From Critical Distance to Critical Intimacy: Interactive Documentary and Relational Media

Abstract

This chapter wonders about interactive documentary as a relational media, and how this relationality is less about telling a story than it is about describing and performing the world critically. Stories struggle to account for, describe, or perform the entangled complexity of the world because of their inherent need to be linear and sequential. The author examines how the concepts and methods offered by recent materialist and post-humanist philosophy such as Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT) invite reconsideration of the role and agency of story for interactive documentary, and how ANT pays close attention to agency and relationality in the formation of complex assemblages. The chapter offers an alternative to the critical distance that characterizes traditional efforts to conduct theory and proposes its inverse: to perform critical intimacies recognizing the agency of all the parts that make up any assemblage that we participate within as interactive documentary makers.

A leading scholar and artist, Adrian Miles was a new media enthusiast and early adopter of vlogging (he coined the term “vog” in 2000), hypertext , and non-linear video , and his scholarly work always strove to expand the boundaries of documentary studies . At the time of his passing on February 5, 2018, Adrian had already submitted a rough draft of his chapter for this collection. To honor his memory, and with the blessing of his family, we asked two of Adrian’s former PhD students, Hannah Brasier and Franziska Weible, to work alongside Bruno Lessard to complete his chapter. Adrian was a bold critic and a generous reader, but also a tireless advocate of personal expression and creative freedom, who always sought to integrate theory and practice in novel ways. He will be sorely missed in the documentary community.