By Patricia Zimmermann, Professor of Screen Studies, Ithaca College; co-director, Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival

I've never been more unsettled, confused — and excited — about documentary.

Everything I have ever theorized, historicized, analyzed, criticized, programmed, and written about documentary in its linear, argumentative, analog forms needs a serious gut job. A total renovation from the attic to the kitchen.

Why?

Over the past few years, when I've gone to film festivals or scholarly symposia, it's the new media sidebars — where no one wants to be called a director anymore and everyone is a convener or a designer — that yank me away from the movie theaters.

Who?

Example: Helen De Michiel's Lunch Love Community Project — a lush mosaic website of short collaborative videos chronicling the movement for healthy food in Berkeley, California, public schools, produced with the teachers, cooks, kids, and parents.

Three-dimensional spheres of place-based issues and people, these transmedia projects dismantle all of my previous theories — intellectual wrecking balls, if you will. Beyond the trendy tropes of mash-ups, crowdsourcing, user-generated, "produser," and marketing engagement through double-screening, open-space documentaries invite encounters with people, ideas, places and technologies.

Example: Saving the Sierra, produced by jesikah maria ross and Catherine Stifter — a collaborative project charting the stories and voices of Californians and environmental issues in the Sierra Nevada Mountains using radio, community meetings, and innovative story mapping.

Collaborative and shape shifting, these projects open up dialogue, convenings, stories, and a new form of collaborative, grounded space. They migrate fluidly across the analog and the digital, using adaptable platforms and inviting in newly interactive communities.

How?

Example: The Cotton Road Project, by Laura Kissel with Li Zhen, tracing the supply chain of cotton from South Carolina to Shanghai manufacturing, with short video vignettes, multiple stories, and the innovative "sourcemap" that tracks supply chains of commodities through crowd research.

 Although I still love their gutsy vigor, long-form doc features loom a bit like skyscrapers from the 1960s — overbuilt and probably not sustainable. In comparison, these more modest, open-space transmedia projects, seem more agile, more adaptable, more alive, more responsive, less predictable.

 If you want to dig further into open-space documentary, you can join De Michiel, ross and Kissel for conversation at the working session on "Open Space Documentary" (I will moderate) at this year's utterly alluring NAMAC Conference, Leading Creatively, in Minneapolis, September 6-8.

This conference promises one of the biggest open spaces in the new media ecology.

Blog written by Patricia Zimmermann, professor of cinema, photography and media arts, Ithaca College and codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival

Meet Helen De Michiel

Helen De Michiel is a documentary filmmaker and producer, public policy media arts advocate and analysis, and explorer of the possibilites of new media for engagement with communities. She's had a long and vibrant career in all of these fields, with award-winning feature films and documentaries. Most recently (1996-2010), she served as codirector of the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture (NAMAC). Her new multimedia documentary engagement project, Lunch Love Community, launched last week. Lunch Love Community explores healthy food for schools, and how documentary practice can be rewired away from preaching to communities, towards convening community involvement as a key part of the documentary project. More on Helen in my previous blog HERE.

The Interview Continues

Patricia: What are new developments in the media landscape that completely change our concepts, operations, and practices of public media? 

Helen: Now, we are in a period when every citizen has a stake in defining the role of a public media sphere. Corporate media pounds us with diversionary fluff. Those narratives invade everyone’s consciousness and infect our public forms of discourse and reflection.

Public media is no longer only NPR or PBS. How can digital natives—that generation that has grown up permeated by all forms of emerging media and platforms-- build up a new concept of public media that designs meaningful spaces among all the new nodes of entry?

This movement of public media practices within new platforms is happening at the cellular level of our emerging new communications system. Hybrid forms of journalism, filmmaking, and writing are being tested. With new interfaces and applications, broadband media makers are making mistakes and test piloting their way into the future.

In fact, social media may be the most salient public media form of this current period. It is driven by engaged individuals speaking and sharing virally. The challenge, however, resides in how to create the “story” of this new public media sphere. How do we connect the nodes and protect them from being crushed or marginalized?

For example, filmmakers can now gather and organize groups of interested fans and users online before a work is completed. They can invite their feedback, enter into meaningful dialogues, and make an interactive exchange of ideas and questions part of the work’s development. This kind of open inquiry approach will completely transform our legacy ideas of public media.

Patricia: What are some projects emerging in this new public media landscape that you think open up new ways of thinking about our digital futures?

Helen: I am deeply intrigued by the multiple public media/public art projects being organized by Jon Ippolito and Joline Blais < http://www.three.org/>, who teach new media practice at the University of Maine. They work with social networks, kinship systems, indigenous peoples, and environmental issues. I don’t always understand exactly what they are doing, but when I do, I am jolted by the new connections they are making. And that’s a good thing.

Perhaps readers of this blog can share projects they know about that open up new ways of thinking about our digital futures? I welcome more interaction on this topic. Let’s discuss!

Patricia: What is unresolved in this new landscape? What are some debates we need to consider and engage in?

Helen: The idea of resolution may be a pipe dream in this landscape with new nodes for public media futures. Perhaps the game will just go on and on, changing abuptly just when resolution seems at hand.

Here are some of the questions I continue to ruminate over:

1. How can artists get interested in and more actively engaged in the huge telecommunications and cultural policy debates of our time?

2. How can we encourage gamers to change the terms of what is public media and learn new ways to play our way into common spaces for dialogue?

3. How can I connect 20th century cinema and art practice to the new media forms I see emerging?

4. How is the burgeoning “maker’s culture” changing both technology and arts communities?

5. Where will the new public media reside in the coming decades? Will it still be defined primarily by television or radio – or the next medium after Facebook and Twitter?

6. How can we bring into focus the urgent need for digital literacy? How can we recognize digital media not only as a conduit for ‘content,’ but as a creative medium itself in the process of being defined?

And finally, for me, one of the most important pieces missing in these larger debates is seeing the variety of voices of creators articulating and writing about their own experiences in the digital environment, as artists and participants.What is working? What is not working? What are some of the values or ethics we need to articulate as creators in this space? What new connections are you making in your work?

There is no excuse anymore for creators and producers to not become engaged in the rebuilding of a public media space. As designer Bruce Mau wrote in “An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth" :

"Organization=Liberty: Real innovation in design, or any other field, happens in context.”

Blog written by Patricia Zimmerman, professor of cinema, photography and media arts at Ithaca College and codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival

Meet Helen DeMichiel

Helen De Michiel has just left her position as codirector of the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture (NAMAC), a position she has held since 1996,  to pursue her innovative work in digital media, public media, arts public policy and administration, and engagement. She's also developing a groundbreaking documentary social media project called Lunch Love Community (more on that in a future posting).  Helen's experience, knowledge and insights about the massive changes in the public media landscape and its new nodes spurred me to want to interview her to learn more about the challenges of this new topography.  I'll post in three parts:  a two part interview, and then an analysis of the significance of the Lunch Love Community documentary project. Stay tuned and join the conversation!

Helen De Michiel is a director,writer and producer whose work includes film, television and video installations. She is principal of Thirty Leaves, a media production company. Her 1995 feature film Tarantella, starring Mira Sorvino, has been shown, among others at the Seattle Film Festival and the Mill Valley Film Festival, and won the Audience Award at the 1996 Torino International Woman’s Film Festival. After the theatrical release it was broadcast on public TV nationwide in 1997-98 through The Independent Television Service, and is currently available in home video and DVD. Her documentary, Turn Here Sweet Corn(1990) was seen nationally on the PBS series POV, and is in distribution to environmental organizations as an educational and organizing tool. It has received awards from Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Earthpeace International Film Festival and the American Film & Video Festival. An earlier work, Consider Anything, Only Don’t Cry (1988) received the “Best New Vision” Golden Gate Award at the 1989 San Francisco International Film Festival. Her documentary The Gender Chip Project, is one of the most innovative works exploring college age women and science careers, with enormous outreach and usage within STEM communities.

Her films are included in the media art collection/archive of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Her video installation The Listening Project (1994), is part of Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center Permanent Collection and won the 1995 “Muse” Award in New Media & Technology from the American Museum Association. She has been the recipient of several NEA Awards and a Rockefeller Foundation Intercultural Film/Video Fellowship, among others. She has served as the National Director for NAMAC (The National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture), the national arts service organization for the media arts field, form 1996-2010. In 2001 she was appointed to the board of The George F. Peabody Award for Electronic Media. She has an MFA in film and visual arts from the University of California, San Diego. She lives  in Berkeley, California.

The Interview on New Nodes for Digital Futures

Patricia: How does the US public media landscape look different now than 20 years ago?

Helen: Let’s time travel a bit, since we both can still remember 1990. In 1990, indie filmmaking was new, fresh, and in ascendancy.

The Independent Television Service (ITVS) had just been funded by Congress. The Learning Channel was commissioning and running a 13-part series called The Independents, a curated thematic series showcasing independent films on cable. HBO was young, hungry, and willing to try out new projects. The MacArthur Foundation was pioneering the funding of media arts and public media organizations. Community media and public access were robustly funded by local franchise fees, and teaching citizens how to make and broadcast locally-based media.

In 1990, it really looked like emerging filmmakers could make work and bypass the clutches of the industry. It took twenty years. Now this idea of work outside the industrial system is more possible  than ever thanks to the internet and broadband capabilities.

What I find so interesting is how this wave of cultural activity in public media in the 1980s and 90s set the stage for the digital revolution we are now immersed in. What artists and filmmakers were dreaming of and talking about then -- to be able to engage directly with audiences as users and participants in the media making enterprise – is now a reality.

Patricia: What significant changes have you observed in the public media landscape?

Helen: We are coming to terms with the fact that the “nodes of entry” to a media experience, or cultural experience, are wildly proliferating (that is, as long as we fight for net neutrality and protect a free internet).

We can listen to radio, or internet radio, or Pandora, etc. We can watch TV or record it for later. We can watch everything online, or download it. We can go to movie theaters and see movies…or simulcast operas. We can get news from anywhere online for free. We can comment, add images, videos, and sounds of our own to the collective mix.

All of  this content can be delivered  through devices we put in our pockets and  can share globally in seconds. This is another way to think of “public media”—the nodes of entry are open to anyone: the whole idea of powerful gatekeepers is collapsing.

Since we are now curators of our own media experiences, it can be daunting and exhausting to stay on top of these choices and options. Here is a powerful emerging paradox:  the “public” nature of a communal media literacy is weakening. 

Do I watch an appointment television show, stream it on Hulu, get it VOD, or wait for aYouTube version? How do I watch and understand the work out there? As entertainment or education? When there is so much blurring and overlap, how do we discern between propaganda and advocacy?

As a media maker, I also have hard questions to think through. Do I toil for five years to make a long form documentary that public television may broadcast, but may not offer sufficient compensation or licensing fees. Or, do I test other ways to connect to different audience, who,  although much, much smaller, are perhaps much more devoted to the concepts and issues in the work and who will support that work through  small contributions?

We are also coming to terms with the hard reality that financial sustainability will not come from selling a media product. The new models emerging suggest that economic sustainability  for producers will be peripheral to the media object itself. 

New business models for rethinking independent and public media production are still to be shaped, ones that offer a real and authentic experience. I do believe that in this over-stimulated and noisy media environment, our future will focus on building a public media space that perseveres to create real world dialogue and inquiry.