This roundtable will feature new media practitioners and theorists diving into how emerging new media forms enter into, think through, and remake entangled environments. And—it will feature interactive engagement among participants to unpack these practices and ideas.
Judith Aston, i-Docs
Sandra Gaudenzi, i-Docs
Mandy Rose, i-Docs
Moderator: Patricia Zimmermann, FLEFF
How does augmentation invite us to look differently at the hidden layers of environments virtual and material? How do different interfaces, technologies, platforms, and software open out to thinking about other species and the more-than-human?
Can we encounter cows, snakes, swamps, insects, rocks, storms, machines, microbes, and viruses through old and new media technologies?
As the tech industries push the metaverse, what other augmented resistant realities might we invent that speak to the pluriverse?
We are living in a specific, unresolved historical moment of the pandemic, where sometimes COVID is silent and absent, the emotions it conjures repressed. Isolation makes us feel we are not fully alive.
Can augmentation, interactivity, and immersion in i-Docs galvanize reconnection and deep connection? Can they put different world views into collision to produce new reflective spaces? Can we become more entangled with other species? Can we rethink augmentation as an idea and not a technology?
The three curators of i-Docs—Mandy Rose, Sandra Gaudenzi, and Judith Aston—combust all these ideas in this highly interactive, discussion-driven event that looks at a variety of ideas and projects across many platforms including Instagram, AR, VR, legacy film, i-Docs, animal-cams, social media, and more.
Judith Aston is an Associate Professor/Wallscourt Fellow in Film and Digital Arts at UWE Bristol. She is Co-founder of i-Docs and Chair of the RAI Film Committee. As an active member of the University’s Digital Cultures Research Centre, she is also an experienced tutor and PhD supervisor.
Her interdisciplinary experience is in anthropology, geography, interaction design and creative media practice. At the heart of her work is the desire to put evolving media technologies into the service of promoting multi-perspectival thinking and understanding. She has published widely on this and her collaboration with Stefano Odorico on Polyphonic Documentary is the latest manifestation of this ongoing endeavor.
Sandra Gaudenzi consults, researches, lectures and writes about interactive, immersive and transmedia narratives. She is Course Leader at the University of Westminster of disLAB, the first UK MA to be totally dedicated to interactive storytelling. She has played a leading role in the development of the DCRC's i-Docs Symposia and website and is part of its research group, with whom she has co-edited and published the book i-Docs: the Evolving Practices of Interactive Documentary.
She is a fellow at the Interactive Narrative Studio, Lodz Film School. Between 2015-18 she was Lead initiator and Head of Studies of IF Lab, a European development lab for digital storytellers. Her recent projects include Corona Haikus (2020) and Digital Me (2015).
Mandy Rose is Professor of Documentary & Digital Cultures at UWE Bristol and Director of the Digital Cultures Research Centre. She has worked in non-fiction film, TV and emerging media. During 20 years at the BBC she led participatory and interactive projects including BBC 2’s pioneering Video Nation project.
She is co-editor of i-docs: the evolving practices of interactive documentary and co-convenor of the i-Docs Symposium. She was Co-Investigator on the Virtual Realities: Immersive Documentary Encounters project and is a Co-Investigator on the UKRI My World project. Her recent writing appears in Studies in Documentary Film, World Records, and Convergence.
i-Docs is for people involved with or interested in interactive and immersive documentary, called “i-docs” – a term coined by Sandra Gaudenzi, one of the co-founders of the i-Docs project. The website is a space for news, analysis, and dialogue between practitioners, researchers, students and enthusiasts. The website is run on a community model. If you would like to contribute a post on the aesthetic, ethical, critical, political, or business aspects of i-docs, we would like to hear from you. We welcome practice-based explorations as well as theoretical academic work and dissemination of research – contact i-Docs for more information.
The i-Docs website is one arm of the i-Docs project which is a research strand within the Digital Cultures Research Centre at UWE Bristol. i-Docs began with a Symposium—the first dedicated to interactive documentary—convened by Judith Aston, Jon Dovey, and Sandra Gaudenzi in March 2011. Four further i-Docs Symposia have since been held (with Mandy Rose included as convenor), in 2012, 2014, 2016, and the most recent in March 2018. Alongside the symposium and website we also run a range of events within the i-Docs Presents strand.
FLEFF: A DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENT