Towards “Affective Knowing” in the Diary Film !and Interactive Documentary

!1

Hannah Brasier

theme

!2

in honours

I applied Deleuze’s concept of the affect-image, outlined in Cinema One: the movement image, as a framework for the creation of two interactive online videos.

question

!3

then

!4

What can the essay film contribute to interactive documentary? What can interactive documentary contribute to the essay film?

now

How may interactivity as an affective system, and the diary film as “affective knowing”, provide a framework for new ways of making and theorising the diary film, and interactive documentary?

!5

What can the essay film contribute to interactive documentary? What can interactive documentary contribute to the essay film?

How may interactivity as an affective system, and the diary film as “affective knowing”, provide a framework for new ways of making and theorising the diary film, and interactive documentary?

now…

!6

interactivity

!7

modularity means each element of a whole maintains their “separate identities…without losing their independence” (Manovich 30)

variability means a new media object is “not something fixed once and for all, but something that can exist in different, potentially infinite versions” (Manovich 36)

interactivity

!8

“as a cultural form, the database represents the world as a list of items, and it refuses to order this list” (Manovich 225)

interactive documentary

!9

Manovich finds it surprising why “narratives—still exist in new media,” when there is “nothing in the logic of the medium itself that would foster its generation” (228)

Miles considers that because documentaries focus on the contemplation of ideas, as opposed to narrative movement, they can be considered as a collection of contemplative affective moments.

!10

interactive documentary

a working concept of interactive documentary is a collection of modular affective video clips that are interacted with by a user through an interface.

affective system

!11

“what matters in interactive documentary is the enlarging of the interval between perception and action…so that deciding becomes analogous to understanding. This is synonymous with Deleuze’s affect image” (Miles 24)

diary film

!12

from the essay film

described by Corrigan as a “(1) testing of expressive subjectivity through (2) experiential encounters in a public arena, (3) the product of which becomes the figuration of thinking or thought” (30)

diary film

!13

to the diary film

where essayistic subjectivity continually reinvents itself “between the extremes of boredom and emergency as a series of different, daily, and redemptive time zones” (Corrigan 144)

!

“affective knowing”

!14

In the diary film, affective moments of contemplation are constructed to show reinventions of enquiring subjectivity through lived experience, and could be viewed as the diarist moving towards a sort of “affective knowing” (Miles 22)

!

towards

!15

I envision this PhD to focus on how the diary film is a form of documentary filmmaking that is particularly suited to “affective knowing”, and how this may lend itself to affective systems of interaction.

!

how

!16

how

!17

Gibson in “The Known World” suggests

“Artist-researchers have the chance to woo two modes of knowing: the implicit and the explicit. They have the chance to entwine the insider’s embodied know-how with the outsider’s analytical precepts” (11)

how

!18

an essayistic approach to writing which displays the

“essayist’s train of thought in full view”

and for the essayist to combine these thoughts to produce a

“constellation of meanings that surround any of the issues considered by the essayist” (Montero 8)

how

!19

The essayist as meditator and combiner mimics the dual knowings of Gibson’s proposition that you need to “step both outside and inside the mystery” (Gibson 4)

project one

!20

!21

making

lists “function primarily as provocations, as litanies of surprisingly contrasted curiosities” (Bogost 26)

mirroring becomes an observational tool to learn “something about the researcher, as well as, perhaps, something about the phenomenon” (Mason 181)

“expertise is sensation to notice, coupled with techniques for analysis of, use of, or enquiry into, that noticing” (Mason 35)

project one

!22

The project asks to what extent does Marker notice? As a probe to think about what has been noticed, and how one might mirror such noticing.

why

!23

why

!24

transformations of the diary film into a new media context

emerging practices of personal expression

contributions to documentary theory and new media studies

tasks

!25

tasks

year 1 now 6 m 1 yr

making!Sunless K-film! Project # 2

exegetical writing

confirmation document!10,000 words

to Sunless K-Film!10,000 words

for publication!

reading10 books!31 articles!12 films watched

diary film!affect theory!new media theory

documenting blog!diary

!26

tasks

year 2 1.5 yr 2 yr

making 3rd project 4th project

exegetical writing

to 2nd project!10,000 words

for publication

to 3rd project!10,000 words

for publication

reading

documenting

!27

tasks

year 3 2.5 yr 3 yr

making editing finalising

exegetical writing

to 4th project!10,000 words

for publication! editing finalising

!28

cited

!29

Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology. Or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Print.

Corrigan, Timothy. The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Print.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema One: The Movement Image. London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 1986. Print.

Gibson, Ross. “The Known World.” Text 8 (2010): 1–11. Print.

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. United States of America: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001. Print.

Miles, Adrian. “Interactive Documentary and Affective Ecologies.” New Documentary Ecologies. Ed. Kate Nash, Craig Hight, and Catherine Summerhayes. London: Palgrave, Forthcoming. Print.

Montero, David. Thinking Images: The Essay Film as a Dialogic Form in European Cinema. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012. Print.