It took about 15 years to accept that the documentaries of the 21st century might be “interactive”. Moving from a linear media to a non linear one has challenged the role of the author in the creative treatment of actuality – as subjects and the users are now directly involved in such creation. But a new shift is about to disturb our idea of what a narrative is: the oculus rift places us in a world that composes itself in real time while we are exploring it, and data mining allows us to personalise stories to their final users. What happens to our understanding of reality when we become the protagonists of hypothetical worlds?
Sandra Gaudenzi has started her career as a television producer. She then moved into interactive television, and has been teaching interactive media theory at the London College of Communication (University of the Arts London) from 1999 till 2013. She is now Visiting Research Fellow at the University of the West of England. Her research interests include interactive documentary, participatory practices, UX in i-docs, transmedia storytelling, locative experiences and games for change. Sandra is one of the conveners of i-Docs, a conference totally dedicated to interactive documentaries, that she initiated in 2011 and she is a creative director of its website, http://i-docs.org/ and Facebook group. She currently blogs at www.interactivefactual.net and is the author of www.interactivedocumentary.net, a blog that she started in 2009 in order to document her own experience of doing a PhD at Goldsmiths (University of London).
Written by
Andrew Whitacre