New apparatuses – new users – new objects
I would give both audience and technology more agency and assert that the globalized, networked, digitized society demands a new cinema form based on interactivity, play, searching, and nonobvious relationships. (Daly 2010, p. 83)
Examples of the new ludic and interactive cinema described by Daly are already distributed on the Internet. This new cinematic form – hybrid audiovisual works that variably combine cinema, games, and social media – was born from the encounter between the vast capacities of new reception and communication devices and an audience adept at a more active *spectatorship*. These more or less interactive forms, in diverse configurations, escape the conventions of linear narration and habitual discourse, responding to the new expectations for entertainment, information, and experimentation of an audience stemming from a networked, digital, and globalizing society.
At this stage of my reflection, it therefore seems important to examine the evolution of the conditions of audiovisual spectatorship – both technical in nature and in terms of posture – sustained and provoked by new viewing and communication devices, in order to fully understand the influence that this new spectatorship exerts on the unfolding of the experienced objects. This will allow me to apprehend the form that now seems necessary for this new cinema and for the interactive documentary object that interests me. A cinema responding to the profound sociological and cultural changes provoked by the technological evolutions begun with the Internet and the digitization of media barely 25 years ago. A cinema that *a priori* challenges my approach as a filmmaker and whose creation, according to Viva Paci, seems to escape the usual communicative intentions of its creators:
Qu’est-ce que cela veut dire de s’intéresser à un sujet issu de la réalité, travailler longtemps à son étude, investir du temps dans son découpage et dans sa scénarisation pour le web, tout en étant bien conscient que même le spectateur idéal n’en fera pas le tour ? (Paci 2015, p. 164)
Renouncing control over the narrative flow that this interactive form requires seems quite removed from what I am accustomed to accepting as a filmmaker. Indeed, at each stage of production of a linear audiovisual work, every aesthetic and narrative flow decision is carried out toward its most precise and ideal realization possible. During the creation of an interactive work, this meticulous work will find its culmination in experimentation, viewing, and listening devices of variable quality. Moreover, it will proceed from a random unfolding which, by its nature, may leave aside a large part of the formal work performed. However, given the numerous and almost generalized presence of these viewing devices, it seems I must abandon, at least in part, this control over the viewing conditions of my objects, whether they are linear or not.
2.1 New Devices
From my beginnings as a filmmaker, I have witnessed a rapid technological evolution and a significant downsizing of cinematographic and audiovisual production means. Briefly, one can establish the start of this technical and digital revolution at the moment of the appearance of word processing software, which accelerated the pre-production stages of filmmaking and, above all, facilitated the non-linear shaping of the processes of reflection and creation of communication documents. Then, video allowed for an increase in the shooting ratio and the immediate viewing of rushes on set. And, finally, non-linear editing systems favored a more intuitive and reactive editing process, less directed upstream and more flexible downstream. These different digital tools engaged in the cinematographic production process allowed for an increase in the control I could have over the realization of my communicative intentions and a growing precision in the form of the documentary object in which I was invested.
Until very recently, and generally speaking, these new production means still found their culmination in a linear viewing of the audiovisual object as designed for the big screen of a cinema or for a specific television broadcast. However, parallel to the evolution of production means, new distribution and broadcasting technologies have succeeded one another, offering an increasing number of viewers the possibility to free themselves from the linearity and the ephemeral nature of the audiovisual experience. DVD, digital recorders, and audiovisual distribution on the Internet have allowed for personalized viewing schedules and access to a greater number of works, thus provoking a transformation of audiovisual spectatorship. Today, with the possibility of viewing on a smartphone, a tablet, or a computer, it is not only the moment but the very space of viewing that becomes decompartmentalized through this multiplicity of media reception devices.
For Robert C. MacDougall, we are in an era where the place where we are located matters less and less for what we can do there: “Another set of realities illustrates how mobile telephony and computer technology greatly reduce the significance of physical place. Increasingly, where one is no longer matters.” (MacDougall 2011, p. 22). Indeed, it is now possible to watch what we want regardless of location or time, whether it be television programs, films, sports, or other events broadcast even live.
2.2 New Users
There was thus a first digital revolution of production means, then an evolution of distribution means, and now a revolution of audiovisual spectatorship is nearing completion, less and less confined temporally and spatially by the unfolding of the show offered to it and by the reception means necessary for its fulfillment. This current normalization of the presence of film in all places and at all times allows Charles R. Acland to compare the film object to a newspaper that one can leaf through and dispose of whenever one pleases:
The formats that typify today's moving images – such as e-mail links to web-based clips, DVD recordings and episodes of serialized narratives specifically for mobile phones – are closer to the crude ephemera of newspapers and brochures, so unremarkable have they become. (Acland 2009, p. 22)
In fact, many viewing devices are held with one or two hands, close to the spectator, in a familiar manner similar to a daily newspaper. Roger Odin also compares this new filmic spectatorship to the reading of a newspaper or a book. But for Odin, it is in the very form of its unfolding—often interrupted by various events of the current reality or by the technical device itself allowing for other interventions—that this new type of viewing on portable devices resembles reading:
We might describe this new positioning as a move from the position of a spectator to that of a reader: unlike what happens for the performance (of a play, or a film in the cinema), we rarely read a novel from beginning to end in one sitting […] (Odin 2012, p. 159)
Odin introduces an important notion here that directly concerns me as a filmmaker demonstrating reality: that of the activity of the "spectator-reader" who participates actively and voluntarily in the unfolding process. This reading posture, in the literal sense so to speak—the act of reading and scanning words, turning the page, closing the book and picking it up again later—seems for now to represent the most significant and transformative change in spectatorship for conventional audiovisual forms.
However, unlike reading a newspaper, the viewing of a film has, since its origins, taken place in collective or family entertainment venues and through devices whose nature often necessitates a shared experience. Freed from the constraints of broadcast schedules and reception devices, the demobilization of the audiovisual spectacle enabled through these multiple punctual and individual incarnations in time and space now makes the spectatorship experience more solitary than before. Yet, as Jean Châteauvert points out, paradoxically, it is with the help of a communication device that this moment of individual spectatorship often unfolds, and it is thanks to the exchange capacities of this new device for experimentation and viewing that a new sense of spectator belonging is established:
In the immediacy of viewing, which is relative and variable depending on whether one is watching a news bulletin, a singer's latest music video, or the posting of the latest episode of a television or web series, the spectator can interact at the moment when reaction and commentary are relevant among internet users. The mobile platform adds to the viewing experience the possible 'live' participation in a virtual network that is created among internet users around the series or the subject. (Châteauvert 2014, p. 15)
This dialogue, carried out in parallel by the spectator using the viewing device or any other device in their possession, modifies the spectator's qualities—their ability to understand and follow the discourse, their concentration, their availability of time and attention—by allowing an engagement toward the realization of other intentions; multiple intentions of communication, entertainment, and information. Consequently, in my view, it is much more than a spatio-temporal liberation of the filmic spectacle that is provoked by the multiplicity of viewing and interaction platforms. It is the very singularity of the ongoing audiovisual experience and the uniqueness of the engagement it requires that disappear during its more or less linear unfolding to which the spectator has invited themselves. Does this multiplicity of punctual and parallel engagements necessarily lead to a clear loss of quality in spectatorship, or is it rather a modification of presence and a shaping of different intentions responding to social and technological evolution?
According to Kristen Daly, the spectator engaged in experiencing a film, regardless of the platform used (cinema screen, TV, computer, tablet, phone, etc.), requisitions new multimedia and multitasking devices for other media and communication functions during the ongoing spectatorship experience in order to optimize the value of the global media engagement:
For Cinema 3.0, a movie no longer exists as a cohesive, unchanging art piece but instead participates in a world of cross-media interaction, and this has enabled new forms of narrative requiring, as part of the enjoyment, interaction in the form of user-participation and interpretation. (Daly 2010, p. 82)
Daly highlights here two essential elements for the understanding I am building of my new approach as a creator of interactive documentary works. First, she explicitly emphasizes that a film distributed on the Internet no longer exists as an integral, coherent, and singular object, and that we must instead consider it as existing within a network of intersecting media offerings. Then, she prompts me to consider that this networked existence and this new spectatorship—whose pleasure is based in part on interaction—can cause a fragmentation of the experimentation with the object during viewing. Indeed, as Sean Cubitt noted as early as 1998, the appeal of the interface, due to its design and its interactive and navigational capacities, steers the user toward an active presence with multiple engagements:
Peering into the screen, the browser interface invites you to enter not the internal workings of one machine, but the composite ensemble of all linked terminals. The facilitating hardware, increasingly transparent as user-friendly, icon-driven designs become second nature to synergetic subjects, has loosened its grip on materiality to present itself as a vast virtual playground […] (Cubitt 1998, p. 83)
This new media and network landscape—this vast virtual playground—would thus foster the creation of new audiovisual forms and new multimedia functions that are appreciated by the spectator based on the different possibilities for interaction and participation allowed, whether intra-diegetic or extra-diegetic. The spectator's desire for multiform and multitasking engagement expresses itself as much outside the experienced form as inside it, using various media devices that are more or less incidental or linked to one another.
2.3 New Objects
The media ubiquity of spectatorship and virtual presence offered by various communication devices and multimedia experimentation platforms has thus provoked a fragmentation of the audiovisual experience and a multiple shaping of spectator engagement, as viewers now have the possibility of investing in a multitude of experiences within the same global process of reflection or entertainment. For example, today, during the broadcast of a hockey game aimed at a large, captive, and already-won-over audience, it is simultaneously possible to watch the game on a television or on the Internet—via tablet, phone, or computer—while interacting with other users through the broadcaster's blog, browsing statistics regarding certain players, and even accessing another level of information constructed from a multimedia and graphic formatting of match statistics. The spectator's engagement is here both divided (by parallel and related applications and objects) and multiplied (by the relative degree of connivance existing between them). In this example, the media shifts undertaken by the spectator are oriented toward the same object (the retransmission of the match) and the same event (the hockey game) and are thus part of the same global space of entertainment.
New digital broadcasting devices and network distribution systems therefore foster new modes of viewing and media participation, which in turn influence the form of the audiovisual objects presented therein. These are autonomous forms that serve their utility of global and multiform engagement as much as they serve their unique representation and singular experimentation. The media industry is already utilizing this transformation of spectator presence and this evolution of media consumption. It offers not only varied and adaptable actantial devices for the same spaces of entertainment or information, as we have just seen with the retransmission of hockey games; it also leverages the browsing and participation data of its visiting spectators through marketing and advertising, in the same way it does with traditional ratings.
Regarding my own work, and as I explained in the previous chapter, the documentary objects I created sometimes found their fulfillment outside of their own experimentation. Once their viewing was complete, these works continued to prompt reflection and information seeking, and were able to continue their communication process through other information sources and through the experimentation of other objects. There is, however, a difference between creating a work whose viewing will spark a desire to experiment with additional objects in order to deepen an already initiated reflection, and the creation of an interactive object that will be all the more appreciated insofar as it allows the spectator to abandon it during its own experimentation. How should I approach my object and structure its communication and interaction offering when it is dependent on other offerings and other actions that modify the unfolding of the offered experience, the latter being undoubtedly subject to frequent exits from the spectator's presence?
Referring to Lev Manovich, Marida Di Crosta clarifies the function and nature of the interactive film and allows for an approach to the dual function of the "screenic" surface. For her, the interactive film is rather a film-interface, a global device where the film and the interface are components of the same object:
In technological artifacts, it is the interface that, by structuring the spatio-temporal configuration and the organization of the screenic surface, redefines each time the particular formal, material, and phenomenological organization of the experience. Consequently, the interface cannot be thought of as separate from the content, since it determines the very materiality of the object and the experience: a simple change in the interface and the meaning of the entire work would be considerably altered. (Di Crosta 2010, p. 156)
It seems, therefore, that I must modify my grasp of the interactive documentary object in order to broaden my understanding of its *raison d'être* and its discursive mechanics. In agreement with Di Crosta, I believe that the interactive documentary film is not a navigable film with an interface, but rather an interactive device offering a variety of navigation, interaction, and viewing experiences, with a documentary component, filmic or otherwise. And as Daly previously indicated, it also seems essential to take into account that the interactive documentary exists in a world of "cross-media" interaction (Daly 2010, p. 82) and must therefore be considered as a place of passage, stoppage, and return, rather than an end in itself.
I propose a comparison inspired by my previous studies in urban planning. The web documentary would have a function similar to that of a public square in a city: that of being a space of passage, action, and interaction within a vast network, whose utility and function exceed the value of its simple punctual use. Manovich considers the interface in a similar way. For him, it is indeed a space that exists as a site of action and presence, but also, and above all, as a mental space, constructed of moments of perception, reflection, action, and memory. A place that is transitory and ephemeral in its form, but continuous in its reflexive mechanics:
Rather than considering only the topology, geometry and logic of a static space, we need to take into account the new way in which space functions in computer culture—as something traversed by a subject, as a trajectory rather than an area. (Manovich 2000, p. 279)
The web documentary should therefore be considered as a space that is simultaneously virtual, digital, and graphic, and as a mental space in perpetual, more or less continuous construction for the spectator. This is somewhat like video games which, through a narrative device shaped within a graphic environment and rendered "tangible" through possible actions, place their user in a predisposition for play and assign them their primary purpose. Once the player is immersed and informed, the graphic aspect remains but gives way to the *raison d'être*, the game. Dominic Arsenault explores this ludic notion of domesticating possible virtual action and navigation:
Every video game thus begins with a more or less long period of experimentation, which depends on the player's video game culture and the complexity of a given game, during which the player mentally maps the repertoire of actions offered to them. (Arsenault 2013, p. 257)
The web documentary, for its part, would place its user in a predisposition for reflection and information seeking concerning a reality and its representation in different forms. Since the user's interactive actions are rooted more in a desire to understand and in curiosity, the presence required would be similar to that required by discovery video games where the player is called upon to understand and to act in order to understand more. However, the interactive gestures that allow for this evolution of understanding are devoid of actantial narrative pretext or character incarnation. They are initiating gestures of reading and viewing, sometimes of writing and communication, which expose the user to more information and predispose them to greater understanding. They are integrated and actualized according to an interface offering different gestures and devices for information, communication, and reflection. According to Viva Paci, these different devices of reflection are shaped and made available to the active spectator by a creator who is less interventionist than the linear filmmaker, but still required and still the signatory of the work:
[...] we want to emphasize the issues related to interactivity. They are embodied by the notion of the interface. Opaque or transparent, the latter contributes to mobilizing behaviors in the user that will determine their posture, and thus the aesthetic regime of the work and its reception. Interactivity is therefore also the site, specific to the web documentary, through which the author can share their relationship to the world. (Paci 2015, p. 161)
The research elements that have guided my reflection thus far clearly indicate that the form of audiovisual and multimedia experiences is currently influenced by new qualities of spectatorship engendered by new viewing and communication devices. However, Paci introduces here the notion that the very form of the interactive object can influence, or even model, the spectatorship of the moment that is actualized through interaction. An interaction which, in my view, allows both the spectator to construct and direct their reflection by mentally mapping the repertoire of actions offered to them (Arsenault 2013, p. 257) and the creator of the interactive work to share their relationship with the world (Paci 2015, p. 161).
Unlike the linear documentary, this new interactive form of reflection on reality thus seems to be constructed from several layers of information and meta-information (metadata) presented through an interface, and must not be considered or approached as a unique, linear, and limited experience. Moreover, if the form of this new object seems controlled by and subject to a new spectatorship established by new media devices, its experimentation appears both capable of benefiting from the multitasking trends influencing this new *spect-actor* and satisfying their new expectations of multiple engagement:
Cet espace est en perpétuelle communication avec d’autres espaces et d’autres individus investis eux aussi dans d’autres formes et d’autres espaces de communication comme facebook, tweeter et textos. La sociabilité du Web devient partie intégrante du webdocumentaire. (Tremblay, Tassé 2015, p. 3)
This documentary form is therefore not to be conceived so that a spectator, even an ideal one, might see the whole of it (Paci 2015, p. 164). Rather, it exists as a range of possibilities, more or less directive and multiple. And it is made available to the *spect-actor* to allow them reflection and discussion regarding an exposed reality. The *spect-actor*, free to leave and resume their participation at any time, is in control of their journey. They will be, as they wish, in communication and interaction with other objects and other participants, according to their choices and the space for reflection that we will have installed with and for them.
According to Robert C. MacDougall, the responsibility of the creator of interactive works even exceeds the limits of the space and the interactive object. They would be responsible not only for this space of reflection shaped by the interface and through interaction, but the "lived" media experience would have repercussions on the very construction of the user's reflective capacities:
New methods of observing and measuring brain activity and the burgeoning field of epigenetics (essentially, the study of genetic change that occurs above or after the genome) suggest that the media choices we make today will be consequential with regard to the way future generations will think about, perceive, and interact in, through, and with their worlds. (MacDougall 2011, p. 22)
These considerations go beyond the intentions of this thesis but nonetheless echo the remarks of Sandra Gaudenzi cited in the conclusion of the first chapter: "[…] The user is not “observing” the digital artefact, not “controlling” it, but “being transformed” by it." (Gaudenzi 2013, p. 75). I note therefore, in concluding this chapter, that the communicative media object, interactive or not, has multiple intentions: some punctual ones that are actualized through the course of viewing and interaction; and others taking shape over the long term, following a possible process of reflection. My previous linear creations had similar aims and also desired to be inscribed in time. My forthcoming interactive documentary object will also manifest similar intentions. And it seems that the open and adaptable form it is set to take makes it even more capable of achieving this. In the next chapter, I will examine two interactive documentary works on which I collaborated. Works that are both coherent and clear in their communicative intention and effective in their capacity to stimulate and sustain reflection. They inspire my current research-creation process and establish a link between my past linear works and the upcoming interactive work.