interactive documentary

Dorset's paranormal history dates back hundreds of years and continues to be a hotspot for unexplained activity.

In your role as a paranormal investigator, complete the interactive documentary by navigating your way through three of Dorset's most haunted locations. Only after discovering the stories behind them will you be able to escape. Good luck.

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)

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)

One highrise. Every view, a different city. This is Out My Window -- one of the world's first interactive 360° documentaries -- about exploring the state of our urban planet told by people who look out on the world from highrise windows. It's a journey around the globe through the most commonly built form of the last century: the concrete-slab residential tower. Meet remarkable highrise residents who harness the human spirit -- and the power of community -- to resurrect meaning amid the ruins of modernism. With more than 90 minutes of material to explore Out My Window features 49 stories from 13 cities, told in 13 languages, accompanied by a leading-edge music playlist. (Source: http://interactive.nfb.ca/#/outmywindow/ "Credits")

(Author's description.) 

“maybe make some change” merges parser-based interactive fiction with textual and multimedia layering to produce a confrontational exploration of a true event. Inspired by the trial of Adam Winfield, a whistleblower soldier accused of murder, the piece freezes a single battlefield moment and replays it from half a dozen violently conflicting perspectives.

“change” questions the trust we place in narrators, and explores the fine edge between moral and immoral acts in a war zone. Juxtaposing its text narration with both footage of first-person shooters set during contemporary wars and online social networking pages of the accused soldiers, the piece also challenges the representation of and engagement with current events in mainstream interactive media.

“change” was part of the jury-award-winning “‘what if im the bad guy’ and other stories” exhibition at the 2011 UC Santa Cruz Digital Arts & New Media MFA show.

On May 25, 1869, you join the crew of one-armed Civil War veteran John Wesley Powell along with eight other fellow veterans, hunters and trappers, in an attempt to be the first to navigate the Colorado River through the vast unmapped maze of canyons in the heart of the Great American Desert. Playing the role of one of the crew members, you are well aware that no European-American has boated the formidable Colorado River -- not, at least, and written about it. Turning inward... this is, perhaps, the final American frontier, a terra incognita. This Flash-based interactive work is constructed using an innovative, sequentially loading horizontally scrolling format in which users travel across fiction and documentary artifact. You will travel across writing modes as well as spaces. Knowledge may lie in traveling among such modes. First comes the adventure, then comes its representation. Much later, comes critical examination, and, perhaps, as a whole, re-invention... The work uses the interactive format to bridge genres and modes of expression.

(Source: Author's description from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Two)