documentary

The criminal punishment system in the United States confines over two million people in overcrowded, unsanitary, and unsafe environments where they cannot practice social distancing or use hand sanitizer and are regularly subjected to medical malpractice and neglect. EXPOSED documents the spread of COVID-19, over time, inside these prisons, jails, and detention centers, from the perspective of prisoners, detainees, and their families. Quotes, audio clips, and statistics collected from a comprehensive array of online publications and broadcasts, are assembled into an interactive timeline that, on each day, offers abundant testimony to the risk and trauma that prisoners experience under coronavirus quarantine. On July 8th alone, there are over 100 statements included in the interface — statements made by prisoners afflicted with the virus or enduring anxiety, distress, and severe hardship. Unfortunately, their words are all we have. Since the first reported coronavirus infection in the US, incarcerated people have been subjected to extreme forms of isolation — visits have been suspended, phone privileges restricted, and the use of solitary confinement expanded exponentially. Prisoners are stranded in quarantine without adequate food or medication — abandoned and unseen. EXPOSED reveals the overwhelming scope and scale of this humanitarian crisis. The monochrome, image-less, headline-styled interface, which allows viewers to step through thousands of prisoners’ statements, is designed to visualize their collective suffering, and signal that the injustices they endure are structural.

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The quotes, audio clips and statistics included in EXPOSED are excerpts from a wide array of online publications and broadcasts. All excerpts are linked in the interface to the original source.

(Author's description on project site)

360 video in the town of Chibok, Nigeria, where 267 schoolgirls were abducted by Boko Haram in 2014. In 2019, 112 are still missing. Part of the 2020 Oculus 'immersive games for change' and screened at the Biennale di Venezia. First person narrative calling for the empathy of the viewer by immersing them in an unfamiliar environment (for most viewers with access to a VR headset). Reminiscent of other 360 videos such as 'Clouds over Sidra' or 'Fatoumata'. No interaction.

For the Engineer, death is an art and a corpse, his friend. This documentary offers a unique and disturbing look at El Salvador’s brutal gang conflict through the eyes of a man whose life revolves around murder.

An interactive series about the exploration, exploitation and transformation of the American West.

Following works by John Wesley Powell and Edward Abbey, filmmaker Roderick Coover creates actual and virtual explorations into the places they wrote about, the landscapes they imagined and contemporary land use.

When John Wesley Powell first navigated the Colorado River in 1869, much of the great American desert was marked on U.S. government maps as an "unknown territory" -- unmapped lands known only to native cultures. His works name, narrative and mythologize the West and his encounters within it. Ironically, later, as U.S. Geographer, Powell came to recognized perils of unsustainable development, but his calls to restrict growth to natural watersheds were rejected.

Writer Edward Abbey moved to the Canyonlands region of the Great American Desert in the late 1950s at a time when air-conditioning, access to abundant water and power from massive dam projects, a cold war boom in uranium mining, and an automobile-driven boom in tourism were transforming the landscape. Abbey worked as a ranger and fire-lookout in Utah and Arizona, and he wrote about what he saw: beauty, destruction, and rising communities of resistance. Abbey's words ignited debates about the role of direct action and free speech in local and national discourse, and they helped to forge new ways of thinking about communities, deserts, and protest.

(source: http://astro.temple.edu/~rcoover/UnknownTerritories/index.html)

The video-essay features interviews with 17 electronic literature scholars and practitioners including Mark Amerika, Simon Biggs, Serge Bouchardon, J. R. Carpenter, John Cayley, Cris Cheek, Maria Engberg, Jerome Fletcher, Maria Mencia, Nick Montfort, Jörg Piringer, Jill Walker Rettberg, Scott Rettberg, Alexandra Saemmer, Roberto Simanowski, Christine Wilks, Jaka Železnikar. The production method for the video-essay is interesting in that the questions being asked of the interviewees are never explicitly pronounced. Rather, the video is divided into sections based on the general themes Futures and Foci, Platforms and Politics, The Human Problem, Senses and Screens, Reading and Writing. The answers given by the various interviewees are wide-ranging and address issues as diverse as the future of electronic literature, the ownership of data, the roles of author and scholar, and the issue of national models of electronic literature. What emerges from the video-essay is a sense of the dynamism and complexities that make up electronic literature as a field. (Source: ELO 2015 Catalog)

In boxing “the distance” refers to the scheduled length of a fight, 9 rounds or 12. For the boxer, as for all of us, the goal is to stay standing, inside the distance. Inside the Distance—a web documentary and an installation with video and a touch-screen interactive interface—documents victim/offender mediation practices in Belgium, where Restorative Justice is institutionalized within the criminal justice system. The project examines how mediation poses a potential cultural alternative to dominant modes and theories of retributive justice and punishment. The interactive interface, which includes interviews with Mediators, Criminologists, Victims and Offenders conducted in Leuven and Brussels, focuses on the subject positions of victim, offender and mediator and the notion that those subject positions are fluid. The content of the project is organized into three parts: • “The Accounts” – presents the narratives of mediation cases as described in interviews with Mediators. • “The Positions” – addresses the instability of subject positions – as articulated by Victims, offenders and mediators • “The Spaces” – takes up the ethical, theoretical, and discursive space of justice and punishment in statements made by mediators, psychologists and criminologists. The mediators interviewed for this project described how mediations almost always begin with a focus on the detail—victims and offenders wanting to confirm each others’ understanding of what happened—who was hurt and how—followed by attempts to find some way to understand why. Inside the Distance stages reenactments of this encounter as described by victims, offenders and mediators. It explores the subject position of each party—and the many ways in which those positions are fluid. Within the project, the space of mediation, the mediation table, is represented as a boundary object—a place of cooperation without consensus. Criminal acts are rents in the fabric of the social order—expressions of something that doesn’t fit. At some level, at some moment, we are all victims—we are all offenders. Inside the Distance is a co-production by LINC-KU Leuven, STUK Arts Centre, Courtisane, University of California Santa Cruz, European Forum for Restorative Justice, Suggonomè – Flemish Mediation Service, and funded by OPAK (Belgium/EU). (source: ELO 2015 catalog)

The Computer Wore Heels is an interactive book app for the iPad that shares the little known story of a group of female mathematicians, some as young as 18, who did secret ballistics research for the US Army during WWII. A handful of these human 'computers' went on to serve as the programmers of ENIAC, the first multi-purpose electronic computer. The app is based on the documentary film Top Secret Rosies: The Female Computers of WWII (LeAnn Erickson 2010), and aims to bring this story to younger students in the hopes of giving today's teens role models that might encourage them to study math, science and computer science. The app's design resembles a girl's diary from the 1940's with the narrative unfolding as an adventure story. Readers may access primary research documents such as original WWII era letters, photographs and mathematical equations actually completed by the story's subjects. There are also numerous audio and video clips that expand on story plot points or events.

(source: Kid e-Lit booklet)

wanted:Guild is a new take on interactive documentary that uses spatial exploration to fuel story. Through audience interaction with audio nodes a narrative is revealed about the intersection of the real and virtual lives of hardcore World of Warcraft gamers. wanted: Guild offers a peek behind the screen for the casual and non-gamer, revealing to them a world of complexity that is often overlooked.

(Source: Elo conference: First encounters 2014)