22 Nov Seven Billion Stories and Counting | Moments of Innovation

Julia Scott-Stevenson reviews Moments of Innovation for Seven Billion Stories and Counting in “Everything Old is Innovative”:

Interactive documentary gets meta with newest contribution to the form Moments of Innovation. An interactive documentary work about, well, interactive documentary, it concisely covers everything that’s exciting right now about non-fiction on the web. The boffins at MIT’s Open Documentary Lab have partnered with IDFA DocLab to create the project, which is also currently in installation form at IDFA in Amsterdam.

Don’t be fooled by my ‘right now’ statement though, Moments of Innovation neatly places everything new within a history of media-making. So while social media specialists are currently hyperventilating about collaboration and participatory processes, Moments reminds us that participation has been around since the box brownie made photography accessible to the masses around 1900. Similarly, user curation could be seen as an updated version of the family photo album – something everyone over the age of about 20 has had a shot at. It’s also an impressive piece of work that can draw a link between the Lascaux Cave Paintings of 15,000 BC and the Sexperience 1000 under the banner of data visualisation.

Read Scott-Stevenson’s complete review at Seven Billion Stories and Counting.