Video Interview | William Uricchio on Authorship and Collaboration in Interactive Documentary

Video Interview | William Uricchio on Authorship and Collaboration in Interactive Documentary

The OpenDocLab team is pleased to welcome Arnau Gifreu Castells as an OpenDocLab visiting research affiliate. A Professor of Communication Studies at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) and the Universitat de Vic (UVIC), Arnau is also a member of the i-Docs group. The Director of the UVIC_Lab, the Digital Content Laboratory at UVIC, he has also held research lecturer positions at Harvard University (Harvard Metalab) and York University (Future Cinema Lab).

Arnau is in the process of interviewing a number of practitioners, scholars, and students of interactive documentary about the state of the field. He will be posting select clips on the OpenDocLab website. Below you’ll find Part 2 of an interview with OpenDocLab Principal Investigator William Uricchio.

In this series we focus on the theoretical part of the study of interactive documentary. We will conduct video interviews with the main experts in the field based on six key questions: (1) the definition, how would they define the interactive documentary; (2) the evolution of the form, whether they believe that the interactive documentary is a natural evolution of the linear documentary; (3) the change in the logics and dynamics, if they believe there is a change in the logics of production, distribution and exhibition; (4) the role of the author, if they believe that the role of the author is threatened; (5) the business model; and (6) their views on the production, research and events organized by countries that are active in this field, placing special emphasis on Canada and France.

Our first interviewee is William Uricchio, Professor and Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program and Professor of Comparative Media History at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He is also Lead Principal Investigator of the MIT Open Documentary Lab and MIT Game Lab. In this video interview Uricchio answers the following questions:

1.Do you believe there is a change in the logics of production, distribution and exhibition?

2.Do you consider the role of the author threatened in this specific form?

 

[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/63473345[/vimeo]

 

Interactive documentaries reveal huge changes in the production, distribution and exhibition logics and dynamics compared to traditional documentaries. Uricchio points out that production technologies are becoming cheaper, easier to use and more pervasive. Distribution has been transformed by the Internet, so that people can now spread information easily throughout the world. In terms of exhibition, he remarks that we’ve seen big changes in digital devices, for example the development of tablets, and people have a different kind of emotive relationship with them. Uricchio believes that these factors all point to a radical shift.

 

[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/63473346[/vimeo]

 

Uricchio affirms that the traditional understanding of what an author does is certainly threatened by interactive documentaries, but there’s another way of considering the authorial voice according to the analyses by Barthes and Foucault. Uricchio sees the author as a “collaborator”, someone who is shaping and creating an environment, providing structures and new avenues of experience. But this new role does not mean that the director will lose the authorial voice. Uricchio stresses the word collaboration as a negotiation of reality between the author, text and user.

 

Arnau Gifreu Castells (PhD)
Research Affiliate, MIT Open Documentary Lab
agifreu@mit.edu