Korsakow Perspective(s): Rethinking Documentary Knowledge in Digital Multilinear Environments

Abstract

In linear documentary land, we are trained to see stories everywhere we look. Digital media and its materially distinct characteristics encourage reflections on this particular schooling and the power relations it is embedded in. As a result, many artists, filmmakers and scholars advocate interactivity as presumably more ‘authentic’ organizing principle for representing realty. While linear storytelling still prevails as framework for a majority of these interactive works, the documentary apprenticeship observed at the non/fictionLab offers an example for exploring digital materiality beyond the narrative paradigm. Drawing on my ethnographic study of a small group of research-practitioners, this paper analyses media software as part of an emerging counterpractice that challenges story as primary organizing principle and facilitates further investigation of digital environments for the making of documentary.