What Are Students Doing When We Aren’t Looking:

A Pilot Exploration of the Ways Students Interpret the Production and Risk Assessment Process when Working Independently of an Educator on Location Film Shoots

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33008/IJCMR.2020.03 | Issue 3 | April 2020

Annie East

Bournemouth University

Abstract

There is a gap in the knowledge in ways that educators understand how students relate to the risk assessment process when working independently on media practice film shoots in Higher Education (HE). This article maps the existing research in this area before going on to consider ways of closing the gap by exploring the findings of a pilot study. The results of the literature analysis reveal significant findings from health and safety literature of the construction industry (Lingard et al., 2015) as well as health and safety literature on HE chemistry lab work (Gibson, Schröder and Wayne, 2014; Hill and Finster, 2013) which both move the current field of film industry health and safety (H&S) literature and HE screen arts H&S literature (Kerrigan et al., 2011; Oughton, 2013) forward to explore a significant gap from which to conduct research. The article then examines the pilot study. Steeped in a hermeneutic phenomenological methodology, it utilises 360-camera capture technology, as a tool, to record the field and then re-immerse students back into the field using virtual reality headsets to re-live, reflect and re-experience their filming processes, alongside the researcher.

Introduction

This discovery article charts the journey to completion of a pilot study utilising a method of VR elicitation with 360-degree video. It aims to enable reflective and reflexive conversations and shared understandings to occur about ways in which student filmmakers perform health and safety (H&S) risk management on their film shoots. Initially, the work looks at the literature of working in a tripartite environment in higher education (HE) (Kerrigan et al., 2011; Oughton, 2013), which is summarised below and then goes onto consider literature around risk as imagined and risk as performed (Borys, 2009; Hale and Borys, 2013) before outlining the literature that encourages student participation around concepts of risk (to health and safety) (Kerrigan et al., 2011; Oughton, 2005; 2013). It will then go onto underpin the pilot study method in hermeneutic phenomenology concepts before describing the pilot study of VR elicitation as well as the discoveries made from it. This article will conclude with a consideration of how to move forward to the main study.

Context

There is a gap in academic literature around students relating to the risk assessment process when working independently on media practice degree film shoots (production courses). How do we observe students, and if we do, how do we ascertain their understanding of risk and do we need to close the feedback loop to inform on pedagogy? (Hale and Borys, 2013; Borys, 2009; Lingard et al., 2015). The pilot project looked at ways to learn and share from the student location film shoot experience (where the educator is not present). How might this experience enable students and educators to become co-constructors of knowledge around their filmmaking processes (in particular, health and safety) through a hermeneutic phenomenological approach (Gadamer, 2004) and within an interpretivist paradigm? The research questions that formed the entrance point for this discovery were:

1. In what ways are students performing the process of production risk management on a film shoot?

2. In what ways can a re-immersive and reflective experience, using 360-degree virtual elicitation, work towards a shared interpretation of the processes on a student run film set where the educator is not physically present?
   

Mapping of the literature

This section explores literature on the regulatory construct imposed on us within HE; it also considers the principles before then exploring the practice. Grounded in the regulatory principles of UK legislation, Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 (Crown), this first section explores both cross-disciplinary literature as well as the limited literature in the field of health and safety and filmmaking in HE.

Legislation

The Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 (Crown) is now over forty years old. The act was a result of the Robens Committee findings and at the time was heralded for its forward-thinking approach which involved goal-setting for commercial firms (Lewis, 1975). It moved away from the dictatorial authoritarian language of The Shaftesbury Factory Act 1833 (HSE, 2018a) describing it as more ‘self-regulatory’ and ‘enabling’ (Lewis, 1975: 442). Looking at the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 (Crown) in a contemporary light, it is clearly dated in the language used: the use of ‘him/his’ becomes an indication of the gendered position of men in working society of the 1970s. Contrary to Lewis’ analysis of the 1974 Act, the authoritarian voice of the legislation still suggests a top-down approach using words such as ‘duty’, ‘imposing’, ‘control of (premises)’, ‘power’, ‘punishments’, ‘authority’, ‘failure’, ‘liable’ (1974: 4-10). This authoritarian voice also brings to the fore a common-sense approach to health and safety which had been missing in previous iterations of the legislation. This was the ‘modern’ voice of reason that Lewis (1975) was advocating, using terms such as ‘reasonably practicable’: ‘It shall be the duty of every employer to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety and welfare at work of all his employees’ (Health and Safety at Work Act, 1974: 2).

The term ‘health and safety’ is now ubiquitous in all commercial and civil environs in the UK and beyond. It enters our everyday lives from a young age with schools required to interpret the legislation and complete risk assessments for activities (HSE, 2018). The Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 (Crown) does not attempt to define these terms. In everyday parlance we tend not to separate the two but it is perhaps useful to start to look at how these have been socially constructed individually. ‘Risk is only what people choose to say it is’ (Johnson and Covello, 1987). Law makers and industry leaders impose on us their principle of what risk is by creating regulation and hold us accountable for any non-compliance in practice in this area. With this constructivist gaze (Berger and Luckmann, 1971), this study will therefore investigate the tensions in how students (who are not employees) choose what ‘risk’ is when in the field of their practice, with the expectations of those forming policy within institutions, largely as a result of government legislation. At the moment, we do not fully understand this tension, although, as tutors, we may have different levels of confidence in how the risk is ‘imagined’ when it is written down as an assessment of risk prior to the activity taking place. Consequently, we, as researchers, need to better understand how risk is ‘performed’ when the activity is actually taking place (Almklov, 2017; Borys, 2009; Hale and Borys, 2013).

Filmmaking and Risk Assessment in HE

Nicholas Oughton has published three articles relating to this area of study, with papers dated 2005, 2011 (co-authored with Kerrigan et al) and 2013. The latter article builds on the arguments of the former two, and whilst written from an Australian perspective, the approach to H&S (occupational health and safety) or H&S (health and safety) is based on similar regulatory paradigms to those in the UK. The following points summarise three themes from the articles that resonate with my research field:

1. They highlight the paradoxical nature of working in a tripartite environment; education that teaches industry practice whilst complying with HE rules (Kerrigan et al., 2011; Oughton, 2013).

2. There is an emphasis on risk processes up to the film shoot taking place – again, risk ‘as imagined’ – but little emphasis on exploring the risk assessment ‘as performed’, despite mentioning it as part of the reason for creating a new occupational health and safety (H&S) paradigm for creative work (Oughton, 2013, 2005; Kerrigan et al., 2011).

3. They introduce the idea of student participation in health and safety policy and risk management and valuing that participation (Kerrigan et al., 2011; Oughton, 2013, 2005).

These studies are valuable to this research project due to the limited availability of other comparable literature. This review will go onto explore these three themes, drawing on further cross-disciplinary literature.

Exploring the paradoxical nature of working in a tripartite environment (Theme 1)

Kerrigan et al (2011) and Oughton (2013) both acknowledge the limited literature around H&S in filmmaking and H&S in HE filmmaking. Oughton (2013) also suggests we are failing students in HE who work under an outdated authoritarian H&S system only to leave and immediately become their own boss entering a freelance screen industry. To further contextualise this debate, we can look cross-discipline to the literature on health and safety in higher education chemistry laboratories and discover the tensions between teaching whilst working within the policy confines of HE. Goodwin, Cobbin and Logan’s paper (1999) on H&S in chemistry labs highlights two areas that are still current. Firstly, concerning H&S, there is a suggestion that ‘the quality and quantity of information taught have the potential to be variable, being dependent on enthusiasm and knowledge of individual staff members’ (Goodwin, Cobbin and Logan, 1999: 1227).

Goodwin, Cobbin and Logan’s research (1999) reveals variations in quality and quantity of H&S delivery in chemistry programmes, and we could correlate that with Hill and Finster (2013) and Gibson et al (2014) who remind us of the tension between academic freedom and health and safety. Describing academic research centres or departments as academic ‘fiefdoms’ (Hill and Finster, 2013: 29), it is suggested that a fatal chemistry lab accident (in the US) was as a result of clusters of academics and students working within their own fiefdom, with their own preferred methods of safe working. Hill and Finster (2013) move the debate along by pointing out the differences in the organisational structure of HE compared with the lines of accountability in a traditional business organisation. In particular, their research discusses the accountability at the bottom being a lot more unclear in HE, where students are not employees. The results of the accident investigation was the call for a more standardised set of processes across HE (Gibson, Schröder and Wayne, 2014), which is counter to the call from Hale and Borys (2013) and Dekker (2014) who are suggesting that standardisation is helpful but does not address the restrictions on freedom and innovation. Oughton (2013) suggests that the generic H&S methods are a failing paradigm in the creative industries and in creative production education. It is in this section that we can see the complex results of working in the tripartite environment that Oughton is referring to in theme 1 – namely, education that teaches industry practice whilst complying with HE rules.

Exploring concepts of work as imagined and work as performed in relation to risk (Theme 2)

Working with H&S risk in production-based courses focuses on instruction and form filling. It does not focus on understanding, interpretation or practice. Borys, Hale and Almklov suggest there is a disconnect between risk as imagined (the writing of a risk assessment, imagining what hazards and risks could be posed from an activity) into risk as performed (carrying out the actions that have been written down to reduce the risk of a hazard occurring) (Hale and Borys, 2013; Borys, 2009; Almklov, 2017). Pink et al. (2010) used visual ethnographic studies to investigate the tacit knowledge of migrant construction workers. Their studies highlighted two areas that link to risk as imagined and risk as performed. Through ethnographic observations, it revealed that the migrant workers, working on a building site (using English as a second language), used nodding in their safety briefing to indicate understanding. Those delivering the briefing took this to mean the safety video had been understood and all workers signed to confirm this. The nodding was in fact a transference of tacit knowledge that ‘nodding’ was required of them at that point so that they could go on to do their day’s work. It was not an indication that the safety briefing was understood as managers thought (Pink et al., 2010). The risk as imagined (by construction safety managers) will, therefore, never be the same as the risk as performed (by migrant workers). The study went on to discover the ways in which migrant workers used ‘existing communication channels through which migrant workers enact safe working’ (Pink et al., 2010: 657). When looking at students working on film shoots, we could view them through the same lens as the migrant workers: working with a new language, the language of television and film (and all the jargon that goes with it) and question whether they are using other communication channels or knowing in practice to keep themselves safe (Pink et al., 2010; Molander, 2015; Schön, 1983). My research is looking at ways of revealing a ‘knowing in practice’ of a student group who are working independently of an educator.

Considering student participation in risk management (Theme 3)

Encouraging students to take a more participatory approach to health and safety informs the thinking around my own research focus. The use of participatory video in research on construction sites saw possibilities for this method to be used to help bridge the gap in health and safety pedagogy (Lingard et al., 2015). ‘Participatory video has potential to engage workers in the design of the workplaces or systems of work that might affect their health of safety’ (Lingard et al., 2015: 743). This is similar to Oughton’s call to involve students and embrace risk as an asset on film shoots. Considering risk as an asset has an effect on crossing learning thresholds (Meyer and Land, 2005) that we can see in practice in the section that outlines the findings of the pilot study. In that section, we see the reflective articulation by the student participant of bringing two aspects of production together – shot listing and cold weather – to make the learning leap, witnessed by the educator. These authors are suggesting that systems of work are produced to complement the specific practices of the workers (Pink et al., 2010; Oughton, 2005). This goes away from regulating worker behaviour towards a more holistic way of looking at the system (Oughton, 2005; Lingard et al., 2015). As Pink et al state: ‘Such recommendations run counter to the health and safety orthodoxy which tends to focus on the standardization of safe working practice rather than on the acknowledgement and interweaving of existing practice’ (Pink et al., 2010: 657). My research will pick up on the calls of Oughton, Pink et al, Hale and Borys, and Almklov for a more holistic and participatory approach, and will do so by looking at ways that students perform the risk assessment and explore the use of visual tools to generate a space for shared meanings and understanding.

This summary reveals ways that HE is teaching industry practice under institutional regulatory systems. This has led us to look at ways in which physical risk is imagined and then performed and the opportunities to embrace risk and enable a more holistic, reflective and participatory approach to doing so. As a result, it is suggested that bureaucratic and standardisation of processes can hinder innovation and yet academic fiefdoms can also lead to serious issues (in this case, threats to health and safety).

With the field mapped, this article will now move onto considering the conceptual framework for the pilot study. In order to answer the research questions, a hermeneutic phenomenological approach was chosen. This approach underpins the uncovering of knowledge by ‘bridging the gap between the familiar world in which we stand and the strange meaning that resists assimilation into the horizons of our world’ (Gadamer and Linge, 2008: xii). One way in which we can look at how this knowledge is being presented to us is by working with the concept of the hermeneutic circle (and in analysis, using the circle to create cycles of interpretations).

The Hermeneutic Circle

The hermeneutic circle, first conceived by Schleiermacher (Schmidt, 2014; Gadamer, 2004), is one where the whole and parts of a text (or in the case of this research, a discussion of an event) are looked at and interpreted in a circle which spins out centrifugally (sometimes referred to as a spiral (Brinkmann and Kvale, 2015)) and this expansion further adds to our understanding of the part or the whole of the event. Gadamer suggests that this ‘whole’ and ‘parts’ can be understood by thinking about how we understand ancient language. ‘We learn that we must “construe” a whole sentence before we attempt to understand the linguistic meaning of the individual parts of the sentence’ (Gadamer, 2004: 291).

Fusion of Horizons

Gadamer (influenced by his teacher Heidegger) took the hermeneutic circle into an ontological perspective by adding the concept of the fusion of horizons, which takes both the parts and whole and from that integrating it with the interpretations of ‘I’ (researcher) and of ‘Thou’ (research participant) (Scheibler, 2000; Gadamer, 2004). This fusion is what Holzer (2011) describes as a second hermeneutic circle. It foregrounds prejudice and bias as part of a fused action of interpretation, moving back and forth between the text and the reader or the researcher and the research participant. This is the idea of ‘openness’ and is a way of ‘safeguarding the rights of the Other’ and that in doing so ‘seeks to demonstrate that the Other might be right and thus places an emphasis on the intersubjective, rather than the subjective dimension’ (Scheibler, 2000: 61). Holzer (2011) suggests three ways of working towards a fused horizon (a way of being open to alternative interpretations) within this second circle:

‘Listening to the otherness of oneself’

‘Listening to others who partake in the study’

‘Listening to the ‘otherness of the text’’

(Holzer ,2011: 120-121)

These cycles of interpretation along with Holzer’s suggestion of approaches to listening are useful tools to operationalize a methodological approach to the material gathered from the pilot study. This article will now look at ways of putting this philosophical viewpoint into practice with a pilot method that draws on the cycles of interpretations. The aim of the study was to test the 360-degree camera technology and associated VR viewing as being a suitable method to answer the research questions for the main study.

Drawing on principles of reflective methodologies to create a research method

The key challenge in terms of this research design is the notion of seeing ways that students work with risk on their film sets when they are independent of the educator. The design, as mapped out below, utilises a two-stage approach to data collection (which from here-on-in we shall refer to as ‘cycles of interpretation’). Stage 1 utilises a visual tool: a 360-degree camera to capture 15-minute film clips of students working on their film shoots. These clips are used in Stage 2 where a student/participant immerses themselves using a virtual reality visor (VR visor) and watches the film clip directing their gaze as they choose. The design of this stage allows the student/participant to watch the 15-minute film clip, without any prior discussion about content or direction, whilst having an informal conversation with the researcher/educator (myself). Once viewed the student/participant and researcher/educator read the production risk assessment together and then the student/participant re-immerses herself once more and watches the same film clip, from her chosen perspective, whilst again having a conversation with the researcher/educator.

This section will briefly consider photo and film elicitation as a reflective method and then draw on some concepts around virtual reality in education to place the method within the research design. It will conclude by foregrounding a method of VR elicitation.

Figure 1: Visual representation of Stage 1 and Stage 2 of the research method.

The piloted method employs a 360-degree camera as a tool (see Figure 1) and VR playback for reflective interactions (or cycles of interpretation) and elicitation. The camera and film clips are a tool that serves interpretation and seeks to limit any criticism that the film clip is the subject to be analysed. The cycles of interpretation will be the conversation about the film clip that is under the agency of where the participant guides us with their virtual reality moving perspective (see Video Clip 1).

Photo and film elicitation

Photo elicitation asks research participants to look at a photo or watch a film. An interview is then conducted by the researcher to elicit meanings from the participants on what they see. Photo elicitation can inform the execution of the informal interview when one considers that according to Clark-Ibanez (2012: 7) ‘the most common experience conducting photo elicitation interviews (PEIs) was that photographs spurred meaning that otherwise might have remained dormant in a face to face interview.’ The idea of dormant meanings I can map to the dormant potential to cross a threshold in understanding (Meyer and Land, 2005). Clark-Ibanez goes on to discuss that concentrating on a photograph (or, in this case, video) lessens the awkwardness of the situation for a participant. Cousin (2009: 214) points out how photographs and other visual forms can transcend language because they often ‘elicit more expressive and emotional responses than would, for example, language-based conventional interviews.’ An example of work that resonates with this proposed method is the film-elicitation of a small group of people who were filmed watching themselves in a documentary (see ‘Jero On Jero: A Balinese Trance Séance Observed’ (Connor, Asch and Asch, 1980)). Key findings from that analysis were that one participant, aware of the camera filming her, watching the film back, used the opportunity to ‘correct any (mistaken) impression that viewers may take away from the earlier film’ (Banks and Zeitlyn, 2015: 95). This has similarities for my research and whilst described as potentially a restriction to the work, this kind of commentary from the participant is to be welcomed in a hermeneutic phenomenological approach. This approach will foreground and make valid any participant or researcher bias and reflexivity and open up grounds for shared understandings and meanings.

VR in education

This article defines VR as an immersive experience of a 360-degree live action film. ‘The question isn’t whether the created world is as real as the physical world, but whether the created world is real enough for you to suspend your disbelief for a period of time’ (Pimentel and Teixeira, 1993: 15). This immersive experience, described by Pimental and Teixeira in the first wave of VR from the 1990s (Jones, 2017) can be brought up to date with VR in education which further enables this suspension and opens up the possibilities for deep reflection.

The research tools used in the pilot method will enable a student to re-look at the film shoot, and the student group performing it, from the perspective of the risk assessment. The work of Falconer (2013b) investigates student learning within an immersive environment via ‘Second Life’. In this study, students took on an avatar and entered the virtual world where hazard accidents could be studied. (‘An avatar is any digital representation (graphical or textual), beyond a simple label or name, that has agency (an ability to perform actions) and is controlled by a human agent in real time’ (Bell, 2008: 3)). The case study found that virtual worlds enabled educators to ‘see students learning’ (Falconer, 2013a: 259) and the crossing of thresholds. This is further bolstered by the outcomes of a study by Falconer and Savin-Baden (Savin-Baden and Falconer, 2016) that suggested that we look towards recognising ‘learning leaps’ across the moving threshold of liminality that virtual worlds afford and that this will allow a ‘pedagogical shift to occur’. Whilst this study is not a simulation and students do not take on an avatar, the pilot study, testing the tools and the method, suggests that there is the potential to see learning and the crossing of thresholds between both educator and participant. In the medical profession learning leaps are currently being afforded through verbal communication and non-verbal gesture through the work of Nick Peres whose PatientVR enables a ‘series of immersive live action 360-degree film experiences from the patient perspective’ (2015: 1).

Rheingold takes on Randall Walser’s concept of calling creators of virtual worlds ‘spacemakers’ (Rheingold, 1992: 192) and that we ‘can never hope to communicate a particular reality, but only set up opportunities for certain kinds of realities to emerge’ (Rheingold, 1992: 286). This pilot project sought to discover the possibilities of using immersive tools not to re-create reality but to elicit a reflective and reflexive re-experiencing of an event in a shareable form, with the viewpoints under the agency of the participant.

VR elicitation

The above consideration of visual methods and VR in education leads to the method for the study which, based on the consideration of the reflective and reflexive mode of the aforementioned methods, I am calling ‘VR elicitation’. This type of VR elicitation is different to that as outlined by Orefice et al. who use the term in their research on emotion elicitation (2017). My method proposes a two-stage approach that sees a 360-degree camera placed onto a film shoot and then re-immerses a student participant back into the shoot, at a later date, whilst having a conversation with the researcher/educator. In order to get a glimpse of what cannot be seen by the educator, this work is attempting to reach into and through the student experience by witnessing the student participant revisiting and re-experiencing the film shoot from a new immersed, embodied perspective. This work is therefore not looking at the film clip captured but looking through the lens of the student watching the film clip. The 360-degree capability adds an immersive experience for the student and allows the participant to have agency over their viewing perspective (Bell, 2008). We have already looked at some of the limitations of visual methods, as outlined above. This VR elicitation method gives us one more: the concept of being watched through a panopticon, as originally suggested by social theorist Jeremy Bentham in 1787 (Bentham, 2008). In the case of this research, the panopticon is the 360-degree camera and 360-degree film clips. This means that the researcher always has their eye on the participant. Whilst this is true, the 360-degree viewing experience also allows the person viewing the VR film clip (the research participant) to place themselves metaphorically into the centre parapet of Bentham’s panopticon (2008). This gives them agency as well as a new set of perspectives to share with the researcher from which to create new knowledge and to potentially cross thresholds together. We should be mindful, however, of concealed institutional power (Foucault, 1991). Foucault reminds us that anyone can take the metaphorical power position in Bentham’s inspection lodge: ‘Any individual, taken almost at random can operate the machine: in the absence of the director, his family, his friends, his visitors, even his servants’ (Foucault, 1991: 202).

The warning to heed with the method of VR elicitation is about concealment of power. The choice of a 360-degree camera is not about removing the power of the researcher, or indeed the power of the institution, but is more concerned with moving the research participant into the centre of this potentially concealed power dynamic. The student participant will have their eyes on themselves and also on their peers (Foucault, 1991; Sheridan, 1980). Moving from the pilot into the main study, the cycles of interpretation will need to be mindful of the power shifts that are likely to ebb and flow.

This section has explored the principles being drawn on to underpin the method for the research design. It has considered the reflective and reflexive practices that enable the potential for threshold concepts to be seen and warns us of the power tensions evident within educational practice-led research (Land, Meyer and Smith, 2008; Foucault, 1991). The method, drawn from a hermeneutic phenomenological methodology, moves through to the analysis by cycles of interpretations. This is explained in the pilot study summary to follow.

The pilot study described

The pilot study took place within a HE institution in the UK that has media production undergraduate courses. Research participants were second-year students on a three-year course. The pilot aimed to discover how the technical setup and workflow aided the gathering of the cycles of interpretation and whether it is an appropriate tool and method to take into the main study. The initiation of the pilot study began by breaking down requirements of the fieldwork into two stages:

Stage 1: 360-degree film clip capture of a student film shoot;

Stage 2: virtual re-immersion, of one student, back into the film shoot whilst having an informal conversation about the experience of re-immersion.

Stage 1: 360-degree capture of student film shoot

A 360-degree camera was placed into a second-year location film shoot on an undergraduate media production degree programme. It captured film clips of two x 15-minute sessions. The first recording captured the setup of the shoot and the second captured the shoot halfway through. A first-year media production student research assistant was brought in to place, operate and oversee the camera in lieu of the researcher being physically present at the shoot. Whilst this did not remove the presence of the researcher, it did mean that the student/participants were more comfortable with a peer than with a member of staff observing them. Discussions took place between researcher and assistant prior to the shoot day, about where the research assistant might place the camera.

Figure 2: The student film shoot.

Stage 2: VR immersion back into the film shoot

Two days after the 360-degree film clip capture, Student 1, the research participant, met with the researcher in a university screening room to be re-immersed into the field. This re-immersion was via the film clip on a smartphone slotted into a VR headset (see Figure 3). The student/participant watched two different sets of film clips through the VR headset each time watching the first clip (approximately 15 minutes in duration) without any prior discussion about content or steering. During this viewing, an informal conversation occurred (see Video Clip 1). We then stopped, removed the visor, and together read the paper risk assessment that was produced for their film shoot. Having read that, the student participant then re-watched the same 15-minute clip, whilst having a semi-structured conversation with the researcher/educator.

Figure 3: Student participant wearing VR visor

During the interaction, which was approximately 1 hour 10 minutes, the informal conversation was recorded, whilst the participant was immersed in the VR headset, watching the film clip. Alongside the student/participant, the researcher viewed a partially mirrored copy of what the student/participant was viewing (see Figure 4). The researcher view, which was mirrored onto a screen, displayed like a pair of glasses lenses with identical images in each lens.

Figure 4: Image showing Student 1 with headset and mirrored view on laptop and cinema screen.

Pilot Study Findings

Challenges with technical set ups

The pilot study has highlighted various challenges in working with technology within HE. WIFI connectivity from the phone (in the VR visor) to the screen on the laptop (mirroring) was tested away from the institution. Once within the institution the WIFI signal was blocked, meaning hard wiring into the laptop was required, reducing the freedom of movement when wearing the VR visor. Moving forward further IT support will be put in place to enable the WIFI to work as intended.

Threshold crossing

The pilot saw the potential to see the participant crossing threshold concepts whilst engaging with the cycles of interpretations during analysis (Land, Meyer and Smith, 2008; Gadamer, 2004). In this particular case, the core concept of why we carry out pre-planning in film work and the core concept of why we carry out risk assessment came together into risk as performed (Borys, 2009) and we witness the participant crossing a threshold. This can be seen in the following three video clips:

(1st viewing prior to looking at risk assessment with researcher/educator).

Student participant first immersion back into the film shoot. The participant is looking around and wondering what they are all waiting for.

(2nd viewing, having looked at the risk assessment with researcher/educator)

Student participant spends some time watching what they are doing. Then makes the link between not following the shot list and the actor/participant getting cold outside.

(Continuation of 2nd viewing, having looked at the risk assessment with researcher/educator)

Researcher/educator clarifies what the student/participant has just said (about clip 2) as part of the cycles of interpretation and the creation of shared meanings (Gadamer 2004)

Power dynamics

The process of analysis and subsequent findings revealed a power dynamic emerging whereby a student sought to limit their exposure to being wrong. Sheridan’s interpretation of Foucault suggests that interpretation of meaning links to power and power always come from the institution. It is never context-free (Sheridan, 1980). Ball also references Foucault in discourse around education and policy: ‘In any society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and redistributed according to a number of procedures whose role is to avert its powers and its dangers, to master the unpredictable event’ (Foucault, in Ball, 2006: 26). Whilst the participant is having a conversation with me (the researcher/educator) I am aware that, at times, the participant is displaying their knowledge on risk management to me. In this respect, I am the representative of the institution, i.e. the tripartite environment where the student is studying within higher education under The Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 (Kerrigan et al., 2011). The institution of the British legal system metaphorically sits with us in the room. This can be seen when the student/participant highlights a process of running backwards with the camera (the safety person is called the ‘spotter’). She linked it to the risk assessment saying ‘Well obviously, we got someone to spot me as I was doing it and then I think Crew member 2 tried as well so that we both had tried doing it, taking the shot and at least we had someone spotting us.’ The student/participant is showing me, the tutor, her knowledge and application of professional processes and is keen to be seen in this light.

Knowing in practice

The student/participant had been taught the concept of ‘spotting’ to keep a fellow filmmaker safe when moving backwards with the camera and this was evident in the written risk assessment. She pointed out an example of knowing in practice (Pink et al., 2010; Molander, 2015), describing her action as she directs the viewpoint to herself back on the screen: ‘And then I was holding her shirt.’ In addition, her peer had told her to pick up her feet ‘so I don’t fall over.’ This was how the student/participant had made meaning of risk and embodied risk on the shoot. This was a good example of student interpretation of the ‘risk as imagined’ into ‘risk as performed’ (Borys, 2009; Hale and Borys, 2013). As researcher, I did exercise my power knowledge by pointing out that this was well done, but observed that the spotter (Student 1) was not looking where she was going thereby increasing the risk of two people falling, not one. This power knowledge exchange is not necessarily a negative one and can be viewed as one that has emerged out of shared readings. This is an example of a fusion of horizons whereby the researcher and participant are open to each other’s interpretation of an event as they attempt to reach a shared understanding (Gadamer, 2004).

From the analysis of the cycles of interpretations, three themes have thus emerged:

1. There is potential for researcher and participant to experience a crossing of a threshold (Meyer and Land, 2005; Savin-Baden and Falconer, 2016) in shared understanding.

2. We need to be aware of the power dynamics (Sheridan, 1980; Bentham, 2008).

3. It is possible to see knowing in practice (Pink et al., 2010; Molander, 2015).

The pilot study has been an essential step towards operationalising the research design. It has tested the technological aspects as well as trialling a method of semi-structured conversation with a research participant about their practice. The analysis has utilised hermeneutic phenomenological principles reflectively and reflexively through cyclical interpretations involving both the research participants and the researcher.

Conclusion

Risk as imagined and risk as performed has been the starting point for this research, thinking about who might be harmed and how through our actions and questioning the social construction of risk within this space. The research method of VR elicitation under a hermeneutic phenomenological conceptual framework has allowed for a rich and deep discussion about filmmaking processes undertaken when an educator is not present. This has been under the agency of the student participant who has taken us on an immersive journey back into their film shoot. The method allowed for new shared understandings of ways through which students are keeping themselves safe. Introducing a VR elicitation enabled an embodied experience that is reflective and reflexive, not just for the participant but also the researcher/tutor allowing a deeper insight into ways that risk is being embodied and performed on student film shoots. Moving forwards to the main study, there will be a consideration of ways to upscale this to include other members of the film crew to be immersed reflectively back into their student film shoot. Further research is required around how we conceive presence, in the practice of VR elicitation experience, and ensure the work remains grounded here. In doing so, this will be a research project that will allow for a deep description of the experience.

Acknowledgements

With thanks to supervisors Mark Readman and Fiona Cownie for their support. Thank you to Mark who first uttered the phrase ‘VR elicitation’ as a way of describing the methodology I was developing. For information about the full VR elicitation study please contact Annie East: aeast@bournemouth.ac.uk.

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Art Based Research as Virtual Cultural Heritage

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33008/IJCMR.2020.04 | Issue 3 | April 2020

Annie Wan

Abstract

Virtually (Y)ours – Expanded Dialogues with an Archive (2017-18) is a conversational piece presented by three artists. It was developed by Annie Wan in collaboration with Amy Cheung Wan-man and Ng Tsz-kwan. The aim is for audiences to actively participate in a ‘dramatic’ digital encounter; artworks from a museum archive are ‘remediated’ and ‘reimagined’ within a web graphics library (WebGL) platform. The objective is to explore the interdisciplinary solutions best suited to inventing a ‘mnemonic cultural tool’ through remediation, in turn facilitating a form of collective identity through the shared memories of individuals as well as those of the institution (in this case, the Hong Kong Museum of Art).

Research Statement

The artist’s or researcher’s role in an Art Based Research (ABR) project can be characterised by its formative approach to the visual. The role of ABR, as a learning task, is to help us learn how to see, and thus learn how to feel (Rolling, 2013). However, ABR research does more than help us see external reality that has yet to be uncovered. It teaches us how to read images and actively form new visual realities by creating images. Eventually, it can generate renewed self-perception based on processes of remediation (Bolter and Grusin, 2000), which speak of the idea that all ‘new’ media always mutate from older media, and pay homage to older media, such as paintings, photography, video, etc.

Grounded in this ABR approach, Virtually (Y)ours – Expanded Dialogues with an Archive (2017-18) is a project commissioned by the Hong Kong Museum of Art. It remediates and reinterprets stories from the curators’ memories and museum archives as intangible cultural heritage. Audiences are invited to explore the museum’s collections and curators’ memories, being empowered to transcend boundaries across time and space. This article describes this project through the critical lens of an Art Based Research (ABR) approach, in which artists/researchers assume the role of the critic, with the purpose of educating and sharpening individuals’ perceptions. I will first describe my co-created artwork and the relationship between the artwork and the methodology. I analyse how this artwork relates to intangible culture heritage, and in particular the influence of digital media on the evolution of preservation, emulation and dissemination practices within the context of cultural heritage.

Methodology

The artwork adopts a modular structure. The connections among the modules are imaginary, and the dynamism transcends what the audience is told. It is less about telling the audience directly about the story in each module and more about empowering the audience to discover by themselves. There are 14 interactive scenes (modules), which the artists created after studying the Hong Kong Museum of Art’s collections and probing the curators’ memories by interviewing and reading about them.

Each individual interactive computer animated scene has been inspired by different collections and curators’ memories, such as past collectors’ beliefs, historical events, important collections, and so on. The structure is like stars in a constellation. The audience imagines lines among the stars, forming shapes, and a relationship becomes defined in their minds. The modules are all created in form of 2D and 3D animations as animations are perceived as moving images based on visual perceptions and the time-lapse feature. The phenomenon is similar to how we memorize events in our everyday lives, and the way we link bits and pieces of information in our minds. It is akin to the ways in which curators selectively memorize stories about the museum and its archives. For example, in one of the modules, Coding Temple [1], tribute is paid to all art professionals, including the artist Xu Bing and art expert Geoffrey Bonsall. Xu and Bonsall are very different in their practices; however, both are interested in symbols (Chinese characters) and codes. In the animated scene, viewers first see a landscape built with Quick Response Code (QR code) and when they enter the temple in the front, they see ‘deconstructed’ Xu’s characters and a floating TV set with eyes on it.

The scene was designed as if the audience follows in Bonsall’s footsteps and ‘decode’ Xu’s characters. Geoffrey Weatherill Bonsall, the Museum of Art’s adviser, is an expert in Chinese export paintings and the 19th century expatriate artist George Chinnery. Bonsall decrypted the Gurney system of shorthand that Chinnery inscribed on his work and has served as the Museum’s adviser since 1976. He also contributed to the Museum’s research and publications. While Xu Bing’s most reputable works have involved new ways of deconstructing and reconstructing Chinese characters, likewise, Bonsall adopted new ways of decoding Chinnery’s inscriptions on The Roof of Chung Qua’s Hong, Guangzhou.

This scene is an interesting exemplar of the ABR methodology, given that it is analogous to how many media artists work nowadays. We study, experiment, fail, try again, and turn codes into visuals and interactivity, a form of decryption and encryption. The featured artist and art historian in the scene share similar ideas in terms of creating and analysing artworks. Xu Bing’s famous work, A Book from the Sky (Tianshu), composes of 4000 ‘traditional Chinese characters’, all being so well-designed that they appeared to be real characters (Tsao and Ames, 2011). Bing carved imaginary Chinese characters, turned them into movable wooden blocks and produced the largest installation in the Museum’s collection.

Each module within my project adopts the same structure, i.e. the interactive animation scene is first presented to the audience, with a short artist statement and remediated description of the artworks following. However, unlike the scene Coding Temple, 2D animation was created for Cruel World because Feng Zikai’s paintings were remediated and his 2D cartoon characters share in the universal appeal of purity and innocence. This kind of pureness and innocence has arguably been remediated if they were myths (Geremie, 2002). This ‘myth’ reminds us of Egyptian art and mythology, one of the most classical cultures in world history. The interactive scene bridges these two art styles by redrawing Feng Zikai’s work in the style of ancient Egyptian wall paintings, thus illustrating this idea of the loss of innocence.

Cruel World was designed in form of handscroll [2]. Handscroll painting is one of most classical styles in Asian paintings; it is usually presented in horizontal form and viewed from the right. Feng’s paintings in the Museum’s collections are remediated in the scene and one of them was originally presented in form of a 4-panel manga. Feng, as one of the most important artists in contemporary Chinese art history, ‘invented’ his own signature style which in fact borrows from Japanese manga. Cruel World bears a resemblance to Feng’s remediation of Japanese manga and advances handscroll paintings through 2D animation. Despite the simple interaction in the scene (audience navigate themselves either to the left or the right and view redrawn animated Feng’s paintings), the background music, which is a piece of well-known funeral music, underpins the aforementioned theme of innocence lost.

Regardless of the methods used, this project is all about attempting to communicate with the audience through adopting technologies that afford a remediation of older media forms. Remediation implies that older media is preserved as new media manipulates certain elements in the older media. Although this creative project is not about digital preservation nor conservation, it borrows ideas from this field, which certainly formed the basis of it.

The Artwork and Intangible Cultural Heritage

I will now move on to consider the methodological questions at stake in Art Based Research. I do this through discussion of the Virtually (Y)ours – Expanded Dialogues with an Archive (2017-18) project, further unpacking ideas of remediation, media technologies, museum collections, and curators’ memories (as intangible cultural heritage).

In some fields, digital media has become intertwined with questions concerning new ways through which cultural heritage can be preserved, emulated and disseminated. Digital culture has had a significant impact on objects and processes of social memory, changing the way that we might experience the world and supporting recognised aspects of social memory. Libraries, archives and museums are no longer unique symbols of authority or facilitators of culture. Further, digital culture can be understood as a reaction against traditional heritage practice, with its sole emphasis on collections and the conservation and static displays of cultural artifacts from a single and unquestioned cultural perspective (Yehuda, 2008).

Some argue that we are now in a ‘post-digital era’ (Hall, 2018), which describes the way that we are now coming to terms with the effects of change associated with the rise of personal computers and network technologies that were so pronounced in the 1990s. Within the arts and humanities community, digital methods were initially developed and deployed by a relatively small number of individuals. However, they are now becoming standard practice and can thus no longer be treated as separate or specialised. Moreover, research questions, primary materials and interfaces are becoming increasingly intertwined, which among other things, means a shift in emphasis from presentation to interpretative tools.

Generally speaking, art preservation and conservation usually adopt technologies to maintain the original ‘look and feel’ of a particular work of art, as was seen in the case study of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City [3]. However, the aim of my project is to go beyond the preservation of archives. In the scene Eternal Narcissism, a Web Augmented Reality (WebAR) technology tool is presented for users to deliberate innate narcissistic desire, which was originated in the genre of self-portraits but has since evolved into contemporary selfie culture. The WebAR technology adopted in this scene overlays two oil portraits from the Museum’s collection, and in real time captures the facial images of the audience from the cameras in their computers.

This practice is especially relevant to interpreting the Museum’s archives as intangible heritage. The two portraits are comparably inexpensive; however, they marked a long-lasting impact on local art and cultural history. Chinese export paintings were popular in south China in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (late Qing period); Chinese export painters usually adopted western painting techniques or even imitated western oil paintings, often attempting to capture ‘every aspect of Chinese life from Birth to Death in order to satisfy the Western curiosity of the country’ (Wen, 2015). One of the portraits in the Eternal Narcissism scene is a self-portrait of a famous export painter Lamqua, while the other is an unknown Chinese lady. They are inexpensive in terms of monetary value, as mentioned, but the heritage ‘preserved’ is intangible because of its cultural value and the absurd, yet captivating, hybrid paintings style. Undoubtedly, there is discrepancy between preservation and remediation in this instance, with the remediation of the portraits offering audiences a playful experience, while equally capturing something of the history of Chinese export paintings of that era.

In this project, archives and curators’ memories are essentially treated as data. Given that they are being remediated, it has become increasingly important to shape how we curate, analyse and translate both ‘big’ (i.e. curators’ memories) and ‘small’ data (i.e. the Museum’s collections and archives). Data manifestation and information visualization have broadened the potential ways through which digital data can be made visible, and as a result, such data can be communicated to a broader audience in the post-digital era. As with the Chinese export paintings example described previously, two historical paintings in the Museum’s collections have been remediated in the scene Hackers and Poison. The paintings in this scene illustrate what is quite possibly the only ‘terrorists attack’ case in Hong Kong’s history, which took place in 1857 (Lowe and McLaughlin, 2015). During the early colonial period of Hong Kong under the British’s rule, a bread poisoning case stunned both Chinese and the colonial officials; the estimated number of victims was between 300 and 400. The prime suspect was Cheong, the owner of the reputable Esing bakery (one of the paintings illustrates the shop of the bakery). He was first arrested and interrogated at the Central Police Station, a scene also represented in another historical painting. Cheong and other suspects were accused of administering poison with intent to kill and murder James Caroll Dempster, a surgeon, and they were mysteriously released but later banished from Hong Kong. To do this day, many still suggest that the case might be related to political unrests or conflicts between the Chinese and the colonial government. In response, in the aforementioned Hackers and Poison scene, a code-generated animation of lines and dots is mapped to an array of cubes. The mapped cubes ‘behave’ as if the computer screens are crushing, like a computer suffering from a virus or malware attack. Remediation in this instance is about re-conceptualising two paintings concerning terrorism in Hong Kong – themselves significant artefacts of cultural heritage relating to Hong Kong history – in the form of a visual, mediatized analogy: one of hackers and their manipulation of computer virus to ‘contaminate’ widespread networks.

This, it seems, exemplifies the post-digital age of cultural heritage. It is a shift that I have only just begun to consider in this statement, but one that can be seen through the remediation of Xu Bing’s work in Coding Temple, of Chinese export paintings in Eternal Narcissism, of Feng’s work in Cruel World, and indeed of the twisted representations of historical drawings in Hackers and Poison. Going forward, design methods, remediation processes and further transdisciplinary thinking will all continue to form the bridge between the physical and the digital, between old media and new media, and between the people and the digital. The official institutions specializing in the preservation of cultural heritage (namely, museums, archives and libraries) are well aware of the realities and indeed the challenges of bringing heritage to life and making it meaningful to through ubiquitous forms of new media.

Conclusion

It is clear that preservation today must meet the needs of a new digital society. It is now clear that at the intersection of Art Based Research, museum archives and cultural heritage – while dealing with computer technologies – it is time to reconsider new methods of inquiry and new forms of knowledge production. By creating a virtual ‘dramatic encounter’ through the use of Art Based Research in the Hong Kong Museum of Art, artists are redefining the boundary lines of artistic creation, first through reference to digital preservation, before then borrowing multifarious ideas producible by older media that create a multifaceted model of remediation. Through collaboration with the Museum, such transdisciplinary and computationally engaged research has given new life to their archives and cultural heritage.

Visit the Hong Kong Museum of Art website to learn more about Virtually (Y)ours – Expanded Dialogues with an Archive (2017-18).

Acknowledgement

This project was commissioned by Hong Kong Museum of Art.

References

• Bolter, J D and Grusin, R. (2000) Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

• Burdick, A. (2012) Digital Humanities. Cambridge: MIT Press.

• Hall, G. (2018) ‘Centre for Postdigital Cultures’ Coventry University, https://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/areas-of-research/postdigital-cultures/

• Geremie, B. (2002) An artistic exile: a life of Feng Zikai (1898-1975). Berkeley: University of California Press.

• Lowe, K and McLaughlin, E. (2015) “‘Caution! The Bread is Poisoned’: The Hong

• Kong Mass Poisoning of January 1857.” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 43 (2): 189–209.

• Rolling, J H. (2013) Arts-based research primer. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.

• Tsao, H and Ames, R. (2011). Xu Bing and Contemporary Chinese Art: Cultural and Philosophical Reflections. Albany: State University of New York Press.

• Wen, J. (2015). Issues of contemporary art and aesthetics in Chinese context. Berlin: Springer.

• Yehuda, K. (2008). Heritage: New Media and Cultural Heritage. Abingdon: Routledge.

Notes

[1] https://hk.art.museum/55thwebgl/code/

[2] https://news.artnet.com/art-world/an-introduction-to-the-chinese-handscroll-30455

[3] https://www.guggenheim.org/blogs/checklist/how-the-guggenheim-and-nyu-are-c onserving-computerbased-art-part-1

Non-Linear Documentary and Museum Exhibition Design: Interdisciplinary Inspirations

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33008/IJCMR.2020.05 | Issue 3 | April 2020

Helen Gaynor

University of Melbourne

Abstract

An Internet connected, data and software driven, computerized environment dominates contemporary media production, distribution, exhibition and consumption (Murray, 2011). Given the non-linear and interactive affordances of this ‘new media’, what disciplines can linear filmmakers look to, to work in this space? This article interrogates the intersection of the representation of the real between documentary and museum exhibition. Museums share documentary’s claim to the representation of the real (Pearce, 1999; Kidd, 2014). But unlike linear documentary, museum representation takes place in a non-linear setting. I explore how museums represent the real in this spatial and nonlinear setting. I will also interrogate how contemporary museum exhibition design includes the affordances of the digital medium into the representation of the real, and what of this theory and practice may assist in the design of non-linear and interactive documentary.

Introduction

This article interrogates the intersection of documentary film and museum exhibition in the presentation and representation of the real in the non-linear digital media setting of the twenty-first century. Some practitioners and theorists working in the linear documentary genre have applied the affordances of what Janet Murray calls the digital medium, to their work (2011). This emerging form has been described by some as interactive documentary (Gaudenzi, 2013). I argue that museum design is a useful reference for documentary filmmakers in addressing the issues of the representation of the real in a non-linear setting. Historically, museums have presented and represented the real through curated collections. In the spatial setting of the traditional museum, curators may indicate a narrative but visitors may choose their own way through it in terms of both order and time. This museum exhibition practice and theory may be utilised by linear documentary practitioners moving into the representation of the real in the non-linear and interactive documentary. Contemporary museum exhibition design also includes the affordances of the digital medium in representations of the real (Kidd, 2014). In this article, this adaptation of the digital medium by both disciplines is interrogated through key theories and understandings of the software driven, computerized environment dominating contemporary media production, distribution, exhibition and consumption (Murray, 2011).

Presenting and representing the real: Intersections between museology and linear documentary

Documentary as a film genre has existed for over one hundred years. British filmmaker John Grierson is credited with being the first person to apply the word documentary to film production, when commenting on the Robert Flaherty documentary Moana in 1932. As founder of the British documentary movement, where much early work in documentary practice and theory was produced, he proposed that the intention of the documentary was to educate the public and the powers that be, the screen being a pulpit. This was achieved by the filmmaker revealing the hidden story of everyday life via the artistry of the film. In a 1932 interview with Sight and Sound he proposed that documentary:

‘… is capable of direct description, simple analysis and commands in conclusion, and may, by its tempo’d and imagistic powers, be made easily persuasive. It lends itself to rhetoric, for no form description can add nobility to a simple observation as readily as a camera set low, or a sequence cut to a time-beat’ (ibid.).

The rhetorical intention has commonality with the aims of museum design of the early twentieth century. Susan Pearce (1999) establishes the construct around museums in the twentieth century, and identifies its concern with the development of grand narratives imbued with universal significance. Sonia Livingstone (2013) points to the founding claim of the museum; the presentation of the real. The twentieth century museum was devised around the idea that reality could be captured and understood by collections of objects, things and material goods. These objects were evidence for the assertions made about the ‘real world’ (Pearce, 1999). The difference in actualization of truth claims between museum and documentary originally lay in the museums’ ability to present material objects, whereas documentary could only represent them. Thus, documentary’s claim, not to present the real, but rather to represent it (Winston, 1995). However, Roger Silverstone points out that museum design increasingly included the art of representation:

‘…simulations and the unreal are of course a fact of museum visitation also. Here, the Museum emerges as already an agent not of innocent and un-mediated display, but as an agent of an artful and sophisticated creative representation, in which the claims to be presenting the real are simply that; claims’ (1988: 233-4).

Whatever one makes of the claim on the real, museum exhibitions and documentary films, for a large part of the twentieth century, have shared a methodology and intent. They have collected artefacts, actual or filmic, that bear an indexical relationship to the real world, and arranged these in a way to form a narrative of the real world. To create their narrative, museums collected physical artefacts, and curators organised them, deciding what went next to what and how this related to that. The resulting exhibition delivered knowledge and understanding of ‘the real’ in a spatial material way. The methodology of the documentary filmmaker was similar. Audio visual content was collected around a narrative proposition, the content ordered it in such a way as to propose a ‘creative treatment of actuality’ (Grierson, 1966), utilising audio-visual technology. Both disciplines claimed to represent the real and aimed to reveal a deeper understanding of this real through the rhetorical organisation of their artefacts from the real world.

Filmmaker and theorist Brian Winston has pointed out the inherent contradiction in the notion of actuality and its creative treatment, questioning how ‘actuality’ can be left over after the application of the ‘creative treatment’ (Winston, 1995: 11). Winston proposes that in the late twentieth century, the idea of objectivity in documentary gave way to the notion and acceptance of subjective expression. Pearce identifies the effect of this type of post-modern critique of the notion of an objective, certain truth in the museum exhibition space:

‘Signifiers, objects and exhibitions, among others, can trigger off a large range of meanings in the minds and feelings of those who experience them, and since the inherited signification of the past – roughly, the consensus of meaning resulting from history – has been demoted, there is no way of judging validity between these variously experienced meanings’ (1999: 14).

The development of digital technologies in the late twentieth century added an additional pressure to the notion of the real. Winston, writing in 1995, addresses the impact of the emerging digital medium, on the already shaky claim of documentary to ‘represent the real’ (ibid.). With data and software as the new capture and replication technologies, he argues that this ‘digitilisation’ cannot guarantee the real in the same way as the plastic physicality of film and the impact of this diffusion of clams of the real will be profound (Winston, 1995: 259). Jenny Kidd also observes that the digital medium is changing expectations of representations of the real world in the museum setting:

‘Museums are also grappling with the integration of new media with a legacy position.…the ways we create, distribute, access and assess information are changing, with new ways of managing knowledge creation and information sharing. … This is especially challenging for museums as institutions grounded in discourses of authority and professionalism’ (2014: 5).

Kidd proposes that digital projects have a growing currency in museum exhibition and are now central to ‘proof’ of public worth, vital to an exhibition in a world of constrained spending after the global economic downturn in 2008. In a 2017 publication, Winston, Vanstone and Chi propose that whatever the impact of digitilisation on documentary, it is ‘evolutionary, no revolutionary’ (Winston et al, 2017: 81). The filmed, filmer and spectator are all still present as they have been since the inception of the genre. The same could be said for the museum exhibition. The way in which the spectator interacts with the artefact may have changed due to the affordances of the digital medium. But the desire to interact and take part in a type of discourse provoked by the exhibition still remains. What also remains in both disciplines is the indexical relationship of content and discourse with the real world.

Manovich’s metamedium and Murray’s digital media

I have established the commonality of intent between documentary practice and museum exhibition design in the representation of the real through a narrative. Historically the tools and artefacts that each discipline uses in this endeavour have differed. However, the application of digital technologies to production methods in both disciplines is collapsing divisions between them. To understand the implications of these technologies and the changes they pose, I look to the work of software designer and academic Lev Manovich. He asserts the primacy and centrality of software in the computational space, as it determines what can be done with digital technologies (Manovich, 2013). Manovich defines media software as programs that create and interact with media objects and environments. He proposes that searchability, findability, linkability, multimedia messaging and sharing, editing, view control, zoom and other ‘media-independent’ techniques are a given in any software driven environment. He identifies the key role of the computer in its ability to remediate existing media, as well as augmenting it and generating new working tools and types of media itself.

Notably, Manovich asserts that the digital technologies are not a defining element as ‘digital’ has no properties in and unto itself (2013). The computer is the machine, and digitisation is the method to get the material onto the machine. It is the software that allows the digital affordances of the computer to produce meaningful output. This point is of significance because it locates where, in the computational environment, creative expression and authorship lies – in the software. Manovich positions the adoption of software by the global cultural and communication industries, such as the film and television industry and museums, as having the same impact as the invention of print, photography and cinema (ibid.). Rather than software, Janet Murray proposes that it is computational affordances that lie at the centre of this new medium. She urges for the notion of a digital medium, that is:

‘created by exploiting the representational power of the computer. Focusing on computation allows us to see all of these disparate artefacts...as belonging to a single evolving medium...it allows us to focus on the four representational properties of digital environments (the procedural, participatory, spatial, and encyclopaedic affordances) that provide the core palette for designers across applications within the common digital medium’ (Murray, 2011: 8-9).

Having argued for the use of the term, the digital medium, to describe this computational world, and identified its representational properties, Murray identifies the key design consideration as being agency that works for the user. The level of satisfaction based on the quality of agency is of primary importance. A satisfying experience, she sates, is the matching of the interactants’ expectations to the design of the of interaction, resulting in ‘…the pleasurable experience of agency’ (Murray, 2011: 12-13).

Manovich provides a final way of thinking about that Murray’s digital medium. Having established the notion of a meta medium (2013), Manovich proposes another model which encompasses everything from devices to apps and all in between:

‘When we start considering the larger ecosystem of the proliferating devices, network services, interface technologies, media projects, and over one million apps for mobile platforms available to consumers, the (medium) concept can no longer be stretched to describe them in a meaningful way…The key advantages of a “species model” over a “mediums model” are their large numbers (Earth contains many million species—at least for now); their genetic links (which implies significant overlap in features between related species); and the concept of evolution (which implies constant development over time and gradually increasing diversity)’ (2013: 235).

Thus, Manovich describes a design environment that is in constant change and flux. I would contend that this type of environment is not that alien to practitioners in the documentary and museum exhibition space. It fits well with the historically plastic nature of both the linear documentary and museum exhibition, in the use of whatever material appropriate to the discipline and mashing it up into new types of narrative delivery.

The application of the digital medium to the linear documentary

A linear documentary can be described as having a fixed beginning and end, to be viewed in a continuous and self-contained time frame on a single screen. It has been defined as a time-based artefact (Gaudenzi, 2013). No interaction with the material in the documentary is invited apart from a pre- or post-viewing discourse, although projects can be part of a larger activist strategy, with the documentary being the call to action.

As with many areas of twenty-first century life, the documentary form is being buffeted and inspired alike by the rapid changes in digital media technology. New forms have and are emerging. Kate Nash (2012, 2015) describes these forms as documentary re-mediated for the Internet age, utilising modes and tools of traditional documentary production with interactivity as a new affordance, and the Internet or mobile device as the user platform. The interactivity comes about with the users’ ability to self-direct their interaction with the platform.

Theory and practice around interactive documentary are relatively new fields. Nash posits that the shift to the participatory space of the Internet is transformative in terms of the documentary text and the maker-audience relationship. Unlike linear forms, the maker expects the audience or user to engage with this participatory text. The modes of engagement or user experience are shaped by the maker via the design of the interface. This aligns with Manovich’s proposition that in digital media, software is where authorship takes place.

Sarah Gaudenzi proposes that interactive documentary is any project that uses interactive media technology to document the real, with the emphasis on the ‘interactive-native nature of the artefact, and on the documentation intentionality of the author (2013: 31-32.) She positions linear documentary as representational, in line with my assertion earlier in this paper. She then defines interactive documentary as a relational object, where the work cannot exist as an independent entity and so cannot be analysed using traditional film and documentary theory. Gaudenzi goes on to analyse the position of the people formerly known as the audience, now known as the user in relation to the interactive documentary. Unlike the linear documentary which is a completed and closed artefact, Gaudenzi proposes that the actualization of an interactive documentary can only take place when there is a user who is interacting. The user, in fact becomes part of the system; the user and the interactive documentary bound together in an interdependent loop of action and interaction (Gaudenzi, 2013: 15).

Having established the primacy of the user, interaction and participation, Gaudenzi and Nash propose systems for defining the inherent characteristics of different types of interactive documentary. This desire to impose some order on the landscape draws on the linear documentary tradition, exemplified by Michael Renovs’ documentary tendencies and Bill Nichols modes. Renov proposes ‘impulsions which fuel documentary discourse’ (Renov, 1993: 22). Nichols proposes modes as a way of organizing recurrent features or procedures. (Nichols, 1991: 32).

In the interactive documentary, Nash proposes the notion of structures based on the position of the user within the project. She asserts that there are three relevant aspects of interactivity – control over content, ability to contribute and the framing of the user contributions, and the ability to form relationships and present one’s case. Building on this, she posits that there can be a multidimensionality to participation, these being technological, relational, experiential, and discursive. Gaudenzi (2013) argues that it is this new interaction between the authors and the users that challenges the power relationships of linear documentary. She proposes four modes for interactive documentary, in which the organising principal is the type of interactivity and level of agency. Her modes are the conversational mode which applies to projects whereby the user explores an open-ended environment or situation, the hitchhiking (or hypertext) mode which gives agency to the user through hyperlinks from one area to another. The participatory mode allows the user to contribute to the database, thus participating in the on- gong creation of the work itself. The experiential mode implies embodied interaction with an environment. Gaudenzi brings these modes together in an overarching definition of the interactive documentary as being in fact, the living documentary (living replacing interactive as the descriptor). She explains in the following way: ‘A Living Documentary is … an assemblage composed by heterogeneous elements that are linked through modalities of interaction. It can have different levels of autopoiesis and can be more or less open to transformation’ (2013: 83-84). This idea aligns with Manovich’s theory of speciation as a more appropriate way to think about the computational world of Murray’s digital medium.

In summary, then, the interactive documentary differs from linear documentary in several ways. The representation of the real by an author in a time-based manner by is replaced by a relational, open ended experience. Murray’s four representational properties of digital environments (the procedural, participatory, spatial, and encyclopedic (2011: 8-9) speak to Nash’s notion of multi-dimensional participation. Nash proposes that the viewer is now the user, and the user has agency. Nash and Gaudenzi concur with Manovich and Murray that authorship is expressed in the interface and software design that underwrites what the participatory/interactive relationship and experience will be. They propose that the differing patterns or modes of textual organisation and user experience in interactive documentary can be identified and utilized in designing for the interactive documentary.

Museums, media making and the digital medium

Museum collection theorist Parry argues museums are in themselves a social medium that gives knowledge a spatial form, but are also full of media (see Kidd, 2014). He proposes that historically a museum’s ‘shapes and functions’ have been informed by contemporary communication technologies (ibid.). The communications technologies of the twenty-first century, defined by Murray’s notion of the digital medium, have been embraced by museums, through the use of websites, blogs, wikis, the digitisation of their collections, and in-house and on-line digital interactive activities, to name a few. Exhibition design has also incorporated the affordances of the digital medium. Kidd likens contemporary museum exhibition design to that of the transmedia producer, with an emphasis on participation. As with Parry, Kidd positions museums as media makers and situates the centrality of the exhibition:

‘ …scripting, editing, selecting, designing, commissioning and seeking out ‘blockbusters’ are now significant parts of museological practice. We might note how lighting is manipulated, audio-visual materials are created, oral histories are recorded and stories are told…Russo extends this idea, asserting that ‘the contemporary museum is a media space’ (2014: 6).

This emphasis on the blockbuster, using all the affordances of the digital medium, is in part being driven by increased competition in the market for cultural experience (Kidd, 2014: 8). Stogner proposes that a visitor number focus is the driver to create ‘experience’ that uses a ‘media-enhanced onsite experience’ or ‘media-driven offsite experience’ (see Kidd, 2014: 8-9). As Stogner points out, the interaction with the museum can now also take place off-site and anywhere there is a computational device and internet access. The affordances of the digital medium allows the museum visitor or audience to become a participator, collaborator, or curator. Kidd calls this the mediated museum, which ‘cannot be contained within walls or within dedicated websites … where the notion of a comprehensive, complete and ‘satisfying’ museum encounter begins to lose its appeal in favour of museum experiences that challenge, fragment and spill over into the everyday’ (2014: 24).

It would seem that museums are incorporating the affordances of the digital medium not only into its site-based temporal exhibitions, but into its notion as an entity. The on-site exhibition utilises the affordances of the digital medium, but the museum itself may in part also reside within digital medium. The interactive documentary form is also shifting the documentary forms’ original place of residence, the fixed screen of the cinema of television, within the digital medium. Thus, these two disciplines that have historically pursued the representation of the real in different temporal arenas, may find themselves sharing the same digital space.

Ways in which museological design may inform interactive documentary

I have established that museum exhibition design shares organising and communication principles with the documentary. It is the curatorial process in exhibition, and the editing process in documentary that produce narratives. I have introduced the notion of the digital medium being a part of contemporary museum design, that museums themselves are media makers. I have proposed that the computational digital medium may become a meeting place of the two distinct disciplines of museology and documentary.

Despite these similarities and convergences, there is one historic difference. Museums have by and large existed within a non-linear environment, the environment in which the interactive documentary is now situated. It is for this reason that I propose museum exhibition design in its temporal setting as in informing practice for interactive documentary design.

The museum visitor and the interactive documentary user

The user of an interactive documentary has much in common with the museum visitor. They enter a province that they understand is making claims to the representation of the real. They can interact with whichever of the facets being offered they choose, and for however long they choose. They can engage with the proposed narrative, or simply snippets or chapters of this narrative, and in any order they choose. The challenges for the linear documentary maker moving into this design space are the new considerations that are part of this landscape. Now that there is no time-defined narrative, or single screen, how are users enticed to stay, interact, and participate?

I propose that this lack of compulsion is one of the key design challenges facing interactive documentary designers, and a major shift from linear delivery. An interactive documentary resembles the informality of the museum exhibition in that it proposes content and interaction but cannot compel the user to participate, explore, or stay. So how does museum exhibition design, situated in a three-dimensional environment, with physical objects as its component parts, inform the screen-based discipline of documentary, interactive or otherwise? David Dean describes the rules on engagement for the visitor to the museum: ‘There is no compulsion – no force allowed, needed, or wanted – in a museum visit … visitors can do as they wish within reason. They can learn at their own taste, in their own way, or not at all if they choose’ (2002: 1).

To enhance engagement in this setting, Dean proposes that the ‘patron’ needs to feel physically or intellectually comfortable in an informal environment to have a ‘beneficial learning experience’ in a museum (2002: 1). In order to design this intellectually comfortable environment, he proposes a schema for identifying types of visitors, as follows:

‘First, there are those people who move through a gallery quickly and display exit oriented behaviour. They are often casual visitors using their leisure time to participate in what they consider a worthwhile activity without becoming heavily involved … The second group, on the other hand, are all those who show a genuine interest … However, they ordinarily do not spend much time reading, especially texts that appear difficult or require too much effort to understand. These people prefer a casual, headline approach to information display. They respond strongly to situations that offer visual stimuli. … (Then there is) the … group (who) are a minority … They are willing, and usually able, to understand presented materials no matter how technical. They spend an abundance of time in the galleries … and require little enticement to come (Dean, 2002: 1).

Dean’s identification of types and their needs presents the interactive documentary designer with a method for categorising types of prospective users. This can be added to Gaudenzi and Nash’s modes and structures of participation and interaction. Kidd, similarly, describes the multi-functional world in which Dean’s types now visit an exhibition:

‘Where once, people moved in and out of their status as audiences, using media for specific purposes and then doing something else, being someone else, in our present age of continual immersion in media, we are now continually and unavoidably audiences at the same time as being consumers, relatives, workers, and – fascinating to many – citizens and publics’ (2014: 10).

Stogner also provides a description of the mind set and expectations of this twenty first century museum visitor that speaks directly the implications of the continuous media immersion asserted by Kidd: ‘I want to be entertained / I want it now / I want it everywhere / I want it my way (personalizing, customizing, individualizing) / I want to share with others / I want to create something’ (Kidd, 2014: 5).

To summarise, in an earlier section of this article, I outlined the structures and modes of interactive documentary proposed by Nash and Gaudenzi. They identify the position of the user within the interactive documentary, and what types of participation and agency they may have. However, they do not provide assistance for the linear filmmaker in relation to the new challenge of maintaining user attention when there is no compulsion to stay and find out what happened in the end. Museological theory proposes some methods that may be useful to the interactive documentary designer. The first is the necessity to identify and then design for users who have different styles of interaction. The second it to acknowledge the multifaceted roles that a user is engaged in while interacting with a project. The third and final is to acknowledge the ubiquity of the digital medium in the lives of the citizens of the twenty-first century. This implies expectations of an immediate, personalised, creative, participatory, entertaining interaction. How these properties may be designed for is addressed in the next section.

Designing for interactivity in the museum exhibition and the interactive documentary

Many interactive documentaries are bespoke, as are most museums and their exhibitions. However, there are commonalties of design and engagement considerations that can carry across from one museum and exhibition to another. Kidd proposes a way of thinking about designing for the user/audience. Utilising computer terminology, she proposes Read-Only and Read-Write as ways to describe museological design and the culture of the response it provokes. She describes the central qualities of Read-Only as one where the creativity is generated by the talented individual and consumed by the viewer/audience. The only interaction is in the act of consumption and was the dominant model for engagement with cultural content in the twentieth century (2014: 119). Clearly, Read-Only culture includes the conventions of linear documentary, which positions the filmmaker as the only author, the work as closed and places the audience in a response only position. Kidd goes on to provide her definition of what she calls the Read-Write culture:

‘Read/Write culture differs in that it allows for, and often encourages, practices of remixing where people add to the culture they read by creating and re-creating the culture around them… It is thus a more participatory culture, with users having more options to produce and influence cultural outputs … this media scape reinvents the museum as a mash up, a site of active consumption, micro-creation, co-creativity and remix’ (2014: 118-119).

But does this proposition of the Read-Write mashed up museum provide any guidance to the interactive documentary designer? My answer is yes, it must. The importance of this notion is articulated by Lev Manovich, who identifies remix as the dominating form of the early the twenty first century: ‘If post-modernism defined 1980s, remix definitely dominates 2000s, and it will probably continue to rule the next decade as well’ (Manovich, 2007: 1).

In summary, designers of both disciplines need to be cognizant of the shift from a Read-Only to a Read-Write expectation by visitors. Given Manovich’s proposition of the centrality of the remix culture, this should be considered when designing for interactivity and participation. The user must be placed at the centre of the design and given some form of agency. The authorship and creativity reside in the design of the user experience.

Conclusion

The claim to the representation of the real provides the original commonality between the disciplines of documentary filmmaking and museum exhibition design. I have likened the curatorial process of the museum exhibition to the editing of a documentary and have identified the twentieth-century belief in a grand narrative as part of a Read-only culture in which both disciplines have resided. Postmodernism has altered this perspective so that museum design is now more reflexive as audiences are less willing to accept the museum as authority, and subjectivity is now an acceptable norm in the documentary genre.

The effect of participatory and interactive digital media on visitors and users is an emerging commonality between these two disciplines. They now share similar design considerations: how to engage an audience that is many things at one time, how to talk to the devices that are in everyone’s hands, how to present a narrative but also invite participation and Read-Write, how to represent the real, in a time of participation, remix and remediation.

I have proposed throughout this article that the design of successful museum exhibitions can provide inspiration and guidance for the design of the interactive documentary. This is because museum design is predominantly non-linear. The non-linearity of museum exhibition is articulated in the fact that visitors by and large cannot be compelled to follow a specific route. They may interact with what they want, where they want, for however long they please. By its very nature, museum exhibition is a non-linear representation of the real, unlike the linear documentary viewed on a fixed screen that promises a conclusion in a known amount of time.

Museum designers now have new technologies to consider, that affect both visitors and designers. The tools or properties of the digital medium are computerization, digitisation and software. Key characteristics of the digital medium are interactivity and participation, and authorship lies with the software and interface design that determines how the user will interact, and with what outcome. The medium itself is ever expanding and ever changing, as physical elements become digitised, and new procedures are constantly evolving. The unknowable end-point of the media’s evolution has been likened to that of evolution of Earth’s species and compared to a living organism.

Interactive documentary theorists and practitioners are also grappling with the affordances of the digital medium. The user is now so central to the design of the interactive documentary that it comes into existence only when there is user interaction. This may also apply to the design of some museum exhibitions that utilise a high degree of interactive media content. The different ways in which this interaction between user and media can take place have been identified by Nash and Gaudenzi. It is in eliciting engagement with the user that interactive documentary designers may look to museological design for clues. Of primary importance is the usability (comfort) of design, in the form of clear purpose or function. Also important is the acknowledgement of the centrality of the digitised citizen and their need for agency in the form of interaction and participation, if they are not to leave the metaphoric room.

But ultimately it is not the answers but the exchange of ideas, the sharing of experience, the collapse of boundaries between museum and documentary where the possibilities of the disciplines informing each other lie. As their historic/legacy theories and practices become less useful in designing for the digital medium, I propose that documentary filmmakers moving into the interactive design space may consider studying museum exhibitions as part of their professional practice. In observing the types of visitors, they need to ask how the visitor ‘type’ has been designed for? How has Murray’s four representational properties of digital environments – the procedural, participatory, spatial, and encyclopeadic – been applied? What constitutes satisfying agency and how has that been achieved for each category of visitor? If, as Manovich and Gaudenzi suggest, the digital medium is akin to a living and ever-evolving species, the constant change that this implies requires that designers working within it must look beyond what they know. This article suggests one small step in interdisciplinary collaboration in those dealing with the digital medium and the representation of the real.

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