William Uricchio is a Professor of Comparitive Media Studies at MIT, who started Open Documentary Lab in 2012 as a research initiative to look at implications of emerging technologies & the implications for the work of documentary. The MIT Co-Creation Studio was started in either 2018 or 2019 to research methods of immersive media creation. We talk about the theory, practice, & history of immersive storytelling and the medium of documentary, as well as the R&D Progam collaboration between IDFA DocLab and MIT’s Open DocLab that was launched in 2018.
This interview was recorded on Tuesday, December 20th, 2021 as a part of a collaboration with IDFA’s DocLab to celebrate their 15th year anniversary.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye. I do The Voices of VR Podcast, but I'm also doing this special series of looking at the 15 years of IFFA DocLab. And today we have William Uricchio. So William, maybe you could go ahead and just introduce yourself and tell me a bit about what you do in the realm of immersive media.
[00:00:26.041] William Uricchio: Sure. So I'm a professor at MIT, professor of comparative media studies, and about 10 years ago started MIT's Open Documentary Lab, So it's a lab, in a certain way, an academic counterpart to the work of IDFA. We look a lot at emerging technologies and what their implications are for the work of documentary. And I was going to say documentary storytelling, but that's not quite right, because even the notion of storytelling is up for grabs with some of these new technologies. About five years ago, we started the co-creation studio, which looks a lot at methodologies of creation. How do these new technologies help us to rethink notions of authorship and agency and making. So we look both at the technology side of emerging media and documentary and at the creative side through these two different labs.
[00:01:13.032] Kent Bye: Awesome. And maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into this space.
[00:01:17.954] William Uricchio: Sure. So I started life kind of as a philosopher slash historian. That's my academic pedigrees. And my background is actually in film history. My dissertation many moons ago on the first 10 or 13 years of non-fiction in cinema. It's an area that most cinema historians have tended to ignore in terms of non-fiction. There's a lot of work on fiction and the slow emergence of a storytelling vocabulary, but non-fiction was kind of written off as naive somehow. I don't get it, but that's what happened. I think it's because a lot of the early non-fiction films, whether of factories or of cities, I focused on cities, tend to just be tracking shots or static shots or a vertical tilt. That's the film. And you sort of can get why that's considered naive. From my perspective, I tried to locate it, not so much as the beginning of a new medium, but rather the culmination of a series of earlier media practices. So the panorama, for example, which is akin to the pan. or naturally still photography, whatever. So the stereoscope with its penetration of depth. So a lot of my work turned out to in fact be, in historical terms, very much about emerging media and what they had to do with the ways in which people look at the world. Why nonfiction? It's because nonfiction is very often a site of, I think it's like the R&D lab for the film industry generally, for color films, for sound films. first moving camera. All that stuff is happening in nonfiction before, as nonfiction kind of works out the protocols and then the fiction world picks it up. That's my theory anyway. So that's where we are today. A lot of emerging technologies and documentary is kind of parsing them, feeling them out. I think what works or what the conventions are, those will eventually be picked up by the fiction world.
[00:03:05.680] Kent Bye: Yeah, that's really quite interesting because there has been quite a number of, say, 360 videos in the VR sphere, which is probably similarly ignored in the sense of, you know, not really having great distribution options or really as exalted as something as like the video games or some of the other fiction pieces that have seen a lot broader distribution. Before we dive into some of the aspects of what's happening with these new immersive tech, I'm just very curious from a historical perspective, I've heard about the cinema of attractions as being a big part of the early phases of film. And so do you think that the documentary was actually happening maybe even before or at the same time as that phase that's commonly referred to as the cinema of attractions for film?
[00:03:45.912] William Uricchio: Yeah. So Tom Gunning picked up the term cinema of attractions from Eisenstein, in fact. And I think it pertains, you know, there's a tension between the two poles, you might say, in this period. And one is very much about the theatrical and the telling of a story in a staged manner, referring back to the dominant modalities of storytelling on the stage. But the other was sort of using cinema to generate an experience of being there, akin to a roller coaster ride, right, where there's sensation is the key thing. And I do think that a lot of the early nonfiction evoked that. By putting you somewhere where you weren't, by And especially that accounts, I think, in part for some of the strange absence of editing in some of these films, right? That it's a three minute track down the street, or a five minute track down the street. That sense of being there is very akin, the sensation, I think, is evoked in that. So it's not, again, you know, it's easy to call that naive, but one might also sort of see it as, if you've ever been to one of those amusement park rides where you're in a little booth and it's kind of has legs you're going up and down in the thing and you're watching a roller coaster ride or a helicopter ride you're inside the vehicle. any break in that, whenever the film breaks and they tape it back together, those are terrifying moments. There's a kind of epistemological vertigo that occurs. And I think it would have been very similar in the early days, these early days of film. The sensation of being somewhere is, I think, you know, I never spoke to Tom about this, but I suspect it would fit easily within the cinema of attractions. And we're certainly back there today with a lot of 360 use, for sure. Yeah. But I think, again, you can see that tension quite strongly in 360 between folks who are trying to tell a story and direct your attention and maybe throw in a little sensation as well. But the whole endeavor is to take 360 space and, in fact, get you to focus somewhere, as opposed to those folks who use 360 as a site of exploration, to let you explore 360 in its richness. One of them is trying to make 360 like a movie, but with something behind you. The other is trying to find a way to let 360 be 360. It's an interesting, yeah, it's an interesting moment as we try to work out these protocols.
[00:05:56.504] Kent Bye: Yeah, and maybe you could give a bit more context as what was the catalyst for the beginning of the MIT DocLab, or if that was the origin point for you, or if it came out of something else. Maybe you can take us back to when that started and what was the catalyst for that?
[00:06:10.669] William Uricchio: Sure. So I was, you know, my department at MIT, Comparative Media Studies, is a media studies program with a twist. two twists actually. And one of the twists is that rather than being a media studies program that looks at the silos of media that dives deep into film or television or new so-called new media games or whatever, we've really always kind of looked across them. Like what can we learn by looking across different media forms? What do they share in terms of what moments of introduction, the kinds of anxiety narratives that they introduce in society? People love them and then hate them. And that seems common to all of them. Like what can we learn by comparing these media forms? Not just in terms of historical development, but what can we learn by comparing them, for example, across cultural usage? Cell phone is used in very different ways in rural Kenya than it is in downtown Manhattan? And what can we learn from those differences? What can we learn by putting different kinds of theoretical frames or using different methodologies to assess them? And that's quite different from most media studies programs, which tend to embrace one or two media forms and one or two sets of methods and one or two perspectives. So anyway, that's been MIT's little twist on it. And the second twist and the relevant one for our conversation is that MIT is a fairly technologically oriented place. It's a lab culture. And we thought, we should do this as a lab. We should think about how we can test our thinking about media by applying it. And so we've always had somewhere between six and 10 different labs, a games lab that's looking at the frontiers of technology, but also in terms of the notion of the ludic and the playable, a lab that looks at civic media and how we might deploy media in civic settings as ways of enhancing agency for regular folks and aggregating and whatever. So in that spirit, as someone with a long and abiding interest in documentary, I started the Open Doc Lab. And it came about because MIT has a rich tradition in media generally. Technicolor comes, it's the Tech and Media Institute of Technology. Technicolor starts way back in 1919 at MIT, but up through folks like Ricky Leacock, who started the film unit in what is now the Media Lab, Ricky Leacock, probably best known as one of the driving forces behind direct cinema, using 16 millimeter cameras to get out there and observe the world. That took place in the very building where I work. And Gloriana Davenport worked there, one of the patron of interactive cinema with her Media Fabrics Group, using all that was full of technology to sort of build these interactive cinema environments. So we really looked at that legacy and combined it with MIT's commitment to openness, open source software and open courseware, trying to make things available to the public, and just sat in the middle of that little triangle between Ricky's work with innovative uses of technology for documentary, Gloriana's with interaction and the openness, and said, what are we doing at a moment where all of us have high definition cameras in our pockets. Like, what does this mean for documentary when all of us have the capacity to see and to record and to make things? Software is accessible. Distribution platform is accessible through the internet. We all have the cameras in our pockets. Does this hearken a kind of new era of documentary or at least the potential for that? So that got us looking at nascent forms about a decade ago. So there was a lot of interactive stuff online. There's a shift in who makes these things because a lot of regular folks can now document the world around them. What do we do with the YouTube and it's 300 plus hours uploaded per minute of video content? How do we think about that from a documentary lens? So really, it's been about trying to understand, provoked by all these media changes and accessibility and new kinds of affordance and new kinds of agency, what does it mean for that old project of trying to see the world as the world, trying to represent the real in the world, and trying to get other folks to see it the way that you see it? So that's where the lab started. Okay.
[00:10:12.385] Kent Bye: Yeah. You said about a decade ago, and I know that the Oculus Kickstarter is like August of 2012. So are you talking around 2010, 2011, then when DocLab started?
[00:10:23.533] William Uricchio: I guess we are. Yeah. I don't know the exact date when we started. It was, you know, it was kind of bubbling for a while, but the formal start, I think we're at our 10th anniversary right now. So yeah, it must be 11. Okay.
[00:10:33.981] Kent Bye: Yeah. And the DocLab is at the 15th year anniversary. So when did you first come across the DocLab then?
[00:10:39.830] William Uricchio: Well, I came across Kasper first, actually, in the classroom in Utrecht, where I was a professor and he was a student, and it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. And even then, when I was, so I used to be a professor at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, starting in 93, and kind of helped give birth to the media side of what was soon to be named the Department of Theater, Film and Television Studies. And anyway, as one of the two media professors in the Netherlands, it was a pretty new field in the Netherlands. Of course, I knew about IDFA and was soon invited to be on the jury of regular IDFA. Allie Dierks and the women who ran IDFA, in fact, were all from Utrecht University. That was their background. So I knew about that festival from the start of my arrival in the Netherlands, and was a regular there forever. But the DocLab was a really important development. I mean, a really, to my mind, a really crucial development in the in the space of thinking about where new technologies meet old traditions, meet established ways of thinking and seeing. Yeah, so that's right from the start.
[00:11:43.485] Kent Bye: Well, with your background in both philosophy and comparative media theory and looking at the early days of film, as we start to look at these immersive technologies and what's happening just broadly within documentary across all the media, do you have any favorite theoretical frameworks that help you orient yourself towards each of these medias? Because it's really a combination of video games and theater and film and aspects of the internet and human computer interaction. And so are there any existing folks or ways that you've found that help you either understand the affordances of each of those media or specifically for each of those media, if you're taking insights from those and then kind of adding them to this broader XR immersive technologies as we start to try to make sense of this whole space?
[00:12:29.754] William Uricchio: I mean, that's a really good question and a difficult one to answer. And I'm going to get off the hook by giving you an analogy. What's the right way to cut open an orange? You know, there's a lot of – cut it across the horizon and it reveals a bunch of little triangles. You can cut it from end point to end point and see a bunch of curved sections. you can just squeeze it and get a bunch of juice. There's a lot of ways to analyze the structure of that thing, and each one reveals something, but no one reveals the full workings of the orange. And I think about theory that way a lot, that there are There are a lot of theories out there, and each reasonable theory probably has a pretty strong affordance, a pretty distinct use value. But I'm really fond of using a bunch, like a couple of different ones, to try to, in a certain sense, triangulate what in fact is happening. Each one reveals something, but includes a lot more than it reveals. So I tend to be a little agnostic on the theory front and really do think about using multiple. So history is one I turn to religiously. I think there's a lot to be learned from precedent. So there are folks who have theorised that. Baltzer and Grusin have a notion of remediation, where they argue that each new media form kind of starts off by trying to replicate an earlier media form. Well, that's a useful insight and a very helpful one. It doesn't explain everything, but it's a great way to crack it open. So I guess, yeah, that would be my answer, that it's more about the number of theories I deploy than which theories. Any bunch are always going to yield something kind of interesting in the spaces in between. That said, what's exciting about some of the newer media forms we have It's something people have said, I think, with the introduction of every new media form, but I think there is something a little different with our current ones. And that has to do with their recursive character. There's a way in which, you know, if you think of our media regime as something that starts in the 15th century, like Gutenberg's book, but also Three Point Perspective, those two phenomenon are about 30 years apart in the 1430s to 1460s, somewhere in that window. What those things do is amplify a difference between the subject and the object, between the speaker and the world, between the viewer and the world in the case of three point perspective, or in the case of the book, you know, the author and however many copies, it's very much about an amplifier of the self. All of our media have done that radio, television, film, print, until now. And I think where we are now is there's like a little twist. And it's not always very visible, but the twist and the new stuff is the recursive character that now suddenly, if you think of the way social media work or the way VR, real-time VR works, actually we think we're a subject and we think we see the world, but there's actually something curating what's in between. We don't see everything that people are sending to us on Facebook. We see a mix, and that mix is constantly being curated to extend our length of stay, to intensify our engagement. We think we're seeing what's out there, but we're seeing something that's being cooked. And what's being cooked is being cooked somewhere between the needs of the system designer and our own behaviors. And we're seeing that more and more. I think we're starting to see this. I mean, something like notes on blindness, which is a beautiful, a beautiful VR piece. I wasn't aware until I talked to the makers that actually It's responsive to how users use it. If you just put on the headset and sit still, it's a relatively quick experience. If you put on a headset and look around and kind of explore the space, it slows down, slows down the unfolding of the narrative. It takes longer. The system is responding to you. But it's responding to you based on certain assumptions that movement implies interest. So anyway, I think that moment, that recursivity that's starting to occur in new media forms is deeply fascinating and something that has enormous potential for good and for ill, as we're starting to learn. But that is different from anything we've seen from the 15th century. So while every new medium has been greeted with claims of radical difference and newness, I think for the first time, actually, I could make a pretty strong case for it. I think now.
[00:16:32.676] Kent Bye: Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. Oops. I'm hearing you back. Maybe you could mute on your side just for a second. Cause I'm hearing some feedback for some reason. Yeah, so I guess the thing that comes to mind is, as you say, all that is the girdle and completeness nature of like, for any system, it's not going to be complete. So it sort of leads to this pluralism to be able to look at a wide range of different types of approaches. And so I've, I guess I've taken a similar approach for me and also look at different primary fundamental aspects of like, there's dialectic polarities that are happening with the tension and contrast, but also a piercing semiotics and triadic approach when you start to interpret some of these different media or tetradic if you look at the elements. And for me, I use ancient philosophy of looking at different aspects of the elements and looking at active presence and mental and social presence and emotional presence and embodied environmental presence as metaphors. But I think there's also a big part of context of how, as you immersed into these places, you see context in a way that goes above and beyond how we are able to communicate context within the 2D media or other forms. And so how there is this kind of way of nesting context from I guess, Whitehead and his concepts of mariology and wholes and parts, so you're able to kind of have fractal nesting within the context of media. And yeah, I guess as I look out, I'm curious for your perspective, as you start to look back at some of maybe the philosophical primitives, if there's other philosophers that have talked about certain aspects of whether it's like Hegelian dialectic as applied to perception or other things that you may be looking to in terms of helping to understand not only the human and human consciousness and philosophy of mind, but also relative to the world around you as we talk about media. Specifically, if you feel like there's looking back into more primitive aspects from other philosophers to see how they might be able to be applied. For me, I get a lot of inspiration from Whitehead and process philosophy, but I'm curious if there's other philosophers or other insights you get when we start to look at, you know, understanding this media.
[00:18:32.157] William Uricchio: Yeah, well, I've been, you know, it's funny. So I cut my teeth, as I said, on film. But one of the first, you know, stepping out of graduate school, got a Fulbright, went to Germany, looking at early nonfiction. The Germans are great. taxonomizers. So there's wonderful enriched discourse. We're talking here pre-World War I, wonderful enriched discourse on nonfiction. But anyway, I was in the archive. I kept stumbling across stuff on fanzine, on television. I was like, what the hell? How can this even be? Everything I knew was post-World War II for TV. I started collecting stuff. Anyway, it turned out I became a historian of very early television, 19th century and early 20th century television. And what really hit me was how both the question and the difference. So we often tend to conflate those two technologies a bit. We know one's electronic, but somehow television is just kind of a new distribution system for the cinematic. And the film came first, we think, and actually it didn't. TV was first. But actually, the difference between them clarified the moment I started thinking about the pre-Socratics and the ways in which someone like You know, you have Parmenides and his notion of continuity and like, how does television work? How does pre-digital TV work? It's a scan line. It's a scan line that never stops and just goes across the raster. But it's really a point why Rudolf Varnheim talks about film as art and radio as art, but never talks, even though he writes an essay on TV and a good essay on television in 1935, it never reads the word art. And it's because it was information poor from his perspective. That little dot not only creates the illusion of an image, but it does it fast enough and often enough that it creates the illusion of the moving image. Whereas at least film starts with an image before it plays the trick on you. So it was information thin, but from my perspective, like, hey, this is Parmenides, like this is flow, pure flow. And if you think of Democritus and the atomists, Well, what's film? It's proof that it works, right? It's this series of little atoms, these little images that are all still, but coming at you fast enough, create the illusion of something actually there and moving. Just as atoms, for all their dynamism and whatever, create the illusion of solidity and presence. So that was a very clarifying moment for me, thinking about these two pre-Socratic traditions that just hit on the head the fundamental difference between those two media forms. I'm a Hegelian at heart, I will admit, with a soft spot for Perse, and triads, you know, tingle my soul. So anything I can do to kind of jump between two positions and find a third way out is something I think I do as just a default way of thinking. That's for sure.
[00:21:14.485] Kent Bye: Yeah, I know that Hegel's approach towards history of looking at dialectics in the thesis, antithesis and synthesis, I think has been also a really helpful way of also thinking about these things. And as we come into the synthesis of whatever these immersive technologies are, I'm curious if we can maybe turn to that process of, you know, as we've looked at this evolution of the media, I think DocLab has been a key part of both featuring different works but also creating and cultivating a community for those creators to be able to interact with each other and to have a platform for experimentation that I think has been a pretty key part of this area as well. And I'm curious at what point you decided to take the next step with DocLab to form this additional partnership and maybe you could just speak more about that and what was the catalyst for that coming about?
[00:21:59.770] William Uricchio: Yeah. So just to amplify what we said, I mean, I think it's so right that what makes DocLab so special is that it was never just a showcase for new projects. It does that, of course, but it's always been about the community and the conversation. And that's something I really loved about it. And it's funny to watch like in the wake, it's 15 years, but let's say in the last five or so years, there've been a flurry of festivals starting labs and starting kind of formalizing the stuff that was organic and intrinsic to InvisDocLab from the get-go, that community part, that, in a way, that research part. Drawing folks together to kind of think about the process and practice and technique, that's been really valuable. And of course, universities do that by default. That's kind of our core business. And given our stance at MIT, which is like that kind of core research business, but always with an attempt to apply it or to find to test it in the world, it just seemed like a ready-made partnership. And it was great that I knew Casper, and it was great that Casper knew about our work. I knew about his work, and it just was a hand-in-glove kind of fit. It really worked well. I think, you know, obviously we spent a lot more time, like all year, doing research. And one of the great powers of a festival is its status as an event, a time-bound event, which kind of forces makers to meet a deadline, to kind of do that final push to get it in. Unlike the academic world, where there are deadlines, but basically we kind of keep on rolling. So I think that disjunctive temporality has actually been good, too. We can continue to mull things over in our own slow academic pace, where the festival is a punctuation mark, where it has to stop or start or pay off Yeah, sorry. I forgot that. I forgot where I was going with this.
[00:23:42.186] Kent Bye: So yeah, what was the name of the thing again that you created with the DocLab? And maybe talk about like what the intent and purpose of this collaboration that you're doing with them and what the goal of it is.
[00:23:52.269] William Uricchio: Yeah. So what's so important about research in this sector is that the research is happening as much with the makers as it is happening with folks like me and the Academy. And I think back to Lev Kuleshov and You know, the experiment we all know, the experiment where he, he, Pudovkin says this, I don't know, I only know it through Pudovkin, who says, you know, he intercuts this footage of a face with a coffin, and a face with an empty cupboard and a face with a girl. And the face is always the same face, the same actress face, the same non expressive face. And people read this inscribed emotion to it. This is the birth in a way of the theories of montage. And what's compelling about this anecdote is that It took place in the world's first film school, the Moscow Film School was the world's first. And it really shows how with a nascent technology, film was relatively new by that point, 30 years old, maybe 25 years old. These are some of the first systematic steps to, instead of copying what was happening on the film stage or doing what photographic or stereoscopic practice were doing with the street scenes that I looked at so much, this was really an endeavor to experiment with the medium, a new medium, and to try to invent and find a language for it and explore its capacities and come up with some practices. So, I really take that to heart, and I think a lot of our work with Infodoc Lab, our work at the OpenDoc Lab, has been really about that, about looking at this new stuff and saying, well, what kind of taxonomy are we going to use? Are we going to use a language that derives from film and television? Are those the right concepts to use, or should we take concepts from computer science? Should we take concepts from immersive theater? What descriptors, what categories, what language should we even use? That's a fairly important question. And of course, these things are also nascent, that they're inscribed with all of those languages and all of those concepts, depending on which reviewer you read or which essay you read. So our job has been to reflect on that and figure out what are the affordances of each of these approaches? You know, the problem shows up in a very tangible way with like, well, how do you fund something that's really new, like a new technique or a new technology? Does that fit into the film funding? You know, there's always these guidelines and boxes when money is at stake. Well, is it a film or is it television or is it theater? Well, actually it's something else. Well, we don't have a box for something else, you know, unless it's the new media art. Is it new media art? And of course that drives a lot of people into that discursive main to try to get the funding to continue the work. But it's something that's really important because why those boxes are there is because they have well-established criteria, right? There's ways of assessing whether something is good or not so good, interesting or not so interesting. But in a box called the new, there's not a lot of criteria. So funders tend to shy away from it. So we've been really trying to look at that process, understand it and find ways to help emergent forms kind of fit into a system where they're able to be funded, where there can be a critical discourse, where multiple parties can look at this and have a kind of common discursive platform so they can exchange ideas in a meaningful way. I think that's the place in the ecosystem that we inhabit. We try to be an enabler. We try to find a way to take these new unruly things and not so much force them into pre-existing boxes, which is to deny their newness and deny their innovative potentials, but rather, you know, really make that stuff evident, but in a way that people can talk about and assess and hopefully fund.
[00:27:28.350] Kent Bye: I'd love to hear your thoughts on this interactive component of the documentaries. Because when I first went to DocLab, I was seeing works that I've seen other pieces, you know, these kind of interactive explorations. And there was the Anagram Groups, The Collider was a piece that I saw that was particularly striking in terms of the type of interactivity that you have with kind of acting out this psychodrama with two people. And when I think about documentary, it was sort of that was an experience that I didn't automatically think of as like documentary form. But as we think about reflections of different things that are happening in reality and how we define documentary, but also concepts of potential of a lot of times, linear media doesn't have those aspects of potential. It's just the things that have been actualized by the maker, and it's very authored, but there's a shared authorship. For more of the video games, you talk about the generative media or agency or interactivity. For me, philosophically, I think of it in terms of potentia and potential and how that there's a range of possibilities, like quantum ontology, there's something that goes from the potential into the actual through the context of measurement, you know, the quantum measurement problem, or just in terms of these deeper archetypal realms of, you know, Whitehead had these concepts of the eternal objects or Platonism for, you know, these realms of ideal forms that are somehow coming into actuality. But, you know, this translation from the potential to actuality is something that is, I think, unique into the interactive and participatory aspects of the media that I guess, you know, when you talk about documentary as documenting something that's already happened versus something that's emerging in the moment that you're actively participating in the expression of determining different aspects of your own character by being put into that context and making choices and taking action. So I'm curious to hear your thoughts on, you know, these blending of forms of this interactivity with the documentary and how you start to conceptually think about some of these things.
[00:29:23.664] William Uricchio: Yes, that's a really rich area. And I would say the key factor here is agency. Where is agency and how does agency operate? What are its contours and its potentials? Indeed, we have been shifting in our media forms have been shifting from a kind of center to periphery model to something else. We've always had that something else, correspondence, when the telephone emerges, that was always something else. But our mainstream media have always been center to periphery. There have been authorities, the agency has been centralized, and it's been parsing the world for us on our behalf. And the rise of, let's say circa 1990, and the kind of emergence in the popular world of computation, PCs started to enable the internet and World Wide Web and all that start to enable a different kind of interactions, amplifying perhaps what's already there with post and telephone, but like doing it at scale and doing it robustly. And with that, it's also interesting that coincides with the kind of deregulation in the US and some European countries in television, the rise of cable in the mid 80s, right? There's a series of shifts that start to weaken that center to periphery clarity. And with that comes a kind of, it's accompanied by things like post-structuralism, which are starting to sort of get away from the master narrative and challenge that a little bit. That's happened a decade or two earlier. It's prescient. Games are really a great manifestation of it, always have been. But once again, they're at scale. And once they're social, rather than two players, once you're talking about a much larger social scale, really interesting stuff starts to happen in terms of the power of the individual, the user, to actually start to not just interpret a system differently, but actually construct a text differently, to make choices within a textual system. Yeah, we have people like Julio Cortázar and Hopscotch, where you're encouraged to jump around in the book. That's happened with the book. Yeah, we have Chelsea Girls, Warhol's film, where the projectionist can kind of figure out which of two soundtracks to flip this between. We've had forms of interaction before, but this really does it at scale and does it intensively. And I don't think we've really reconciled where we are with that. We're kind of caught between the long term, and I mean, you know, centuries long term notion of like, what a narration is or what a story is, and we're entering a world where something quite different is at hand. And there are one of two ways to look at this. You can look at it as, like I just said it, it sounds new, like, oh, we're entering this new space, what are we going to do? Or you can kind of reassess where we've been and say, actually, we've always had some of these other forms. So an example I've used in stuff I've written is Disney. You know, the Disney company and the Disney project is a really interesting one. really early proponents of transmedia, for example. Mickey is on the screen, but Mickey's on records and Mickey's in comic books. And, you know, that was happening, I don't know, 40s, maybe 30s. It's been happening for a while, but maybe more interesting from like where we are today with a technology like VR or interactive, you can buy Bambi and you have a linear traditional story, beginnings and ends, and you have to read it more or less in sequence. Or you can go to Disneyland And you can wander down any path you want. You can go left. I can go right. We're all going to come out with a Disney branded experience. We're all going to put together a series of experiential dots and have our story to tell at the end of the day around the campfire. But it's completely interactive and it's completely immersive and it's completely different for all of us. And yet we come out with a lot of the same messaging and branding. And that space to me is very akin to what one might find in an interactive online project or a 360 immersive experience where you can be looking one way and I can look the other. And yet at the end of the day, we were kind of assembling a world. So while a lot of this stuff seems really new, and you know, actually Carlo Ginsberg, the Italian cultural theorist has written eloquently about the roots of narrative and what he calls the fanatic tradition. So hunting, the hunter goes through a world and sees its fur and footprints and can construct a whole narrative from that, right? This is an aging female that's on its way for water or whatever. And And he says, he qualifies it and says it's a very daring hypothesis. But I think, yeah, it's a very useful hypothesis to think about in terms of where we are with this, in this so-called new world of interactivity. It's always been there. It's just differently technologized. But it helps us to sort of step away from the dominance of that center to periphery fixed textual system that our cultures have sort of thrived on for hundreds of years, and kind of reassess what's kind of always been there in the cracks and underneath. It's, you know, we do a lot of work in my lab in the co-creation studio. It's what it's all about. Co-creation seems like something that's kind of new and emergent, but it's deeply embedded in our culture. It gets overwritten with the rise of copyright and the rise of the author that coincides with the 18th century, 17th century invention of authorship as intellectual property. We need the author in order to protect, but look back at Rembrandt or Rodin, these are always collaborative efforts. These are studio efforts that get branded under one name for legal reasons, ultimately, for financial reasons. So looking at something like co-creation today allows us to look back through the past and discover, actually, it's always been there. We write it off as folk culture. We demean it as amateurism. But in fact, it's a very basic way that we have always created. So to me, that's the power of a lot of the new media, that it helps us to kind of reassess older practices that we kind of didn't think about, that weren't so visible to us, or we didn't really think about, and learn from those and see what elements of that we can broker into, you know, to help clarify our understanding of the present and future, of course.
[00:35:16.618] Kent Bye: Yeah, one way that I orient myself around some of these questions is that famous Robert McKee quote where he's talking about how the process of telling stories is you put these characters within a certain situation and context, and when they're put under pressure, they're making choices. And the types of choices they make under pressure is revealing their character. And the more intense of that context is that the more you get to their essential character of who they are. And I think in authored media, we're watching other people make those choices and we're seeing them and how that's revealing their character in the context of that situation. But yeah, I think we're moving into this realm where us as the interactors and participants within this media are being put into these contexts and these situations and we have to make those choices. And those choices, it may be contextually dependent or there could be certain aspects of those choices that are revealing certain aspects of our essential character. which I think is kind of an interesting switch from the typical ways we've thought about narrative when we turn this into more, say, of a depth psychological approach where kind of a Jungian, you're being put into this psychodrama that is allowing you to tap in and reveal certain aspects of who you are. And so you walk out of this experience, maybe understanding more about yourself. which I think is maybe different than what we've seen in other media in the past. I mean, to a certain extent, maybe video games are starting to do that. But I think with the documentary and everything else with the immersive media, it seems to be amplified more. So I'm just curious to hear your thoughts of how you orient sort of documentary into this idea that we're going into these pieces and maybe learning more about our own essential character.
[00:36:47.931] William Uricchio: Well, you know, I think it's Kate Nash who talks about this new turn of documentary as being relational. that really, instead of presentational, instead of presenting us with the world, this is really relational. It's kind of exploring the space between us and the world we inhabit. And I think the summation you just gave is pretty eloquent about what that difference is from us sitting back and being presented with the authoritative take on things to now us being part of the process and being able to reflect on what our part in that process is. I think a well-crafted interactive documentary will always enable us, will always present the user with a bit of a mirror to be able to assess the choices they've made in interacting with their stance within that world. That needs to be something the user is aware of. If it's just a novelty, if it's just like, oh, you can go left or right and you'll see different things, but so what? Seems to me to be a lesser use of the medium for nonfiction purposes than helping the user to really think about their relatedness, their situatedness in something. So obviously it's not a form that's for every documentary, for every topic, but those scenarios that will benefit from the user having exercising agency and being aware of the logics that motivate that agency, that's real power, I think. So I think, you know, obviously we're very still at early days. Some projects do it quite well. Some projects use the trappings, but don't actually get at the essence. And I do think we're very much caught between two worlds where you see this, the VR is the space where this is most clear, where we're coming from a world of well-crafted, well-authored stories. Folks who do that well want to explore a new medium and want to tell a great story versus people who, and maybe it's just where you're coming from. If you're coming from immersive theater, chances are you're going to make a far more interesting VR space because you're thinking about it as a space where the user can be empowered to explore and discover and connect dots versus I have a bunch of dots I want you to connect and I'm going to use little audio cues and visual cues to get you to see my dots and follow my story. Anyway, my only point here is to say we're at a moment where both of those discourses are there. Kind of the old way of doing it, you know, the new wine and old bottle thing. But there are, folks, more and more examples of people really finding the potentials of these technologies. enabling the user to actually think a bit about their own agency and see the patterns that they've been pursuing. I mean, even a project like Do Not Track was really wonderful, eloquent in the way it just kind of did a little flip so that you suddenly were seeing yourself in the documentary and becoming aware of your own behaviors as part of the project that was being documented. It did it in a I don't want to say traditional way, but a very easy to sort of swallow way, did nothing radical or about the form and yet really subversive in terms of how it enables individuals to see themselves. So, yeah, I think that shift in agency and the capabilities of agency and the awareness of agency, that's really what's at stake and what's, you know, when it's done right, really, really is added value of these new forms.
[00:39:52.729] Kent Bye: It's interesting to hear the relational connection there because I take it back to Whitehead and his process relational metaphysics that he has a metaphysical approach to saying like all of the nature of reality could be described in terms of relationships and processes they're unfolding in these nested contexts that are kind of meteorologically nested in these holes and parts. you know, when I think about perception or embodied cognition or these ideas of context, they're all going back to these aspects of relationality. But relationality is in everything from indigenous philosophy and Chinese philosophy and Heraclitus and Schelling and Hegel and, you know, Whitehead is connected to the, you know, Peirce is also very process relational, Teheradesh. And then, I mean, you can go back and kind of look at the evolution of this dynamic flux and how it's more about Rather than the substance metaphysics that would be these static concrete objects that have properties, it's more about how there's this underlying core of dynamic flux of processes and relationships that are unfolding. And whether or not you go down to the metaphysical level or not, I do think that there's something about process in time and how time unfolds and the qualities of time that are there. You know, there's a lot of insights that I draw from personally when I look at the more process-relational approach, you know, starting with Whitehead, but going back into Heraclitus and other process-relational thinkers over time. So I'm curious to hear your thoughts on kind of this process-relational turn and if you feel like experiential design as well as other aspects of this media could be benefiting from taking that more relational approach.
[00:41:21.392] William Uricchio: Well, so A, I think it's intrinsically relational. The question is how we unpack it. And I think what you've offered is a really wonderful way to sort of, you've offered a philosophical through line of folks who've been engaged in this endeavor philosophically. And I think these are projects that really, and I think that is one could probably point to some earlier artistic practices that do this. But I think for the first time, we're working with systems that are built to, you know, again, to advocate Nash, that are built in relational terms. I mean, it's intrinsic in the operation of these systems. You can't be a passive observer, whatever that even means. And I think what you've also done is offer a great rationale for why philosophy, it's a pit, you know, when I have a double academic career, I was pursuing a PhD in philosophy and one in film studies. And about the time I was finishing in philosophy, they were closing departments. You know, it's like, how can that be? This is such an enabling set of discourses. Like what an argument to get this back into our academic agendas, to have people think not about the thing, but about the kind of drivers and contexts and indeed relations that undergird these things. I think it's really fundamental to these systems in particular. Again, it helps to distinguish them from that centre to periphery delivery system. It's something that in a more sociological way, someone like James Carey, Professor of Journalism at Columbia, when he was alive, has written about in this, what he saw as the side of communication. So communication tends to be talked about as transmission. So it's very much that object, artifact side of things, getting a message from point A to point B. Indeed, they embrace engineering, Shannon Weaver model. This comes from telephone engineering. Let's get the packet from here to there. Where's the noise? And let's mitigate the noise, you know. And Carey says, well, there's another side to this. And that side is ritual. And ritual is actually not just that the sports is always on the last page, or the weather is always at the end of the newscast, because there will be a tomorrow, no matter how dismal the news. It's not just those packeting formats. Ritual is what we do with this stuff, that we talk about a coffee machine, that we start our day with it, that we share information with one another, that we combine. I read the Times, you read the Guardian, and we combine our stories to try to figure out with one another what's happening. It's the social, lived, relational side of the communication process. And just as, you know, as if we needed evidence that this is the case, that this is really important, and in fact more important than ever now that our technologies require it. Again, a thing I've written about, but it's such a vivid illustration. In 2014, Bezos buys the Washington Post, and the Post is really worth something like $60 million. Of a $250 million deal, the Post itself, the best content packet that gets transmitted from point A to point B is worth $60 million. Zuckerberg buys WhatsApp the same year for $19 billion with a B. And what's WhatsApp? Well, it's relations, but there's like no content. It's just like a network of potentials. It's relational. It's purely relational with nothing else. So that just says, as loud and clear as you can say it, that we have entered a domain. We have entered a technological moment where the relational is the thing that has value. And okay that's not that we should throw away the content at all it's not to say it's an either or but it is to say this is a side we really have to think about and we don't quite I mean I think you've offered a great way to locate it philosophically as part of a long-term endeavor to think about the relational but we don't I don't think we understand socially speaking yet just looking at the kind of on patterns across the world, not just the US, we have a lot of stories we could tell, but you could go to the Philippines or Turkey or pick your country, Hungary, and very similar phenomena are occurring, which point to a, I don't think we've yet figured out how to manage this relational, these new relational dynamics required and yet not fully understood of our new systems.
[00:45:20.018] Kent Bye: Yeah, for sure. We're in a network era, that's for sure. Well, just to kind of wrap things up, I'm curious what you think the ultimate potential of all these, you know, immersive storytelling technologies might be and what they might be able to enable.
[00:45:33.051] William Uricchio: Well, I'll tell you where I think we're headed with these story systems. I think we're, you know, we've seen like two extremes. We've seen the sort of long term, like linear fixed story, And through interactivity, we're in a space of pick and choose and find our way, deploy our agency, hopefully even reflect upon our agency in the process. What I see emerging fast is a third way that's not necessarily a good way, but a third way. And that is recursive narrative systems that basically do what Google already does, but do it in a narrative way, which is to say, track our past behaviors. We know what your likes and dislikes are. We know what you tend to do. watch our biometrics, track our biometrics, and path us through a story accordingly. So take an interactive story world, a branch narrative, Bandersnatch with the Black Mirror episode, take that thing with its one supposed one trillion various options, and the system will watch us and track us through based on where we're looking, what our pupillary dilation is like, what our EEG, whatever the biosensors are, path us through that. So experientially, we're getting a linear narrative, a fixed linear narrative, but in fact, one that's so-called made to measure. But that made to measure is both something that we've contributed and something the system has contributed. That's a slippery new space. It's a very interesting space. It'll be an incredibly fun space to play in, but it's one that's really a fraud space because the question is what's happening to agency. Because these sensors and these algorithmic systems, there's no way they're simply amplifying what I feel. They're reading and they're interpreting what they think I feel and merging it with the optimization, whatever the optimization systems are that are hardwired into the algorithm. So that's a really fraught space, because I think, you know, right now we're in a world where some people, my sense anyway, is that some folks, a lot of people like linear narratives, like to sit down in front of the TV or go to a movie theater. And a bunch of those people are put off by even games, but let alone having to make choices is not always a, it's an almost Brechtian thing where you're pulled back from the narrative. You have to make this new way, this third way will solve that. But it solves it in a way that I think tampers with agency in a potentially problematic way. But that's where I think we're headed.
[00:47:57.220] Kent Bye: Hmm. Nice. And is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community or the DocLab community?
[00:48:04.686] William Uricchio: Congratulations on 15 fantastic years. I can't wait to see what the next 15 bring. No, it's just been a joy. It's been a thought leader in the sector. And I can't wait to see what next year brings, if we can really be together in person in Amsterdam.
[00:48:21.893] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, William, thank you so much for joining us today to be able to kind of unpack not only your journey into this space and kind of reflecting on the past. There's this Kierkegaard quote that talks about how life can only be understood by looking backwards, but it has to be lived forwards. So I like that idea of understanding the historical context that allows us to understand where we might be going in the future. Yeah, just thanks for coming on and sharing both these pointers to different theoretical perspectives and reflecting on the different philosophical implications of it all. And yeah, thanks for for joining us today on the podcast.
[00:48:54.426] William Uricchio: Kent, thank you very much.
[00:48:55.707] Kent Bye: Bye bye. So that was William Uricchio. He's a professor of comparative media studies at MIT, who started the Open Documentary Lab in 2012 as a research initiative to look at the implications of emerging technologies and the implications for the work of documentary. He also started the MIT Co-Creation Studio in 2018 or 2019. to look at methods of creation in immersive media. And this conversation was recorded on Tuesday, December 20th, 2021, as a part of the collaboration with IFA's DocLab in order to celebrate their 15th year anniversary. If you'd like to support the Voices of VR podcast, then please do consider becoming a member at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
