of different theoretical approaches and perspectives may seem conflicting
with the development of a consistent epistemology. However, we must acknowledge the
complexity of the interactive documentary’s phenomenon, which comprises the indexicality of the
lived world, the re-presentation of a fragment of the same world, an authorial perspective built
upon the filmmaker’s subjectivity, the technological mediated embodied experience and, equally
important in this investigation, the spectator’s subjectivity who accesses and manipulates a
reshaped version of the existent world. By bringing together various arguments to analyze specific
cases I will productively explore the strengths and the weaknesses of each research perspective.
Such as Judith Mayne (1993) argues addressing her research on spectatorship, different theoretical
approaches do not necessarily conflict. In fact, since each one of the theories focuses on various
facets of the same object of study - spectatorship – the combination of several perspectives
contributes for a broader and more complex approach that may meaningful inform a single and

71
unifying analysis. Furthermore, the conception of a more holistic approach provides further insight
into the interactive experience and contributes to a deep perceptive analysis of the senses conveyed
by the interactive non-fiction works during the interactive practice.

Once the theoretical framework for investigation was established, I selected a corpus of
study for undertaking this research. Considering the longtime tradition of the National Film Board
of Canada over almost eighty years and the cutting edge work developed in the interactive
documentary realm, the Canadian public institution become the most challenging place for
conducting this research. Albeit empirical research was never the purpose of this investigation, the
access to the interactive documentary production process, to the digital creators and the insight
into the interactive structure of the digital objects provided an outstanding opportunity for deep
immersion in the field of study.

Why the National Film Board of Canada

The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) is a governmental agency with public funding
that produces and distributes documentary films, animation, and interactive documentaries. The
institution was founded in 1939 by the mythical British producer John Grierson, considered as "the
father of documentary film" (Ellis & McLane, 2005, pp. 120–122). Since then, the NFB has
produced over 13,000 productions which have won “over 5,000 awards, including 8 Webbys, 14
Canadian Screen Awards, 12 Oscars and more than 90 Genies” (NFB, 2012). Albeit the NFB’s
foundation aims promoting the production and distribution of films in the national interest, in a
time when film and particularly documentary served as propaganda, the institution is known by
the pioneering and groundbreaking work and for constantly pushing the boundaries of
documentary and animation forms.

Not only had the NFB marked the aesthetic evolution in several moments throughout the
history of film, as also developed technological innovations, as the "Sprocketape", a portable sound
recorder light-weight and synchronized with the 16 mm cameras, which allowed the evolution of
the Cinéma Véritè and the Direct Cinema styles, and the development of the Imax film format

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(Evans, 1991). In 2008, under the mandate of the visionary commissioner Tom Permultter24, once
again, the NFB settled the trends regarding the most challenging and innovative direction for
documentary film. Besides the NFB’s core purpose established in 1950 in the National Film
Act, "to produce and distribute and to promote the production and distribution of films designed
to interpret Canada to Canadians and to other nations" (NFB, 2012), Permultter defined a Strategic
Plan (2008) where is introduced the first NFB digital strategy, pointing out the digital
transformation and its impact in audiovisual media. The NFB implemented Digital Studios, based
in Vancouver and Montreal, that also work as research and development centers, and started
producing documentaries featuring “interactivity, mobility, control of time, user-generated
material” (National Film Board of Canada, 2008, p. 6), without neglecting “the importance of
artistic voice and diversity of voices” (National Film Board of Canada, 2008, p. 7).

Therefore, the interactive documentaries produced by the National Film Board consistently
express the authorial point of view argued in the first chapter of this dissertation as one of the
fundamentals of a digital work to consider it an interactive documentary. Digital projects as
Highrise (Cizek, 2009), Bear 71 (Allison & Mendes, 2012) and Circa 1948 (Douglas, 2014),
among others, present a wide range of interactive strategies, always with an innovative approach
to digital storytelling and grounded in the traditions of the public institution. Highrise (Cizek,
2009), for instance, is a digital project which comprises five interactive documentaries - The
Thousandth Tower (2010b), Out My Window (2010a), One Millionth Tower (2011), A Short
History of the Highrise (2013) and Universe Within: Digital Lives in the Global Highrise (2015)
– and two dozens of derivative works, such as art installations, live performances and even a theatre
play, portraying how people live in skyscrapers. Although each work developed within the
Highrise project has its own characteristics, overall the digital interactive project is known by its
collaborative approach, bringing together filmmakers, photographers, architects, 3D animators and
also, in some cases, residents who were provided with digital cameras to capture their lives in
high-rise towers and contribute with video features for the interactive documentary.

24
Tom Permultter served as Government Film Commissioner and Chairperson of the National Film Board
of Canada from 2007 to 2013.

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 The approach resembles the participatory legendary project Challenge for Change
(Kemery, Low, Dansereau, Forget, & Stoney, 1967), established and ran by the National Film
Board from 1967 to 1980 and created with the intention of “giving a voice to the voiceless”
(Waugh, Baker, & Winton, 2010). Imbued by the ethnographic practices of the 1960’s and
concerned with issues of representation and power, as a strategy of self-representation among
underrepresented topics and communities, the NFB provided to the communities the means to
image-making practices and encouraged the members to film their representations of the issues
that interest them the most. The project originated the production of over 200 films and videos,
tackling social and political concerns, including the 29 well-known films by Colin Low about Fogo
Island, produced with the purpose of facilitating economic development of the fishing villages on
the island (Waugh et al., 2010).

Since 2008, the National Film Board produced over 70 interactive projects, in a pace of
eight to twelve interactive objects a year in the more recent years. In 2013 the NFB renewed and
updated its strategic plan by reinforcing the digital and interactive approaches and underlining an
increased interest towards the audience’s participation. In the report Imagine, Engage, Transform:
a vision, a plan, a manifesto 2013-2018 (National Film Board of Canada, 2013), besides the overall
aims previously settled, the NFB established the creation and distribution of "innovative and
distinctive audiovisual works and immersive experiences” (2013, p. 5) as its mission, exploring
the unique possibilities of the digital platforms and embracing the audience’s participation in the
interactive works (2013, pp. 16–21).

By and large, during the last 15 years, the NFB has been taking the risk of experimentation
by producing interactive media that extends beyond what numerous media producers have been
creating in the interactive non-fiction field. Besides the social impact of the interactive
documentaries produced by the NFB, as well as the novelty of providing the audiences the agency
of manipulating and creating contents, the NFB digital works, thanks to the internet age, are
broadcasted worldwide and achieved world notoriety. It is also conscientious to state that the NFB
has been influencing the development of the interactive documentary realm as an art form, while
simultaneously respects and preserves its heritage. For these entire reasons, it’s easy to understand
why the National Film Board was considered the most suitable organization for receiving this
research.

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 Moreover, the interactive documentaries produced by the NFB present experimental user
interfaces and novel strategies to engage audience in diverse interactive experiences, from
databases displayed in a desktop screen which allow a multilinear navigation, to diverse
collaborative ways of constructing narratives, tablet applications, virtual reality experiences and
walk-in interactive installations, fostering in the audience a more deeply involvement in the story.
Such diversity of interactive approaches provide a diversified range of possibilities for analysis,
ensuring that each sort, or mode, of interactivity, will be covered by the NBF's collection of
interactive works.

Corpus of Analysis

Once it was granted access to the National Film Board facilities and interactive
documentaries, I decided to focus my research in few interactive documentaries to allow a close
and in-depth analysis of the interactive objects for the understanding of the phenomenon of
audience’s subjectivity in interactive documentary. Although each one of the seventy interactive
documentaries produced by the National Film Board presents specific subject matters, features and
ways of engaging the audience’s participation it would be unrealistic to assume an elaborated and
intensive reading of each one of them while simultaneously respect the doctoral program
deadlines. Moreover, several projects, while relatively different, present similar agency forms and
may be framed under the same mode of interaction25.

Therefore, considering the NFB’s portfolio, three interactive documentaries were selected
as objects of analysis, taking into consideration that each one of them may be regarded as
paradigmatic examples of the different modes of interactivity purposed by Sandra Gaudenzi
(2013): hypertext mode, conversational mode, and participative mode. As regards the experiential
mode no significant examples were found to include in this study. By expanding the search, even
to other production institutions, it was concluded the experiential mode of interactive documentary
never had significant digital authorial artworks that could serve as examples of this interactive
mode. Moreover, after an early enthusiasm with location-based non-fiction works the experiential

25
Following the modes of interactive documentary purposed by Sandra Gaudenzi (2013).

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strategy of interaction rapidly dislocates from the documentary to the entertainment and marketing
fields.

Studying the multiple modes of interactive documentary, represented by the three

interactive documentaries carefully selected as a corpus of analysis, grants a broader and
diversified understanding of the differences and the similarities between the cases, covering the
wide range of interaction possibilities. Such sample composition allows analyzing the digital
works both within each documentary and across situations.

Representing the hypertext mode of interactive documentary, Bear 71 (Allison & Mendes,
2012) allows audiences to follow the story of a bear’s life through Banff National Park. The film
explores the connections between the human and animal world, and the far-ranging effects that
human settlements, such as roads and railways, have on wildlife. This interactive documentary
presents a perfect combination of linear and non-linear experiences and may highlight the
audience’s interaction and engagement in what Gaudenzi considers the most elementary level of
interactivity within the interactive documentary modes. While the narrative unfolds during 20
minutes through the narration, users are allowed to freely move through the park’s geography,
following the Bear 71’s movements and access further information about other Park species.

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Figure 1. Bear 71's interface (Allison & Mendes, 2012)

Albeit Bear 71 interactive documentary may be considered a closed database of contents

which doesn't allow the incorporation of external media content and, consequently, according to
Sandra Gaudenzi, consubstantiates a lower degree of interactivity, the viewer is invited to turn on
the web camera and receive back her or his own image at the end of the interactive documentary.
Also, despite its almost linear narrative, such feature could be an essential asset to this research to
understand the audience’s perceptions when interacting with documentaries with low levels of
interactivity.

Regarding the conversational mode of interactive documentary, within the NFB’s

collection, the interactive documentary Fort McMoney (Dufresne, 2013b) was selected for
analysis. Portraying Fort McMurray, the region in Alberta, Canada, known by the oil exploration
and the subsequent environmental and social problems, this digital non-fiction film incorporates
game elements and allows audiences to decide the virtual city's future, while attempts to engage
the users in virtually developing the world's third largest oil sands reserves with a sustainable
strategy. Fort McMoney sets a more complex and evolving sort of interactivity, with a fundamental

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interactive structure that intends to be dynamic, providing a multifaceted experience to its users.
Moreover, the embodiment of the main character’s role within the experience will allow analyzing
the phenomenological experience of spatial-temporal dimensions, in an immersive and self-
centered interaction, without neglecting the indexicality of the imagery and of the subjects
represented, which ensure a perceptual cinematic subjectivity.

Figure 2. Fort McMoney's episode 1 (Dufresne, 2013b)

Fort McMoney’s analysis will also contribute to an understanding of the spectator’s

perception of the world represented since the camera embodies the first-person point of view and
enhances the development of a self-centered gaze. While this interactive documentary forges the
perspective of human vision, it also disrupts the fluidity of a linear narrative. Applying and
expanding a phenomenological notion of embodiment and perceptual subjectivity provides insight
of how the spectator theoretically interacts with the conversational interactive documentary from
both imaginary and diegetic perceptions.

The third digital object selected for the unit of analysis is the participative interactive
documentary A Journal of Insomnia (Choiniere et al., 2013), framed within a mode of interaction
that according to Gaudenzi (2013, p. 250) holds the highest degree of interactivity. Firstly, this

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multi-awarded documentary presents four testimonies of individuals suffering from sleeping
disorder who share their experiences of sleeplessness and talk about how insomnia affects their
lives. This core media content with the four insomnia stories was produced, filmed and edited by
the National Film Board of Canada. Secondly, the interactive documentary A Journal of Insomnia
allows the audience contributing for the documentary’s archive by sending their video content and
sharing their own stories about insomnia, gathering all the testimonies in an overgrowing archive
of content which assembles close to three thousand contributions 26. The high degree of
participation is a key factor for understanding audience’s interpretation of self-representation and
collaborative audience’s experience.

Figure 3. A journal of Insomnia's interface (Choiniere et al., 2013)

26
Between September 2012 and December 2015, the interactive documentary A Journal of Insomnia gathered
and published online 2967 contributions. Data provided by the National Film Board of Canada.

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 The documentary A Journal of Insomnia allows the joint participation in a collective
practice of self-representation and shared experience, which occurs through constant negotiation
with notions of the Self and the others. The subjective experience of interactive documentary,
mediated, enhanced and developed by collaborative virtual environments, becomes a process that
surpasses the one's perception and creates empathy with the other's lived reality, fostering the
construction of an intersubjective shared experience. Such encounter between the Self and the
Other contributes for the spectator’s realization of her or his position towards the world and even
for the juxtaposition of the two entities as part of the same phenomenon (Merleau-Ponty, 1968).
From this perspective, the meaning is no longer the possession of a single person but becomes an
intersubjective space of mutual understanding.

Also, during the mediated interaction experience, the spectator may be confronted with
both her or his own reflected image and the images of other participants. Thus, the analysis of this
intersubjective experience is also central to exploring the formation of individualities and
understanding the concept of the mediated Self, following a psychoanalytic approach to describe
the type of identification a spectator is allowed to engage in participative interactive
documentaries.

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 PART II

Corpus of Analysis
 CHAPTER 4

BEAR 71: A VIRTUAL PANOPTICON

Figure 4. Bear 71's opening sentence

The opening sentence in the Bear 71 interactive documentary (Allison & Mendes, 2012)
should come with a spoiler alert. Since the beginning, we became aware that the female bear, who
will address us during the documentary, will die due to unnatural causes. Bear 71 is an interactive
documentary, which portraits the life and death of a female grizzly bear at Banff National Park, in
Alberta, Canada. Created by Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendes, under the Digital English
Program at the National Film Board of Canada, the documentary explores the intersection between
wildlife, humans and technology, and raises awareness about privacy and control in contemporary
society.

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 Leanne had access to thousands of hours of footage, captured through remote surveillance
cameras during ten years, portraying animals and visitants in the park. Among the footage, there
were images of the bear number 71, tagged with a GPS surveillance equipment when she was three
years old. The park rangers tracked the bear’s movements over eight years and, through motion-
activated cameras placed throughout the park, captured scenes of her daily life, allegely to protect
her. All this information allowed the reconstruction of the life of the documentary’s character Bear
71: her daily habits, the obstacles she faced, the three litters she raised, the encounters with humans
and, ultimately, her death.

Leanne Allison identified and tracked the story and the images of this particular female
bear, proposing to focus the narrative on her life. At first, she pitched the idea to NFB as a
traditional linear documentary, but the low-resolution images would not be suitable for a large
theatre screen. As the NFB considered the story a powerful subject matter with intriguing elements,
the digital team proposed Leanne to direct an interactive documentary. Leanne Allison and Jeremy
Mendes, creative director and digital creator at the digital studio, went through the footage during
around six months. While watching and selecting footage, still images and information, the
creators came across not only with the topic of human impact in wildlife but also with the concept
of surveillance and how technology enhances our ability to infringe someone's privacy. That is
what was happening while they were watching all the footage of Bear 71.

Jeremy Mendes says that he “immediately saw this as surveillance of animals rather than
documentation, regardless of the park’s intention” and he also saw parallels between animals and
humans in a “moment when we are watched more than ever” (J. Mendes, personal communication,
October 28, 2015).

The interactive documentary Bear 71 mixes linear and non-linear experience, combining a
linear soundscape narrative with free navigation through the interface, which represents the
topographic details of Banff National Park. The interface was created by Toronto based company
JAM 3, using Flash to allow a continuous narration of the story. Bear 71’s voice, performed by
Mia Kirshner, tells us her life story, her encounters with humans, and how she constantly bumped
into technology: “It is hard to say where the wired world ends and the wild one begins". All these
constraints and the ever-encroaching human presence in the bear’s natural habitat forced her

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adaptation and affected the animal’s instincts developed through millions of years: “the first rule
of survival is don’t do what comes naturally” (Allison & Mendes, 2012).

Right at the beginning of the interactive documentary, the audience receives some
instructions for the interaction experience: how to navigate with the keyboard; how to use the
mouse; the possibility of interacting with the webcam, asking permission to activate it (which the
user may refuse); and information to turn on the sound.

While listening to the female grizzly bear’s story, the audience can follow Bear 71
movements, as well as trigger several windows with surveillance images and information of
different animals: elks, foxes, golden eagles, wolves, and deer mice. Such as Bear 71, each animal
is identified with a number, as well as each human that accesses the interactive documentary. By
clicking on their markers, the viewers reveal a group of surveillance feeds with several animals,
including their video feed, through the webcam.

Bear 71 it was launched on January 13th, 2012. Along with the web-based interactive
documentary, the NFB team presented an augmented reality interactive installation, at Sundance
Film Festival’s New Frontier in Park City, Utah, on January 20th. The installation presents a large
image of the same Banff National Park’s stylized map projected onto the gallery walls. By using
an iPad, the audience can select video from specific points all over the park, selecting one of the
trail markers, and add an extra layer with the video recorded from that trail marker’s camera. Next
to the interactive installation’s screen, it was placed another large screen playing the interactive
documentary as seen on the main website.

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Figure 5. Bear 71's interactive installation at the Sundance Film Festival (The National Film Board of Canada)

By the time, Bear 71’s executive producer Loc Dao, described the installation experience
as the following:

Online, the user faces the disconnection from nature by the very form they are using
— sitting in front of their computer. Similarly, at the installation, the viewer is out of their
element, being in a public space, and like many of us who live our lives through iPhones
and digital cameras, the user at the installation experiences the grandiose 24-foot wide
digital grid world of Bear 71 through a tablet app, limiting their view of the bigger picture
and giving them safe distance from what’s happening in front of them. (Aziz, 2012)

Besides the interactive installation, the documentary Bear 71 was also presented as a live
performance with Jeremy Mendes and Leanne Allison playing a director’s cut of the interactive
documentary, with live musical accompaniment by Tim Hecker, Loscil, and the cellist Heather
McIntosh. The live performance had several public presentations, namely at St. Andrew’s-
Wesley United Church, in Vancouver, during DOXA Documentary Film Festival, May 2012,
at IDFA, in Amsterdam, in November 2012, and in a live concert hall in Montreal, in November
2013, which Siobhan O’Flynn assisted and reports:

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 What we lost in our positioning as spectators were offset by the physical
enhancement of the live cello accompaniment, though the immersion I experienced had
much to do with the scale of the projection and the cinematic quality of the unfolding
narrative. Here the experience was designed for spectators, rather than interactors… (O’
Flynn, 2016)

Finally, in 2016, IDFA challenged the National Film Board of Canada to reimagining Bear
71 as an immersive Virtual Reality installation, included in a program the organization titled
“Elastic Reality”, with the aim of crossing the boundaries of the internet in non-fiction works. The
Virtual Reality experience of Bear 71 enhances the immersion in the park and momentarily
suspends the perception about the surrounding space, but the interface and interaction design
remains very similar to the web-based interactive work.

From Linear Sound to Interactive Navigation

A black screen with the NFB logo is the entrance doorway for the documentary Bear 71.
The black background remains and an informative message is displayed: "This is a 20 minute
Interactive Documentary" and time starts to count down with a timer on the upper left side of the
screen. Such message prepares the audience to the following experience, making them aware of
the documentary's length but could also be interpreted as a control mechanism, since time and
space are, according to with Foucault (1995)27, elements for coercing individuals. Also, the
information about the documentary’s length may be regarded as a sign that we are about to
experience an interactive documentary with, somehow, a linear narrative or at least that we cannot
control its duration.

Along with the timer, nine small square screens flicker with black and white surveillance
images, exhibiting animals in what appears to be wildlife. Images jump from one animal to another,
in a zapping attitude, interspersing footage with magnetic dropouts. These images have a
coincident aesthetic with the urban surveillance cameras that we are used to, presenting a diffused

27
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison was originally published in 1975 in France under the title
Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la Prison and was translated into English in 1977.

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and blurry quality, fuzzy and grainy, in what Patricia Pisters (2012) considers to be the “Affective
Aesthetics of Surveillance” (pp. 106-110). The images go along with dramatic music by Tim
Hecker which suggests stasis, immersion, and a state of dreamy contemplation. The structured and
repetitive tone triggers a pervasive tension that never really dissipates and evokes a relatively
lulling effect, but the mood remains dark and uneasy.

After the presentation and the main credits, a message unveils the narrative’s denouement:
“There aren’t a lot of ways for a grizzly bear to die. At least, that’s the way it was in the wild”,
and the interactive documentary starts with a linear video of 1:45 minute. The introductory video
works as a contextualization about Bear 71, introducing to the audience the character and her
environment. The bear seems to be restless, tied in with rope and struggling in the woods between
trees. We see a park ranger preparing to shoot the bear with a sedative. The low-resolution images
are filmed with a handheld camera, with some zoom-ins to focus on the main subject filmed, in an
aesthetic similar to amateur home movies. The imagery presents several size shots, varying
between full, medium shots and, mostly, close-ups to reveal details of the park rangers’ work.

Meanwhile, the voice over provides several information about the process of capture, the
tranquilizer, the radio frequency device attached to the bear and the number assigned to the animal:
Bear 71. The first time we listen to the bear's name, or number, the animal is facing directly the
camera, in a close-up shot, gazing the audience. The bear’s voice, performed by the actress and
activist Mia Kirshner, with a calm and sad tone, speaks in the first person, embodying the bear’s
position. Therefore, within this dissertation, and considering the anthropomorphic nature of the
bear, we will address the animal by “she”.

Bear 71 is released and runs into the wood for freedom. However, to what extent is she
free? How can she be free being under constant surveillance? Does the argument of protection
justify the control and infringement of privacy? Several questions can be raised just by watching
the introductory video, while we observe Bear 71 running away.

From a black screen to a white background. From a linear video to an interactive

environment. From a moving image segment to an interface with an audio soundtrack. When the
introductory video fades out, the audience is presented with a stylized map of Banff National Park,
representing the geographical landforms of the territory, such as the Castle Mountain, the Bow

88
River, the Lake Louise, the Trans-Canada Highway and the Canadian Pacific Railroad. The
audience is allowed to freely navigate through the park and explore the footage from several
surveillance cameras, marked with spots which open up small windows when activated.
Meanwhile, the female voice keeps providing information about the park, the surveillance cameras
and the radio frequency devices, always in the first person as if the Bear 71 is communicating with
the audience.

Each spot represents an animal, such as coyotes, elks, wolfs, foxes, etc., and when pinpoints
are activated open up windows with the surveillance footage and further textual information about
the animal is displayed. An interesting detail is that each animal is identified with its number,
similarly to what also occurs with humans that are navigating in the documentary. As users, we
are able to identify our location in the park, the location of other humans that are interacting at the
same moment, and all animal's position. The use of numbers to identify both animals and humans
may be regarded as a sign of authentication, since creators are indexing the animals to their
assortment in the park, but also makes the audience aware that in the digital world we all are
numbers.

Eleven chapters addressing different topics of the bear’s habitat break down the interactive
documentary. The chapters automatically display and Mia Kirshner’s voice brings to life Bear 71.
Although the interactive documentary is split into parts, the oral discourse ensures a continuous
and builds a unified narrative with a linear story that comprises a beginning, a middle and an end.
The story also unfolds through a dramatic structure with a narrative arc, to move the character
from one situation to another and take the audience with her, culminating in a climax.

In the first chapter, entitled "My home range", Bear 71's voice provides the audience a
context, both geographical and conceptual, and creates a sense of attachment to the character. The
content of the spoken message is not unbiased. Between the park information, Bear 71 complains
to be under surveillance, observed by "15 remote-sensing cameras, plus infrared counters, and
barbed-wire snags to collect my hair" and intuits "that explains the radio caller constantly beeping
my location to some ranger playing God".

Furthermore, Bear 71 lives close to Canmore, a town that "doubled the size in the past
decade and it gets five million tourists a year" (Allison & Mendes, 2012). The demographic impact

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in the grizzly bear's life is significant and Bear 71 warns that "there used to be grizzlies all across
the Canadian Prairies, and now there aren't any. Not one. We have been pushed into the mountains"
creating a survival challenge to grizzly bears. Bear 71 continues arguing: "thing is, you can take
grizzly out of the prairie, but you can't take the prairie out of the grizzly", drawing attention to the
fact that bears need their habitat to survive. Also, the main character Bear 71 requests the audience
to think about the bears as refugees, forging an identification with human beings again and
appealing to an empathic feeling.

During the second chapter, "The first rule of survival", Bear 71 complains that massive tourism
brought to the valley many unknown smells that affect animal's abilities to detect prey and
predators. The introduction of alien elements disrupted the delicate natural balance and threats the
animal's survival. Therefore, Bear 71 has trouble to find food or to protect herself and her cubs
from dangers and concludes that “when the first rule of survival is don’t do what comes naturally,
of course it’s not going to be easy”.

Figure 6. Pop-up window of Bear 71

Also, human presence introduced into the valley “thirty-five cell phone towers transmitting
3G data, voice over IP and text messages around the clock”, making evidence of how ubiquitous
technology is nowadays. As Jonathan Crary argues, individuals feel the need to be “constantly
engaged, interfacing, interacting, communicating, responding, or processing some telematic

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milieu” (Crary, 2013, p. 15). Moreover, Bear 71 unburdens: “it’s hard to say where the wired world
ends and the wild one begins”.

On the third chapter, "a mother bear is a cautious bear", Bear 71 unravel arguments to show
the human impact in its life. The freeway and the railroad split the valley into the middle and cars
and trains become part of the park's daily life. "There's a freight train every hour" and "one car
every five seconds". Although there are underpasses and overpasses along the freeway, "there's
nothing ‘natural' about a grizzly bear using an overpass". The train is even more dangerous,
because “there’s no safe way to cross the railroad” and cars leak grain along the railway. “Since
2000, 17 Grizzly Bears have been killed in the Bow valley due to railway fatalities”.

During the first six months, after Bear 71 was wired, park rangers used to chase her and
shoot rubber bullets to stop undesirable behaviors. Bear 71 says "they call it ‘aversive
conditioning'. I call it rubber bullets", which is the fourth chapter's title. And she continues
explaining that "even at a distance of a hundred feet, a rubber slug is still moving at 650 kilometers
an hour."

The chapter opens a full-screen video and takes the audience back to footage images. A
still camera portraits an underpass of the freeway, filmed in a wide, colored shoot with the camera
in a low angle, in which we can see Bear 71 crossing the freeway and coming in our direction. The
camera stays still and a group of tourists walks in the opposite direction. Then, Bear 71 returns to
the other side of the freeway through the same underpass and a moose slightly intrudes into the
frame. Somehow, with the moose peeking at the camera, we are reminded there's always someone
behind technology watching our steps.

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Figure 7. Full video screen in chapter 4

All along within the video segment, the female voice keeps embodying the main
character’s persona, thinking about her youth and memories, lulled by a sad piano’s melody. Bear
71 returns to the surveillance topic, relating to her radio-frequency collar to trace her location and
protect the park visitors. Doing so, she is also addressing surveillance in urban life and raises a
very pertinent parallel: “I suppose is like most of the surveillance that goes on today – it’s partly
there to protect you, and partly to protect everybody else from you”.

In the fifth chapter, "what looks random probably isn't", Bear 71 tells a story of a man
stretching his quads in a rubbing tree, laying back, eating chocolate and updating his Facebook
status, as if he had forgotten why he stopped there. It happens, that was not an ordinary tree. That
tree happens to be the one rubbed by bears and by other animals. Bear 71 uses this metaphor as an
example to address the unknown forest language, considering environment has its natural order,
and to state that it will not be through surveillance cameras and test tubes that humans will
understand and learn that language.

The main character keeps telling her life story. "Cubs change everything". She tells us
about the dreams she had before maternity and how cubs constrain her to move away from the
valley. She raised three litters of cubs, eating berries and hunting invisible elks. On chapter six,
Bear 71 starts enunciating that something fateful is about to happen: "what I really want to

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understand is this: I was a good bear. I didn't knock over anyone's garbage cans. I didn't break into
anyone's mobile home." This feeling of being misunderstood remains on suspension, and she
moves on, again, addressing cameras, surveillance and technology. There's a "video camera in
front of every train. Why? Liability – to keep a record in case of an accident". Of course, for the
female bear, this is a pointless decision, because the train it will be “unstoppable” if something
gets into the railroad.

On chapter seven, Bear 71 keeps addressing the interference of humans in wildlife and
unveiling the inconsistencies between words and actions. While human activities were responsible
for the extinction of passenger pigeons, there is ongoing research to extract DNA from a specimen
and reproduce the bird artificially. Also, Bear 71 questions how some humans “can start a
revolution on a smartphone, but can’t remember to close the lid on a bear-proof garbage can”.

On chapter nine the music stops. Winter is coming and silence gives rise to the sound of
the cold wind blowing. With a poetic tone, Bear 71 describes a white and icy landscape and the
soundscape transport us to an inhospitable scenario:

There are times when the human world seems to disappear, like when an early
snowstorm shakes the trees all night, and all the noises are muffled and the footprints go
back to their houses – and an older version of the world continues. (Allison & Mendes,
2012)

The weather is used to address famine and the hardship of mother and cubs to find meat
before went into the den to hibernate. "You can't eat technology" is the title of the ninth chapter.
Bear 71 uses, once again, the word “unstoppable” to address the following events as unavoidable
consequences. “Looking backward from any single point in time and everything seems to lead up
to that moment.”

Chapter ten opens a full-screen video with images from the train camera, with the sound of
Glósóli, by Sigur Rós. It presents a traveling shot following the railroad, with snow around and on
the top of the mountains ahead. Bear 71 and her cubs were sniffing for grain along the tracks when
the train takes them by surprise. We can see three still black and white images placing Bear 71 and
her cubs in the train trail.

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Figure 8. Subjective travelling shot of the train

Figure 9. Bear 71 and her cubs in the train rail

As audience members, we foresee what's coming and the inability to prevent Bear 71’s
death make us feel powerless. The tension raises and the video segment uses parallel montage,
intercutting the train's point of view shot with Bear 71 facing the unstoppable train, increasing the
sense of anxiety.

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Figure 10. Shot and reverse shot of the train's POV

Suddenly, the moment of the impact is replaced by a black screen, using dropouts as an
aesthetic appeal for the transition between shots, and dipping into black. It is a one-minute
powerful video which intersects the color image from the train camera with black and white still
images from surveillance cameras of the park.

Figure 11. black screen interleaved with drop-outs.

The full-screen window closes, in fade-out, and the audience is driven back to the
topographical interface, led by the continuous music by Sigur Rós as if the creators decided to
provide the audience a moment to breathe after the shock of witnessing the death of the main
character. But the truth is, we do not see the precise moment of death. The "decisive moment", as
Robert Capa would call it, is replaced by a black screen, maybe because, in an act of respect for
Bear 71’s privacy (something she never had during her life), the creators decided to veil one of the
most intimate, almost sacred, moment of someone’s existence – her death.

After a brief moment, the full-screen comes back and a point-of-view camera shot shows
us the park rangers approaching. The image fades out and we start seeing a bear in the railroad.
The Bear 71's voice keeps talking to us about her deepest feelings. What is a mother's greatest
fear? To die and leave her cubs alone. Bear 71 expresses her concerns:

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 I keep telling myself she can make it. But she shouldn't be out there alone, you
know? She's just starting her second year. She was already tagged with her own radio
frequency signal, and has her number – she is Bear 107. (Allison & Mendes, 2012)

A time-lapse of an extreme long shot shows us Banff National Park and Tim Hecker's soft
and emotional music returns to cuddle Bear 71’s confessions:

For eleven years I did everything right, and then I made a mistake. Now, my cub is
on her own. More than a million years of evolution have prepared her to live in the wild,
but let's face it, the wild isn't where she lives. (Allison & Mendes, 2012)

The narrative’s dénouement unveils a cyclic story when Bear 71 talks about her daughter
and denounces the fact that the young cube is already tagged and numbered by the park rangers.
Also, expressing her concerns as a mother, Bear 71 proceeds interrogating the human interference
in the natural ecosystems and how technology is disrupting animal and human lives, while the
screen splits into nine windows displaying surveillance images from different animals, similarly
to the design displayed at the beginning of the documentary.

As regards the interface, Bear 71 interactive documentary has a very simple interaction
strategy, although it is quite engaging due mostly to the voiceover that drives us throughout the
story. The wireframe is composed of a single white and minimalistic design screen, representing
Banff National Park with its landmarks. The virtual territory is divided into eleven sections, with
x and y-axes, to guide the audience through the park’s map. Bear 71 herself describes the
documentary interface as “the grid”. By triggering a hyperlink on the top right corner of the screen,
we may access this documentary’s feature, which spots our position within the park, Bear 71’s
position and other characters’ locations, as well as discloses the explored and unexplored regions
of the park.

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Figure 12. Bear 71's interface "grid"

While navigating throughout the park, the audience will find several interactive signs
representing different animals, each one identified with its number. The spots are continually
moving, simulating the animal's course, and can be triggered to reveal video feed and textual
information about the animal. Each time an interactive sign is activated a pop-up window opens,
overlaying part of the screen. The audience can also choose to follow the character Bear 71, by
clicking on her marker, as she moves through the park, in line with the story.

As the story unfolds and Bear 71 moves around, small black dots reveal her footprints in
the screen, tracing her path through the park. Her tracks remain carved in the interface, for marking
her territory. At the end of the story, after Bear 71’s death, the interactive sign remain immobile,
lifeless, next to the train rails, at the place where the bear died.

Considering the interactive signs are activated through clicks on hyperlinks, even if they
present an unusual configuration, we may frame the Bear 71 interactive documentary within the
hitchhiking or hypertext mode (Gaudenzi, 2013, pp. 47–53). Bear 71 also responds to other
characteristics, listed by Sandra Gaudenzi, to be considered a hypertext interactive documentary:
presents a closed, or pre-established, database; videos and contents are limited in number and
duration; therefore, there’s no space for the unexpected; contents are activated through hyperlinks;
and the starting point of the narrative is fixed (Gaudenzi, 2013, p. 49).

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 In fact, regarding the documentary Bear 71, the entire narrative is fixed and elapses using
the sound storytelling. We may even consider that the interactive component is optional, insofar
as the documentary does not necessarily demand an action to keep evolving. Indeed, if the viewer
remains inactive during the documentary, the story will unfold continuously through time.

Sandra Gaudenzi also considers that the hypertext mode is closed to external elements and
doesn’t allow incorporating additional contents. Although Bear 71 is framed within this interactive
documentary mode, we must acknowledge that the artwork allows the incorporation of the webcam
feed, portraying the viewer as an imagery resonance of the Self.

Unlike most of the hypertext mode interactive documentaries, Bear 71 doesn’t sustain the
narrative in a multilinear structure of branching the story, since there are no alternative paths to be
chosen. Alternatively, should be considered a multilayer journey, providing the audience access
to several layers, or frames, of information and control on the object displayed on the screen. Since
the documentary’s narrative relays mostly on a linear sound story, to properly demonstrate the
navigation structure I draw a timeline, with a chronological development through time but which
allows the non-linear navigation around the space. In specific moments the documentary displays
a video in full-screen and denies to the audience the ability to interact with the windows of the
surveillance footage. Therefore, the documentary's structure may be represented through the
following scheme:

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Diagram 1. Bear 71's timeline

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 The digital artwork Bear 71 may be regarded as a transitional interactive documentary,
where old narratives and new interaction strategies meet, by combining a linear sound narrative
with a random navigation environment. In this interactive documentary, the linear soundscape is
the element that sustains the narrative progression throughout the story, and while the
chronological sound narrative drives the audience throughout the story and discloses Bear 71’s life
journey, the audience is provided with the experience of delving into other species’ information,
opening window by window and diving in deeper degrees of interaction. While the story
progresses in a chronological, horizontal axis (x), triggering the several pop-up windows allows
drawing a vertical axis (y) to translate the navigation's depth.

0:00 …narrated story… 20:00

x – progression through time

Crow 23 Wolf 77 … Dog 21 Raven 122

Black Bear
… Deer 325 Coyote 431 …
39
Deer Mouse Cougar 35 Fox 55 Bear 107
… …
y – navigation’s depth

Diagram 2. Bear 71's progression through time and in depth

Multiple frames and juxtapositioning of frames (or windows), rather than a single frame,
provides the screen onto the video and immerses the viewer in the interactive documentary varying
depths. Such interaction strategy corresponds to what Lev Manovich describes as “spatial
montage” (Manovich, 2001, pp. 322–330). Instead of sequencing the information one after the
other, the viewer may access several windows of micronarratives simultaneously. The several
layers of information contribute to a higher degree of familiarity with the park's fauna and
landscape and grants additional footage for enhancing the awareness about surveillance. The
strategy of overlaying several windows of information intends to present the multiple facets of the
subject matter, as well as providing a network of interrelated data holding its own semantic
meaning. While navigating, the audience’s multilayered experience allows the interaction of

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dispersed content and entails multiple perceptions and apperceptions28, as well as apprehensions
of the symbolic significance of the represented subjects.

Regardless the action of triggering the additional information displayed in the pop-up
windows, the story progresses through time towards the documentary's end. The audience does not
hold the control of manipulating the temporality by re-arranging the narrative. The interactive
documentary provides instead the freedom of navigating through space, virtually visiting the park's
land and roaming around the territory. The experience becomes the exploration or navigation of a
topological and geographical space. Instead of expressing the filmmaker’s perception through an
unfolding time, the digital body of the documentary presents a multidimensional unfolding space
and through time.

Although the interactive documentary Bear 71 develops employing a time-based

chronological narrative, the digital body of the documentary as well as the interaction experience
do not express the filmmaker’s and the audience’s perception through an unfolding time, but rather
through a multidimensional unfolding space and through time. The digital object follows an
aesthetic of navigation where the audience is allowed to freely explore the park, represented by
the documentary's interface, and wandering through the virtual space. The experience becomes the
exploration or navigation of a topological and geographical space, provided by both the
documentary’s interface and the immersive soundscape.

Moreover, there are four central moments (introductory video, chapters number four,
number ten and eleven) in which the interaction is denied to the audience, as the video plays in
full screen and doesn't allow triggering the interactive signs unless the viewer closes the full-screen
video as skips part of the documentary. During these segments, Bear 71 embodies the "voice of
God"29 and requires the audience’s absorption into her life’s description. Such interaction strategy,
or the deliberated denial of interaction, demands from the audience full attention to the video and

28
In this context “apperception” should be understood under the phenomenological Allan Casebier’s
perspective (1991), where representation is discovered and experienced through a selective recognition of what is
being represented. Thus, the audience’s perception is a selective recognition of the objects represented through the
experience of “living through” (or “interacting through”) the digital documentary.
29
The term “voice of God” is used by Bill Nichols to address the documentary’s narration where the
filmmaker (or a narrator) presents a scripted commentary to guide the audience through the film.

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converts the interactor back into a spectator. The audience loses a degree of autonomy and becomes
exposed, as much as immersed, to the documentary’s intended meaning.

Also, the interactive documentary Bear 71 engages the viewer into a participatory feature.
By enabling the computer webcam, requested at the beginning of the experience, the spectators
become part of the digital artwork. After chapter eleven, the interactor is confronted with her or
his own image displayed at the screen's center and placed next to the animal's park surveillance
images. Such characteristic interplays the subject the desire and pleasure of looking at the park's
species with its awareness that one can be viewed and surveilled. Under this “gaze" effect, as
described by Jacques Lacan (1977, pp. 67–121), the interactor realizes that is a visible object and
loses a degree of autonomy. The audience becomes a voyeur of their own spectacle.

Bear 71’s Conclusions

Bear 71 presents a narrative unfolding on tensions: the tension between animals and
humans, the tension between wildlife and technology, the tension between linear sound and non-
linear navigation. The antagonisms not only create the narrative arc as they instill in the audience
the desire of proceeding listening and interacting with the documentary. The tensions also
anticipate several possibilities within the story and induce uncertainty about the character Bear
71’s destiny, which makes the audience engage emotionally and physically in the interactive
documentary.

The pervasiveness of observation all through the narrative allows the audience nurture a
more profound sympathy with the wired animals and engages the viewer deeper into the story.
Simultaneously, the interactive documentary Bear 71 also provides the audience with the excuse
of experiencing a voyeuristic overview on the animal’s lives, creating a feeling of almightiness
over the characters watched. The computer screen becomes a “rear window” (Hitchcock, 1954),
enabling the audience into a visual stalking. Leisurely and, as far as the viewer thinks, privately,
from his personal space, the spectator observes the animal’s lives. However, we must acknowledge
that, such as in James Stewart’s case, the point of view accessed by the audience is merely the one

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provided by the surveillance imagery, a framed, partial and fragmented perspective of the non-
human characters.

Moreover, Bear 71 is a meta interactive documentary, using technology to raise awareness

that the technological dispositif itself is encroaching our lives. While interacting, the viewer is
enhancing the technologies of control. His digital traces are recorded, gathered, stored, processed
and manipulated as a form of accumulating data on user behavior. Passively and, in most cases,
unconsciously users collaborate participating voluntarily in an infinitely extendible "panopticism".

Following Foucault (1995), in a panoptic system, the prisoner is the one that ensures the
power's operationalization, insofar as the individual never knows for sure if he is the one being
watched within the architectural space. The interactive documentary user is watched but cannot
see who is watching him, although he is aware that surveillance could be practiced at any time,
and this feature constrains him and forces him to behave as if he is being watched all along.

In this post-disciplinary society, the "individuals are no longer confined to particular spaces
that discipline them (prisons, schools, hospitals) but can move freely while nevertheless being
constantly watched and controlled" (Pisters, 2012, p. 102). In this case, the viewer, or in Foucault’s
words, the prisoner, embodies the surveillance dispositive itself and carries it at every moment.
The system induces in the observed audience the feeling of being under surveillance all along,
even if isn’t happening at that particular moment. The individual himself generates his own
subjection and, conformed, accepts it, and can even actively participate by constantly developing
this state of submission.

Bear 71, both the interactive documentary and the animal, encourages a strong
identification with the audience by intrinsically articulate two main narrative documentary’s
components. One of them is the narration, comprising both the story and the performed voiceover,
and the second one is the strategy of using the webcam to engage the viewer in a panoptic of
surveillance.

As regards to the first component, while the interactive documentary unfolds, we can listen
to the soundscape, which rebuilds ambient sounds from the park, placing the audience in the exact
space and time narrated, and the different moments of the story are underlined with music to

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enhance the dramatic effect. Nevertheless, Mia Kirshner’s voice is the sound that captures our
attention. The profound and intimate narration or voice-over counterbalance the shortage amount
of cinematic images in the interactive documentary. By the selective hearing, the voice intonations
draw most of the audience’s attention, responding to what Michel Chion calls “vococentrism”:
“Speech, shouts, sighs or whispers, the voice hierarchizes everything around it. (…) Human
listening is naturally vococentrist, and so is the talking cinema by and large” (Chion, 1994, p. 6).

Mia Kirshner intones the main character’s story with a deep and intimate tone of voice,
interweaving (interchanging?) descriptive, argumentative and poetic modes of rhetorical
discourse. As the story unfolds, the voice of Bear 71 reports several pieces of information,
descriptive and inferential statistics about Banff National Park, wildlife, and technologies. The
anthropomorphized life of the Bear 71 leads the presentation of formal data, which forges in the
audience an identification with the nonhuman character by virtue of her life events: her youth
aspirations and dreams, the adaptation process to the human interference in her habitat, how her
life changed thanks to motherhood, and all the concerns with her cubs.

In the digital object Bear 71, the anthropomorphism is used as a mode of embodiment in
the bear’s voice, demanding from the audience to imaginatively accept that a grizzly bear holds
information about surveillance, technology, and statistics about the park. Moreover, the interactive
documentary presents the non-human character as able to express events from the past, her most
profound thoughts, and nurturing concerns and feelings by other animals, similar to the ones
expressed by human beings. The individual non-human voice resounds the collective audience
thinking. The intersubjective encounter enhances in the viewer a sensory recognition compelled
by recalling his life events in the Bear 71's narration.

The second component of the interactive documentary that emboldens the audience’s
identification with the narrative is the use of the webcam. Bear 71 encourages spectators to face
themselves as participants in the interactive documentary, by confronting them with their own
video feed, next to the animal’s surveillance images. At this moment, the interactors become aware
that was under surveillance during the interactive experience and, such as children in the Lacanian
"Mirror Stage" (Lacan, 2006, pp. 75–81), recognize themselves as inscribed in the documentary
narrative.

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Figure 13. user's webcam feed displayed in the interactive documentary

Bear 71, the digital documentary, encourages the imaginary integration of the Self in the
artwork. The spectator’s image is not merely a mirrored reflection but becomes a representation
of a permanent structure of subjectivity, an apperception induced by the symbolic contraption.
Actually, spectators not only enjoy the act of interacting but they are conceited enough to take
pleasure in seeing themselves into the objects of observation.

Whereas in self-reflexive films, such as Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985)
or Jean-Luc Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963), the internal spectator is utterly aware of the
audience's inscription in the film, in Bear 71 the external spectator is also incorporated into the
subjective image. Moreover, by confronting the audience with his own participation, this
interactive documentary also incorporates the spectator's response. The audience is introduced into
the diegetic world represented on the screen, creating a hybrid object with an ambiguous
ontological nature, interplaying the position of spectator and character, viewer and viewed,
observer and observed.

The self-reflexivity operates, in this instance, as a coercive force, intimately compelling the
spectator's responsibility and complicity to the perpetuation of the surveillance. By laying heavily
in the Brechtian practice of distantiation, Bear 71 enables the mythical “alienation effect” (Brecht,

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1978)30, trapping the spectator in a technological vortex, implicating him in the control society and
calling him to account for the main character’s tragedy.

30
The term “Alienation Effect” was firstly used by Brecht in the essay "Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting"
published in 1936, for describing the way in which the audience was hindered from identifying itself with the
characters in the play.

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 CHAPTER 5

FORT MCMONEY: PLAYING WITH REALITY

Any resemblance between Fort McMurray, the region in Alberta, Canada, and Fort
McMoney (Dufresne, 2013b), the game-based interactive documentary, is not purely coincidental.
Fort McMoney is a paronomasia to address the oil exploration and the economic sustainability (or
unsustainability) of the Athabasca oil sands, located in Fort McMurray, Canada. More than 1,5
million barrels of oil are extracted every day from the oil sands, representing seven percent of
Canada’s total greenhouse gas emissions, and it is expected that the number of barrels will increase
to 5 million a day over the next 20 years.

The region is inhabited by a multicultural community, attracting people from all parts of
Canada and the world with the promise of well-paid jobs. Over the last ten years, Fort McMurray's
population raised from tens of thousands to over 100 thousand people. However, not all
immigrants succeed, and housing prices and rents are far higher than one would expect in such a
remote area. The result is that a significant number of people live in caravans, and there is a high
rate of homelessness and prostitution. Also, the average temperature during the winter is -18º C,
with the lowest recorded temperature as -50.6º C, making life difficult for those living in Fort
McMurray.

After two years of research, a team from the National Film Board of Canada, in
collaboration with the private company Toxa and the French television channel ARTE, filmed
2,000 hours of footage, over sixty days, at 22 of Fort McMurray’s locations, under the direction
of David Dufresne. This footage includes 55 interviews with citizens, ranging from homeless
people to the Canadian environment minister, and the chairman of the energy giant Total.

The director David Dufresne had already explored the genre through a game strategy in his
previous interactive documentary, Prison Valley (Dufresne & Brault, 2010), and when he was

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finishing this work heard about Fort McMurray. After overcoming some skepticism about the
subject matter, Dufresne realized Fort McMurray could be the perfect place to portrait in a game
base interactive documentary since he considers capitalism itself is a game. A cruel, terrible,
fascinating game ─ terribly human. Also, he states that the city of Fort McMurray is more virtual
than real, as it is miscreated. For him, Fort McMurray is something between a real-size Sim City
and the economic lung of a country less and less green (Dufresne, 2013a).

Through the documentary, the viewer is able to travel virtually around the city, meet
residents, hear their stories and interrogate the city’s figures in the interviews, to learn their opinion
about specific issues predetermined by the documentary creators. The interactive documentary
Fort McMoney, provides audiences with a sense of control over the city’s virtual future, exploring
Fort McMurray’s social, economic, political and cultural dimensions through real footage, and
tries to secure from the audience an active role in seeking a solution to Fort McMurray’s problems.

Structurally, the interactive documentary Fort McMoney is stratified in three levels and has
a progressive organization, according to which users must complete a set of tasks to gain access to
certain areas. Each option chosen by the viewer has an impact on the city's life, for it is
accompanied by an accumulation of points, through their conversion into votes, enabling him to
vote in the city's virtual referendum that will influence (together with other user options) Fort
McMoney’s virtual development. More specifically, each action performed by the viewers earns
them influence points that enable them to vote in referendums and thus contribute, as part of a
collective experience with other viewers, to the transformation of Fort McMoney. The final
outcome is a synthesis of the interaction of all the participants. Despite its interactivity and a
reminiscent strategy of video games, Fort McMoney follows a documentary approach since it
seeks to “give a tangible representation to aspects of the world we already inhabit and share”
(Nichols, 2001, p. 1) while engages audiences in the issue of sustainable economic development.

Fort McMoney, the National Film Board of Canada’s interactive documentary with its
characteristic video game strategy, may be framed under what Sandra Gaudenzi (2013) defines as
the Conversational mode. This kind of documentaries are based on Human-Computer-Interaction
strategies and “inspired by a type of interactivity that wants to reproduce the interaction between
two human beings, or a human in a physical space” (Gaudenzi, 2013, p. 41), providing to the

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interactor the illusion of an infinite database, open to endless possibilities. Gaudenzi compares this
ability of movements to an interaction with the world, such as Google Street View which affords
users with the false impression of freely explore a geographical location.

The interactive documentary premiered at IDFA – the International Documentary Film

Festival of Amsterdam, with pre-launch events in Paris, Toronto, and Montreal. Originally, Fort
McMoney was launched in three episodes, starting in November, the 25th, 2013, played in real-
time over a four-week period, engaging more than 190 thousand users in virtual debates and voting
in the weekly referendums. Since then, the interactive documentary became fully available, and
more than 360 thousands users accessed Fort McMoney, with a total of 493 thousand sessions,
contributed with nearly 6,500 arguments in the forums31.

A Spatial First-Person Interaction

Figure 14. Fort McMoney's wireframe

31
Data extracted from the National Film Board of Canada Google Analytics, from November the 25 th,
2013, until December, the 31st, 2015.

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 When we arrive at Fort McMoney, we find a cold and inhospitable place. The first
wireframe in the interface, which acts as a gateway to Fort McMoney, is an image of an icy
landscape with vapor, resembling an explosion. The sound of wind blowing makes us snuggle in
our coats and get ready for the experience to follow. The introductory video segment is a traveling
movement filmed from a car's point of view that drives us to the first level. The first shots, as well
as others during the experience, resemble the opening sequence of Michelangelo Antonioni's Il
Deserto Rosso (1964), which presents the industrial structures of a petrochemical plant.

Figure 15. Fort McMoney's petrochemical plant (left) and still frame from Il Deserto Rosso (right)

A female narrator serves as a guide to explain rules and provide clues. This female voice
addresses the viewer directly, in an apocalyptic tone: “you have reached the end of the road at the
world’s edge” (Dufresne, 2013b). In other moments, the voice has a more informative tone,
explaining to the audience the documentary game’s rules or providing background information
about what has happened and is happening. The narrator addresses viewers in the second person,
assigning thus to them the role of the main character, and summoning them to take control.
Sentences such as “your mission?” and “Fort McMoney’s faith is in your hands” reinforce the
feeling that audience’s actions and choices cause the narrative to move forward. At certain
moments, there is music to create a more immersive environment and create the emotional mood
intended by the director.

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 Perhaps because Fort McMoney has a game-like structure, David Dufresne felt the need to
draw the audience’s attention to the indexical nature of the interactive documentary: “you are
embarking on a documentary game where everything is real: the places, the events, the
characters...” (Dufresne, 2013b). Such as Nichols points out, addressing non-interactive
documentaries, an “indexical image serves as empirical or factual evidence” (2001, p. 125) and,
thus, reinforces the audience’s perception of the documentary’s verisimilitude.

Fort McMoney is structured around three levels, or episodes, in the same way as a video
game, enabling audiences to go forward in the documentary’s narrative and attain greater
involvement in decisions considering the city’s future, as they deepen their knowledge and interact
in civil life. In level one, entitled Boomtown, we can visit the city center and are introduced to
several subjects who share their experiences of living in Fort McMurray. In a trail camp, for
instance, we get to know a migrant worker, Richard Page, who works as a carpenter and tells us
how difficult it is to rent a house with such a high prices, forcing most people living in caravans.
We also meet Carl Valdock, an unemployed alcoholic in recovering, that collects and sells cans
and other recycling garbage to survive. Carl confesses he had a hard time to get used to Fort
McMurray: "I used to call it hell, now I call it home". Marquesa Shore, a waitress, expresses a
positive feeling towards the city. Although the job market is very male-dominated, she states there
are still many opportunities for women: "it's nice that women can make as much money as men
now. It's good to be a woman here". Attending the municipality council and interrogating the
mayor, visiting the hospital and a center which supports homeless people, as well as the casino
and the striptease club, are other possible actions in the first episode.

As the first level evolves, audiences are interpellated by the police patrol and invited to
register to keep a record of their interactions and scores. Without registration, the user cannot
proceed and has no access to the second level.

After introducing us the subject matter and the main conflicts, like poverty, prostitution
and environmental sustainability, the second level, Black Gold, presents the main subjects and
activists regarding the oil exploration. The episode evolves around the Macdonald Island Park,
where we can interrogate Jean Michel-Gear, CEO of Total Canada, and listen the arguments of a
journalist, as well as a lobbyist of the oil sands developers, and the member of the Legislative

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Assembly of Alberta, Don Scott, among others. Most of the interactive signs, with a shape of an
arrow, inside the leisure center simply drive the audience through a tour along the corridors and
provides the possibility of visiting some of the rooms. The experience is very similar to Google
Street View’s navigation, as we explore the building and encounter certain subjects.

At the third and last level, entitled Winter Road, we are introduced with the following
welcome message: “you have reached the end of the world… or close”. The footage take us in a
tour to the remote and icy village Fort Chipewyan, 140 miles north of Fort McMurray, where we
can meet and listen to some of the strongest opponents of the oil exploration, such as Allan Adam,
the Chief of the Athabasca Chipewyan First-Nation, and Melina Laboucan-Massimo, the
representative of Greenpeace Canada. Besides the environmental issues, they raise awareness
about the abnormal number of cancer cases in the region. There's also time for listening to a
medical doctor and the Minister of Environment, before having the chance to visit the Shell site,
which ends up being the “reward” for the three weeks interaction experience.

Among the other elements incorporated into Fort McMoney, we find documentary
segments, during which audiences are not able to act, except to pause the playback and go forward
to the next stage. Not all documentary segments can be regarded as a scene, as some of them occur
in more than one location, but they may be considered as a sequence since they are related to a
particular character. This element has an informative function (i.e., it mainly offers information
about places, lives, and everydayness conditions) and an argumentative function (i.e., it presents
topics advocated in a particular situation).

Most documentary segments begin with establishing shots, introducing the viewer to the
place inhabited by the character. Subsequently, the audience follows the character in an everyday-
life situation, such as walking or driving a car. The character is filmed mostly in a medium sized
shot, creating the sense that we are close enough to have a chat with them, while we listen to a
voice-over relating the subject’s story of their life experience at Fort McMurray. David Dufresne
presents several medium shots from different angles (front, side and mainly back) filmed with a
handheld camera to follow the subject's journey. Audiences have the feeling of walking alongside
the subjects while they talk, and thus the sense of a shared experience and moment. The sound

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combines the character's interview as voice-over, diegetic direct sound and background music to
provide the audience with a more immersive experience.

Figure 16. Walking alongside subjects (front and back)

In order to drive the audience between different places, the interactive documentary uses
ellipsis as narrative devices, displaying a video segment from a car's point-of-view. The viewer is
emplaced in the driver's seat, traveling through the city and listening to the radio broadcast. The
sound ambiance results both to create continuity between scenes and to convey information about
the subject matter.

When we accompany a character who travels by car, traveling images frequently show the
landscape outside. In fact, landscapes are of major significance in the documentary’s narrative,
whether they are natural scenarios or images of an urban highway in the city’s downtown. There
are several moments when we behold Fort McMurray’s surroundings through establishing shots,
extreme long shots and traveling shots from the car’s point of view, both in documentary video
segments and in some videos that transport us between places or levels. The more we move away
from the city and go towards its outskirts, the wider the shots become; this technique reinforces
the feeling of how cold and inhospitable the region is. Some of the shots remind us of images from
the film Fargo (Coen & Coen, 1996), with its icy landscapes and deserted roads. The
petrochemical plant itself is filmed in extreme wide shots to underscore the largeness and
mightiness of the oil company, imposing a sense of distance and detachment on the viewer.

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Figure 17. Fort McMoney’s icy landscape (left) and still frame from Fargo (right)

When the viewer encounters institutional representatives (mayor, minister, doctor,

environmental activist), she or he can choose the questions that will be answered by the subjects.
However, options are constrained to three topics predetermined by the director and could
eventually be deepened more elaborately if the viewer wishes. Regardless of whether the interview
takes place at the City Hall, a council building or a coffee shop, they have a very formal approach
regarding the image’s framing, with the interviewee filmed in a close-up or a middle-sized shot,
as if talking to a news reporter.

Figure 18. Interview with the City Mayor (Dufresne, 2013b)

Few documentary segments, on the other hand, take place during the night. Nevertheless,
these moments create a closer and more intimate relationship with the characters, as well as
contribute to simulating different times of day, providing the impression of the passage of time. At

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the end of each documentary segment, the narrator provides audiences with instructions about their
subsequent options. From time to time, the voice reminds the viewers that “your choice will affect
your experience”, to provide a sense of empowerment and make the audience aware of the ultimate
goal.

As regards the interface, audiences are able to move forward in the story and build their
own narrative through “interactive signs” (Andersen, 1997), considering the users can manipulate
them directly. Interactive signs trigger actions in response to user interaction, as a mean of
providing feedback to the actions performed by users, by clicking on the characters or additional
signs on the screen. In general, these signs change transient appearance and become other signs;
i.e., each time the viewer clicks on a button (even if it does not have the appearance of a button),
something happens to show them that their decision is ongoing. This behavior is critical in
providing feedback on the user's action while it is being carried out. The sign button has the
handling characteristics illustrated by the user's action of clicking on it and, as a result, triggering
an action in the narrative.

At the beginning of each level, we access an interface of still images representing public
places at Fort McMurray, in a 160º view that rolls right and left, as if viewers actually turn their
head and look around.

Figure 19. Fort McMoney's subjects gazing at the camera

Characters are placed in the image’s center, looking at the audience in a long shot from an
eye-level camera angle, waiting to be chosen for interaction. Each one of them embodies an
interactive sign to allow triggering her or his story. Therefore, interactive signs (or buttons) are
mostly placed at the screen's center, or their position depends on the viewer and their choice to roll
the wireframe right and left. Furthermore, all subjects that embody an interactive sign address the
audience directly, facing the camera, with a view “more interactional and emotive than

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representational” (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006, p. 89), to establish an imaginary relationship with
audiences. In each middle screen, there are several possibilities – from getting to know some
individuals, to accessing buildings or a news media archive or picking up clues with information
for the next levels. Whereas the human characters are placed at the screen’s center, archives and
small documents with game clues are scattered over the ground. This director's decision
emphasizes the human stories and experiences over the additional materials and makes them less
obvious.

Figure 20. Clues scattered over the ground

The interactive work presents a very complex structure, insofar as it offers audiences
several narrative possibilities, as well as the opportunity to navigate backward and forwards
through the documentary's contents. Due to the great significance of the interactive documentary's
structure, we have adopted the social semiotic model for multimodal meaning analysis, presented
by Martinec and van Leeuwen (Martinec & van Leeuwen, 2009), in order to transform Fort
McMoney into a diagram with three independent, but nevertheless related levels, comprising a
semantic structure. With this approach, we imply that the interactive documentary’s different
modalities (film, interface, still image, sound, text) can be converted into a meaningful whole.

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Diagram 3. Fort McMoney's structure – level 1

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Diagram 4. Fort McMoney's structure – level 2

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Diagram 5. Fort McMoney's structre – level 3

In analyzing Fort McMoney’s navigational structure, we find a complex combination of

nodes and connections aimed at creating a range of communication paths. The diagram drawn
from the different navigation possibilities can be considered as a complex non-linear model
(Martinec & van Leeuwen, 2009, pp. 65–76) with a star composed by several satellites, consisting
of non-hierarchical and non-centralized information, as well as plenty of transitions between the
documentary segments and the different levels. Regarding the complexity of the Fort McMoney’s
interaction structure, the non-linear diagram is divided into three parts, one for each level of the
documentary, and maps out all the contents available and the possible paths followed by the
audience.

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 Each level of the documentary presents a nucleus node as the point of departure for the
interaction. From there, the audience may move on to other nodes which configure satellites of the
primary node. The satellite nodes are simultaneously superordinate of other nodes less central and
subordinate nodes of the nucleus node. Furthermore, satellites are subdivided into sub-nodes that
provide the audience with sub-information for deepening the knowledge about certain places or
characters.

As the audience progresses throughout the space is given information about events,
characters and the location/ environment, providing them with the context for their actions. Hence,
the narrative establishes the viewers’ position within it and the actions they are expected to take as
a result. Also, as the interaction procedure is regarded, the interactor may move back to a central
node or the nucleus node and pursue a different path from the previous one followed, acquiring
new information and getting to meet further characters. The most interesting aspect of this dynamic
content organization is the potential it creates to explore this virtual world as much as possible.
Multiple storylines may be followed, leading the audience to a wide variety of content
organization.

There are, however, certain steps that the user must follow in order to achieve the ultimate
goal, which is still predetermined by the documentary director. By analyzing the diagram, we may
identify that some nodes hold a more centralized and prominent role in the documentary's
narrative, either by converging a more substantial number of video segments' connections or by
performing a pivot crossing point within the narrative and, therefore, the creators demand from the
audience to undergo through those nodes in order to navigate through the documentary.

In this sense, there are certain patterns to be found in the navigation structure. First, each
interface level may be considered a node, connected to different documentary segments in order
to allow audiences to develop their personalized paths. Moreover, some documentary segments
have several connections to both nodes and other documentary segments. Second, the connections
are designed to diversify the semantic values of each connection as much as possible — i.e.,
documentary segments are organized within patterns (public/private place; ordinary citizen/
institutional spokesman; urban/ rural landscapes) which are presented to audiences in an interlaced

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way with the purpose of creating a feeling of randomness. Third, and finally, there are
predetermined landmarks, which must be revealed in order to accomplish the ultimate goal.

We must not expect Fort McMoney's narrative to be structured in terms of a narrative arc
or climax. The interactive documentary's structure is designed to offer the audience a series of
multiple climaxes that culminate in the documentary’s conclusion. However, we may identify that
each level, or episode, produces a more profound knowledge in the experience and raises a more
profound awareness of the subject matter. All the elements in Fort McMoney’s story lead
audiences to an ultimate goal, whose accomplishment presupposes that viewers use everything
they have learned and felt along the process.

Fort McMoney’s Conclusions

Fort McMoney is designed to be a journey, a roadmap through the city, introducing the
viewers to several arguments to help them make informed decisions. The interactive documentary
presents an evident perspective on the subject matter, or as Bill Nichols writes, “stands for a
particular view of the world” (Nichols, 2001, p. 43). Regardless the many subjects interviewed
and presented within the documentary, with pro and con arguments about the oil exploration, it
becomes clear that David Dufresne's main purpose is to raise awareness about the environmental
consequences of such economic activity. His position could be summarized through the voice of
Allan Adam, chief of the Athabasca Chipewyan First-Nations: “They call it development, we call
it destruction” (Dufresne, 2013b).

The multiplicity of people interviewed, as well as allowing the audience to select segments
of the interview for each character, creates a very fragmented discourse. The impressions conveyed
by the characters are mostly superficial, and the interactive documentary lacks a deeper approach
and immersion that we usually experience in a traditional non-interactive documentary. Also, as
the video segments are short and are constantly stopping, requesting a choice from the audience,
the state of “suspension of disbelief” (Coleridge, 2009) is constantly interrupted and becomes hard
to create empathy with the characters on the screen. In fact, regardless David Dufresne interviewed
subjects with pro and con opinions about the subject matter, people portrayed seem to have a

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merely informational and instrumental function in the narrative, as representatives of an institution
or a certain fringe of society, to convey a message pre-conceived by the creators. Furthermore,
when we move on to the next location and leave behind a certain subject, we will rarely come
across with her or him again and, if so, the interaction with her or him is replicated from the
previous one. The hypothetical audience’s identification with the characters is disrupted by the
need to proceed in the narrative.

More than a character-driven documentary, the digital object consists, primarily, in a non-
linear narrative that progresses dynamically throughout the viewing experience. Its characteristic
interactivity opens up the possibility of exploring several narrative paths that may occur
simultaneously, in parallel or dynamically. At the same time, it operates as a matrix combination
that enables choices and perspectives limited only by the existing database. Despite the viewers’
progression towards a goal, defined by the documentary’s director, each is free to find her or his
own path through the process.

The interactive documentary provides viewers with narrative control and the possibility of
choosing certain aspects of the environment — above all, the power to imagine an alternative Fort
McMurray. This strategy provides audiences with a sense of control over the narrative's
construction and, ultimately, the city's future. Through their actions and interactions, they produce,
transform, and continuously develop heterogeneous and interlinked spaces.

Whereas most of the classical documentary forms evolve through time, Fort McMoney’s
narrative progresses across space. Such as Henry Jenkins suggests the method of environmental
storytelling for games, David Dufresne built this digital object “privileging spatial exploration over
plot development. Spatial stories are held together by broadly defined goals and conflicts and
pushed forward by the character’s movement across the map” (Jenkins, 2004, p. 123).

Fort McMoney’s indexical relation to reality affords to interactors the feeling of physically
visiting the place and traveling around Fort McMurray, contributing to a recognizable sense of
place. The complex and multilinear structure may, however, induce in the audience the feeling of
roaming around aimlessly. During the development of a personalized pathway, by moving back
and forward between choices, the viewers find themselves in a maze, where the dead ends force
them to retreat in order to proceed through a different path.

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 Due to a great amount of contents and a complex network of nodes and connections, as
shown in the diagrams, the non-linear narrative of Fort McMoney may be compared with a neo-
baroque labyrinth that Angela Ndalianis describes as "an enforced circuitousness, planned chaos,
choices among paths, intricacy, complexity, and an invitation to the audience to engage reflexively
in the diverse linear formations that drive the multidirectional form" (Ndalianis, 2004, p. 84).
However, this labyrinthine structure represents a challenge for the audience, the challenge to
rediscover a certain order in the apparent chaotic structure of contents. As in a maze, “it begins
with the pleasure of becoming lost and ends with the pleasure of discovering where we are”
(Calabrese, 1992, p. 133).

The process of reconstructing the interactive navigation demands from the viewer a certain
degree of mental mapping to keep track of space both in Fort McMurray and within the
documentary’s structure. Moreover, the documentary’s creators established a network of
hyperlinks that allow the viewers to access some pivot crossing points or characters through
multiple paths, as previously named as centralized nodes, becoming more likely that the audience
will step into this elements to progress within the documentary. This strategy is common for open-
ended and exploratory narrative structures, in which “essential narrative information must be
presented across a range of spaces and artifacts, since one cannot assume the player will necessarily
locate or recognize the significance of any given element” (Jenkins, 2004, p. 126).

Furthermore, as Jewitt states, “the potential of the medium to link texts via visual
hyperlinks enables the reader to move between the entity character in the ‘fictional domain’ of the
novel and the entity character in a ‘factual domain’ beyond the novel” (Jewitt, 2004, p. 185). As
such, the form strengthens the bonds between the interactive documentary and the audience. All
these choices, however, are made within a closed database of footage, archive material and pre-
selected arguments that are made available to the public. Whereas audiences are free to choose
and create their own path through the contents, their choices are compromised by contents (in the
documentary database), by how they are presented (via the interface) and by their own social and
personal perspectives.

The interactive documentary Fort McMoney is filmed in such a way to place the interactors
in the role of the leading character. Despite all the different shot sizes, camera angles and

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movements, the camera always embodies an intra-diegetic gaze, in a first-person point of view,
which encourages the identification of the audience with an active role in the documentary, and
cultivates the feeling that the camera embodies the viewer’s exploring gaze.

Not only the classic point of view shots permit a strong identification with the characters
on screen, in a process of “spectatorial identification” (Metz, 1982), as Fort McMoney uses as
rhetorical aesthetic discourse what Ruggerto Eugeni describes as “first person shot” (2012). Such
camera perspective represents a “remediation” (Bolter & Grusin, 1998) of the video games
aesthetics and allows “the player to perform the actions planned by the game, keeping the visual
and aural position of a specific character, whose body isn’t usually entirely visible” (Eugeni, 2012,
p. 22).

In Fort McMoney, the character represented behind the camera is the viewer himself.
Instead of personifying one of the film characters’ point of view, as part of the documentary’s
diegetic world, this “first person shot” embodies the audience’s perspective, entailing an extension
of subjectivity, and encouraging the viewer to embody and perform the main character’s role. Such
position blurs the distinction between interactor and character, inner and outer space, diegetic and
lived world. Drawing on Vivan Sobchack’s phenomenological theories, Eugeni considers that,
through the first person shot, the viewers “are confronted with an embodied, situated, ‘enworlded’
(although non completely-human) subject, and they have to define a kind of dialogical and
dialectical engagement with it” (Eugeni, 2012, p. 27).

Furthermore, this perspective offers to the viewer the illusion of personal power and control
over the world on the screen. Fort McMoney encourages such identification by inviting viewers to
identify directly with the interactive documentary’s protagonist, considering they are actually in
control and able to influence the documentary’s leading character. The tasks performed by the
audiences in the documentary reflect the development of their knowledge and skills, and contribute
to their ego as a reward for their commitment. Allowing the audience member a chance to act
heroically, behave admirably and achieve the desired outcome may be the keystone in providing
them with a positive sense of Self. However, this embodiment of the documentary’s protagonist
also demands from the viewer a constant negotiation between the Self and the extension of the
interactor’s body enacting on the screen.

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 Alternatively, we may consider the possibility of an incentive for the ego in seeking to
perform better in comparison with others, in creating social bonds as affiliation and solidarity and
pursuing social recognition. Moreover, Fort McMoney uses a collaborative strategy to engage the
audience’s participation, and offers users the opportunity of constructing the city’s future
collectively. Audience members induce Fort McMoney’s virtual destiny, but they must work
together, and the final result is as a shared construction of a virtual space of signification, which
each user attempts to shape according to his social and political views, but the result will always
be an intersubjective reality. Therefore, we may conclude that Fort McMoney strengthens
community feeling and provides users with a sense of belonging.

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 CHAPTER 6

A JOURNAL OF INSOMNIA: A COLLECTIVE PORTRAIT

A Journal of Insomnia (Choiniere et al., 2013) is an interactive documentary with a

crowdsourcing component, in which insomniacs are encouraged to provide insight about their
sleepless hours and to share their affliction. The platform collects the participants’ stories using a
User Content Generator feature and gathers the contributions in a digital database about insomnia.

Hugues Sweeney, the executive producer of this interactive documentary, come up with
the idea of gathering insomniac stories shortly after becoming a father for the first time and
experiencing the common parents sleeping deprivation caused by newborns. The nights he spent
awaked while looking after his daughter made him wandering: “Here I am up in the middle of the
night – how many other people are up at the same time we are and why?” (Adams, 2013).

Digging into the subject matter, he found that one in each three Canadians suffers from
sleeping disorders, and this ratio may be extended to all the western countries. The idea was
developed over more than two years at the Montreal NFB’s Digital Studio (Adams, 2013) and
resulted in a very collaborative experience, in which the audience may select the contents to watch
and also contribute with their own insomnia’s experience to the collective journal, by rendering an
interviewed to the NFB staff, through the computer’s webcam.

Although the sleeping disorder may be approached as a health issue, either as a symptom
or through its consequences, Hugues Sweeney had a different idea in mind, framing the subject
matter through a human perspective: “The point of view on insomnia is typically clinical. We
wanted to get at the heart of it. A human story. See how it affects society.” (Carter, 2013).

Besides Sweeney, who introduced the original idea, the National Film Board gathered an
extensive team of creators, including Thibaut Duverneix, Guillaume Braune and Bruno Choinière,

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from the company Akufen, who developed the script and the art concept as creatives, directors and
post-producers, and Philippe Lambert, a composer and sound designer which created the audio
ambience for the interactive documentary.

A Journal of Insomnia was created to induce in the audience the uncomfortable sense of
insomnia, requiring from the viewers to be awake during the night in order to fully experience the
interactive documentary, inasmuch as the creators divided the platform into three different levels
of participation: i) an open-access database, ii) a closed database and iii) the possibility of
participating with contents for the closed access database where contents generated by the audience
are lodged.

The open database can be accessed anytime from any part of the world and contain a
preamble of four stories from insomniacs, produced by the National Film Board of Canada. This
introductory section results as an invitation for a deeper experience and is accessible any time of
the day. To access the closed database, the viewer must schedule an appointment with one of the
four characters and wait for her or his phone call during the night, by providing personal contact
information. The interactive documentary demands from the audience to be an insomniac, or at
least to experience for a night sleep deprivation, to gain access to the full contents from the closed
database as well as to the other participants’ stories.

In a deeper level of involvement, the viewer may become a participant her or himself and
share one’s insomnia experience. Thus, A Journal of Insomnia should be framed as a participative
interactive documentary, since “the interactor can add, change or circulate content - and therefore
transform the artifact itself"(Gaudenzi, 2013, p. 57). To do so, the viewer must answer the
questions asked during the phone call from the National Film Board of Canada. During the call,
the voice on the other side of the line will guide the audience’s participation, inquiring the
participant about her or his insomnia experience. The answers can be recorded in a video file,
through the computer webcam, typing out text and by drawing sketches.

The digital platform started collecting the audience's participations in September of 2012,
and until December 2015, 2967 insomniacs answered the call and contributed with 41354

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elements, as texts, videos, and drawings32. The official premiere happened in April 2013, as part
of the Tribeca Film Festival's Storyscapes section for transmedia, with the exhibition of an
interactive installation, created with Judith Portier, as Art Director.

Figure 21. A Journal of Insomnia's interactive installation (National Film Board of Canada)

The interactive installation consists of a black box, resembling an oblique cube, with a
desktop computer inside. The participants may step into the box and, sited at the computer, facing
the glowing screen in the dark environment, and are invited to answer various questions about
insomnia either through video, drawing or typing the answers. Simultaneously, the answers are
projected onto the black-box’s exterior and inputted into the online database.

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Data provided by the National Film Board of Canada.

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Figure 22. User's answers projected outside the installation (National Film Board of Canada)

Besides Tribeca Storyscapes section, the installation was also presented at the Sheffield
Doc/Festival, DOK Leipzig, Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival and the Musée National
des Beaux-Arts du Québec (Montreal). The creators also presented a collective and sensorial
experience, in a live web-concert, with a 60 minutes director’s cut version, during Cinema du Réel
(Paris), in 2014.

From Interaction to Participation

An immersive voice, with minimal mood music over a dark background invites the
audience to dive into a night of insomnia. The voice is accompanied by a digital sound wave vector,
pulsating out from the screen’s center. A resonant sound effect follows this disembodied voice in
a vacuum, baffling, dreamlike, crossed with a ticking clock sound, setting the pace every second.
The sound designer Philippe Lambert explains that he used and manipulated actual sound from the
webcams to acquire this result: “You can take a sound and pitch it down and it becomes a dark

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bass note, a melody or choir effect. I was using musique concrète techniques to create a
soundtrack” (Pangburn, 2013).

As the creators tried to enhance a sense of surreal darkness, the voice resembles the erotic
and appealing tone of the actress Debbie Harry in the film Videodrome (1983), by David
Cronenberg. A Journal of Insomnia uses narration as a rhetorical mode of discourse to
communicate directly with the viewer, appealing to her or his senses and speaks in the first person
to create an intimate and personal story, as a confidential testimony of an insomniac. Also, it relates
to the audience in the second person, addressing the viewer directly by “you”, to boost in the
viewer what Edgar Morin (2005) describes as a process of projection-identification: "in developed
countries, 30 percent of people are insomniacs like me. Since the fall of 2012, privately, under the
cover of darkness, I have been meeting them and collecting their stories. Welcome to A Journal of
Insomnia” (Choiniere et al., 2013).

The interface of A Journal of Insomnia induces a feeling of dyssomnia in the audience and
sustains a surreal experience. According to Akufen, the company that designed the documentary
interface, “every element of graphic design is in a direct link with the visual identity; intense color
contrasts, shrieking elements, glitches... Anything to make a user the most uncomfortable, just like
as sleepless night would” (“A journal of insomnia - Akufen,” 2013).

The opening sequence works as a preamble for welcoming the audience into the
documentary content, divided into an open access section for all viewers, a closed section with
further content, available only to the viewers that schedule an appointment, and a closed digital
archive with all the participants’ contributions. The voice delivers this information, warning that
“only by making an appointment and coming back tonight will you receive the full experience. It's
your turn now to invest part of your night” (Choiniere et al., 2013).

The open access content is accessible to anyone during the daytime, composed by teasers
of four stories produced and filmed by the National Film Board of Canada to introduce the subject
of insomnia. Four parts compounded by the faces of four subjects (Francis, Sarah, Fatiah, and

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Tina) split the screen, while the narrator asks “Who will you join?”. The hands of a clock move
over the screen, setting the pace in slow seconds.

Figure 23. Welcome screen, presenting a combination of the four individual portraits of the protagonists (Choiniere
et al., 2013)

The four individual portraits combine into a single face, visually conveying that although
each story is unique, all the stories have something in common: insomnia. These four stories work
like an invitation to a deeper experience in the interactive documentary. Tina, Sarah, Francis, and
Fatiha share their intimate thoughts to promote identification with the audience, while images of
their empty bedrooms overlap with a still close-up portrait of each subject, facing the camera
directly and subsequently the audience.

It's a blend of movement and stillness, just as Tina describes her nights: "thoughts running
through my mind, images constantly streaming through my mind, words… Ghostly thoughts…
thoughts and images. Movement. Motionlessness, which is hard to bear at night". For Tina
“insomnia is a space-time continuum that must be tamed, in order to surrender to it. Otherwise,
insomnia drives us mad” (Choiniere et al., 2013).

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 The inevitability of the continuum of space and time in life is suspended in film, as montage
has the ability to manipulate time and space through flashbacks and flash-forwards, slow motions
and ellipsis. While reality traps us in a certain place and time, the film has the peculiarity of
interrupting time, of displacing us to another world, leading us to a state of “suspension of
disbelief” (Coleridge, 2009). Furthermore, in an interactive documentary the concept of time and
space is even more discontinuous, considering the contents are fragmented to allow the audience
to navigate through the database and experience a multilinear narrative, leading to a complex
process of reception, interaction and, consequently, interpretation, which Sandra Gaudenzi
describes as following:

While in linear documentaries meaning was created by framing shots and editing
them together, in participatory interactive documentary meaning is shared and layered:
there is the meaning of individual clips (not controlled by the interactive documentary
author), the meaning of the interface (normally conceived by the author) and the meaning
of the browsing (the narrative route and association generated by the user, while jumping
between videos). (2014, p. 200)

All the images from A Journal of Insomnia are dark, accentuated on a black background,
flicking and tilting slowly. The aesthetic of a tawdry and intended low-resolution quality image
and sound, to forge the analog recordings, presents an attempt for creating a tension between the
high-quality images, normally associated with digital new technologies, and the human, defected,
faulty and disruptive sleep of the insomniacs.

The four protagonists complain that sleep deprivation is disrupting their lives. Fatiah
describes insomnia as "hell", and all of them affirm that their minds are over-busy. If that's not the
case, Francis discloses, he tends to "dwell on something that wasn't there". Meanwhile, the night
represents an emptiness, a vacuum, when “nothing happens”, as Sarah resignedly says.

Once we have watched and interacted with the open access database, we are invited to
schedule an appointment during the night with one of the characters, for accessing the closed
content about that particular subject, for contributing with our insomnia experience and interacting
with the digital archive comprising the other participant’s contributions. In order to experience the
full participative interactive documentary, the user is invited to embody the point-of-view of an

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insomniac, interacting with the archive and simultaneously experiencing a condition of insomnia
during the night.

Figure 24. Inviting the audience for making an appointment

Accepting the challenge will lead us to the second level of interaction within A Journal of
Insomnia. By clicking on the alarm clock interactive sign and requesting an appointment, we are
redirected to a webpage that suggests the time for the appointment, asking for the user’s approval.
As the viewer accepts the time for the rendezvous, the platform requests her or his contact
information, such as e-mail address, country code and phone number. The information is
confirmed via e-mail with the following text:

Hello, Thank you for agreeing to surrender part of your night in order to experience
collective insomnia. Your meeting with (name of one of the four characters) will be at
23h11 (scheduled time). The invitation will expire after two hours. (Choiniere et al., 2013)

After receiving the e-mail, all we can do is waiting for the night to fall.

It's night. The dark sky above our heads tells us it's time to sleep. Most of the lights from
the houses are off. Only the street lights punctuate the urban landscape. It's silent. Probably

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everyone is sleeping, or at least I assume so. I feel like I'm the only human being on earth that is
awake. Thoughts are streaming into my mind and do not allow me to just forget about daytime.
The feeling of loneliness is suddenly interrupted by my phone ringing. It's a call from the National
Film Board of Canada.

On the other side, the surreal narrator’s voice starts conducting the experience with a
sententious discourse: "Good evening! The time has come. Don't miss your appointment. Someone
is waiting for you in the night. Click the link I've sent you in the e-mail" (Choiniere et al., 2013).

The link redirects us to a black screen with a countdown timer, notifying the time remaining
for the rendezvous.

Figure 25. landing page of the e-mail link (Choiniere et al., 2013)

After presenting the frontal close up portrait of the subject, we are introduced in the
characters’ house entrance hall, and we are provided to choose where, inside the house, we want
to go, by clicking on one of the arrows in the image.

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 The interactive documentary presents a specific aesthetic to each character as an attempt
to illustrate how each one of the four describes her or his nights, what kind of thoughts run in their
minds and what they usually do when they can’t sleep.

Figure 26. Sarah's entry hall (Choiniere et al., 2013)

In Sarah’s case, the interactive signs will lead us through a walk in the house by displaying
an accelerated first-person point-of-view sequence shoot. Both the image and sound’s aesthetic
resembles a VHS tape played in fast forward. In an interview for The Creators Project, the director
of photography of A Journal of Insomnia, Thibaut Duverneix, explains that he shot the room
images with a Red camera and then transferred the footage to a VHS tape in order to degrade the
look, as a way to represent what Sarah described as her experience of insomnia. Duverneix
elaborates that he had some doubts considering the aesthetic: “I was really pushing it far from
interactivity. Far from making it look good, honest and intimate” (Pangburn, 2013).

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Figure 27. Documentary footage with VHS drop-outs

However, the half-amateur, home video aesthetic make us feel closer to the character as
she becomes more tangible and human. Such aesthetic approach reinforces the audience’s
identification with the subject, since VHS images and sounds are familiar for most adults that deal
with it during the 1980's.

After walking through the house, the Sarah is waiting for us in one of the rooms, framed in
a medium size shoot while is talking about her life and insomnia experiences. During the video
segment drop-outs typical from the videotape playback are used to veil the jump cuts between the
different parts of the interview. At any moment of the video segment, the user is able to interrupt
the interview, either by closing the window and going back to the entrance hall to choose another
video segment of the same subject, or by clicking on an interactive sign placed in the bottom of
the screen to explore further footage related with the characters’ description of her or his insomnia
experience. While the interactor manipulates and selects the images displayed the interview is not
interrupted. The soundscape grants the continuity between segments.

While in Sarah’s and Francis cases, the extra contents triggered are mainly close up shots
of the room where they are sited, in Fatiah’s segment the images become all warped or
defragmented in multiple smaller windows composing a kaleidoscopic yantra. Such aesthetic
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represents the fragmented and messy sleep she experiences, as described in her interview. In Tina's
interview turn, the extra contents triggered present ghostly images overlaying her house, just as
she describes her insomnia nights: “ghostly thoughts… thoughts and images” (NFB, 2013).

Figure 28. Fatiah's kaleidoscopic images

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Figure 29. Tina's ghostly images

When each video segment ends, we listen the sound of a shuttle controller being pressed
to stop the video display, and the viewer is taken back through the corridors to the departure place
using the same VHS video aesthetic, but this time in a rewind mode. From there, we can choose
to keep listening to the same character and exploring the other rooms and footage, by clicking in
one of the interactive arrow signs, or abandon the character’s testimony and move on.

Whenever the spectator wishes to proceed with the experience, an interactive sign with an
axe, placed in the upper right corner of the screen, allows leaving this specific insomniac and
redirects the user to “the voice”.

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Figure 30. Dynamic sound wave vector ("the voice")

The sound wave vector, in the black background, returns to inform us that we gained access
to the other three subject’s stories as well as to “all the confessions from all the insomniacs who
collaborated to A Journal of Insomnia” (Choiniere et al., 2013). The black background absorbs the
sound vector, and we gain access to the User Content Generated database. What is intriguing in
the database is the fact that the four main characters’ testimonies are presented next to the
participants’ stories, placing the spectators/contributors and the documentary’s subjects next to
each other and, therefore, regarding them as being at the same level within the documentary’s
structure.

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Figure 31. Participant's digital archive

In the bottom of the screen, we may identify the option of contributing with our own
experience and contents to A Journal of Insomnia. This interactive sign displays an interface with
the black background and the ticking clock sound. The arrow placed in the center of the screen
leads the interactor to the interview to answer the questions and participate in the interactive
documentary. Each question is presented both typed on the screen and through the voice that, by
now, has become familiar to the audience. The interface also provides to the participant the chance
of choosing the answering mode: through the webcam, typing and drawing the answers.

The participant’s answers are then included in the digital database, and available to the
other insomniacs. While some participants clearly accept the call with the intention of gaining
access to the database and do not disclose their intimate thoughts, the truth is that most of the
contents present a very intimate, profound and honest description of the audience’s experience
with insomnia. The producer Hugues Sweeney considers “there's a real need for these people not
only to come out as an insomniac but also to share how they feel” and whereas the oral and typed
answers are insightful, the drawings unveil the deepest private worlds:

Most of the drawings were especially affecting. I didn’t expect them to be so

personal and so natural. There’s one that asks, “how does the insomnia make you feel
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 towards the people around you?” And that person really drew themselves as completely
separate from the world. That touched me. I was impressed with the ways that people would
create themselves. The medium is a website and they talk like they would to a real person.
(Kemmerle, 2013)

Figure 32. Drawings made by participants for answering questions.

By and large, most of the participations occurred in the bedroom or the living room, with
a warm and shimmer light. While participants are aware the result of their contribution to the
interactive documentary will become available for streaming online, the videos reveal a
surprisingly intimate and confidential tone. The digital documentary’s archive becomes a
confession booth where interactors feel they may unveil their thoughts and traumas. Such
comparison between documentary and confession was also suggested by Michael Renov, who
drawing upon Foucault’s theories of the confessional subject, addresses the video camera as “an
instrument of confession” (Renov, 2004, p. 196), as a kind of psychoanalytic stimulant which
encourages people to self-disclose and reveal their emotions and experiences in depth. Renov also
addresses the first-person video confessions, as objects which satisfy Foucault’s concept of
confession as a “discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement” (2004,
p. 200), the subject of enunciation. Such practice may serve as a cathartic moment for reliving

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anxieties and unburdening afflictions, almost in a therapeutic way, which provides interactors with
the chance of sharing experiences. This process may also contribute to the audience's sense of
virtual companionship.

Regarding the interaction strategy, although hyperlinks activate the interactive signs and
the documentary allows exploring its contents in multilinear navigation, the most significant
interaction component in A Journal of Insomnia is the acceptance of external video segments sent
by the audience. As a participative interactive documentary, the digital object challenges the
interactors contributing with contents and, thus, “the video database can evolve through
participation” (Gaudenzi, 2013, p. 56). Therefore, I draw two diagrams for disclosing the
architecture’s structure of A Journal of Insomnia: a simple non-linear tree model (Martinec & van
Leeuwen, 2009, pp. 30–35) for the open access database and a complex non-linear model,
combining a tree and a star model (Martinec & van Leeuwen, 2009, pp. 45–54), for translating the
semantic structure of the closed access database.

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Diagram 6. A Journal of Insomnia's open archive

The first diagram corresponding to the open access database, as a simple non-linear model,
translates a basic interaction navigation which branches the contents for providing the selection of
pathways. By selecting one of the characters, a short video with her or his testimony is displayed,
without providing further control over the narrative to the interactor. The viewer is also allowed
returning to the homepage and select another subject to listen to her or his introduction story.
Regardless the character selected, in any case, the viewer is driven to the invitation screen and
encouraged to make an appointment and actively participate in the documentary by adding her or
his own insomnia experience. Such structure classifies the items under a hierarchical system with
different levels, in which the higher level nodes contain the information about the characters and

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the lower levels invite the audience to schedule an appointment and later proceed with the
experience of participating in the interactive documentary.

Diagram 7. A Journal of Insomnia's closed archive

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 As regards the closed access database, represented on the second diagram of A Journal of
Insomnia, it structures the contents in a combinatory scheme of a tree with a star model. Whereas
the video segments with the characters’ testimonies are presented under a tree form, the
participants’ evolving database is organized within a star architecture. In the tree model format,
each one of the characters' interview is fragmented into four segments represented by central
nodes, which in turn evolve in sub-nodes with further additional information. Each one of the video
segments focuses on a specific topic within the subject of insomnia, contributing along with the
sub-information contained in each sub-node to deepen the audience’s familiarity with both the
person and the subject matter. Concerning the digital database where the participants’
contributions are included, the items are organized as a star pattern, where the main interface with
the appearance of a mosaic is the nucleus, and each one of the video segments available is a
peripheral element. Each one of these elements represents a satellite of the nucleus, insofar as the
video contributions are directly related and under the main interface. Moreover, at the end of each
video segment, the interactor is driven back to the nucleus to choose another video segment or to
proceed with the interactive experience.

Notwithstanding the distribution of contents within a structure may comprise semantic

meaning, in the interactive documentary A Journal of Insomnia the more significant feature is
undoubtedly the audience’s participation in the work by contributing with a personal experience
to the overgrowing digital database. Under the participative interactive documentary, interactor
steps forward and engages in the work as a co-creator who contributes to the expansive database
in a collaborative ecosystem where the documentary’s characters co-live with the participants’
contributions. By allowing and engaging the effective participation in the documentary, A
Journal of Insomnia fosters a sense of virtual community among the participants and connect
them in a collaboration of collectively constructing the digital object. Moreover, the audience’s
awareness about the expansive capacity of the digital archive provides them with the feeling of
contributing for nourishing the approach to the topic of insomnia.

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A Journal of Insomnia’s Conclusions

The Internet is probably the best place to talk about insomnia. The World Wide Web
disrupts our concepts of time and place, and as Jonathan Crary states in his book, “24/7 announces
a time without time, a time extracted from any material or identifiable demarcations, a time without
sequence or recurrence” (2013, p. 29). The technologies efface geographical borders and blurry
the divisions between night and day, light and dark. We can be online 24 hours a day, seven days
a week, and in some place on the planet there will be daytime, and there will be someone online.

Pierre Lévy compares this alternation process of succession to a “changing of the guard”,
stressing for the continuous of internet, a system that never sleeps and breaks the sense of
discontinuity and the corporeal:

While the thought of individuals is discontinuous because they sleep, grow ill, tired,
take vacations, the collective intellect is always alert. When a mind slips into sleep, a
hundred others rise to take its place. Consequently, the virtual world is always illuminated,
animated by the flames of living intelligence. By combining thousands of intermittent
flickering rays, we obtain a collective light that shines continuously. (Lévy, 1997, p. 107).

The interactive documentary A journal of Insomnia plays with this specific Internet
attribute to contradict it, requiring the audience to be online during the night time. In order to give
their testimony and to access most of the documentary’s contents, it is necessary that participants
make a night appointment and receive a call from the National Film Board to guide their
participation. In a sense, this interactive documentary tries to restrict a world without apparent
constraints, establishing limits for the endlessness of the World Wide Web. However, the digital
database of the interactive documentary is an overgrowing archive, always accepting another video
contribution, and where interactors may experience a sense of loss and infinity, insofar as the
countless documentary contents may generate an everlasting interaction performance and stress in
the users a sense of endlessness.

A Journal of Insomnia also triggers the audience in the process of self-representation by

encouraging the participation in the documentary’s content. Such practice goes beyond the
projection-identification process defined by Edgar Morin (2005). While in his Imaginary Man

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writings Morin establishes the spectator as outside the mise-en-scène, deprived of actual
participation and without the ability to change the narrative, in the interactive documentary the
user can shape the story and, furthermore, to include himself as an active participant in the artwork.
For Morin, cinema is an aesthetic experience because it is meant for a passive spectator “who
remains conscious of the absence of the practical reality of what is represented” (Morin, 2005, p.
97), by converting the magic crystallization into affective participation. While, in participative
interactive documentary the user contributes to building a world that is not merely imaginary,
where she or he inscribes oneself and intervenes directly, even though such constructed world is
always intersubjective.

By accepting to participate in the documentary and including their stories the users become
“both spectators and actors” (NFB, 2013). They not only navigate and watch the contributions
from other insomniacs, creating a personalized narrative, as may send their own contents,
contributing to a collective portrait. In fact, in such collaborative ecosystem spectator becomes a
character among other faces, a part of the collective world represented by inscribing her or himself
into the narrative and ensuring a shared omnipresence online. Such high degree involvement in
the interaction process may trigger the interactor's sense of belonging to an online community. As
a participant sharing common interests, anxieties and experiences with other audience members,
users perceive a sense of connectedness which may contribute to their absorption in the
documentary.

Also, we must acknowledge that we are living “in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the
epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed”
(Foucault, 1984, p. 46)33, and insomnia conducts to a feeling of extreme loneliness. On the other
hand, while we become more rootless in our physical space, we are more and more embedded in
the new digital neighborhood, connected through cultural and personal interests. As networked
beings, we are becoming intellectual and social “nomads”(Lévy, 1997), moving through a virtual,
mobile and discontinuous territory.

33
The essay Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias was first published by the French journal Architecture
/Mouvement/ Continuité in October, 1984, based on a lecture given by Michel Foucault in March 1967. Since the text
was never reviewed for publication by Foucault is not part of the official corpus of his work.

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 Each video of the database may be regarded as a personal territory, a space of affinity that
is built by its participant to mark her or his presence in a virtual world of insomniacs. The
individual stories are both produced and presented as discrete experiences, disconnected from one
another, and connected through a common subject matter. When ephemeral stories captured by
our digital artifacts become part of a heterogeneous assemblage, they find their space within a
narrative and draw a map, delineated from the emotional virtual bonds. The combination of these
contributions collaborates in constructing a specific territory for its users based on affective
geography and generating a map of multi-shared experiences. The archive keeps evolving, and the
map keeps growing every time someone contributes with a new personal story.

In a prophetic statement, Foucault (1984) imagines the networking of individuals as a

means to constructing geographies of human interaction. The Web 2.0 and collaborative digital
environments appear to reanimate a spacialization of thought and experience and simultaneously
gather individual experiences to enhance collective memory. In a certain perspective, we may infer
that participative interactive documentary brings people closer together and connects them through
sharing their stories, fostering a sense of belonging among participants. If only in a figurative
sense, by bringing the users closer to each other through identifying with an issue in common, the
artwork also forges in the audience a sense of place.

Moreover, through a displacement of archives to the user’s screen, the digital artwork
presents a “reterritorialization” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2000) of images, building a map that provides
the digital archives with a new context and meaning. Even if the archives were deterritorialized
from their original territory, in participative interactive documentary the images are resituated in
a new territory of knowledge to assume a different function.

Also, the database works as a “sounding board” for insomniacs’ confessions. Each one of
the participants present a unique story and contributes to creating a multi-perspective,
multidimensional, and multilinear map of insomnia, mapping the sleep disorder in an artistic rather
than in a clinical perspective. In the interactive documentary the digital archives encompass
multiple perspectives with different approaches to the same subject, such as insomnia, and
together these perspectives build a broader point-of-view, or as Pierre Levy calls it, a
“Cosmopedia”, in which knowledge is not in possession of a few, but a form of "universally

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distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in the
effective mobilization of skills” (Lévy, 1997, p. 13).

Later, by facing themselves in the documentary’s content, participants are confronted with
their image transferred to the screen and interact, physically and conceptually, with their own
beings. We may consider this self-inscription as a self-portrait, a face to face with the subject, a
proper inquiry into the essence of the subjectivity of the individual. The interactor beholds the Self
through her or his own mirrored digital image, and watches her or his own eyes and gaze, her or
his image from the otherness point-of-view. Thus, the viewer experiences the dialectics of the
symbolic form between the Self and the Same.

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 PART III

THEORETICAL DEVELOPMENTS
 CHAPTER 7

WAYS OF AFFECTION

Back in 1964, when Marshal MacLuhan (1994) wrote Understanding Media, there was no
such thing as interactive documentary, the Internet was in its infancy and the first experiments in
interactivity were being developed. Nonetheless, the recent progress of electronic media brings to
the discussion McLuhan’s writings about the human body as an extension of the technological
apparatus, like an implosion of a shared consciousness that comprises significant changes in
experiencing the world. McLuhan goes further by considering that media is, in fact, an extension
of our senses:

Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extension of man – the technological
simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and
corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended
our senses and nerves by the various media. (McLuhan, 1994, pp. 3–4)

In this cultural-technological upheaval Marshal McLuhan’s suggestion that electronic

media change how we feel becomes relevant for understanding the perceptual and multisensory
experience of interactive documentary. Also, Vivian Sobchack proposes a "cinesthetic" mode of
embodied spectatorship. In the paper "What my fingers knew" (2000), she argues that film
experience is not only a visual experience but a fully body-sensory pleasure since cinema appeals
to the viewer's multiple senses and creates a para-sensory experience similar to synaesthesia. As
such, the subject’s body becomes the agency and location of perception where all the senses
cooperate and commutate. Furthermore, Sobchack stresses that electronic media, as pervasive
cultural technologies, transform our sense of subjectively perceived and embodied ways of "being-
in-the-world", altering the audience's subjectivity, extending our senses and the “capacity to see
and make sense of ourselves” (Sobchack, 2016, p. 4).

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 The digital devices, such as the mouse, the keyboard, the monitor or any other input and
output devices positioned between the viewer and the virtual environment, provide to the human
body an extension, in the McLuhanian sense, where the interactor may act and through which she
or he perceives the mediated experience. As a domestic digital medium, de digital screen appears
here as an “object of fascination” that demands the constant interaction through seeing and
listening, as also through touching and reasoning, providing a multisensorial interface of
interconnection between the human body and the diegetic world of interactive documentary.
Consequently, the digital screen becomes a space in-between the interactor and the digital
environment, for providing the fusion of technology with the body in a perpetual symbiosis, not
only in an embodied phenomenological sense, in which the device reshapes the user’s experience,
but first and foremost in a postphenomenological “hermeneutic relation”34, in which "the user
experiences a transformed encounter with the world via the direct experience and interpretation of
the technology itself" (Rosenberger & Verbeek, 2015, p. 17).

Drawing upon Merleau-Ponty's concept of phenomenology, which analyzes structures of

human experience between the world and the bodily sensory experience, Don Ihde's
postphenomenological approach explores the relationships between body and technology, how the
latter induces bodily experiences of interacting with it and, consequently, shapes how the human
beings perceive the world. He also distinguishes between two dimensions of perception: micro and
macro-perceptions. While the first one (microperception) is the dimension of bodily-sensory
perceptions, elaborated on the work of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, macroperception comprises an
interpretative dimension that discloses cultural, historical and anthropological meaning, drawn
upon philosophers such as Heidegger and Foucault. Following Ihde’s approach, these two aspects
will be analyzed as intrinsically interrelated, since “there is no bare or isolated microperception
except in its field of hermeneutic or macroperceptual surrounding; nor may macroperception have

34
Don Ihde (1990) understands technological mediation as the role technology plays in the relation between
human beings and their world. He discerns several relationships human beings can engage with technological artifacts:
“embodiment relations”, when the instrument is “incorporated” and becomes an extension of the human body,
experientially quasi-transparent to the user; “alterity relations”, when the users interact with devices as if them were
other living beings; “hermeneutic relations”, when technologies provide representations of reality, which need to be
interpreted by humans in order to constitute a perception; and “background relations”, for addressing technologies
that play a role at the background of our experience, creating a context for our perceptions.

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any focus without its fulfillment in microperceptual (bodily-sensory) experience” (Ihde, 1993, p.
77).

In this sense, technologies have the ability to alter certain phenomenological sensations,
since their embodiment “simultaneously magnify or amplify and reduce or place aside what is
experienced through them” (Ihde, 1990, p. 76). Thus, whereas the experience of interacting with
the digital documentaries alienate the interactor from the surrounding world, also provides
sensations and enhances her or his illusions and fantasies. The spectator-interactor, i.e., the subject,
manipulates the interactive documentary, i.e., the object, as much as is shaped by it. They mutually
reflect upon one another their desires, dreams, and aspirations through the perceptive and
expressive articulation of subjectivity. The beholder becomes an active and passive character
simultaneously, controlling the digital object as much as it is controlled by it.

Deleuze and Guattari (1994) talk about the interaction of bodies as a condition for
sensibility, or proto-sensibility and proto-affectivity, a state of the body induced by another body.
Besides the perceptual experience, they behold the state of affection as a moment of unformed and
unstructured potential, when the human body is affected by the encounter with another body so
that it affects one's power of being. It is through an increasing or decreasing intensity that such
encounter prepares the body for acting. Such as Eric Shouse (2005) summarizes, “affect plays an
important role in determining the relationship between our bodies, our environment, and others,
and the subjective experience that we feel/think as affect dissolves into experience”. Thus, while
navigating through the interactive documentary contents, triggering hyperlinks, making decisions
and interpreting the filmic interactive narrative, the audience is brought into the performative
action and becomes vulnerable to bodily felt senses conveyed by the experience itself, as much as
uses her or his personhood for shaping the subjective perception of consciousness.

The term sense is employed in this study through a perceptual approach that has been
guiding the experience of interacting with the digital objects, to address the way in which the body
perceives the external stimulus provided by the interactive experience. Although emotions and
feelings are related with and influence affections, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish the terms,
addressing affections as states of mind and body which add intensity and a sense of urgency to the
practice, influencing the subjective human experience. However, affects cannot be translated into

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language, since they are unformed, unstructured and always prior to and outside of consciousness.
Thus, not only interactive documentaries communicate with the spectator through vision and
hearing, as, in a phenomenological perspective, the interactive perception is an embodied
experience following through the entire body, providing sensations and feelings which trigger
affects and encourage the pleasure to proceed to interact with the digital objects.

Within the last three chapters I presented a descriptive work of the interactive
documentaries’ experience selected as the corpus of study, while describing the nature of the
human perceptual contact and the interaction with the world re-presented on the screen, as the
essence of the spectator’s perception and consciousness35. The experience of interacting with the
digital objects while provides to the spectators the opportunity of participating in the interactive
documentary at different levels, as aligning the fragmented parts of the interactive documentaries,
building a personalized narrative, contributing with her or his own contents for constructing the
narrative, also grants the audience with perceptions, sensations and affections.

The affects conveyed by the interactive documentary experience are, however, impressions
that do not necessarily represent faculties, but more an illusion of intentionality. Throughout the
experience of interacting with the documentary contents, the audience actively seeks out for
pleasure and for fulfilling a sensation of delight. The sensuous encounter with the interactive
documentary provides a virtual gratification for the spectator’s performance, translated in this
research as a “sense of”. These senses of are embodied responses of the viewers from the process
of interacting with the documentaries, as also represent embodied ways of being seduced and
shaped by the experience of manipulating the digital objects. Instead of representing real
achievements, as types of feelings, the senses of imply the audience’s perception rather than their
emotions.

Such as the various modes of interactive documentary represent different ways of

interplaying with the documentary's contents, and consequently, with the world, each interaction
strategy behind the digital objects convey different ways of affection, or senses of, to the viewer.

35
Both concepts of perception and consciousness include the processes of reasoning and interpretation, as
well as sensation induced by the experience of film viewing and interacting.

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While interacting with the documentaries, the spectators are imbued by these sensations that shape
their perception and subjectivity, as also influence the interaction in itself.

Sense of Control

Having non-linear structures, interactive documentaries are responsive objects, flexible,

sensitive and open to the audience’s inputs, responding in “real-time” to their instructions. Such
process of interacting with the contents generates an illusion of greater freedom for choosing paths
and outcomes. While the documentary unfolds, the viewers introduce commands into the system
and receive the transformed feedback from their orders instantaneously and consistently with the
expectations created by the digital object. The immediate response to the user’s instructions as
well as the sense of shaping the object elicits in the audience the impression of having control over
the narrative, consequently over the flow of the story, and ultimately over the character’s destiny.

While interacting with the digital environment, the spectator experiences a sense of control,
insofar as all her or his instructions have consequences and produce a development. The simple
action of navigating through the narrative, triggering hyperlinks and receiving back images, audio,
and video contents, creates in the beholder the sensation of determining the flow of the story,
encouraging her or him to proceed and achieve the plot of the documentary. As the interactive
practice evolves, the embodied experience provides to the audience the tactile sense of having the
documentary’s diegetic control at the fingertips, palpable sense of a living object that feeds and
sustains the process of meaning-making. The user, thus, comes into a relational dimension for a
subjective mediation of reality.

While the sense of control is transversal to all interactive documentaries by virtue of the
mere operation of interacting with the contents, the degree of manipulation, and therefore the
perception of controlling the narrative, varies according to the interaction architectural system.
Looking at the interactive documentaries analyzed within the previous chapters, we realize the
choices are generally limited to a database, and the audience's participation is guided by the rules
established by the documentary's creators. Moreover, although the system is responsive and

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presents to the viewer the contents selected, the result of the interaction doesn’t necessarily change
the development of the story.

In the hyperlink interactive documentary Bear 71, not only the interaction is restrained to
the contents available as the choices made by the audience have no impact on the story’s
development and denouement. Regardless the information triggered and displayed about the park’s
animals as the story unfolds, the linear soundscape leaves no space for manipulating the sequence
of events and the final destiny of Bear 71 remains unchangeable. Such systems present mere
procedural actions and result in a deterministic relationship between the subject and the object,
allowing the audience just a few creative freedom.

On the other hand, a truly interactive system grants the audience autonomy for navigating
more freely through the contents and even allows unexpected choices and developments. That’s
one of the reasons why Janet Murray (1998) distinguishes generic interactivity, action and
participation from the concept of agency. While a responsive system based in a cause-effect
scheme corresponds to the expected feedback, an interactive narrative should seek for a high-
agency experience, comprising both the author’s intentionality and the openness of unexpected
and meaningful developments. In the participatory database of A Journal of Insomnia, the user is
free for compounding a personalized puzzle of fragmented contributions from insomniacs and
creating a unique narrative which flows according to each spectator's choices. Such interactive
documentaries, with a higher degree of openness, result from a mutual collaboration between the
audience and the machine, evolving in a dynamic, contextualized and continuous progression, and
consequently fostering in the viewer a more profound sense of control.

Besides the action of triggering hyperlinks, documentaries like Fort McMoney position the
user in the role of the story’s protagonist, automatically prompting an intimate empathy with the
documentary’s goal. The virtual eyes become the spectator’s vision, the user’s navigation and
choices become an extension of the character’s movements through the narrative, immersing the
audience at the plot center and blending spectator and character in a single entity. In such
documentaries not only the spectator experiences the sense of control over the narrative as also
enacts the personification of the main character and, by large, has the impression of controlling
the world portrayed.

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 To summarize, depending on the interaction strategy and the degree of manipulation
provided, the impact of the user's interaction may be more or less significant for the documentary's
development and, consequently becomes more or less meaningful for the audience. Whereas the
sense of control is always induced in the interactive audience, the impression of being in control
also varies according to the degree of the spectator's autonomy and the position undertaken.

Sense of Presence

Such as Marshall McLuhan (1994) highlights, as extensions of our nerves and senses, the
technological media may lead to an illusion of overcoming the bodily constraints of space and
time. While interacting with digital objects, the awareness of the physical self is replaced by the
sense of being surrounded by the diegetic world of the interactive documentary, since the
experience allows users to virtually visit, inhabit and interact with those worlds. Furthermore, the
digital environment change our perception and experience of space as much as make it possible
that no territory becomes off-limits, providing to the audience imaginary worlds:

Interactors will be lured into worlds where they float, tumble, and arc through
thrillingly colored spaces, fly through imaginary clouds, and swim lazily across welcoming
mountain ponds…enchanting worlds of increasingly refined visual delight that are
populated by evocative fairy-tale creatures. (Murray, 1998, p. 263)

Regardless if the interactive documentary is build up from live events footage or 3D

computer generated images, each digital object creates its private world, or a heterotopia36 as
Foucault (1984) would call it, and induces the subjective perception of transferring the viewer to
the simulated place, providing her or him with a sense of presence in the diegetic world.

36
Michel Foucault (1984) describes heterotopias as real places which stand outside of its space, capable of
combining several spaces in a single place, usually sliced in time, and both isolated and open and accessible, as public
spaces.

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 The term presence 37 has been widely explored by scholars (Heeter, 1992; McMahan, 2003;
Steuer, 1992), along with immersion, for addressing the experience of virtual reality and games,
as a perceptual and psychological state of being transported to the constructed digital environment,
either by means of the realistic images and sounds or by positioning the audience role-playing the
story. In either case, the users experience a sense of presence when they forget about the physical
place where they stand and have the impression of being absorbed into the diegetic digital world.
For Heeter (1992), beyond the technological apparatus that bears the interactive objects, the
uniqueness of digital environments lies mostly on the subjective mediated experience offered to
the audience, inducing the perceptual impression of one’s existence within the constructed world.
According to her, the impression of “being there”, at the story, when individuals become absorbed,
concentrated, and fascinated by the environment, is what provides to the audience a sense of
presence.

Heeter proceeds by distinguishing three dimensions of presence within Virtual Reality -

personal presence, social presence and environmental presence – which may be applied to the
experience of engaging with interactive documentaries. Personal presence is described as the
subjective perceptual experience of the audience's perception of being included in the virtual
world, by the realistic imagery and sound or by the responsiveness of the environment to the user's
movements. In the documentary Fort McMoney, the personal presence is induced in the users by
an intra-diegetic gaze translated through the first person point-of-view camera that feeds the sense
of an audience who role-plays the story. In the 180º view at the beginning of each level, when
some characters are introduced to the user, the interface responds to the audience's simulated head
movement, rolling right and left. Also, the documentary is filmed in such a way that places the
audience into the story, and the user experiences the impression of strolling through the geographic
space.

Other important feature for a sense of personal presence results from pointing out the user
through “position trackers to place the participant inside a virtual environment” (Heeter, 1992, p.

37
In this context presence is a derived term from telepresence (Minsky, 1980) which originally describes the
ability to manipulate objects remotely in the real world through a technological interface. As the term evolved,
telepresence is now considered a mediated perception by which the user feels incorporated into a virtual environment.

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264). In the interactive documentary Bear 71, the viewer is represented by a dynamic orange dot,
identified by the word “human” with the number attributed to the user and followed by “you”, as
a way of determining the viewer’s location and presence within the screen and the park. By
constantly seeing their position, the users become aware of their presence in the documentary and
are provided with the impression of being included into the diegetic documentary world, a strategy
that in Heeter’s opinion “has a powerful personal impact” (1992, p. 264).

Figure 33. Identification of user's location within the interface (Allison & Mendes, 2012)

Additionally, the sense of social presence is only possible if more than one viewer interacts
simultaneously in the same digital environment, insofar as demands from the users identify other
interactors in the virtual space. Such awareness reinforces in the audience the impression that the
diegetic world “exists”. Moreover, the encounter and interaction with other participants who
recognize the user’s presence offers further evidence of the viewer’s virtual existence and stresses
in the interactor the perception of being inside the digital world (Heeter, 1992, p. 265).

Whereas in Bear 71 the social presence is limited to coming across with other audience
members, pointed out by similar orange dots and identified by their specific number, in Fort
McMoney the user "encounters" other participants in the debates and can advocate in order to
influence their vote in the referendums. Furthermore, by contributing to reimagining an alternative

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Fort McMurray, the users are engaging in a post-symbolic communication process38, “in which
they could jointly create or modify virtual worlds from within those worlds” (Heeter, 1992, p.
266), and collectively shape the virtual city’s configuration. Such degree of social presence
influences the audience’s impression of being in the digital environment.

On its turn, as a participative interactive documentary, A Journal of Insomnia is formulated

around a collective experience of sharing personal stories and interacting with other participant’s
contributions, boosting the perception of social presence to a higher level. By inviting the
interactors to send their testimonies and images to the digital environment, the interactive
documentary introduces each participant to the other interactors and allows them to watch and
interact with their contents. The documentary triggers in the audience the awareness of being
together and sharing the digital space, reinforcing the sense of social presence among users.

Also, when the participants include their contents in the digital archive of A Journal of
Insomnia they are modifying the object of interaction and actively participating in the construction
of the virtual environment, fostering a sense of bodily building the digital space. While many
digital environments are designed for being merely explored by the users, in Heeter's perspective
the responsiveness to the user's interactions, which allows them to modify the virtual space,
induces in the audience a sense of environmental presence (Heeter, 1992, p. 266). Therefore, the
sense of environmental presence is provided by the audience's ability to shape the digital space
and depends on the effectiveness of the participant's interactions.

As regards the interactive documentary Fort McMoney, when accessing the dashboard
area, the audience becomes aware of the changes introduced in the virtual city as result of the
collective interaction and manipulation of contents. The participants experience a sense of
environmental presence by comparing in the map the before and after result, as an outcome of
their performative experience within the digital environment.

38
Researching the intersection between computer science and neuroscience, Jaron Lanier (2010, pp. 179–
192) believes in a system, perhaps Virtual Reality, which will allow communication between human beings without
any symbols, either visual or audio, using technology as an extension of both mind and body.

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Figure 34. Comparison between Fort McMurray (left) and Fort McMoney (right) transformed by users.

Sense of Self

The procedural experience of agency in interactive documentary places the user at the core
of the story, providing her or him with the possibility of developing the narrative through mutual
interactions and compounding the segments into a composition whole. The spectator is persuaded
by a self-centered experience while constructs a self-narrative, as she or he has the impression of
role-playing the story. Instead of watching a single or collective protagonist leading the
development of the narrative, in interactive documentary, the spectator experiences a sense of
control, when accepts being the imaginary leading character, and a sense of presence, integrated
into the represented space. Simultaneously, the interactive performance stimulates the audience’s
imagination and transforms the users into something other than their selves, insofar as the
perceptual and sensorial differences between the digital environment and the lived reality tend to
efface.

Such experience leads the audience to a self-induced shift in consciousness, a sense of Self
that necessarily diverges from the daily physical existence. The users are in front of the screen but
are simultaneously absent from the concrete reality; they are living the materialistic existence
while experiencing the sensuous encounter with their own digital beings. The spectator is
progressively erased, redefined and reinscribed as a persona and the Self is replaced by the digital
being of the documentary world. Subsequently, the sense of presence in the digital environment
represents a dislocation of the interactor's identity, which yields from her or his position in the

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physical world to be replaced by the digital Self. As a result, when the core Self is detached from
its commodity of origins and becomes dispersed and fragmented throughout the digital
environments, the interactors fulfill the disembodiment of their own beings and experience a
“bodily extension”39 (Merleau-Ponty, 2002) form of Self. The interactive audience incorporates a
different position and, thus, enacts a separate self each time it interacts with a documentary.

Concretely, whereas in Fort McMoney the user embodies the role of an explorer who
discovers the city and helps shaping its future, in A Journal of Insomnia the participant becomes
an insomniac connecting with other sleepless humans, as the interactive documentary demands
from the user being awake during the night for interacting with the digital archive and sharing her
or his intimate thoughts and distresses. Moreover, Bear 71 arouses the viewer’s consciousness for
the relocation of her or his Self when displays the image of the webcam at the screen, incorporating
the audience into the digital object, next to animal characters. The embodied experience of
interacting with the digital documentary reveals the self-awareness of the spectator's subjectivity,
translated into the consciousness of the audience's digital identity or, in other words, into a
particular sense of Self.

Although interactive documentary still considers an embodied felt experience, the Self is
not enclosure restricted to the human body skin. Contrariwise, it becomes penetrable, a dynamic
and fluid identity, in which the corporeal body and the technology spread across each other and
become interwoven. Pierre Lévy (1998, pp. 39–42) elaborates around the virtualization of the
body, or the creation of a "hyperbody", which overcomes the skin, as the boundary between the
self and the external world, multiplied and dispersed outside the individual. He also believes this
process of detachment from the physical Self encourages traveling from one being to another, and
virtually participate in a collective body.

Notably, the agency practice in digital environments must consider the fragmentation,
dispersion and dislocation of the audience's Self, not only according to each interactive

39
Drawing upon Merleau-Ponty’s concept of “bodily extension” (2002), I believe the virtual and
disembodied Self ceases to be an object and becomes an external but integral part of the interactive bodily experience,
in the same line of thought proposed by Donna Haraway in the A Cyborg Manifesto (1991). Haraway’s essay A Cyborg
Manifesto was originally published in 1984 and rejects rejection the existence of rigid boundaries, notably those
separating "human" from "animal" and "human" from "machine".

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documentary but also acknowledging that the performative action is not fixed to one single settled
digital identity. As the interactive experience unfolds, the user interconnects various spaces and
environments and embodies changeable positions within the virtual environment, while performs
different roles and may enact several personas throughout the documentary. Such as Sherry Turkle
suggests, interacting in digital environments generates “a distributed Self that exists in many
worlds and plays many roles at the same time” (Turkle, 1999, p. 644). The agency and the
subjectivity of the “I” move across from one Self to another, providing the audience with a
dynamic and fluid experience of the Self, insofar as the digital identity is encouraged or even
imposed by the object of interaction.

More precisely, in the interactive documentary Bear 71, while at a given moment the
viewer performs a voyeur who oversees the park through surveillance footage, in another time
becomes the bear's companion and follows her steps through life. At the end, the viewer faces her
or his own being, displayed at the screen, integrated into the object of interaction, revealing the
consciousness of his subjectivity. Additionally, while exploring A Journal of Insomnia, the user
enacts a careful collector who selects and enjoys segments of content. However, she or he mutates
into a sleepless participant when contributes with materials for the collective archive.

Nevertheless, such flexibility of the spectator’s digital identity doesn’t undermine her or
his digital sense of Self. Contrariwise, may reinforce it, since interactive documentary ultimately
enables the engagement of the Self in a multiplicity of roles, distributed through varied
environments, positively contributing to the audience's self-esteem.

Sense of Place

The sense of presence in the interactive documentary, of being surrounded by a different

reality, is intrinsically related with the audience’s experience of exploring an illusionary world and
temporarily inhabit it, interacting with its characters and perceptually exploring unknown territory.
While navigating through a particular interactive documentary, the audience is provided with the
sense of strolling across the contents and, thus, athwart the topographical area of the documentary.
It is through the subjective interaction performance that the users are caught up in the diegetic

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world of the documentary, making meaning out of the experience and fostering a sense of place40
towards the virtual space. Such affect enables the sensory engagement with the space portrayed,
by the identification of the viewer with individual and cultural particularities of the portrayed
world.

The performative action of interacting allows the audience a certain familiarity with the
virtual location, charging the space with meaningful connections and nourishing feelings towards
the constructed world. Considering the perception of a space is directly related to the way we move
through and inhabit it, as the interactive experience unfolds the audience takes pleasure of learning
to move within the constructed world and starts creating attachment to the virtual, nevertheless
eventually real, places and excursions, fostering a sense of place towards the diegetic space.

While interactive documentaries are constituted by broken and partial scenes, the act of
sequencing the segments through the navigation experience creates an illusion of continuity both
throughout the narrative and within the space. Linking one documentary segment into the next one
may represent, in a certain sense, moving from one location to another space, and affords the
audience with the opportunity of embodying the practice of displacement into the interactive
experience. By means of their performative actions and interactions, the viewers produce,
transform, and continuously develop heterogeneous and interlinked spaces, fostering the
perception of a linear and continuous movement all over the diegetic documentary space. Also,
the sense of continuity between fragments and spaces may be assured by a continuous soundscape
or by a smooth transition of sound between different locations.

The topographical diegetic spaces of interactive documentaries are not necessarily constructed by
landscapes or interior scenes. In the interactive documentary Bear 71, the representation of space
is revealed by the interface design, in a stylized topographical map of Banff National Park, in
Alberta, Canada. A white screen with variable dots, which change dynamically and responsively

40
The concept of sense of place has been explored by diverse fields of study, such as Anthropology (Low,
1992; Low & Altman, 1992), to address the symbolic relationship that people culturally create with a particular space,
Geography (Tuan, 1990), describing the variations of affective bonds between people and places, Architecture
(Jackson, 1994), as the attachment that inhabitants create within the course of time as a result of habit or custom, and
Sociology (Hummon, 1992), which explores the subjective perceptions of communities about their environments.

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according to the audience's navigation, replaces the indexical images usually used by
documentaries to represent actual places.

Figure 35. Bear 71's topographical interface

When the users move the mouse across the screen, the interface allows traveling through
the space of the park, coming across with the main topographical details and following the animals,
as well as encountering other humans navigating through the territory. By the process of exploring
the map the user gains an understanding of the landscape, recognizing natural and constructed
landmarks and fostering an apperception of the space. While the minimalist design lacks the rich
imagery of the real footage, the diegetic soundscape contributes to an immersive perception
experience of the land. While traveling in the park, the audience listens to the train, and the
highway traffic, gets closer to the river and explores the arboretums where several animals take
refuge. Also, Bear 71’s narration elicits the bodily sensations of experiencing the space, when the
character describes the spring smells over the park, the cold winters and the icy breeze in her nose.

Moreover, in order to support the viewer's spatial orientation and contribute for
wayfinding, the interactive documentary Bear 71 presents a two-dimensional map of the park,
identifying the users and the other characters’ locations, pointing out the explored and unexplored
regions of the park. This feature provides to the viewer the spatial awareness needed to proceed
the pleasure of discovering unexplored areas.

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Figure 36. Bear 71's grid pointing out the explored and unexplored regions, as well as the identification of users and
animals within the park.

On the other hand, Fort McMoney explores the neighborhood through indexical images of
Fort McMurray, portraying streets and buildings, icy landscapes and forests. To progress through
the story, the viewer must visit various locations and get to know the region, moving across the
virtual environment and constructing a “spatial narrative” (Jenkins, 2004). By virtue of its imagery,
not only the documentary provides an immersive and compelling representation of the place, as
also allows and even requests the audience to explore the territory. The enjoyment of interacting
with the contents develops into the pleasure of discovering Fort McMurray and becoming familiar
with the area, contributing to a sense of place within the interaction experience.

Also, the strategy of placing the user as the role-playing element forges a strong
identification both with the protagonist and with camera movements, since the user is the one who
pushes forward the main character’s expedition across space. In these terms, the progression
through the virtual environment represents what Vivian Sobchack considers an “embodied
activity”, as an extension of the physical movement in the world, or of the audience’s
consciousness, since the viewer is “embodied in the world and able to accomplish and express the
tasks and projects of living” (Sobchack, 1982, p. 318).

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 Interactors, however, do not merely occupy the space. In the interactive documentary Fort
McMoney, they are invited to vote for referendums, reimagine and reinvent the city’s
configuration, and envision an alternative Fort McMurray. Such feature may be understood as a
process of placemaking, since the virtual community’s aspirations and desires, as well as the
opinions, are taken into consideration for conceptualizing a sustainable and friendly city. The
process strengths the connection between users and the place, as she or he feels represented in the
decision-making process and fosters a topophilia 41 towards the constructed world.

Figure 37. Fort McMoney's foruns and referendums.

Sense of Belonging

The interaction strategy of inviting the users to collectively redesign an alternative Fort
McMurray also affords to the audience the chance of a shared experience of the place, fostering
among users a sense of belonging. Besides the individual pleasure of discovering and interacting

41
The term topophilia was used by Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space (1964), for describing the
affective bonds between human beings and certain places or settings, which contributes for a strong sense of place.

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with the contents, the audience is stimulated for constituting a virtual community by developing
social and cultural interventions. The will of advocating political and social views as well as the
pursuit for companionship may prompt the interactors’ participation in the virtual decision-making
process. Nevertheless, when the audience takes part in the collective discussion and decision, the
interactive experience triggers the perception of a reciprocal and interdependent relationship with
others, in which each is seen as equal and contributes for a common purpose based on the group
wellbeing.

In the broadest approach, the sense of belonging is a social and psychological need of
human beings to be accepted as group members within their individual and social structures,
whether in the family, among friends and co-workers, as part of a religious group, and so on.
Through life individuals establish connections with other human beings, seeking for acceptance
and empathy, and fostering feelings of membership and affiliation with several groups. The
psychologist Abraham Maslow (1943) places the need of belonging halfway within his pyramid
of human needs, suggesting that belong plays a crucial role in increasing the individual confidence
and self-esteem.

Applying the sense of belonging to digital interactive environments, particularly to

interactive documentary’s experience, sense of belonging is the audience’s perceptions of
connectedness and virtual relationship with other participants, which elicit feelings of
identification and affiliation. The sense of belonging may positively influence spectator’s
subjective interaction experience, encouraging her or him to interact with the digital object
continuously, and by extent with other audience members, as well as eventually returning
consecutively to the performative interaction. By assigning to the audience active and constructive
roles, the interactive experience stimulates the interactors in looking at each other’s experiences,
nurturing empathy among participants and building insights that may lead to virtual relationships.
Whereas new technologies contribute for social isolation, since the interactive experience usually
occurs in an individual environment, the strategies of interactive documentary which feed this
sense of belonging contribute for providing the audience with the affection of constructing social
bonds and virtual communities across the internet.

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 On its turn, as a participative interactive documentary, A Journal of Insomnia provides a
more profound sense of belonging to its participants than Fort McMoney. Not only A Journal of
Insomnia contradicts the loneliness and sadness arising from long and sleepless nights of insomnia,
virtually gathering the viewers across dispersed screens, as provides the sense of a shared
experience when the users contribute for constructing the digital archive with their own
testimonies. By accepting the invitation of sharing their personal story of insomnia and sending
their contents to the documentary the users embrace the role of active participants and become part
of the documentary’s diegetic world. The audience overcomes the role of interactor and becomes
an actual intervener, inscribing the Self in the interactive documentary work and becoming
engaged in the process of embodied meaning-making.

Figure 38. A Journal of Insomnia's participants digital archive

Through the affective experience of contributing for participative interactive

documentaries, the viewers have the impression of being listened and considered, as also enjoy the
impression of becoming virtually included among peers, reinforcing their sense of belonging
towards the insomniac’s community.

Furthermore, the assembling of all the contents in an archive, placing the Self and the Other
side by side, at the same level, provides a sensuous encounter and creates the illusion of a

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reciprocal relationship between contributors, engaging Self and Other in a bodily perceptive and
positive tension. Also, by sharing the experience of collectively constructing the interactive
documentary, the spectators are both contributing for intersubjective digital work and being
42
connected with other participants through the conception of intercorporeality . The spectators
experience a way of ‘touching’ other participants, by interacting with their contents, watching their
images, listening to their thoughts, in sum, establishing a perception-action loop between Self and
Other. They mutually shape each other in a system fed by the circularity of the contents.

Sense of Almightiness

The desimbodiment and subsequent relocation of the Self, or reimbodiment, in the diegetic
documentary world induces in the audience the sense of inhabiting the cinematic and electronic
space through an external abstract entity. The interactor absorbs a bodily extended Self, capable
of navigating through the virtual environment, personifying and manipulating characters, shaping
the virtual future, and deciding the narrative's forthcoming. The interactor adopts an intentional
stance towards the world and wields all the interactive documentary features from a privileged
position. At home or the office, behind the screen, placed into a virtual environment, she or he is
lead to believe that nothing can harm her or him. The spectator knows everything about everything
and everyone all the time, embracing the sense of being omnipresent, following the narrative all
along the experience, and omnipotent, being able of deciding the characters’ and the place’s future.

From this seemingly untouchable position, the interactive audience experiences a new form
of embodiment translated as a sense of Almightiness, conceived as a Supreme Being fantasizing
about domination and control, in sum, playing God. From the user’s transcendent viewpoint, the
incorporeality of the digital Self allows her or him shaping the narrative while being changeless,
overseeing the diegetic space and remaining unobservable, controlling the character’s destiny at
her or his will as a free and autonomous being, evolving into a reciprocal loop where the audience

42
Intercorporeality is a concept proposed by Maurice Merlau-Ponty (2002) to address the relationship
between one's own body and other's corporeality. For Ponty, intercorporeality encompasses a reciprocal perception
and reaction between the self and the other.

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directly controls an external entity. The interactor’s body becomes what Merleau-Ponty defines as
a “second body” (2002, pp. 104–105), a body absent from the objective space, which sees and
touches the world but it cannot be seen or touched, offering to the audience space for mortality
denial.

In the interactive documentary Bear 71, almost all along the narrative, the viewer beholds
the topographical representation of Banff National Park from a high angle perspective, a
transcendental aerial view, also called as God’s point-of-view. Although the stylized map of the
park is rooted in reality, it is also removed from that same reality as experienced by the park’s
visitants in loco. As it is designed, the interface simplifies the structures on the ground and de-
familiarizes the space, providing an utterly new perspective on the park and producing different
views of the existing reality. The elements seem small, squat and flattened, even the ones that the
viewer consciously knows are immense, like mountains and trees. The characters look
insignificant, only pinpointed with dynamic and manipulable dots. When contemplating the earth's
surface from above, the interactor is provided with the impression of flying over the space and
controlling events on the ground from a godhood position.

Also, in interactive documentaries which place the interactors in the leading role, as Fort
McMoney, the camera and the spectator are combined and bound together, providing to the later
an embodied agency and presence within the documentary world. Through the camera’s lenses,
the user is granted with an observable representation of the enworlded body, moving accordingly
with the audience’s interactions within the digital environment. The camera performs its perceptual
role and becomes a vehicle which drives the embodied subject and responds to her or his wills.
Furthermore, the camera serves as an extension of the spectator’s body: the camera movements
personify the audience’s navigation within the space, granting a kinaesthetic perception of strolling
through the narrative, extending the user’s eyes, ears and fingers, and re-locating her or his bodily
self-awareness into the diegetic world. Moreover, the perceived control over the character’s
movements, actions and faith within the story fulfills a pleasurable experience and contributes for
reinforcing the sense of Almightiness. The documentary’s characters become mere instrumental
elements for the audience’s achievements, who use them according to their own convenience to
proceed through the narrative and accomplish an ending.

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 On the other hand, in A Journal of Insomnia the interactors are vulnerable and aware that
their Self is one among many. Instead of experiencing a sense of eminence over the other
interveners the users share the consciousness of a collective portrait, in a mediated alterity
relationship, and the Self is diluted between the various representations.

The sense of Almightiness may persist throughout the interactive experiences until the
moment when the spectator encounters her or his own image represented in the screen, such as
happens in Bear 71 and A Journal of Insomnia. At that particular instance, the viewer’s immanence
is manifested in the diegetic space and the self-aware audience recognizes her or his own body’s
presence in the digital environment, a “body-image” as Merleau-Ponty (2002, p. 114) would point
out, through which the experience appears as meaningful. The interactor becomes aware of being
as vulnerable as other participants and characters of the interactive documentary and come down
to earth, so to speak.

Sense of Endlessness

Interactive documentaries are by its nature multilinear narratives with rhizomatic

structures, which not only allow but mostly demand from the audience a dramatic agency, selecting
fragmented parts and following pathways. Although the interactive objects grant to the audience
the freedom of choosing their own narrative developments, they also necessarily leave certain
aspects of the story open, when the interactors forsake part of the documentary’s contents. As
exciting as navigating through the narrative may feel, its openness comprises unwatched
ramifications of the story, questioning the coherence and closure of the narrative while induces
dramatic ambiguity. The massive amount of contents that constitutes the structure of interactive
documentaries, some of them that will necessarily remain unwatched, leads the audience to a
sensation of infinitude. During the interactive procedural action, the audience dives into the
documentary's database, selects options, watches segments and chooses gateways, progressively
becoming aware of the difficulty of experiencing all the contents available. The pursuit of a
"complete" interaction process may hypothetically result in an interminable process of interacting
and, consequently, generates in the viewers a restless sense of endlessness.

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 While some documentaries are constructed with a narrow amount of contents, such as Bear
71 and Out My Window, allowing users navigate through few options and realizing their choices
have limited impact on the narrative’s development, other documentaries present databases
compounded by numerous segments and constituents, complex and heterogenic contents, with a
structure based in a non-centric distribution and a non-hierarchical organization. Digital non-
fiction works as Fort McMoney, Prison Valley and Waterlife play with the multidirection options
and, to a certain extent, with the unpredictability of the narrative’s development. In such cases, the
sense of endlessness becomes more compelling and leads their interactors to multilayered
perceptual experience. In fact, categorical interactive documentaries compounded by a vast
number of contents and apparently with no inner technological order reinforces the sense of
endlessness. Also, as far as Fort McMoney and Prison Valley regard, employing its interaction
strategy characteristic, framed under what Gaudenzi named as conversational mode, the computer
system provides to the audience a pretended inner dialogue simulating artificial feedback and
extending the sense of endlessness for the interactors.

Moreover, in documentaries with multiple possible choices, the contents may be subject to
manifold recombinations, generating alternative versions of the same digital object and expanding
the audience’s prospects for further developments and endings. The spectator follows an iterative
process of discovering the unknown segments, pursuing the eager of fully exploring the interactive
documentary’s contents and reach several possible endings. Such peculiarity provides a seemingly
perpetual feedback between the interactors’ choices and the several narratives developed during
the interaction experience. The documentaries’ narrative and its associated meanings necessarily
change depending on the sequence of contents selected, which generates a cybernetic loop between
the user’s consciousness and the documentary’s feedback, enlarging the sense of endlessness in
the viewers.

The participative interactive documentaries, with expansive and overgrowing databases,

allow the constant inclusion of further segments to the existent digital archive. The participants
may keep sending their contents, and the viewers may keep watching and interacting with them
seemingly ad aeternum. Such interactive documentaries based in participatory strategies, as A
Journal of Insomnia, are objects of never-ending openness and extensive endlessness, stretching
the sense of endlessness to an efficient entangled process of continuum and combining the

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hypothetical perpetuity of the interaction experience with an evolving twofold strategy of
participation and interaction. Scrolling down through the evolving database with countless
contributions raises the audience’s conscious awareness for a myriad of interactive connections,
multifaceted viewpoints and multiple interpretations. The experience of interacting with these
participative documentaries becomes a collective virtual conversation of the users’ coexistence,
exposed to other “realities”. Also, the audience experiences the unpredictability of the interactive
documentary through the adaptive dynamics that lead to a multidimensionally narrative
development, comprising both the contents itself and the various possible combinations. While the
interactors are aware of their physical and existential finitude within the universe, they face a
continuum and endlessness process of interacting with the digital object.

Sense of Incompleteness

If on the one hand, such seeming infinitude of contents in interactive documentary may
engage the audience in a persistent and continuous interaction experience, on the other hand, may
lead the viewers into an unpleasant sensation of may be overlooking relevant details and missing
part of the story, perceiving the experience as a perpetual incomplete narrative. In order to proceed
throughout the experience, the interactors must make choices, and in most cases leave behind
unexplored spaces and undiscovered options. In this sense, the interaction with the objects of
understanding remains necessarily incomplete, since their meaning is never entirely exhausted by
the interactor. Incompleteness, gaps, interruptions and faulty alignments of contents may induce
into an illusory narrative and mislead the perceptual understanding of the story’s general and
accurate meaning, outpacing the audience’s ability to fully grasp its complexity. Whereas the
navigation through a partial narrative may fulfill a certain sense of closure, the audience’s
awareness of experiencing a partial and shortfall narrative, along with the unfamiliarity of all the
other neglected and unchosen options, may induce in the interactive audience a Sense of
Incompleteness.

Moreover, the neglected segments could eventually have contributed to providing further
details and a broader context to the narrative. Such context may be of great significance for creating
a compelling narrative, capable of generating emotional involvement in response to the represented

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events, characters and places, and increasing the overall experience's gratification. Also, to proceed
throughout the narrative, after encountering certain characters the interactors must leave them
behind, which may decrease the potential empathy and involvement with the individual stories that
contribute for a coherent and faultless whole. In order to entirely understand the story and
appreciate all its dimensions, the audience may feel the need of repeatedly returning to the
interactive documentary to watch what she or he have missed, also motivated by the desire to
observe how alternative decisions and choices may lead (or not) to different developments and
endings.

The concept of incompleteness has been approached from a psychological and medical
perspective, heavily associated with an Obsessive–Compulsive Personality, which explanation
may contribute metaphorically for a better understanding of the digital sense of incompleteness
related with the interactive documentary’s experience. From a medical viewpoint, the sense of
incompleteness is generated by an obsessive-compulsive disorder, where patients are unable to
control their thoughts or activities, feeling the need of regularly perform specific routines and
repeatedly check things (National Institute of Mental Health, 2016), pursuing sensory
perfectionism. Both in the documentary Bear 71 and Fort McMoney, the compulsion for a
repeatedly return to the interactive experience may contribute for satisfying the desire of
discovering new options and details while, nonetheless, leads the users to the impression that other
pathways and contents remain unseen and, thus, develops the sense of incompleteness.

In each interactive documentary, particularly categorical webdocs composed by numerous

contents like Waterlife, and especially the participative mode documentaries like A Journal of
Insomnia, which comprise digital overgrowing archives, the sense of incompleteness may trigger
a metaphorical hoarding behavior, a derivative disorder from the obsessive compulsion, where
people feel the need of accumulating objects regardless its actual value. The user becomes a kind
of extreme collector, watching more and more segments, eager to assembling as many
documentary contents and fragments as possible. In a Freudian perspective, the users feel an
emotional and almost physical need to possess a particular "object of desire", obtaining in
exchange a feeling of simulated comfort and security. The more unique and difficult is to own the
object, or in this case segment, the more desirable it becomes. However, for each fragment

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gathered there will be other contents uncollected, or at least the impression of it, which maintains
the audience’s sense of incompleteness alive.

Conclusions

The previous sensory accounts arise from the descriptive and subjective experience of
interacting with the digital objects selected as the corpus of study. The diversity and multiform
interactive structures contribute to a varied explanation of the user's subjectivity, positioned as
internal representations, such as sensations, perceptions and affections. In this perspective, through
different ways of affection, interactive documentaries seduce the audience into an immersive and
engaging interplay between perception and interaction. The spectators become absorbed into and
by the interactive experience, involved in the flow of images and sounds, and engendered in the
procedural action of interacting. Whilst the users acquire the ability to shape the documentary's
narrative, by means of their performative act of making choices and decisions, during the
interactive experience they become vulnerable to the documentary’s persuasion and yield their
position to perform an embodied perceptual experience.

These proposed ways of affection, or senses of, are not fixed to a particular audience
member, not even to a given interactive experience. Such as the modes of interaction may flow
from one to the other within the same interactive documentary, so the audience’s perceptual
experience is fluid and changes throughout the interactive performance according to specific
situations and environments. The induced senses may even evolve from other perceived affections
and overlap each other. Nevertheless, some interactive documentaries’ modes are more related
with certain ways of affection than others.

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Table 2. Interactive documentaries of the corpus of study and their related ways of affection

Interactive documentary Interaction mode Senses

sense of control
sense of presence
Bear 71
Hyperlink documentary sense of Almightiness
(Allison & Mendes, 2012)
sense of endlessness
sense of incompleteness

sense of control
sense of presence
Fort McMoney
Conversational documentary sense of place
(Dufresne, 2013b)
sense of Almightiness
Sense of Self

Sense of control
Sense of presence
A Journal of Insomnia Sense of belonging
Participative documentary
(Choiniere et al., 2013) Sense of Self
sense of endlessness
sense of incompleteness

Both the sense of control and the sense of presence are transversal affections embodied by
an engaged audience during the interaction experience all along, regardless the documentary’s
interaction structure and how the interactive mode addresses the audience. Nevertheless, the sense
of control induced in the interactors by the digital documentary varies according to the interactive
structure. The more open the documentary structure is, a higher degree of sense of control will be
generated in the users. Likewise, both the sense of endlessness and the sense of incompleteness
may intersect documentaries with various architectural structures and be induced during different
interaction experiences. These senses are not necessarily perceived as gratifying feelings but may
contribute for encouraging the users pursuing the interaction procedural action.

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 Also, the relevance of the audience’s induced affections depends on the number of contents
available and its distribution through the documentary's structure. The larger and more numerous
the database of contents is, the higher sense of control the audience will feel, while the sense of
endlessness and the sense of incompleteness becomes more conspicuous. Besides, the less
hierarchical and organized the contents are, the more the audience will experience the sense of
endlessness and the sense of incompleteness. On the other hand, the apparently non-hierarchical
and non-organized distribution of contents will lead the audience to a deeper sense of control over
the narrative and the story.

The perceptual illusion of inhabiting a certain space and interacting with it will provide to
the interactive audience a sense of presence within the digital environment. Despite the various
dimensions of sense of presence, distinguished by Heeter (1992), may elicit different levels and
modes of presence, the perceptual impression of an unmediated living experience greatly
contributes for the interactor’s immersion in the diegetic documentary world. Directly dependent
upon the sense of presence, particularly ensuing the sense of environmental presence, the sense of
place is mostly experienced in interactive documentaries portraying geographic spaces, which
require from the interactors undertaking a journey and virtually traveling throughout the territory
in order to construct the narrative. The audience may experience the impression of strolling
through the documentary’s world and momentarily inhabiting the diegetic space.

By combining the sense of control and the sense of presence, the viewers experience a
projection-identification43 process with their own selves. Instead of merely going through affective
participation, as in non-interactive movies where the spectator projects the self onto one of the
characters, the interactive audience is granted with a sense of Self, by projecting and deceptively
transferring their own beings into the digital environment and become part of it. Also, in some
instances where interactive documentaries enhance a confident sense of Self, the interactors may
feel especially pervasive and ubiquitous, with the ability to play God and, thus, experiencing a
sense of Almightiness.

43
The term projection-identification is employed by Edgar Morin to describe the way how the film spectator,
through an affective participation, “instead of projecting himself into the world, absorbs the world into himself (2005,
p. 86).

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 On its turn, the sense of belonging depends upon the induced affect of being included into
the interactive documentary world, i. e. the sense of presence. Enhanced by collaborative and
participatory strategies, the sense of belonging evolves specifically from the sense of social
presence which provides the awareness of being accompanied in the virtual environment and
encourages the users’ interacting with each other, reinforcing their perception of virtual
connectedness. Conversely, while experiencing a sense of belonging during the interactive
performance and participating in the collective construction of the digital object, the users are
unable to experience a sense of Almightiness. When placed next to other participants and
interacting with them, the viewer recognizes others as equals and is absorbed into an alterity
relationship, assuming the existence of an alternative viewpoint and, thus, acknowledging to be
one among others.

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 CHAPTER 8

THE DIGITAL GAZE

Figure 39. Bear 71's landing page

The countdown displayed on the screen indicates the waiting time for initiating the
experience of interactive documentary. As the interactive experience unfolds, progressively and
intentionally the audience yields to the interaction process. First, they perceive a sense of control,
by shaping and manipulating the story according to their desires. Secondly they experience a sense
of presence by relocating the Self into the diegetic world, and, finally, they virtually construct and
inhabit the space obtaining the induced feeling of becoming the Almighty subject of the entire
interactive experience.

Such like other digital spaces, interactive documentaries may be framed under what Sherry
Turkle describes as "simulation spaces", which allow users experiencing a dreamlike reality, free

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of physical constraints, where they may discover a self inhabiting environment where "objects fly,
spin, accelerate, change shape and color, disappear and reappear" (1995, p. 66). On Turkle’s
postmodern perspective the cyberspace has the ability to develop the users’ sense of Self through
their own particular volition, providing them the opportunity of creating a multiple, decentered
and fluid identity. Through such deconstructed Self, each user may explore various desired parts
of identity and discover one's "inner diversity of being" (1995, p. 256), interplaying between
multiple selves 44
. Such perspective doesn’t deny the existence of one single Self, as argued by
authors as Jacques Lacan, Christian Metz and Gilles Deleuze, but believes that due to
contemporary everyday life pressure people doesn’t see themselves anymore as unitary actors.
Also, the ubiquity of digital devices enabled the people’s ability for unrevealing a manifold of
facets of the Self, spread across various online contexts.

Likewise, within the procedural action of interacting with interactive documentaries, users
are provided with the pleasure of navigating from one environment to another, embodying several
identities and elapsing multiplied iterations of the subject. Through such process, they build up
their fluid and dynamic subjectivity, projecting their deepest dreams and desires in a constructed
digital alter-ego and identifying themselves with it. As the interaction evolves, the digital Self
arises crafted upon a combination of the user’s digital experiences and her or his aspiring online
existence. Such digital Self isn’t inborn; it’s a selfobject 45
which derives from the Self and is
experienced as part of it, acting on behalf of the interactor throughout the interaction process with
the digital environment. In this sense, the interactor is bound by the agency of the digital Self, who
carries out entrusted actions and incorporates the fantasies and desires of her or his related subject.

Hence, the digital Self doesn’t stand on its own; it's an extension of the subject's imaginary,
and its existence remains entirely dependent on the true Self. As the digital environment provides

44
The idea of multiple selves was developed by Sherry Turkle in Life on the Screen (1995) for explaining
the player’s embodiment of several identities in MUDs (Multi-User Domains games), where she extends Lacan’s ideas
about the Self and argues “the unitary self is an illusion” (1995, p. 15), since “the culture of simulation may help us
achieve a vision of a multiple but integrated identity whose flexibility, resilience, and capacity for joy comes from
having access to our many selves” (1995, p. 268).
45
The concept of selfobject or self-object, was developed by Heinz Kohut for addressing any narcissistic
experience in which the other serves the desires of the self. In The Analysis of the Self (1971), Kohut defines selfobject
as the object of an obsession that is the reason for a narcissistic transference. In his view, although the selfobject is an
external object works as part of the subject and is not perceived as separate or independent from the Self.

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interactors with the opportunity of abstracting themselves from the material, real subject, they
immediately experience as much as project themselves into the digital Self. Moreover, when the
users interact with their digital Selves they are not experiencing the material existence, but dealing
with the virtual image of the Self, transferred to the digital environment and projected by and in
their imaginary. Whereas the digital Self is an elusive construction in the virtual environment still
represents the subject, insofar as it structures the interactor's way of dealing with the Self. The
digital Self may be considered what Don Ihde describes as a "virtual body", a quasi-other identified
as oneself, that experiences a multidimensional gestalt "in the here-body of the embodied
perspective, whereas the visual objectification out-there is spectacle-like" (Ihde, 1998, p. 350). In
such perspective, the digital Self plays with the dialectics of embodiment/disembodiment, between
the material "here-body" and the "over-there" image-body. The digital Self is, thus, a virtual and
manipulable affiliation of the real Self, a virtual re-presentation of the Ideal Ego which occupies a
digital and detached position from the “I”, even if it is intrinsically connected to the spectator’s
body, sharing feelings, dreams and pleasures.

Both the sense of control over the diegetic world and the sense of presence positioning the
interactor role-playing the narrative leads the audience to a continuous perceptual form of self-
identification. As the procedural form of interaction pushes the viewers into an embodied
participation, the interactive environment becomes a realization of their imaginary and instills
them into exploiting an intra-diegetic gaze, experiencing an illusory self-awareness of perceiving
the virtual Self as their bodily presence in the virtual environment. Even if the interactors don’t
literally see their faces in the digital documentary, they are interacting and shaping the object from
inside, placed in the narrative’s subjective world in order to perceive the digital inner experiences
of the Self and become an extension of their own subjectivity.

If in the Lacanian mirror stage (2006) the child becomes aware of her or his own body and
existence through the reflected image in the mirror and constructs an ideal version of the Self, film
theories developed on the 1970’s by authors as Jean-Louis Baudry (1974) and Christian Metz
(1982) compare the film screen with a mirror where the spectator receives a reflection of itself as
master of those images. Metz particularly states the spectators’ recognition of their likeness on the
screen is the “primal form” of identification, an identification with the gaze and through which the
audience makes sense of the film. When comparing the digital screen with the Lacanian mirror,

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the interactive audience doesn’t feel the need of undergoing through a projection-identification
process as proposed by such film theories, insofar as the digital device already reflects back to the
interactor the agency and image of her or his own Self, leading the viewers to self-identify with
their disembodied extensions, constructed upon the felt sense of Self. More than a mirror which
reflects back the image, the digital screen becomes a space of in-betweenness the real and virtual
worlds, a communication chamber which mediates the relationship between the virtual alter-ego
and the Self and functions as a portal that allows users to get in touch with their digital Selves.

While the interactor recognizes the digital Self as the extension of her or his own body,
also conceives an improved image of selfhood based on the constructed digital alter-ego,
perceived as more complete, more perfect and more powerful than experienced in her or his own
bodily existence. The user beholds her or his digital Self as real, but it’s a merely imaginary entity,
an Ideal Ego anticipating what she or he wishes to be. Furthermore, the audience’s identification
with their digital alter-ego extends the notion of méconnaissance (Lacan, 2006), (in English,
misrecognition), insofar as the spectators become alienated from their Selves and perceive their
selfhood through a distorted and improved image created in and by the digital environment. The
illusion of the mirror stage is enhanced by the digital screen, which provides the audience with
the opportunity of perceiving oneself through the virtual persona. At this point, the virtual world
works as an echo chamber that intensifies the spectator’s misrecognition, who sees oneself based
on the likeness of the constructed digital alter-ego. Even when the audience actively seeks the "I"
beyond the Self fails to recognize it, loaded as it is with the satisfaction and pleasure of finding
oneself in the diegetic world and dazzled with the seemingly magnificent Self.

Nonetheless, the interactor’s misrecognition cannot be circumscribed to the subject’s

misunderstanding of its image in the digital object, through a distorted and overestimated
likeness. As the interactor fails to recognize oneself also perceives the distressful feeling of being
absent from the digital object, seeking for the Self within the diegetic world. The digital Self
becomes thus the site of the gaze, an unobtainable object that remains invisible to the audience’s
eyes and ultimately drives their unconscious desire, triggering and feeding the eager of
continuously proceed interacting. The users try to overcome the flatness of the screen and see
beyond its surface but are unable to grasp it, making them aware that although they experience a
sense of presence within the digital environment remain as an absence. This is the point where

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the subject’s trauma lays, “this point at which something appears to be invisible, this point at
which something appears to be missing from representation, some meaning left unrevealed, is the
point of the Lacanian gaze” (Copjec, 2000, p. 300) 46.

The realization of the digital Self, which inhabits the virtual environment, is never
sufficiently achieved by the interactor, but simply mediated by her or his desire to obtain it, an
object of desire which the subject pursues and tries to possess; the interactor beholds the narrative
and wishes anticipate to become that alter-ego – ostensible omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient.
As a desiring-being, the digital Self corresponds to what Lacan (1977, pp. 67–121) describes in
the seminar XI as the objet petit a,47 a wishful and unattainable object which expresses the
interactor’s fantasy. Nevertheless, the digital Self, or in this Lacanian perspective the “autre”, is
also the object which causes that same desire. With the impossibility of completely grasping the
digital Self, the subject tries to overcome its absence by possessing the ideal image, through an
internalizing process of embodying the Self into her or his own subjectivity. The audience gazes
at the digital Self and develops a fetishistic pleasure of self-voyeurism, a scopophilia by the Self.
The audience loves its image but desires what exceeds the image, the Self behind the Self which
drives the subject into the ideal-ego, the “point at which he desires to gratify himself in himself”
(Lacan, 1977, p. 257).

However, technology allows the freedom of desiring as much as it means limitations. Such
as Don Ihde notes, the question arising from our existential involvement with technologies comes
to be how those technologies embody our desires and fantasies:

The desire is to see, but seeing is seeing through instrumentation. Negatively, the
desire for pure transparency is the wish to escape the limitations of the material
technology. It is a Platonism returned in a new form, the desire to escape the newly

46
Elaborating around Lacan’s seminar XI (1977), Joan Copjec (2000) recovered one of the founding ideas of
psychoanalysis – the unconscious desire – for understanding the film spectator. Instead of comparing the film screen
with a mirror in which the spectators can project and identify themselves, creating an illusion of visual omnipotence,
Copjec argues the spectator’s absence from the screen is what triggers his desire, a desire which relays beyond the
limits of the image’s visibility.
47
Although “objet petit a” may be understood in English as “little object a”, Lacan (2006) insisted the term
should remain untranslated. In his writings (1977), a stands for the French word “autre”, meaning Other. So, the objet
petit a is the object of desire which the subject seeks in the other.

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 extended body of technological engagement. In the wish there remains the contradiction:
the user both wants and does not want the technology. The user wants what the technology
gives but does not want the limits, the transformation that a technologically extended body
implies. (Ihde, 1990, pp. 75–76)

Furthermore, unlike the film experience, where “there is one thing and one thing only that
is never reflected in it [the mirror]: the spectator’s own body” (Metz, 1982, p. 46), in interactive
documentary the interactors may inscribe themselves into the digital work. Either by leaving
behind subtle traces which disclose the user’s interaction or by actually including an image of the
“I” in the digital object, as a “selfie inscription” performed through collaborative strategies. The
interactor occupies a place in the scopic field and becomes both immersed in the film-world and
part of it, spectating from within himself, present and absent on screen. As the screen exposes the
image of the interactor’s own body, she or he experiences a freeze in the flow of time. The flood
of pixels takes a pause, and the subject gazes at her or his own depicted image, beholding her or
his own body. The audience is, thus, provided with the self-satisfaction of seeing oneself on screen
and being seen by other interactors. The digital Self is unveiled, displayed at the digital
environment, as a spectacle to be looked at, always exposed, visible to the interactor’s eyes and
gaze, subjected to the narcissistic look from outside, either by the “I” or by other participants.

Not only the viewer’s inscription in the interactive documentary fulfills the pleasure for a
narcissistic Ego, as the encounter of the “I” with the image of the digital Self is a complex and
disturbing moment. In that very subtle moment, the subject becomes a specter, a point when the
individual is “neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object” (Barthes,
1980, p. 14). When seeing oneself in the digital environment, the audience experiences an “out-
of-body” sensation, looking at the Self from an external perspective, from the Otherness point-of-
view. That’s also the moment when the spectator becomes conscious that the Self is placed in the
reverse oppositional viewpoint, positioned in the perspective of someone who is being looked at
but simultaneously is looking back. The digital gaze, thus, alienates the interactor by subjecting
her or him to a look from a singular perspectival viewpoint, through the reversibility of observer
and observed; the Self becomes shown as much as seeable, by being seen without being able of
seeing either its observer or itself. As Lacan wrote, “I see myself seeing myself” (1977, p. 80), and
by looking at myself I don’t see myself, but a merely imaginary Self who’s re-presentation on

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screen is looking back at me. The interactor looks at her or his own image in the digital screen
while the image of the Self looks back at the “I”, a “self-diegetic gaze” which overlaps an inner
and outer perspective.

More than an intra-diegetic gaze (Chandler, 1998), represented in filmic and televisual
media by a subjective point-of-view shot, the “self-diegetic gaze” addresses the audience’s
experience of looking at the Self, placed into the diegetic world, from the spectator’s point-of-
view. Therefore, the self-diegetic gaze may be understood as the intertwining of the intra and extra-
diegetic gazes, rendering nevertheless the spectator's gaze, who is simultaneously inside and
outside the virtual environment, and providing the narcissistic pleasure of beholding and
appreciating the digital Self from both an inner and outer perspective. The digital gaze returns to
the viewer through her or his own eyes and involves the subject into a circularity of self-referential
looks, an endless loop of observation, which establishes a mutual and reciprocal mise-en-abyme
and traps the interactive audience into the digital gaze.

Behind and beyond the screen, when other audience members watch the interactors'
depicted image online, they are performing a pervasive action of beholding the subject through her
or his digital Self, insofar as the gaze of other participants overlap with the viewers subjective
look, feeding the viewers' pleasure for her or his participation from the Otherness perspective.
Once the interactive documentary provides the structure for a voyeuristic gaze, the subjects
become the actors of the events in the digital environment, and the audience becomes the gaze of
their own performative actions. As self-voyeurs, the interactors wish to be seen as seers and seek
for the audience’s regard but are unable to recognize it, remaining self-aware of the desired object
and gazing blankly into the digital Self.

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 FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

My motivation for undertaking this research was the curiosity to discover how interactivity
is changing documentary film. As both researcher and filmmaker, I was intrigued by the novel and
disruptive interactive documentary works that emerged over the last 15 years, rapidly growing and
evolving. Since 2010 renowned international film festivals, such as the International Documentary
Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), Sundance Film Festival and Tribeca Film Festival, among
others, started featuring interactive works in their programs. Also, prominent filmmakers like
Ridley Scott and Wes Anderson embarked onboard the interactive aesthetic movement, daring to
experiment this new form of production. Whereas interactive documentary tries to stand out and
to establish its own aesthetic and form also claims to be an evolution of the traditional genre,
preserving its fundamental heritage. The question is far more complex than this, and it is still to be
unveiled, as Rodowick argues:

The old (cinematic) and the new (electronic and digital) media find themselves in a
curious genealogical mélange whose chronology is by no means simple or self-evident. As
‘film’ disappears in the successive substitutions of the digital for the analog, what persists
is cinema as a narrative form and a psychological experience – a certain modality of
articulating visuality, signification, and desire through space, movement, and time. Indeed,
while computer-generated imagery longs to be ‘photographic’, many forms of interactive
media long to be ‘cinematic’. (Rodowick, 2007, pp. 184–185)

As outlined within this dissertation, interactive documentaries significantly change the

form and the film watching experience by breaking the narrative of the represented reality into
pieces, altering the reception conditions and venues and partly withdrawing the creative process
from the director’s domain to the audience’s hands, allowing the manipulation of the fragmented
contents and affording self-centered and sometimes even self-referential experiences. Within the
several transformations, perhaps the most significant one introduced by interactive documentary,
when compared with unfolding or more traditional forms of audiovisual works, lies in the user’s

191
role, insofar as the audience performs an operation during the film viewing process. Such digital
objects not only allow as mostly demand an action from the viewer to activate all its features and
proceed the multilinear structure onwards.

Nowadays we are drawing with images and sounds. Not only we consume contents, but
also produce, change (remix), appropriate, circulate, and broadcast these materials. We do it
because we can. We have the means, the opportunity and the will to do it. However, it is not clear
why we do it. In the “convergence age” (Jenkins, 2006a), grasping the perceptual experience
becomes even more pertinent. We must understand how audience makes sense of the contents and
what the perception is while interaction occurs. It certainly is an exciting moment for researching
audiences, particularly in new media experiences. The possibilities and approaches to interactive
documentary are infinite regarding the objects’ aesthetics and forms, the levels of participation
and how such revolution affects the interactor’s experience. More than watching and interpreting,
in interactive documentary spectator becomes what Sandra Gaudenzi names a “doer”, rather than
a viewer. In this perspective, the interactor is included as part of the system and manipulates it
from inside, tied together with the artifact in a dynamic feedback loop of action-reaction
(Gaudenzi, 2013, p. 15).

All and all, within the prevailing research on interactive documentary, the audience has
been portrayed as an active element (Cohen, 2001; Gaudenzi, 2013; Gifreu, 2013) and
notwithstanding the scarceness of investigation undertaken specifically on audience in interactive
documentary, the few research works published have been focusing in the interactor’s impact in
the digital work; i. e. how the interactor, as the active element of the interaction process,
manipulates and shapes the interactive documentary’s configuration (Gaudenzi, 2014; Nash,
2014b, 2014c). Whereas I acknowledge the importance of considering the new documentary’s
affordances and the audience’s active performance over the digital artifacts, I do understand the
viewer’s interaction and choices are limited and, more importantly, induced by the object of
interaction.

Perhaps the most significant finding in this research lies in understanding how interactive
documentary affects the audience. Instead of analyzing how viewers shape interactive
documentaries, I approach the research focusing on the reverse perspective and explore the ways

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in which interactive documentaries affect users. I propose that interactive documentary's
distinctive characteristics affect the perceptual interaction experience in several dimensions that I
address as ways of affection. As an external material body, interactive documentary provides
impressions and induces sensations which shape the audience’s perceptual experience of the
interaction practice and triggers actions throughout the narrative. As result of the subjective
interaction with the three interactive documentaries selected as corpus of study, chapter 7 describes
the eight proposed ways of affection: sense of control, sense of presence, sense of Self, sense of
place, sense of belonging, sense of Almightiness, sense of endlessness and sense of incompleteness.

These ways of affection are multifarious, involuntary, sometimes paradoxical and,

nonetheless, constitutive of the audience’s subjectivity. In this perspective, the interactor is
subjected to perceptual and experiential senses mediated by technology, that open questions about
control and agency. Both the technological and the interactive dimensions of interactive
documentary structure the subjectivity of the viewer, insofar as the digital screen may be framed
within what Crary describes as “optical devices”: “as sites of both knowledge and power that
operate directly on the body of the individual” (1992, p. 7). Interactive documentary, therefore,
possesses its distinct bodily agency, intentionality, and subjectivity that is experienced by the user
through an embodied, dynamic and fluid performance of operating a re-presentation of the world.
The diegetic environment effaces the limits of the material and virtual world and the absorbs the
spectator.

As so, the Self evolves as a double entity composed of an individual, material and sensory
being, and a fragmented, detached and virtual entity addressed as digital Self. These two entities
are, nevertheless, linked and connected through neural and sensory bonds, reciprocally and
mutually shaping one another and, thus, significantly contributing to a complex and intricate
subjectivity. Through a binary opposition between the corporeal Self and its digital counterpart,
interactive documentary creates a self-reflexive interface, eluding the boundaries between both
entities and interplaying the perception of being in a two-way, dynamic and interactive process,
where each is reflected in the other as one continuous framework. Such as the corporeal Self
informs its virtual alter Ego’s behavior and existence, the digital Self intervenes in the perception
of the physical body and the interactor experiences an expansive sensorial “sameness” within the
virtual environment. The crossover of the Self and its digital image becomes the engagement of

193
both in a mise-en-abyme process of self-reflection, as a reversibility sequence that may be
compared to what Merleau-Ponty (1993, pp. 124–125) describes as an “extraordinary
overlapping”48.

The subjective experience of interaction in digital environments represents an altered state

of consciousness, insofar as the interactive audience loses the awareness of their feelings and
existence, to form a new virtual identity translating their self-consciousness (or the intended self-
consciousness) through self-referential experiences. Moreover, by projecting the Self into the
virtual environment and affording the interactor with ways of affection, interactive documentary
engenders an intersubjective engagement that allows oneself to experience the diegetic space, the
characters and the virtual presence of other users not as objects but as subjects, developing
empathetic affinities towards them based on one’s recognition of their subjective experience. This
intersubjective encounter of the viewer with others and with her or his own image portrayed in the
screen leads the interactor to an awareness that she or he is also a subject and, thus, becomes visible
to others as a subjective and intentional being.

This act of looking, seeing and being seen, simultaneously from an inner and outer
perspective, is what I describe as the digital gaze, a disturbing sensation of being observed which
causes anxiety but, nevertheless, contributes for a scopophilic pleasure of watching oneself in the
digital environment and being aware that others can see one’s image too. In the psychoanalytic
Lacanian perspective (2006), the digital screen becomes a mirror which reflects the audience's
image and emanates the electrical power to implicate and fascinate the subject through an
obsessive and narcissistic gaze. The digital Self becomes the pleasurable object of desire,
vulnerable and exposed for self-contemplation. Moreover, the precise moment when the
interactive audience faces her or his own representation inscribed into the object of interaction is
an unsettling and crucial moment, insofar as the interactive viewer is immersed in a virtual
environment that is also occupied by its digital Self. The reflected image raises the audience’s
awareness about the Self as Other, and the interactor experiences an internal duality in the

48
Elaborating on Art, especially painting, Merleau-Ponty describes the “extraordinary overlapping” as a body
immersed in the world, itself visible: “…my body simultaneously sees and is seen. That which looks at all things can
also look at itself and recognize, in what it sees, the ‘other side’ of its power of looking. It sees itself seeing; it touches
itself touching; it is visible and sensitive for itself” (Merleau-Ponty, 1993, p. 124).

194
awareness of both the Self and its digital counterpart within the diegetic environment, while
struggles to understand the fundamental separation between one’s internal and external worlds.

The image depicted on the screen doesn't necessarily translates the audience's imaginary
about the Self but provides the delightful gratification of existing elsewhere, where others can see
and identify it. Furthermore, the digital gaze is a purely alienation experience, insofar as the unify
and unifying image reflected in the digital environment is never positioned in the place from which
the audience sees it. The audience assumes a self-reflexive stance observing the reflected digital
Self always detached from the subject and oblivious from the true Self, alien to the self-being,
always other than the I viewed from somewhere else. The overlapping of the interactor’s identity
and its image portrayed as otherness, mediated by the technological interface, leads her or him
back to the phenomenon of méconnaissance, such as the child in the Lacanian mirror stage (2006)
who sees in the mirror a misrecognition of the actual physical reality.

Both the proposed ways of affection framework and the digital gaze concept have been
developed with two key affordances in mind. Firstly, they can be employed as an analytical
framework for the critical discussion of the audience's perceptual experience of interacting with
non-linear digital documentaries, contributing for an understanding of how the audience is affected
by the experience of engaging with and manipulating a representation of reality, while shape one's
subjectivity. Secondly, they provide a basis for the critical exploitation of other virtual worlds.
Although the suggested conceptions lend themselves to an analytical deconstruction of web-based
documentaries, I foresee the tremendous potential for investigating interactive environments such
as Virtual Reality documentaries, interactive installations and even glancing on social media
platforms. Particularly Virtual Reality documentaries afford the possibility of an exponential
immersion and consequently enhance the affect on the audience's engagement. As a profoundly
immersive medium, VR provides the viewer with a transformative experience of alienation and
affection. Whereas in 2013, when I started my research, Virtual Reality documentaries were in its
early days of development, and there weren't significant examples for analysis, the fast pace
evolution of works over the last years provides fertile ground for further expanding the critical
understanding of audience’s engagement within the realm of documentary, as well as in other
interactive environments.

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