The historian is present: live interactive documentary as collaborative history

ABSTRACT

Historical narratives seek to give us a shared reality, argued through recourse to evidence. Both impulses are under threat in the Age of the Anthropocene. This article introduces Live Interactive Documentary, a ‘performance dissemination’ model for history that deploys digital tools to merge cinema and lecture into a new form. It is designed to respond to Hayden White’s challenge in ‘The Burden of History’ and Bruno Latour’s call to gather as a bulwark to misinformation and the manipulative, political cooption of postmodern scepticism. Live Interactive Documentary creates a spectacle of archive and expertise, injected with post-postmodern values of polyphony and audience exchange, grounded in the local. This essay describes the form that I piloted with a team that includes historian Robert Nelson and composer, musician and media artist Brent Lee. Live Interactive Documentary is a model of ‘moving (image) history’ that seeks to cross boundaries between practice and theory, as well as history, film, multimedia performance art and participation. This hybrid cinema model draws upon theories of historiography, film and new media. It digitises earlier models of theatre and film exhibition and responds to the challenges of the Anthropocene by prioritising negotiation, complexity and gathering face-to-face in the real space of our analogue world.

KEYWORDS:

• Live documentary
• interactivity
• historiophoty
• post-truth
• performance dissemination
• moving history

Our current age sees two crises colliding: (1) The rise of the human species to the level of a geological force that threatens our planet and (2) the simultaneous expansion and collapse of dialogue through the rise of global networks that silo perspectives and isolate us. Attention is diverted to clashes of distraction and difference as the world around us floods and burns. The disparagement of expertise compounds these effects, whereupon the repetition of slogans and reverse engineered facts have replaced the recourse to evidence.

In We Have Never Been Modern, Bruno Latour considers the twin dangers of seeing ourselves and our societies as apart from nature, alongside the destructive impact of postmodernism. Latour cautions that we are guilty of Icarus-scale hubris, misreading our epic capability to interpret and deploy nature as independence from, and mastery of, the natural world (1993, 10, 13, 29, 32). Although the linguistic turn served a purpose in tempering the epistemological overconfidence that emerged during the establishment of history as an academic discipline in the nineteenth century, its proselytisers took scepticism to new heights, with the fervour emblematic of all new disciples. Latour called postmodernism a ‘symptom’ mistaken for a ‘solution’ (1991, 46) and asks his readers:

Are you not fed up with language games, and with the eternal scepticism of the deconstruction of meaning? Discourse is not a world unto itself but a population of actants that mix with things as well as with societies, uphold the former and the latter alike, and hold on to them both. Interest in texts does not distance us from reality, for things too have to be elevated to the dignity of narrative. As for texts, why deny them the grandeur of forming the social bonds that hold us together?

Are you not tired of being accused of having forgotten Being, of living in a base world emptied of all its substance, all its sacredness and its art? In order to rediscover these treasures, do we really have to give up the historical, scientific and social worlds in which we live? (1993, 90)

In more recent work, Latour advises that in response to ‘the New Climatic Regime’, we must learn:

how to live in the same world, share the same culture, face up to the same stakes, perceive a landscape that can be explored in concert. Here we find the habitual vice of epistemology, which consists in attributing to intellectual deficits something that is quite simply a deficit in shared practice. ([2017] 2018, 25)

Our challenges are manifold. The limits and perils of the human attempt to engineer nature have led to the earth’s immune response kicking in – just as within the microcosm of our own bodies, we are boiled by fevers and wracked with chills as signs of our defences, rather than our disease. We need new platforms for dialogue that mobilise critical and collective thinking toward complicated problems. Live Interactive Documentary is one such venue.

Proposing one answer

Live Interactive Documentary consists of two parts: film and discussion. Part I is the performance; a documentary unfolds as clips are projected on screen, narrated in person with a live musical component. The historian-narrator steps out from the screen to deliver the film’s argument in a spotlight on stage. The composer and editor also materialise, mixing the audio and visuals in a shared space with the audience. Part I is a deconstructed film with narrative-based documentary clips that feature interviews and unfurling linear plots interspersed with narration. This section lasts approximately 50 min; then, the lights rise slightly. Part II, pictured in Figure 1, features remix and remediation, the innovation of the Live ‘Interactive’ Documentary, in which spectators become participants, encouraged to speak. It is here that we pay homage to Hayden White’s ideas in the ‘Burden of History’ and Alun Munslow’s prescription to ‘replace “old” histories with experimental and expressionist histories’ (2010, ix) and for ‘acts of narrative writing, image creation and performance’ that are ’multi-skeptical, multi-ironic, and deeply self-conscious’ (2010, 6). Guided by the specific interventions of the audience, the historian/narrator, editor/live video mixer and musician/audio mixer listen and respond by playing music and non-narrative visuals, speaking through microphones, playing footage and interviews not featured in Part I. In this way, the content is opened to the audience. We invite them into the narrativisation of history. For the next 25 min, the narrator, composer and editor listen and respond in the moment, verbally and through interactive software that allows for the instantaneous selection of video, archival images and interviews, all at the editor’s fingertips.

Figure 1. Robert Nelson looks to audience member making a comment, as Kim Nelson selects video imagery from a trove of video files on her laptop, in Part II of a Live Interactive Documentary. Photo credit: Svjetlana Oppen.

Discussion is accompanied by expressive or poetic visuals, selected, played and processed in real time by the editor using interactive software. A core aspect of Part II is the use of silent visuals and avant-garde aesthetics that create a truly unique and present tense pairing with audience commentary. The advent of VJ (Video Jockey) software, such as Troikatronix’s Isadora and Cycling ‘74’s Max, designed for applications ranging from installation art to the atmospherics of dance clubs and alt-rock shows, enables instantaneous editing, compositing of video and layering of sound. They allow for instantaneous remix: real-time manipulation and layering of images, including adjustments to speed, colour, saturation, pixilation, et cetera, creating a unique experience upon the backdrop of history that intermixes expressive non-linear imagery atop narrative. The documentary editor becomes a VJ, working with spectators in a shared space and experience. These tools enable discussion after the film to be folded into the show itself, creating a live edit that weaves unfolding conversations into recorded sound and image. The audience is embedded in the production and performance process, witness to the deployment of music and visuals to deliver an argument.

The insertion of expressionistic imagery into the flow of landscapes, cityscapes, archival images, and documentary footage creates a non-narrative aesthetic that evokes the artist’s hand in a non-verbal cinematic language, as exemplifed by a still from the show in Figure 2. The intention is to engage the techniques of ‘avant-garde layering reflection and perspective’ to counter the ‘over-assured (often mono-) causality that emerges from linear, narrative organisation’ (Skoller 2005, xxxv). Part I merges the strategies of voice-over and documentary storytelling with the poetic visuals and group discussion of Part II, inviting them to comingle and hold each other in check.

Figure 2. Screenshot of live mixed visuals, layering archival and landscape imagery with adjustments to saturation and contrast. Image: Kim Nelson.

Live Interactive Documentary seizes new media opportunities by repurposing software tools intended for performance art. The totalising grip of the Internet and streaming, on the one hand, and the collapse of cinema screenings of independent, low-budget filmmaking, on the other, calls for a re-engagement of the local, retaking the foreclosed grounds of the movie theatre, inviting real people to emerge whole from their refracted online identities. It is inspired by the earliest days of cinema before commercial interest had wrung audience-participants from the programme in favour of a more passive model of spectator absorption.

The practice is constructed upon the understanding that evidence and expertise matter, and the aims of history and knowledge are strengthened by open exchange with others. It allows the core meanings of a given history to be challenged and reappraised publicly and in real time. Engaging theories through practice, this form encourages embodied, face-to-face interactions that value what ‘i-doc’ (interactive documentary) theorist Judith Aston calls ‘physical co-presence’ (2017, 234). I offer this method in response to the challenges of social media and the ‘unbearable lightness’ of streaming. Live Interactive Documentary is a mode of history that layers time, combining the enchantment and ephemerality of oral histories, from before the invention of the recorded word, enacted by the digital firelight of the cinema screen.

The form reengages our earliest approaches to cinema, which Tom Gunning dubs the ‘cinema of attractions’ model, when the projection of film met with vaudeville and theatre (1986, 2006, 2008). In the early years of the twentieth century, engaging the new medium of film through understandings of the old led to mixed presentations of moving images alongside live performances, often including musical accompaniment and a master of ceremonies on stage addressing the crowd. As exemplified by filmmaker and live documentary pioneer Sam Green, contemporary practices replace cumbersome projectors and film spools with lighter, mobile, responsive software and hardware. The set-up for live documentaries includes (i) a dominating screen; (ii) the co-presence of the film’s author or co-author presenting before the audience; and (iii) narration of the real. Live Interactive Documentary adds the spontaneous and open exchange of ideas between filmmakers and audience.

Call to gather

In his 2004 essay, ‘Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’, Latour cautions that the ‘tools of critique’ that he had himself championed were being exploited by nefarious politicians and spin doctors to the detriment of humanity. His particular concern was that postmodern scepticism was being boiled down and deployed to deny the impacts of human behaviour on our climate. Latour references a Republican communiqué, authored by wizard of the linguistic dark arts Frank Luntz, in which he states that a final strategy to deny the impacts of climate change is to invoke the ‘lack of scientific certainty’ (226; emphasis in original). In a world where the notion of truth is contested, action can be deferred indefinitely. Latour warns that morally bankrupt and craven political actors are using the philosophy of science’s argument that incontrovertible ‘truth’ does not exist to bolster industries and actions that threaten our very existence. This cooption led Latour to intellectual soul-searching for the antidote to this hall of mirrors approach to truth. He suggests that the answer lies in turning from critique and its constant focus on poking holes, questioning and tearing down, to one that builds a consensus upon judgements based on the preponderance of evidence (232). He proposes dialogue, discussion and ‘the crowd’, as the answer, claiming ‘[i]t is entirely wrong to divide the collective, as I call it, into the sturdy matters of fact, on the one hand, and the dispensable crowds, on the other’ and ‘the direction of critique’ should not be ‘away but toward the gathering’ (246). Live Interactive Documentary is animated and fueled by assembly.

The Internet has become a system configured toward profit, manipulation and consumption. We are enmeshed in a mass misdirection, from pressing concerns to petty squabbles that drive up screen time as shopping carts blink in the corner of our peripheral vision. We do not want to know that our lifestyles are jeopardising our lives. The Anthropocene demands that we as a species, so mighty as to have good reason to name a geological epoch after ourselves, deploy our strengths, our inventiveness, our preternatural social skills and our storytelling, to deal with a challenge that demands a level of cooperation beyond any previous scale. It is a matter of international urgency and ‘intergenerational ethics’ (Chakrabarty 2018, 222). We must do this through brain circuitry and modes of ‘socialisation’ that we developed as ‘small bands of humans that fought one another’, a trait still part of ‘our evolutionary makeup’ (Chakrabarty 2018, 213). We did not evolve to collaborate as a tribe of billions or to communicate with that tribe through screens. According to developmental psychologist Michael Tomasello, culture ‘makes human cognition unique’, as it is ‘uniquely cooperative’ ([2014] 2018, ix). He explains that ‘early humans were at some point forced by ecological circumstances into more cooperative lifeways … toward figuring out ways to coordinate with others to achieve joint goals or even collective goals. And this changed everything’ ([2014] 2018, 4–5). We are again forced by ecological circumstances, this time of our own making. We must use the tools we have to respond, a form of cognition comprising ‘individual improvisation enmeshed in a sociocultural matrix’ ([2014] 2018, 1). Live Interactive Documentary responds to Latour’s assessment of one aspect of the climate challenge, our isolation and its concomitant relationship to degrading the concept of truth. The practice is located within the traditional ‘history disciplines focused on the hermeneutic world of the human’ rather than non-human and geological spans of life and time (Parikka 2014, 24). Partisanship, polarisation and the distraction of making enemies of each other, rather than uniting to tackle this mutual threat to survival, is by far our most urgent concern. It is crucial in the Age of the Anthropocene to deal with its agent and culprit to encourage a sense of shared stakes and values.

The pilot

The Live Interactive Documentary is a form that accommodates documentaries with deep stores of historical data that filmmakers cut from the flow of traditional documentaries to keep the pace moving in a primarily imagistic and emotional register. The concept was piloted by ‘The Live Doc Project’ on stages at the University of Windsor and the Windsor International Film Festival in 2016, the Film & History Conference in Milwaukee and the Pluralities Conference at San Francisco State University in 2017. In 2016–2017, historian Robert Nelson, composer and multimedia artist Brent Lee, technical director Svjetlana Oppen and I comprised the Live Doc Project team. I served as director and editor.¹ The first film we used to pilot the model was a live version of our documentary 130 Year Road Trip, which I directed and edited with a score by Brent Lee, hosted by Robert Nelson. I reassembled 30 min of clips from the 80-min feature-length documentary for Part I and drafted a template for the narration to be developed and delivered live by Robert Nelson.

130 Year Road Trip is drawn from Robert Nelson’s historical research (2010, 2015, 2019). It is an international road trip through the prairies of Canada, then on to Berlin and Poland, with Nelson as guide, exploring his study of the connections between the colonisation of North American Indigenous land in the nineteenth century and German settler colonialism in their eastern provinces, as well as later actions taken against Poles and Jews from the 1880s through to the Second World War. It retraces the journey of German agrarian economist Max Sering through the United States and Canada, on a pivotal trip that would affect the late nineteenth-century shift toward ‘inner colonisation’ in Germany, a sociopolitical movement aimed at tamping down German migration to North America and encouraging German farmers to settle in the Polish populated lands of Germany’s eastern frontier. The politics of settlement and land use are central to the story, but the relevance of this pilot for history in the age of the Digital Anthropocene is not the subject matter but Live Interactive Documentary as a forum for dialogue and reciprocal exchange.

In Part I, Robert Nelson narrated from a podium or music stand from the ‘stage’. In one instance, the performance took place on a traditional raised stage above the audience, while other times we performed in a black box space on the same level as the spectators. Composer-musician Brent Lee and I sat at a table to one side of the stage. I projected slides mapped out to include stills, silent video and sync sound video using Apple’s Keynote software. Lee played music that he scored and created for the film from his laptop. Part I is a classic live documentary, a rare form of expanded cinema that fuses lecture and cinema with archival photos and documentary moving images. It is a performance that is preplanned and choreographed through several weeks of rehearsals to fine-tune the interplay of narration, music and imagery. A dance that the team members had to learn, Nelson’s narration was a baton continually handed off to Lee and me as a cue for audio and visuals. Nelson spoke over images and silent video or stood by as sync sound video played. Typically, he shared the space with the screen, standing under a footlight beside it, while at times he stood in the projector’s stream, casting his shadow over the image, visually and metaphorically evoking his role as interpreter of archival material.

In preparation for Part II, the open and interactive section of the show, I preselected more than 40 video clips without sound and 20 interview clips, ranging from 1 to 3 min, that could be immediately accessed and projected. During Part II, a production team member ran a microphone to the audience. Well-meaning friends apprised of the idea urged us to plant audience members with preplanned questions to avoid awkward silences. We refused on principle to do this, and in all cases, despite the novelty of this approach, there was active participation from audience members and no shortage of comments and questions. In the show’s opening, the narrator explains the form to the audience, encouraging them to ready comments as they witness Part I in preparation for the dialogue and open exchange of Part II. In all pilot shows, audience members joined in, and there was no shortage of volunteers to participate until the narrator closed the show after 25–35 minof Q&A, as planned. Experiments to date have involved active audience engagement and a string of participants ready to take part. Although spectator-participants are prompted to ask or speak to anything, for example, about the film production or the staging process, questions and observations were directed primarily at the historian-narrator, asking him to go deeper into certain aspects of the narrative. Lee and I listened to the audience commentary and responded through our choice of imagery and sound. Lee focused on communicating through music, while I often spoke up in response to questions about the history, explaining aspects of the production, and choices made in the edit that affected the narrative.

In three of the four pilots, several audience members pushed back on points to which Nelson had tethered his argument. In addition, during each show, one question or comment allowed me to select an interview clip not presented in Part I. These were some of the most rewarding moments when an audience member, in effect, joined the team, slipping into the role of historian and film editor, prompting the selection of new testimony. This highlights the buried foundations of histories and films, the evidence collected but not cited, usually for structural simplicity, tightness and coherence. For example, in a show at the Windsor International Film Festival in 2016, an audience member asked why the only academics we had spoken to for the film were German or Canadian, prompting me to play a clip we recorded with a Polish historian in Poznan speaking to the legacy of German inner-colonisation in Poland that had been cut from the initial documentary.

Figure 3. Audience member commentary in Part II. Photo Credit: Svjetlana Oppen.

For most documentaries, as much as 90% of the footage is withheld from the edit and left on the proverbial ‘cutting room floor’. In Live Interactive Documentary, excluded material finds a place in the story when spurred by a spectator, rather than becoming part of an unwieldy archive of information, or an overly curated multiple-choice option: do you want to see behind door one, two or three? In this model, algorithms enable the team to choose clips in the moment to correspond to an audience member’s comment or question, as depicted in Figure 3, rather than supporting the constrained, anticipatory interactivity of pre-programmed options set in the past. Thus, the software caters to the infinite possibilities of the meeting of minds, rather than upselling pre-ordained, limited, pre-set menu as ‘interactivity’. Here, we aspire to what Judith Aston cites as the possibility for a live performance documentary to give audiences a ‘central role’ that prioritises ‘collectivism’ over ‘clicktivism’ (2017, 222). We perform and co-create a moving (image) history while ‘editing out’ the tedium of the work in the historian’s study and the filmmaker’s editing suite.

Meanwhile, we avoid the clicking, swiping or waving that often passes for ‘participation’. The frisson of live cinema imbues history with affective, non-verbal reflexivity that serves historiophoty (or moving image historiography) well. Like watching a figure skater in mid-air, the audience is alert to the various ways we may land. Live performance transforms interactive media from something done alone within a web of pre-programmed binaries to a real, live, social space that prioritises mutual respect between all participants, where comments and reactions are open and generative.

In each show, Part I varied slightly, as the team would tweak the visual presentation after each performance, and the narration and visuals included nods to relevant details about where we were performing. For example, in our show in San Francisco in 2017, the narration detailed Sering’s time in that city and its surrounding farms and vineyards. Part II always varied significantly. While the same clips were accessible for me to choose from each time, notwithstanding a few additions made after each show, unique comments and questions were posed by audience members in the room, prompting new discussions accompanied by the selection of distinct videos and music, and the creation of a particular conversation with a specific focus. It was not a different story by virtue of ‘alternative facts’. The experience seems so novel that an audience member who attended in 2016 and again in 2017 explained to other spectator-participants after the show that we had radically altered the entire performance when only Part II had changed.

Part II enacts what Jeffery Skoller calls the ‘sideshadowing’ of history, which he describes as demonstrating ‘multiple interpretations and awareness of the indeterminacy of relations’ between ‘the historicity of events’ (2005, 42). It aims to draw attention to ‘our perception of the movement of time in relation to concepts of inevitability and causality’ (Skoller 2005, 42). The audience has the freedom to speak to anything they like. The trajectory of Part II is not preplanned. The intention of using poetic, non-narrative imagery in this section allows meaning between image and audience utterance to be a live, spontaneous combination. Opening history to audiences invites possibilities to move beyond the interests of historians or filmmakers, the commentary of interviewees or the testimonies contained in the archives, into what Sarah Noble Frank describes as ‘the imaginative discourse of the as if’. Feminist scholars

have proposed to write histories as if, for example, one were ‘listening’ to the voices of neglected historical rhetors … exploring and mapping undiscovered territories … or as if one were relocating marginalised rhetors to the main floor in the house of rhetoric. (2017, 191; 192)

Perspectives not supplied in Part I may be furnished in Part II. Live Interactive Documentary invites audience members to encounter as a performance the creative force of historicisation via lecture and film editing. This involves the historian and film editor’s power to select what they include and exclude, making meaning through ordering and montage and the layering of argument upon evidence. In Part I, the selection of sources to construct an argument through a historian’s perspective is on display. In Part II, the narrative lies open to interrogation by the audience. Paul Ricœur notes that a historian does not deduce but instead judges. When historians ‘explain’, they ‘defend their conclusions against adversaries who would refer to another set of factors to uphold their thesis’ (1983, 125). These very acts of judgement, counterargument and defence are enacted as the hallmark of every performance.

Opposing post-truth

In response to the growth of populism, tribalism and nationalism in Britain, India and the United States, Salman Rushdie writes in despair about our relationship to truth and history and the need for ‘writers, thinkers, journalists, philosophers’ to ‘rebuild’ the public’s belief in ‘reality and their faith in the truth. And to do it with new language, from the ground up’ (2018). Referencing his background in history as a student at Cambridge, Rushdie explains his distress over our culture of ‘state lying’ and ‘fake news’. He notes the difficulty of balancing a reality that is understood as ‘multidimensional, fractured and fragmented’ on the one hand while affirming that something is real or true on the other. It is a complex equilibrium to maintain: to acknowledge the processes of historicising and the multiplicity of truth without abandoning the notion of truth entirely. While some see language and narrative as a problem, others see them as a strength. Rushdie says that the answer to this current crisis of politics and truth is to rehabilitate people’s faith in ‘argument from factual evidence’ (2018). The Climate Crisis makes faith in evidence a matter of survival. In order to take on the environmental threat of this age, three conditions are necessary – we must reinstate: evidentiary arguments, a brokered trust of expertise and acceptance of a shared reality. Live Interactive Documentary responds to these colliding concerns and seeks to meld expertise with audience exchange while enacting history as a process. A hybrid of film, lecture and town hall, it is replicable and collaborative. I call it a ‘performance dissemination’ model of history. It opposes the free-for-all of facts elevated by algorithms bent on cortisol-soaked virality and the multiple realities that ensnare us in the worldwide web.

Jussi Parikka sums up the full spectre of the challenge of our era in coining the term ‘The Anthrobscene’ (2014, italics mine). An ingenious, evocative neologism, it references perpetrator and act, as well as the earth as the ‘scene’ of this performance of an international, intergenerational, interspecies crime. Parikka reminds us that the earth is alive and of the full cycle of the destruction of the digital, from the thievery of mineral mining to the toxic myth that when we are done with our digital devices, we can put them back into the ground from whence they came (6, 15, 29). This idea may also be pushed to conjure the robbing of time from ourselves, the isolation and distraction of synthetic screen-based experiences. It may only be our digital social interactions, measured in characters, that are disposable, an exchange of ecological deep time for cheap time – a twist on Jason Moore’s notion of extractive approaches to the natural environment as ‘Cheap Nature’ (2015). Live Interactive Documentary offers a space to assemble, take stock and discuss time in a way that extends synchronic concerns of the now to the diachronic analysis of human behaviour over generations. Dipesh Chakrabarty draws attention to our pattern of habitual time loops. He points out ‘policy specialists think in terms of years, decades, at most centuries while politicians in democracies think in terms of election cycles’ as humans we naturally focus on ‘the next 5, 50, or 100 years’, while the challenge of climate change is ‘shot through with problems of human and inhuman or non-human scales of time’ (2018, 197). Similarly, Latour addresses our blinkered and present-focused assumptions about time, noting ‘[s]ome of my genes are 500 million years old, others 3 million, others 100,000 years, and my habits range in age from a few days to several thousand years period’ (1991, 76).

The Anthropocene was created in the industrial age that, for better and worse, brought people together. Now we are pushed apart by the electronic and the digital. We steal from the earth, as Parikka suggests, and its inhabitants, present and potential. The laying down of our individual screens, barriers that screen us off from each other, toward different forms of gathering seems a necessary first response. It is not the knowledge of our challenges that we lack as much as forums for communication and open, public, civil exchange. Our core issue is not one of the contents but form. Live Interactive Documentary responds to the collapse of truth and dialogue unleashed when postmodernism corroded into post-truth as it was popularised via social media and cable news.

Algorithms are too often commandeered as agents of persuasion and surveillance. They raid our data, consigning us to self-expression as consumers, rewarding rage. We are set upon for all manner of hunting, tracking and coercion so that our insatiable hedonistic and material desires can be tallied and sold back to us. The human species did not evolve to parse and spread ideas as billions of individual nodes in the matrix. We adapted to gather and to look each other in the eye.

Sharing the burden

In part, historiographical aims of this form respond to Hayden White, who marked his transition from historian of twelfth-century Italy to philosopher of history with his publication of ‘The Burden of History’ in 1966. In this lively takedown of historians, White accuses them of creating ‘bad art’ in the quixotic quest to ‘do science’ and in the process producing bad science as well (127). He notes that when historians deign to refer to themselves as artists, they are mired in the mindset of the deep past, working in the conservative form of the nineteenth-century novel. He explains that because academic history was professionalised in the 1800s, history fossilised into a framework that combined ‘romantic art’ with ‘positivistic science’ (126). White argues that historians must instead look to contemporary art practices for formal rejuvenation, taking cues from ‘action painters, kinetic sculptors, existential novelists, imagist poets, or nouvelle vague cinematographers’ (129; emphasis in the original).

Forty years later, Robert Rosenstone writes that ‘The Burden of History’ is still the manifesto we need. In reasserting the essay, he calls upon historians to be ‘brave enough to experiment with language, image, sound, colour and any other elements of presentation’ (2007, 13). As testimony to Rosenstone’s grasp of the future of history, he prophesizes the seismic Broadway juggernaut Hamilton when he praises multimedia histories and their potential to make history matter to the larger culture, stating: ‘we must paint, write, film, dance, hip hop and rap the past in a way that makes the tragedies and joys of the human voyage meaningful to the contemporary world’ (2007, 17).

Having found inspiration in White’s essay, I was excited to read Rosenstone’s endorsement of it as an essential and enduring call-to-action for twenty-first-century historians. I conceived the Live Interactive Documentary in response to White’s paradigm-shifting appeal by combining the history lecture and film festival screening with multimedia performance art. I take up White’s call for multidisciplinary approaches while seeking to temper his assertion that professional historians are mistaken when they see themselves as uniquely qualified to construct history. He downplays the merits of the travails of the professional historian as he describes them: learning multiple languages and obtaining a PhD (1966, 124). While opening history up to a broader range of approaches, like many who propose new and radical ideas, White goes too far in disparaging the value of a historian’s expertise. He does not believe that historians lay a particular claim to history but work in a field to which many other disciplines may contribute. There is something special about the professionalisation of history that sparked new methods and incentives for historical texts from their prior role as vehicles of political persuasion, collective identity formation and entertainment. History is essential to tackling the present and future dangers posed by human action and inaction by analysing empirical evidence about our intentions and outcomes over time. Training in historiographical theories and methods, informing a critical approach to the archive, sources, memory and testimony, is crucial to the historical project. As in all academic disciplines, a subset views civic, popular or public dissemination of research with a great deal of smugness, engaging in strict border keeping, while another group of scholars views it as a crucial component of the network and ecosystem of scholarly work. Among the latter group, many are creative, pragmatic and flexible enough to collaborate with artists to merge methodologies for new audiences. The Live Interactive Documentary is forged between historians, artists, performers and spectator-participants.

The form is also my methodological response to Hayden White’s proposal of the concept historiophoty, which he suggested in 1988, as a necessary moving image corollary to historiography. The method builds upon the existing model of the live documentary, crossed with inspiration from theories of history, film and media studies. It is conceived as a remedy to social changes of viewership in the age of the Internet and ‘web 2.0’, dubbed interactive, social and participatory, which I argue are only quasi-interactive, quasi-social and quasi-participatory. In response, I devised a form of cinema that includes intellectual and embodied audience engagement. Live Interactive Documentary merges archive and interactivity, expert and community, in an open exchange. It stages the negotiation of historical arguments from evidence and offers an opportunity for spectator-participants to experience and question the choices that shape a historical narrative in real time. They are encouraged to contribute meaningfully by interjecting verbally. This is intentional. The hope is to subvert app and Internet-based, person-to-screen interactivity as it has been marketed to us, whereupon ‘[t]he viewers desire for agency is addressed but is channelled through a narrow set of interventions’ producing a kind of engagement that blocks ‘unruly, active, critical’ responses, shifting the focus from theatrical forms of engagement understood as ‘embodied, interactive, [with a] social dynamic’ to ‘the machine itself’ (Skoller 2005, 183–185).

Tools of digital interactivity allow us to revisit the ‘Third Cinema’ model of engagement described by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino in 1970, in which ‘the participant comrade’ assembles in a free space, to watch a film as ‘a detonator or pretext’ to a discussion (9). Solanas and Getino proposed this cinema in opposition to the ‘perfect’ Hollywood aesthetic with its curated images and performances, its neat, closed narrative structure, in favour of something more open and ‘unfinished’, a ‘practice’, that ‘democratises’ (7–8). Recorded images serve to prompt discussion. Solanas and Getino described their goal and process in three steps that equate to Live Interactive Documentary’s two-part structure:

The first step in the process of knowledge is the first contact with the things of the outside world, the stage of sensations [in a film, the living fresco of image and sound]. The second step is the synthesising of the data provided by the sensations; their ordering and elaboration; the stage of concepts, judgements, opinions, and deductions [in the film, the announcer, the reportings, the didactics, or the narrator who leads the projection act]. And then comes the third stage, that of knowledge. The active role of knowledge is expressed not only in the active leap from sensory to rational knowledge but, and what is even more important, in the leap from rational knowledge to revolutionary practice. (Solanas and Getino 1970, 10; emphasis in the original)

Both models present the ordering of the chaos of the past into a documentary text with a live component (Part I/Solanas and Getino’s steps one to two), which serves as a shared focus for discussion (Part II/Solanas and Getino’s stage three).

The structure of Live Interactive Documentary combines what Patricia Zimmermann and Dale Hudson call ‘push’ and ‘pull’ media. Part I employs a push media approach that is ‘evidence-based’, straddling cinematic and theatrical modes. The audience watches and listens. Hudson and Zimmermann cite ‘celluloid, video, even visual display of GUI [the graphical user interface]’, as examples of push media. While Part II exemplifies ‘act-based “pull” media’, which they describe as ‘user acts, hyperlinks, algorithms’ (2015, 101). Through push tactics ‘the role of the maker can be one of preparing data for multiple readings rather than expressing individual opinions; in other words, practice can become radically collaborative’ (2015, 101). Rather than more evidence or new content, the threat of the Anthropocene demands new forms of engagement that play to human strengths: our ability to work together and reach consensus about action on shared problems. We need platforms that encourage and activate our sense of solidarity, cohesion and community that invite wider communities into a conversation about evidence and facts.

Agreeing on objective truths

To address the trial by fire that is the Anthropocene, we must be in rough agreement about core concepts of scientific truth and empirical reality. In Narrative Logic, Frank Ankersmit recommends shunning the word truth for being more trouble than it is worth (1983, 77). Peter Novick wades into this debate suggesting that instead of speaking of truth, we should use the term historical objectivity, cautioning that it should not be interpreted in binary terms such as true/false or right/wrong (1988, 6). This skittishness about truth comes from essentialism and holding the concept to the standard of the divine (Collingwood 1956, 42). When Rudy Giuliani said ‘truth isn’t truth’ in an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press (19 August 2018), his legalistic and rhetorical spin leaned on essential notions of truth and Luntz’s climate change denying machinations. The result is a sleight of hand that encourages us to dither and not believe our eyes as glaciers collapse and homes burn. It assumes that there could be some value, some profit, some ‘thing’ more important than survival. In the material world and online, the breakdown of public space leads to statements of fact based on wishful thinking or the self-fulfilling prophecy of the faux citation ‘people are saying’, judged as credible and as worthy of repetition as critical analysis based on investigation. Part II of the Live Interactive Documentary stages the collective negotiation of evidence and meaning that is the root of social cohesion and objectivity. As Tomasello writes, ‘although many animal species can cognitively represent situations and entities at least somewhat abstractly, only humans can conceptualise one and the same situation or entity under differing, even conflicting, social perspectives (leading ultimately to a sense of “objectivity”)’ (2014, 4). We require a shared reality moulded through consideration of a range of perspectives, and yet, the platforms to hear and voice multiple points of view are ever vanishing. Live Interactive Documentary is a communal performance that is tangentially about the topic at hand but, on a deeper level, is about the process of constructing narrative meaning of our past that models respect for plural viewpoints.

Grappling truth and objectivity engages the notion of bias. David Lowenthal deems bias both an unavoidable, necessary element of the creative force of history and a source of its limitations. Furthermore, he notes the common intermixing of ‘hindsight’ and ‘anachronism’ incumbent in history is inescapable, given that the historian is privy to ‘the future of the past’ that he or she presents (1986, 216–218). As Ricœur, White and others explain, this is not a problem, as the point of history is the reinterpretation of events from the past through the lens of the present. Acknowledgement of present-day perspectives is not a contaminant to history but something necessary to read into it.

Formal and theoretical inspirations

Historiography

Live Interactive Documentary interprets historians and philosophers’ theories as artistic directives in the most literal way possible. E.H. Carr’s What is History? outlines four core concepts for understanding history:

1. The historian makes history

2. One must gauge and be aware of the historian’s bias

3. Know the different values of the past

4. History is shaped in the present (1961, 22–23)

Live Interactive Documentary enacts Carr’s concepts 1, 2 and 4 (while 3 is a matter of content that is ideally brought independently into each project). By manifesting the historian as ringmaster on stage, we spotlight the historian’s channelling perspective via ‘one synoptic viewpoint’ (Berkhofer 1997, 190). In a similar vein, this hybrid exhibition mode ensures that the ‘historian’s actual reflection on the moment of representation’ is embedded within the text itself (Ricœur 2006, 223). It speaks to Natalie Zemon Davis’ request that historical films have more ‘complex and dramatic indications of their truth status’, signalling other ways to interpret the story (987, 459, 476). Part II responds to historian Marnie Hughes-Warrington’s advocacy for histories that invite dialogue and discussion in a fulsome way, rather than engaging in ‘defensive acts of boundary drawing’ (2007, 190). Audience members become what Michel de Certeau calls ‘subject-producers’, whom he conceives as ‘interlocutors’, and important ‘partners in a shared discourse’ (1986, 217). He argues that historians ought to pay attention to ‘the subject-object relationship’ whereby a multiplicity of authors create ‘a hierarchy of knowledges’ that enable a differentiated and full discourse (1986, 217).

The staging of Live Interactive Documentary is designed to address, perform and foreground these concerns. In Part II, as the historian invites the spectator-participants to prod the presentation of Part I, some seize the opportunity to critique the historian’s focus or inferences, and this becomes a layered performance and sport. In the parlance of soccer or hockey, the team on stage acts as part goaltender, part referee, deflecting some shots while acknowledging other objections and incorporating those ideas into the narrative, allowing them into the net. The audience members are players and referees, and everyone keeps the score. It is essential to the spirit of this model that the historian welcomes alternative interpretations and historical critiques while redirecting conspiracy theories or unreflective views of history. In this way, polyvocality is encouraged. The setting aids the quality of this reflexive dialogue, disincentivising the clickbait system of reward that pervades the web, encouraging outlandish comments by avatars and anonymous trolls. Instead, embodied identities recognised within a real, localised community deliver opinions. Whether they elect to join in or not, audience members learn from subjects brought up for discussion by their fellows. They are given insight into what others are interested in, what viewpoints they brought with them and what they intend to take away. We all learn from the questions, not only the proposed answers. This model exhibits the past is ‘constituted’ via a ‘masquerade of narrative structures’ (Ankersmit 1983, 86; 88; emphasis in the original).

Film and media theory

Participation, in the retro sense of being around other people and taking part, of doing something within an analogue space, is a core mandate of this practice. Patricia Zimmermann’s manifesto-like appeal in ‘Public Domains: Engaging Iraq through Experimental Documentary Digitalities’ inspires the Live Interactive Documentary to look to convergence and remix culture. One of the most exciting, exuberant and inventive of new media scholars, Zimmermann draws on the work of Hayden White, Robert Berkhofer and Frank Ankersmit, among others, to express a vision of historiophoty that values plurality and collaboration, which she pairs with innovative proposals for our digital age. She calls for a repurposing of the fallout from ‘dominant commercialised practices of digitality’ that ‘disembody, isolate, disconnect and desensivitize’ by initiating real-world participatory experiences and collaborative works made with rather than for audiences. Zimmermann enthusiastically endorses ‘the layered histories of live multimedia performance stressing the socio-political importance of people gathering for ‘total immersive experiences’ and ‘embodied, sensual interaction’ (2008, 77). This performance dissemination practice also draws from her more recent concept of ‘Open Space New Media’, expounded in a book she co-authored with Helen de Michel that supports ‘horizontal, collaborative, and flexible arrangements’ and ‘dialogic engagements’ (2018, 6, 8, 12). Like ‘Open Space New Media’, Live Interactive Documentaries are ‘not designed to produce a fixed project but function in a continual state of process’ (Zimmermann and De Michel 2018, 12).

Jeffrey Skoller notes that changes in how we watch are even more profound than what we watch or how it is made (2005, 168). In replacing ‘group-oriented theatrical viewing’, as depicted in the Live Interactive Documentary in Figure 4, for the convenience of home viewing, much of which we do alone, we lose a ‘deeply social practice’ and the ‘energy produced by cinephilia’ (Skoller 2005, 168–169). We also abandon the labour, planning and organising that goes into appearing at a set time and place for a film as an event (Elsaesser 2013, 33; Skoller 2005, 169). Although this way of encountering cinema can be replete with frictions, rude audience members and traffic congestion, the effort involved in attendance elevates our depth of engagement during a film encounter, further cementing the experience into our memories.

Formal antecedents

The concept of Gesamtkunstwerk from the nineteenth century and Epic Theatre from the twentieth inform this practice in the twenty-first. Philosopher Karl Friedrich Trahndorff is credited with the earliest use of the term ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ in his ‘Aesthetics or Doctrine of Worldview and Art’ from 1827 (Neumann 1956, 192–193). Richard Wagner popularised the term. Writing feverishly while in exile in Zurich after his involvement and support of the Dresden Revolt of 1849 (Wagner [1895] 1993, ix), Wagner wrote three influential theoretical essays: ‘Art and Revolution’, ‘Opera and Drama’ and ‘The Artwork of the Future’. Initially distributed in 1849, ‘The Artwork of the Future’ explores the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk or the ‘total artwork’.

Throughout his essay, Wagner analyses several discrete forms of art, including architecture, sculpture and painting. He argues that science uncovers truth and understanding that is, in turn, activated by art; and further that ‘[t]he true endeavour of Art is therefore all embracing’ (Wagner [1895] 1993, 71, 183). For Wagner, the artwork of the future combines all the arts into a unified whole. It builds upon the foundation of drama that he considers the supreme art, given its inherently multidisciplinary nature. He describes the art of his time in a way that modern-day readers can relate to, for its ‘complete inability to affect’ public life and having become ‘the private property of an artist-caste’ (183). His tone portends critiques urging cinema to experiment and adapt, made more than a century later, such as those by Gene Youngblood in Expanded Cinema (1970) and Guy Debord in Society of the Spectacle (1967), that would become sources of inspiration for new and expanded cinema practices to which Live Interactive Documentary is indebted. In many ways, Wagner describes a platform similar to The Third Cinema a century later. Solanas and Getino advocate for a form that

incorporated into the showing various elements (a stage production) to reinforce the themes of the films … recorded music or poems, sculpture and paintings, posters, a program director who chaired the debate and presented the film and the comrades who were speaking, a glass of wine, a few mates. (1970, 9)

Wagner rhetorically asks who will be the ‘Artist of the Future’ and answers: ‘The poet? The performer? The musician? The plastician [makers of paintings, sculpture, architecture, set designers]? – Let us say in one word: the Folk’ (204–205; emphasis in the original). He calls defining the term Folk as the ‘weightiest of questions’ and suggests that the term originally meant ‘all the units which made of the total of a commonality’ (74; emphasis in the original). Wagner defines ‘Folk’ as those ‘who feel a common and collective Want’, stretching across education and class (75, 209; emphasis in the original).² From here, we can retrofit Wagner’s idea of ‘total art’ and Solanas and Getino’s Third Cinema to our age, in which many consider the Anthropocene to be a crisis of [luxury] capitalism (Moore 2015, 2017; Moore and Parenti 2016) and plunder (Parikka 2014), compounded by a lost sense of collective ‘want’ (Latour [2017] 2018, 1–2).

Live Interactive Documentary puts Wagner’s metaphor into a verbatim practice in which ‘the spectator transplants himself upon the stage, by means of all his visual and aural faculties, while the performer becomes an artist only by complete absorption into the public’ (185). We spread the area of the stage to the back rows of the house, as we prompt spectators to stand up, gesture and speak, to have their voices met by those on stage, the music played and the images projected.

Although Live Interactive Documentary may be an amalgam in the manner of the total artwork, it also breaks film up into its constituent parts, separating narrative voice from imagery and music into a suspension rather than a solution. In this way, it is akin to the aims of Epic Theatre in which Bertolt Brecht aspires to appeal to ‘the spectator’s reason’ through a ‘radical separation of the elements’ ([1964] 1992, 23, 37; emphasis in the original). Brecht criticises the Gesamtkunstwerk as a ‘process of fusion’ that traps the spectator, who is in turn ‘thrown into the melting pot and becomes a passive (suffering) part of the total work of art’ (37; parentheses in the original). Live Interactive Documentary can be understood either way, depending upon how one looks at it: blending the arts of film, lecture, town hall and performance into one, while also revealing and splaying out the divisible elements that films combine within each frame: the visuals, sounds and the authorial voice (whether through literal voice-over or narrative structure), disaggregating the assembly of moving (image) histories in a way that can be apprehended experientially. At its most ambitious, Live Interactive Documentary aspires to the action and change espoused by Brecht, Solanas and Getino. At its most cautious, it explores historical truth by creating a polyphonic discursive space that critically engages audiences in historisation as process and performance.

Figure 4. Audience in Part I. Photo Credit: Svjetlana Oppen.

Once more with feeling

In his study, ‘The Socio-Psychological Determinants of Climate Change Risk Perceptions: Towards a Comprehensive Model’, Sander van der Linden explores the psychology of climate change acceptance and denial and finds that ‘when dealing with conflicting informational cues, people tend to rely more heavily on affective and experiential processing’ (2015, 122). We are more adept at absorbing information with emotional resonances than rational ones. Live Interactive Documentary taps the emotional lure of film, the precise aspect of this medium that was so often the site of consternation for historians since the 1960s (Treacey 2016). Ironically, this characteristic is a significant source of the strength of moving images as a vehicle for meaningful engagement. Moving images mesmerise, kinetically evoking the past, moving us in a visceral way. I propose the term moving histories to refer to history in moving images as a material descriptor and to signify their ability to move audiences in terms of their prior interpretations and even more for their powers on the body. The appeal of moving images to our senses is central to why moving histories matter as histories. Alison Landsberg explains the way histories in moving images produce an ‘affective’, ‘complicated’ and ‘contradictory’ interaction within each spectator that resonates in an intense emotional and bodily way (2015, 27). They offer audiences ‘intimate’ access to characters and ‘experiences’ that are foreign and exotic through an engagement that is simultaneously intellectual and emotional (Landsberg 2009, 222).

Amir R. Jaima makes an instructive parallel argument in describing philosophy as a form of the literature. Like text-based history, philosophy is ‘pitched primarily at the persuasive register of reason’, while the ‘kinds of texts that are ethically persuasive are usually narrative accounts of moral problems faced by characters with whom we can identify’ (2019, 16). To various degrees, all histories engage reason and emotion. As a hybrid spectacle, Live Interactive Documentary signals the shift between the immersion and sensual appeal of the history film and the greater expanse and density of detail of the history lecture, merging the mimetic with the diegetic. It is a union open to collaborative teams of historians and filmmakers willing to engage new software and the exigencies of live performance.

It seeks to strike what Landsberg calls an ‘empathicohistorical’ stance by framing the past as partial and never fully recoverable, side-stepping the pitfall of ‘overidentification’ with historical agents and narratives that is so often the effect of movie-going (Landsberg 2015, 35). It answers Landsberg’s challenge to those who lament ‘mass culture’ and the simplification of history, to instead focus their efforts on finding new ways to harness ‘the power of these new media to raise the level of public and popular discourse about history, memory, politics, and identity’ (2004, 21).

Live Interactive Documentary is not distributed through the global and corporate channels of commercial film. It is not a commodity. Instead, it is local and itinerant. Its cousins are touring forms of performance art, the lecture circuit and live music; it is a descendant of the cinema of attractions and the travelogue, rather than corresponding to the feature films of the movie plex or streaming screens. As van der Linden recommends, Live Interactive Documentary explores ideas both ‘personally and locally’ (122). Understanding and acting on challenges like climate change depend on emotional appeals while requiring the same abstract, rational thinking, using the forebrain, linked to the cerebral processing required when engaging history: conjuring a time that does not exist – but did or will.

The importance of place

In Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia, Andreas Huyssen details the importance of memory to our present-day identities and our projections onto the future, emphasising the role and importance of public space. Being with other people becomes more rare and valuable in the Internet era and after the experience of COVID lockdowns. Huyssen’s perspective resonates when he describes museums as ‘cultural mediators in an environment in which demands for multiculturalism and the realities of migrations and demographic shifts, clash increasingly with ethnic strife, cultural racism, and a general resurgence of nationalism and xenophobia’, suggesting that they should adapt to ‘offer its spaces as sites of cultural contestation and negotiation’ (1995, 35). Live Interactive Documentary responds to his call for ‘a space for the cultures of this world to collide and to display their heterogeneity, even irreconcilability, to network, to hybridise’ (1995, 35).

Gathering serves as an important reminder of living IRL (In Real Life). Injecting moving images into a multi-mediated space conjures a reprieve from our online existence. Here, the software tools, interactive aims and clip-based construction of streaming media are loaded into the physical sphere, redeployed to gather people together to speak from their own identities in an environment free of pop-ups, tracking and the call to Click! Subscribe! Buy!

As Sean Cubitt points out, in the web’s promise of ‘universal connection by trade’, we have lost both ‘self-sufficiency’ and ‘the old locale’ (2016). Our solo, screen-based interactions deprive us of our sense of community and our connection as a part of the natural world. Parikka notes that in our iPhones we carry around minerals from Africa along with zinc ore mined in Alaska and refined in British Columbia (37). Through our screens, we are at once everywhere and nowhere. Live Interactive Documentary locates a place for the performance of what Alun Munslow calls ‘epistemological scepticism’, proposing a performance-based model of ‘historiographing’:

As dancers choreograph their performance, historians historiograph theirs. History is as much about the ‘historians’ performance’ – the way he or she constructs or stages his or her narrative and invites a responsive understanding from the audience – as it is about the past itself. (2004, 11)

There are obvious limits to this approach. The insertion of narrative into an avant-garde multimedia art practice makes it more accessible to a more general audience, but it is too linear and bourgeois for the experimental film crowd. At the same time, it is likely too experimental, non-linear, edutainment-y and weird for mass audiences. We open the boundaries of dialogue to the audience, giving them free rein within the borders of good faith civility, but this is already a self-selected urbane and intellectual crowd that is open and interested in this unique experience. I assume that could he attend, Roland Barthes would pull up the collar of his trench coat and decamp during Part II, given his commentary in ‘Leaving the Movie Theatre’, wherein he explains that he goes to the movies to enter a state of hypnosis and identification with the screen and does not like discussing the film he has just seen when it is over (1986, 345). The dreamy escape that he and many others look for in the film is ruptured when moving histories address critiques of history, including Barthes’ own made elsewhere (1989). You cannot attend to theory without losing some popular appeal. Audience members retain an awareness of their bodies in space, which may detract from the power and absorption of film; this is also the point of the form.

Live Interactive Documentary enacts negotiation as spectacle, employing the power of moving images to incite emotion and to traverse time and space while opening the historian and documentarian’s narrative to scrutiny. It crowdsources speculation and weaves it into the narrative. Before sneaking out, Barthes might have appreciated that Live Interactive Documentary makes a strong claim to cinema as a place rather than as a thing or product (1986, 346). The form cannot be domesticated and prevents small screen solitary viewing. You have to be there. It lures individuals back to shared experiences in hallowed, darkened spaces to embrace a new model of ‘we-intention’, the pact we make when we watch films together with the inferred acceptance of ‘social norms and rules’ that constitute a ‘social act – a joint action with collective intentions and often shared feelings’ (Hanich 2014, 346; 349). Who could argue that more experience of ‘we-intention’ is not vital for history and the Anthropocene?

Conclusion

Answering the hand-wringing of proto postmodernists about the imperfection of history, Collingwood explains that the difference ‘between what is attempted in principle and what is achieved in practice is the lot of mankind, not a peculiarity of historical thinking’ (1956, 247). Live Interactive Documentary responds to postmodern historiographers’ rhetorical critiques and creative invocations by performing and displaying many of the processes of selection, construction and criticism that are the ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ of historicity. It imparts agency to the audience, inducing them to observe and interrogate these processes as they are revealed in real time. At its core, Live Interactive Documentary is an effort to democratise and enact history as process. It uses the powers of new interactive software, combined with the spectacle of the theatre, layered with the immediacy of moving images, to be transparent about what history is, its methods and complications. In so doing, it aims to ‘tell the truth’ by connecting and grounding spectators through real, embodied and communal interactions. History is like a path in the forest. You follow the way set out by others. Some routes are walked over and over, histories repeated gain enormous currency, creating wider, more deeply carved grooves, while smaller paths are lost and reclaimed by the forest. Live Interactive Documentary is an attempt to walk these trails together, as a group, to fan out a bit, to stray from the main path – without getting lost.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada under Grant [number 435-2019-0365].

Notes on contributors

Kim Nelson

Kim Nelson is the Director of the Humanities Research Group and an Associate Professor in the School of Creative Arts at the University of Windsor in Canada. She has directed, edited and story edited documentaries that have screened at international film festivals and on university campuses across Canada, the US, and Europe. Her work has been broadcast nationally on the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), History Television (Canada) and online with KCET in the US. She has received support from the Windsor Endowment for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the principal investigator on three current research projects funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Her creative practice includes the development of Live Interactive Documentary, which she has performed with her research team in the US and Canada. Her forthcoming book, Making History Move, proposes principles for moving (image) histories. It will be published by Rutgers University Press in 2023.

Notes

1. Our current team also includes editor Nick Hector. For an example of the pilot project, please see www.livedocproject.com/trailer.

2. We may infer that Wagner’s concept of Folk was tainted by his own nationalism, jealousies and intellectual failings on matters of race, specifically as espoused in his Judaism in Music (1850). He defines Folk across education and class to which I would say the Folk (or ‘the people’) is everyone.