Over the last month, I’ve started to think more about how and why I’m using the farm footage that Scott and I shot over 10 years ago. Here’s a digital story about how I’ve used it so far:
And here are links to the two stories from my Cowbird collection, The Farm:
What do you call the people who visit and engage with an interactive site? So far in my descriptions of my project, I’ve been calling them “users.” I’m not sure I like that term. I think it’s because it seems a bit too depersonalized and business-oriented. I’ve continued to use it because I’m not sure what term would work better. Visitors? People?
This morning, as I was watching a brief video interview with Mandy Rose, she suggests agent (“Active agent in the process”) as an alternative.
I like how this term indicates the active role that people watching and engaging with i-docs play, but it still seems depersonalized. What about co-storytellers? (too awkward?)
(According to MIT’s Moments of Innovation)
The use of the term ‘interactive’ in our contemporary era has a twist. The user doesn’t simply activate a static text; rather, in interacting, the user co-creates the text, making choices that define their experience.
I like this definition of interactivity: users as co-creators. What do I want users to co-create with me? 1. Stories (about the farm, about losing home, about remembering past home spaces, about the UP), 2. The Experience of Being at the Farm (cultivating sense of community + engaging in deep reflection + developing creative/artistic projects)
I love this project from Ze Frank. I’ve already linked to it, but I decided to take a screen shot of their description of the project here. Once you click in/through the project, you can’t access the project description again.
This morning, I’m checking out an amazing interactive site about the history of documentaries and technology. The first section is about Immersion. I wanted to make note of this passage:
The word ‘medium’ has many meanings in English, most going back to classical Latin. But by an odd chance, two ‘new’ meanings first appeared around 1851: medium as a channel for mass communications (‘the photographic medium’) and medium as an intermediary between the living and the dead (‘the medium organized a séance’). One transmits information from point ‘a’ to point ‘b’, and the other ‘makes present’ that which is impossibly distant. The immersive urge that has accompanied our media from the very start seems to embrace both definitions, to tell us about another place and to make that place as present as possible.
I’m struck by the line, “as present as possible.” A key part of my project is to craft a space that replicates the feeling of being at the farm. As much as I want people to “feel” like they’re farm, I know that that farm feeling is only always a replication, an approximation. Is there a way to make that acknowledgment visible in the project?
I’m also struck by the line, “make present that which is impossibly distant.” The farm is impossibly distant. Now that it has been sold and I can’t visit it every summer, it is forever “there,” when it used to be “here.” The only way I can repeatedly access it is through old photographs, stories/interviews and video footage from the early 2000s.
Wow. I want to think about this passage some more and find ways to incorporate it into my project.