Speculations and Questions at Visible Evidence

Field notes from a workshop on co-creation in documentary

by Patricia R. Zimmermann, with Reece Auguiste, Helen De Michiel, Brenda Longfellow, Dorit Naaman

In September 2018, the MIT Open Doc Lab hosted the “Collective Wisdom” symposium to explore the question of co-creation in new media, artificial intelligence, documentary, and narrative. The symposium offered “alternatives to approaches that privilege a single authorial vision. Projects evolve from within communities and with people, rather than being made for or about them.”

Brenda, Dorit, Helen, and Patricia attended. During coffee breaks, we debated the complexities of mapping co-creation. We discussed unanswered questions about challenges, granularity, and how projects evolve from specific places.

To continue the dialogue, Dorit suggested a workshop for the 26th Annual Visible Evidence Conference on Documentary (VE) at the University of Southern California in July 2019.

Since 2009, members of our loose working group have produced collaborative and co-creative new media projects and films. Some have published on collaborative new media practices. Together, we have written speculations and dossiers to explore this significant shift away from the auteur and the artisanal in expanding documentary ecologies.

We have mounted many workshops on collaborative media theory and practice at VE in Bozeman, Los Angeles, Stockholm, and Toronto. Stewart Auyash, Aggie Ebrahimi Bazaz, Elizabeth Miller, Pratap Rughani, and Mark Williams have also joined us.

Our working group unraveled key underlying principles of co-creation: Collaborative Media, Community Media, Dialogic Encounters, Extraction, Granularity, Multiscalar, Participatory Media.

Via email, conference calls, and conversations, we produced a handout for our 2019 VE workshop entitled “Fifty Speculations and Fifteen Questions about Co-Creation in Documentary.”

Because projects adapt to specific challenges, each concept is unfixed, fluid, malleable:

• Collaborative suggests disposing of auteurism and vertical decision-making structures. Each project defines collaboration uniquely.
• Community media implies co-creation grounded in a specific place.
• Dialogic emphasizes encounters between people that move toward a process of empowerment.
• Extraction, a mining term, signifies a documentary strategy of taking from people and places to produce a commodity. Instead, co-creation proposes a more ecological respect for land, people, place.
• Granularity indicates that co-creation attends to the specificities of people, time, place, ground up rather than the top down.
• Multiscalar frames the various interfaces, production strategies, and iterations a project moves across during its life cycle.
• Participatory suggests a range of configurations that amplifies the role of subjects to become agents. It repositions makers as facilitators and designers of encounters.

Our workshop probed co-creation in documentary across platforms. It focused on the complex emotional and political power dynamics in production, often excised from co-creation ecstasies.

In analog documentary analysis, scholars often consider authorial voice, ownership, ethics, and form. In community-based documentary, practitioners and theorists think about the plurality of participants with varying stakes and levels of involvement.

In co-creation, power differentials frequently divide between those with lived experience as the bearers of potential stories and facilitators, documentary directors, and technical creatives with expertise. Various differences of privilege sometimes overlay this division. We discussed:

• How are these differences negotiated? Can co-creation travel beyond euphoria to ground itself along a spectrum of contextually specific interventions?
• Who is behind the camera and who is in front? Can these relationships be re-calibrated?
• What are the distinctions between these utopian emancipatory and nonhierarchical ideals and more complicated embodied practices?

Our workshop examined co-creation’s philosophical underpinnings and its production strategies. Its conceptual and practice-based paradigm shifts suggest interpretive acts, embodied and sensory processes, and interdisciplinarity. Dialogue, openness, and the free play of imaginative understanding underpin co-creation.

Filmmaker and theorist Reece Auguiste (Black Audio Film Collective) outlined co-creation’s philosophical precepts. He drew on Alain Badiou’s notion of the event that illuminates possibilities once unthinkable, but now doable.

For Reece, co-creation reconceptualizes documentary practice through continual interpretation and shifting dialogic modes. It deploys non-hierarchical strategies, invoking multi-vocalities and radical political imaginings. For him, film and media undergraduate programs, which privilege auteurism, need to teach co-creation practices.

Based on her co-creation experiences with film, video, and new media, filmmaker/artist Helen De Michiel (Lunch Love Community) asked about the hidden life of co-created documentary and what animates relationships in this process?

In the co-creative turn, she observed that funders, filmmakers, filmed participants, and audiences can acknowledge and then horizontally redistribute power relationships. She insisted on looking at how unrecognized emotional contours open up and are renegotiated. Helen shared Active Voice Lab’s Prenups for Partners, a highly effective tool for working with these often confusing untamed dynamics.

Maker and scholar Brenda Longfellow (Offshore and Offshore International) proposed implementing a granular consideration of co-creation’s challenges, limitations, and complexities. Brenda is currently working on an extensive, multi-platformed documentary project, Inside-Out, that collaborates with formerly incarcerated women in Vancouver. It demands intense reflection on ethical responsibilities of the initiator and facilitator. She explored the commitments, messiness, mistakes, and revisions inherent in co-creation.

New media maker and scholar Dorit Naaman (Jerusalem, We are Here), who could not attend but participated in our meetings, applied Rosi Bradiotti’s concept of nomadic ethics to the relationship between makers, participants, and co-creators across ethnic, national, colonial, and artistic class/community divides.

Dorit asked: When is co-creation possible?

Patricia Zimmermann (coauthor with Helen of Open Space New Media Documentary: A Toolkit for Theory and Practice) theorized polyphony for documentary new media to generate assemblages of difference, diversity, and interdisciplinarity instead of one unified voice or argument.

She offered the long histories of co-creation, especially in international community media practices mobilizing accessible technologies.

With lightning 5–10 minutes presentations, we designed the session to make room for dialogue. We asked participants to reflect on co-creation as dialectical practices seeking a more liberated moving image practice.

Some workshop participants expressed resistance to setting aside auteur-driven documentary. These critiques seemed to emanate from scholars focused on the single-authored fixed object rather than creative processes and scales, or artisanal filmmakers.

Although co-creation will not replace single authorship, media practices around the globe gravitate to it as a productive alternative to deal with the multi-scalar, the granular, and the extractive.

At the end, we passed the microphone around to every participant to share their take-aways and critiques.

Reece Auguiste is Associate Professor of Critical Media Practices at the University of Colorado, US.

Helen De Michiel, filmmaker and writer, teaches in the Film Department at California College of the Arts.

Brenda Longfellow is Professor of Cinema and Media Arts at York University, Canada.

Dorit Naaman is Professor of Film and Media at Queen’s University, Canada.

Patricia R. Zimmermann is Professor of Screen Studies at Ithaca College, US.

This article is part of Collective Wisdom, an Immerse series created in collaboration with Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab. Immerse’s series features excerpts from MIT Open Documentary Lab’s larger field study — Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating Media within Communities, across Disciplines and with Algorithms — as well as bonus interviews and exclusive content.

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