Interactive documentary and the reinvention of digital journalism, 2015–2020

Interactive documentary (i-docs), an innovative hybrid form at the intersection of film, journalism, and digital games, has matured beyond its first wave of experimentation, gaining distinction among the most highly evolved immersive media of the twenty-first century. The latest generation of i-docs is currently winning accolades at both major film festivals and game design summits. This study charts the evolutionary trajectory of North America’s most recent and influential wave of i-docs in works mostly appearing since 2015. It culturally situates i-docs as immersive media that extend experimentation with narrative journalism into the realm of fine art and social activism. Building on the foundation of activist, highly empathic news experiences established in the early 2010s, the most recent advances in i-docs range from live action VR to animated digital games. Such works include the Canadian National Film Board’s 2018 AR (augmented reality) experience East of the Rockies, Occupied’s 2019 Cannes entry The Holy City VR, Roger Ross Williams’ 2019 Tribeca debut Traveling While Black, and iNK Stories Verité VR Series’ 2017 Blindfold and Hero, winner of the prestigious Storyscapes Award at Tribeca in 2018. The vanguard of i-docs has expanded collaboration between film, news, and digital game industries to provide new forms of citizen engagement through advocacy journalism aimed at social and political change. Through the use of John Pavlik’s (2019) critical framework for understanding immersive journalism, this article examines the texts, producers, and industrial contexts of the most recent and influential North American i-docs, as one branch of the form defined by Gaudenzi, Aston, and Rose. Principles of transparency, social responsibility, and a commitment to veracity in i-docs epitomize the esthetic and political potential of digital journalism as an empathic alternative to traditional news coverage.

Immersive Technologies in Media: Towards the Concept of Generative Mediatization?

The practices of so-called immersive media have been developing in the past few years. The immersive media situation characteristics, infrastructure, content and social aspects have been identified through the use of a multilevel structural and functional methodology, and make it possible to fix its specificity at all levels. The new format of the immersive media situation leads to changes in approaches to the mediatization studies. In the article, to study the media immersive communicative situation a generative approach is proposed for the first time. It is relevant to topological thinking, and to the modern immanent picture of the world, when a person and technology co-create a new form. Along with the generative approach and generative design, the necessity of applying relevant paradigms and methods of psychology to form new theoretical and methodological foundations of immersive user-centric media communication is substantiated. Several new concepts and terms are introduced, in particular, the term immersive hypermediation, which is opposite to immediacy as a classical criterion of media effectiveness. As a result, the analysis of the essence and features of immersive media projects allows fixing the premises of immersive paradigm shift in mediatization studies.

Immersed, yet distant: Notes for an aesthetic theory of immersive travel films

The purpose of this article is to highlight a few stylistic and aesthetic principles, common to the genre of the travel film (both documentary and fictional), as employed by immersive media and devices from the twentieth century – such as the Hale’s Tours of the World, Todd-AO, and Cinerama – up to today’s digital systems like Virtual Reality and 4D Cinema. I will discuss how the different experiences of simulated travels, proffered by those media, are all related to a broader aesthetic tendency in creating what I label as enveloping tactile images. Such images are programmed to surround the viewer from every side, thus increasing their spectacular dimension, but at the same time they strive to temper and weaken the haptic solicitations aroused in the viewer by the immersive apparatus itself. In this sense I propose that the spectator of immersive travelogue films is ‘immersed, yet distant’: she is tangled in the illusion of traversing an enveloping visual space, but the position she occupies is nonetheless a metaphysical one, not different from that of Renaissance perspective, because even if she can see everything, the possibility to interact with the images is denied, in order to preserve the realistic illusion. By analysing the stylistic techniques employed to foster the viewer’s condition of non-interactive immersion in the enveloping world presented by the medium, I will consequently address the topic of the conflict that such immersive aesthetics establish with traditional forms of audiovisual storytelling.

Virtual Reality: Confinement and Engulfment; Replacement and Re-placement

This chapter explicates Virtual Reality (VR) as the first instantiation of the post-screen. Specifically, it interrogates VR’s sense of immersion via two vectors in the post-screen’s “forgetting” of screen boundaries – confinement of a viewer’s visual field with restricted viewing devices; and engulfment by being surrounded with large screens. The chapter’s key idea is its alternative expression of VR’s relations of reality as an immersive media form, which it argues shifts from the critical paradigms of replacement to re-placement. Through theoretical critique and readings of various applications of VR, the chapter argues for re-placement as a more ethical and generative space for thinking through VR’s relations of the real. In turn, where and how the actual and the virtual is re-placed informs the very purpose of media itself.