i-docs/1

vit c,zinc,enchinacea,ginger,lemon, caffeine. i can do it. here we go.

i-docs was one of the most inspiring, interesting, thought provoking, encouraging...and quite draining days in a long time!
I want to  just try and use this to archive my notes in chronological order(of what I got to see/hear that day).

it was a shame there were so many interesting presentations and discussions happening at the same time and we had to chose which one to attend.

Alexandre Brachet brilliant start with what seemed one of the most successful/ popular examples of truly interactive and engaging documentary presented. I mentioned Gaza Szerdot on here before. It's an extraordinary example for design made to fit the content. How do we virtually jump that border between the two towns of either side of the border? Split screen on a website! The participant (not user!as the panels agreed) chooses where s/he wants to be and whom they want to listen to. Brachet's team has some really beautiful ideas of engaging people/ giving voice to the unheard and creating content which also encourages the participants to share what they experience easily (via twitter, facebook, on their blogs) and "use others' content to create their own debate"!!
I loved his idea of Prison Valley - to connect a community seemingly cut off the outside world with strangers from all over the world. It seems curious how these documentaries let us peek into strangers' lives and encourage us to spend time exploring other worlds. In a way his project was beautiful that it might give the prisoners a chance to connect with others but at the same time it just gets me thinking again about the time we spend infront of our computer screens, consuming, networking, maybe interacting but whilst doing that also forgetting about our immediate environment we could explore "in real life" (yeah, "real 3D"! ;) ). Nevertheless, it might be a good alternative to watching a soap or rubbish movie, I guess we cannot hide the fact that we all need a little procrastination sometimes and we are also curious beings most of the time  so maybe it really is a good alternative but maybe it rides the Big Brother wave of reality TV too!? I'm not ready to make up my mind about it just yet, especially when having to think about the essay that is trying to explore immersive pervasive methods of distributing museum content/ exploring unknown spaces. (note: this bloggin business is not helping writing a coherent 3000word piece!)

(random notes: check out agifreu.com.  metamentaldoc multimedia - I wish i remembered what that means...will have to leave that for later)