At the Crossroads of the Documentary and the Web - Text 2
Our initial interest in the webdoc derived from our interest in forms of documentary cinema, along with our reticence to confining the rise of this media genre to the teleological view that everything digital is progressive. What commands our attention is the webdoc’s frequent artisanal experimentation and affinity with a particular kind of documentary discourse.
The term webdoc, it goes without saying, is made up of two components, web and documentary.[2] At a minimum, these terms refer to constituent features which must be discussed in detail; with respect to the Web, multimedia, interactive, non-linear, incomplete and immersive; and with respect to documentary, a desire to preserve or archive and an authorial perspective (and with it situated knowledge[3]).
With respect to the webdoc’s interactive quality, online users have the challenge of finding their way on semi-guided pathways. Although the software (Klynt, Korsakow, Djéhouti, 3WDOC[4]) which makes it possible to create these pathways is based on similar principles, the visual appearance of each work is experimental and artisanal. One must thus always relearn how to navigate in these stories which can be acted upon. We would emphasize that there exist, broadly speaking, two ways of developing a webdoc project. Either the author conceives the structure by drawing on an architecture organized around the possibilities offered by one of these types of software (the way one creates a personal blog based on WordPress, for example); or the project is based on the use of programming in the intended manner, giving rise to an object with a completely novel form (for example, an entirely programmed personal website which does not employ a framework). In professional circles, the latter approach is more highly valued, but it delegates part of the creation to web design companies (such as Deux Huit Huit, Upian, Darjeeling and Honkytonk, among many others). For their part, authors who produce a webdoc completely independently would probably employ software which, although it limits the work’s visual possibilities and editing, affords them the flexibility of artisanal work and does not require advanced knowledge of computer programming – this is the case with Iranorama (2013), created with Klynt software.[5]
