Week 6 Response Essay for November 9, 2017: Indexicality, database documentary, interactivity, and would the real Real please step forward
Indexicality, database documentary, interactivity, and would the real Real please step forward
In “Real|Unreal: Crafting Actuality in the Documentary Videogame,” a dissertation by Cynthia Katherine Poremba, the author starts off by questioning what documentary is in order to set up arguments about whether games can be a form of documentary. This is tricky because the definition of documentary is slippery and ever-evolving.
If one accepts the definition of documentary as recording “reality,” though, I think we need to go back one step farther and first reach a definition of “reality.” That seems to me an even more slippery term, and a very culturally and historically relevant one. Is Aboriginal dream time “real?” To whom? Was the power of European Medieval relics “real?” Is Fox “News”…er, no.
So say you come up with a satisfying definition of what “real” means in your personal universe, or one’s shared universe as Australians, models for Hieronymus Bosch paintings, or Trump enthusiasts. Now you take a bunch of photos or video and index them. But indexing them is not what indexicality means, is it? Two years into a graduate film program and I am still not entirely clear what indexicality means in the context of film. I think it has something to do with signs and signifers, and how an image of a cat indexes the idea of cat?
Whatever vague understanding I have of indexicality, it seems that it should be easily relatable to databases, since databases are not only indices in the sense of record keepers, but also in that they are indices of representations, like catalogued cat images are. Data on butterflies signifies specific attributes about butterflies, like their color, their genus and species name, the span of their geographic location.
So it seems that database documentaries of which the author speaks make a lot of conceptual sense, even if one is a little fuzzy about the precise meaning of “indexicality.” The only database filmmaker I know of is Lev Manovich, and I am a fan. However, my peers tell me that Manovich’s style is, “Not cool anymore, it’s so 2000s.” So is database driven film, documentary or otherwise, still worth pursuing in an art context? Or does it now belong in the realm of Digital Humanities, sciences, and social sciences? And if so, wouldn’t this just loop right back to the idea of documentary, ala Nicols? Pages 3-4 of this dissertation quote Nicols as saying, “…documentary is to stimulate and/or satisfy a desire to know about the world,” it’s about epistophelia.
Isn’t that what a database is part of elucidating? A database is a collection of information that helps to build a picture to create an understanding. So is a database in and of itself a form of documentary? This seems an especially easy leap to make if the database is an image archive or a film archive. Grierson, however, says a documentary is “the creative treatment of an actuality.” Does one have to be more creative with a database to make it a documentary?
If one starts applying interactive strategies, image recognition, or AI to a database, does that count as creative? Is this database now a documentary?
What if you take all your database data and throw it into Second Life and give it visual expression? I worked on such a project at UC Berkeley called “Remixing Catal Hoyuk.” It was a virtual reconstruction of a Neolithic archaeology site in Anatolia (Turkey). Our team mate Noah Whitman terraformed a virtual environment with actual topographic data from the site. My role was to go through databases of video clips of archaeological excavations and pull clips that matched locations “in world.” Another team member digitally matched the videos to their correct correlating locations “in world.” For example, the video of excavating a child skeleton at certain coordinates in “real” life had to correspond to the virtual representation of those spatial coordinates.
Because this project was in Second Life, I thought of it more as an “educational game” at the time. Now I am realizing it was also a documentary. It was a documentary game. It was also an interactive game in that people could explore the space through their avatars. Via avatars acting as telepresence representatives of real scholars, we even had an in-world lecture and an in-world film festival. Both were attended by archaeology enthusiasts from around the world.
So back to my musings on what is “reality,” is Second Life “reality?” Is it A reality? It’s a bunch of pixels, a bunch of 1s and 0s (is 0 “real?”), but it is also a “real” community interacting in “real” time. And in our case, the landscape and terrestrial features were based on “real” data. People could buy things for their “in world” avatars in Linden dollars, but they paid “real” money to purchase Linden dollars. Was the knowledge participants gleaned from their educational Second Life experience on our island “real?” Was it useful?
I think perhaps I am more confused now about what documentary and documentary games are than I was before I read the dissertation chapter. But I think that is a GOOD thing. “Real-ly.”