July2001
Q: Mirella van Markus
Amsterdam
A: Manu Luksch
1) Why would you refer to your online project ‘Virtual Borders’ as a
‘documentary’?
VB is can also been looked at as a ‘sculpture of four-dimensional information architecture’.
2) What if you had made a traditional documentary on this topic instead of an
online documentary
Question doesn’t apply
See 6)
To converge many media within a (documentary) project means to me bridging many users of these different media.
3) What is the aim you would like to reach for with ‘Virtual Borders’?
To inspire and to connect.
4) What kind of audience would you like to reach?
5) By the means of digital possibilities things are easier to manipulate but it becomes more difficult to detect these manipulations.
I don’t agree. It was easier in times before the explosion of media and networks to manipulate the headlines of a handbill or newspaper without anyone finding out about it …
As an individual we have to determine ourselves what is truth or reality for us.
Is one of the purposes of with ‘Virtual Borders’ to give people more clarity about the truth, by offering the audience to interact with the characters in the documentary and with yourself, so that by doing this you can prove a truth and create a common reality?
I am not in the position to ‘hand out’ truth since I don’t ‘own’ it. The interactive structure and the easy possiblilities to get in touch with personalities featured in the documntary are means to get people to stop for a moment and to rethink the questions we are asking.
The Hani-Akha Conference created a similar situation. People coming together felt they shared a common reality through the set of similar questions (represented through the set of keywords in VB) they were asking regarding their future — even if being far from having found an answer in common.
6) What are the consequences for you as documentary maker in your role as narrator when the interactive possibilities of the Internet are involved?
VB has following structure by completion:
It starts as a quicktime movie, introducing the protagonist and the Akha people in a quite impressionist (as opposed to factual) way. He is shown travelling to the conference in China and meeting the other main characters along the way. This 20 minute sequence
obeys the rules of a film narrative: it unavoidably reflects the subjective view of the film director, but at the same time the strenght of dramaturgy is exploited to involve on an intuitive level — a quality a database interface is usually lacking by nature.The moment our protagonist arrives at the conference, he faces as many opinions as there are participants. The story splits up into a four-dimensional information space: the change of format of VB from linear narrative to interactive database structure allows to construct an information architecture that mirrors the existence of many different opinions, and reflects the way topics and realities are intertwining and touching upon each other.
An excessive pool of ‘information’ is accessible online. Material, which doesn’t make it into the film sequence, is published in an online database, but the assumption is that only users who share already an interest for this very specific subject matter, start browsing material using an alphabetical index.
The film narrative therefore is fullfilling the task to introduce a larger audience to the subject matter. The story motivates the user to look at the issue from different points of view. In that sense, the film / narrative is an "emotional, subjective, artistic interface" to a "scientifically organised database" as well as to an open online communication structure for direct involvement.
How does this second part of VB work?
The user can choose a keyword (for example: tradition, script, human rights, Laos etc). The movie continues along this search string by lining up and playing all the clips in the database which belong to this theme.
The second important feature is the ‘information environment’. The movie is embedded in a frame of associated pictures or texts or communication options. At any point, the assembled movie can be stopped and a new theme can be followed — either horizontally by starting another list of movie clips, or vertically by digging deeper into the database and retrieving text-, sound-, or whatever —based information.
7) The director of the traditional documentary makes important choices in relation to the filming and editing process. You could say that the strength of the narration is founded in the way of filming and editing. In case of ‘Virtual
Borders’ we are dealing with a much broader, much more multimedia and
interactive project. Which means and modes of producing do you
use to strengthen your narration?
See 6)
Half I make use of linear narration, half I hand over the tools to the user.
8) In the traditional documentary the function of the documentary maker is very clear. He conducts the angles of the cameras, selects and organizes the images by editing, doing so he creates the product according to his own vision. Is your function as the author of an online documentary still as influential as it would be in the traditional documentary?
As described in 6) I do not renounce all techniques of filmmaking for the sake of multimedia. I believe that each media has its strenghts and advantages compared to another media, and it is my intention to exploit and fuse the best of all media: film, radio and internet. This is the type of "media convergence" I am interested in.
To come back to your question regarding my influence on form — let’s look at it one by one since different parts of the project seem to underlie different degrees of exposure to my influence:
Radio: The VB team made the live radio coverage of TIHAC via the Mountain People Radio Station possible as such. The
RealAudio files, which had been fed to the FM transmitter, provide the ‚red line' and narrative in the film structure. This method allowed the questions to be formulated by Akha themselves for a media they know and trust. We were happy not to have any influence on the questions the radio presenter was asking.Film: My admittedly subjective point of view based on my understanding of the situation of the Akha people
Internet: 1. The database structure is designed along conventional common sense guidelines, but, as we all know, also science is not ‘neutral’.
2. The community web-site is 100% under control by Akha. I simply give remote technical help if required.
3. The information environment of the clips stored in the database follow my personal chains of associations.
9) What are the possibilities for the public to participate in ‘Virtual Borders’?
What kind of function do you lay in the hands of your audience?
10) Your intentions as documentary maker are to express your vision to the
audience but on the Internet people can choose for themselves which parts of your project they want to visit and which they don’t. The consequence of this can be that your vision will not reach the audience the way you imagined. Why then did you make the decision to use the Internet as a medium to express your vision?
See 6)
11) By using the Internet you could attain an audience of millions of people (and even more). But how do you think people know of the existence of ‘Virtual Borders’ and how do people know where to find your online documentary on the web?
Ps: AmbientTV.net will start promotion only after completion of the project
12) What expectations do you have of the online documentary developments in the future?
TV and cinema documentary are said to be in a crisis due to lack of sufficient funding especially for profound pre-production. Online documentary will not be an answer to this problem, since it adds costs of postproduction (including those of constant maintenance of the online project) but does not open up new revenues.
The most interesting documentary genre at the moment seems to me to be the DIY documentary, where people who are engaged in an issue simply ‘do it’. Lack of financial or technical resources is settled by investment of time and know-how. Online documentary will open up new possibilities for those working in this DIY spirit, it will allow to by-pass established distribution channels, and to keep alive an unedited discourse around the theme of the documentary.
This is another important point: the potential of the documentary film to trigger a discourse. At many film festivals filmmakers faced the question… ok now the audience knows about this or that injustice, so what now? What are they supposed to do? Here the internet steps in as a solution also in combination with TV/cinema documentary by simply hosting discussion for a. Again, the maintenance of it can hardly be financed but people with personal interest will run it like they did with homepages…
Secondly, there will be a boom of real-time, unedited web-cast streams. This ‘aesthetic of the constant flow’ will have an impact on viewers habit and on other film genres, not only documentary.
13) What in your opinion will be the position of the online documentary in society?
Let’s put it the other way around. Today information is accessible. The question now is how to generate curiosity, how to motivate people to deal with and to process certain information without manipulating them into it, as boulevard press does.
I see a potential in the use of narrative, multimedia, games structures, or what I call the ambient information interface* as introduction to information / archives / databases for online documentary in order to achieve an position through popularity without compromise on quality.
* Ambient Information Interface:
A way to design an interface in 3 layers: ambient — emotional — factual.
Media will be omnipresent, in some parts of the world they are already so. My premise being that omnipresent media cannot be screaming media since it cancels each other out, I suggest the Ambient Information Interface which presents information in poetic form, as impressions, without specific structure of an beginning or an end, of environmental quality. Ambient information is designed in a way that it sensitises by existing in the background, rather than turning every beep into a spectacle.
The second premise is that all media are going to be interlinked, or converged. The responsible human being can then chose by her/himself if to let the ambient information flow or if to pay more attention and to enter a deeper layer — the narrative interface. From here on it functions as described on the example of VB at 6).
14) What kind of topics is, according to you, particularly suitable for online
documentary?
Any
15) Is there any corporation with the government, certain companies or
institutions to realize the finance of ‘ Virtual Borders’?
[the list of funding bodies which declined support might be more revealing]
supported by
16) Do you like to remark or suggest anything about your online project or about this questionnaire?
* FILM ALWAYS HAS AN END, WHILE REALITY CONTINUES
At the beginning of the film, the audience gets introduced to an "idyllic" looking Akha village, where kids are wearing their traditional costumes and time seems to stand still. Soon conversations amongst the villagers break this "ethnographic clichee" as they speak about being filmed and about the internet-radio plan. Media reality becomes more and more visible when the story evolves: the last frame of the film is the homepage of the Akha community website, which was initiated as part of the film production. Therefore, the "last frame" of the film serves as window into a constantly changing documentation by the Akha.