 Welcome. I'm David Thorburn, the director of the MIT Communications Forum. Normally, we put the website's homepage on the screen, but we haven't done that today. So let me just mention that this is the second of four forums we're sponsoring this spring. The third will be offered on Thursday, April 5, and its title is Adapting Journalism to the Web. And it's going to be a wide-ranging discussion about the ways in which the journalistic principles and techniques of the print era are migrating or not migrating onto the web, and whether that's a good or a bad thing. The final event will be held at the end of the term in early May on May 4, and it's titled Electronic Literature and Future Books. And I hope many of you will attend that event pay attention to that, or check our website where our events are archived in various formats. It remains only for me to welcome our speakers and to indicate to those of you in the audience who are new today that in some sense, this forum represents a kind of culmination of a day-long set of conversations amongst documentary filmmakers, producers, media practitioners of various kinds, and scholars. And my hope is that the people at the table will remember that some members of the audience haven't been there for your earlier discourse. Distill your ideas. We're very eager to hear your most powerful and compelling insights about this central subject. Our moderator today is my friend and colleague, William Eurikio, the director of the Comparative Media Studies Program and the author or editor of a number of significant books, including most recently two books that I think are edited books, Media Cultures and We Europeans, Media New Collectivities and Europe. I perhaps should conclude here by saying that as the Comparative Media Studies program has evolved, especially trying to recover from the departure of the visionary Henry Jenkins, William Eurikio has been our load star and leader. And he's been doing, I think, quite remarkable work in renovating and reconstituting the Comparative Media Studies Program. One piece of evidence for that is this remarkable forum and the activities that preceded it, in which so many media practitioners began to talk about new forms of documentary. William. David, thanks for the kind words. Thank you for coming tonight. So as David said, we had a very exciting day behind our back. This is, in a certain way, the culmination of the day. And it brought together, as David said, makers and academics, but it also brought together funders and folks from festivals. And the mix was an unusual mix. You don't often see more than two sets of these players in one room at one time. What's going on right now in documentary is nothing short of transformational amazing. One of the things I spoke about this morning in my opening comments, I tried to make the case that what's happening today with interactive, usually online documentary, sometimes location-based documentary, sometimes trans-media documentary, there's a lot of form out there. What's happening today is, to my mind, very similar to what happened almost 100-plus years ago with the birth of the film industry. Documentary, which some of us think of as the kind of lame cousin of the feature film, has in fact been a driver of technology. It's been out and front from the get-go. Something like 80% of the films made between the start of film in 1895 and somewhere around 1904, 1905, close to 80% of what was copyrighted anyway was non-fiction. Now, in our world today, that seems a little odd because we would probably think that most of what's out there is fictional. If you look at some of the first sound films, the Jazz Singer is the one we celebrate here in the US, but in Germany, the first sound film was Melody de Velt, a documentary. In Russia, it was Vertov's enthusiasm. So, documentary, again, was pushing the envelope in terms of trying out new technologies. A lot of new color technology was deployed with documentary. A lot of the advances in 16 millimeter, and portable sound, the advent of cinema verite and direct cinema, that transformation in production is something that occurred in documentary. And it's not just about new tools. There was a re-imagination of the subject, of the relationship between the maker and the subject, that those new tools made possible. And I guess where we are today is at a real turning point in film. Things like interactive film that the Media Lab, the place we're in right now, pioneered in back in the 80s, those techniques, which were very labor intensive, very technology intensive, had become quite simple with our new technologies. And documentary, as ever, is the first to pick that up and drive it ahead. So the folks here at this table today all represent people who are working in different aspects of these new developments, and I'll introduce them in a second. But the thing I really wanna emphasize, and it was the point of today's discussion, these new developments are coming from unexpected places. It's not as though the documentary community has thrown up its hand as an abandoned, long-form, linear documentary. That's alive and well and will remain so. Rather, it's that the radical or progressive fringe of the documentary community has picked up on some of these two techniques. They've seen that they can do some remarkable things with it. It's not just the radical fringe, it's organizations like the National Film Board of Canada that have made a major commitment in this sector, a growing commitment, and they've seen the results in terms of growing audience share, in terms of being able to reach beyond the broadcast market, the national limits of a broadcast market, and reach an international market. They've seen the ability of these new forms to engage audiences, not just to let audiences watch these films and maybe be inspired by them, but actually deepen themselves, move around, navigate, explore, and engage in this work. A lot of other disciplines, besides just documentary makers have been involved here, and I just wanna mention a few. People that are involved in interactive art or new media art have been central to these developments. Folks coming from areas like cartography and especially performative cartography where the motion of the body in space, it's not just about maps, it's about performing maps. Those folks have been very important. Game studies has been an area that's yielded a lot. Gamers often think about narrative worlds, worlds of possibility that the user has to negotiate and navigate. So a lot of development here, and what we're here to, naturally these developments bring with them terrific opportunities, but also a lot of challenges, challenges like language. Do we call this documentary, or do we call it interactive, or collaborative, or location, do we use some prefix? I guess you could answer that question by thinking about video. Do we now, do we call it all the time digital video? We've dropped the digital, we just call it video. Probably we're in a transition phase and we'll keep those prefixes, but they're not long to stay. I think another set of questions that we have are about frameworks for evaluation. How do you tell a good one from a bad one? That's very important to funders. It's very important to publics because if they hit a few bad ones they're probably not gonna go back for more. So how can we build up a body of criticism, a set of critical frameworks to understand these new film forms? A lot of questions here and, you know, questions that have implications for funders. What will they fund and what won't they fund? What category do things fit in? How do we show these things at festivals? Something that's best seen on a laptop where you, the user can navigate your way through it. What do you do in a public setting? So these are some of the questions that are percolating through this space. The main thing I wanna get across is that this is an incredibly exciting moment. This is a moment where we're seeing the birth of a set of new strategies, new possibilities, new forms. They have not yet been tamed. There's not yet an orthodoxy or a set of rules or a set of conventions for people to fall back on. There's nothing but possibility. And that's exciting. That's a really exciting moment. It's exciting for makers because they can do anything and see if it works, throw it at the wall and see if it sticks. It's exciting for us, the participants, no longer the audience, but now we're co-collaborators in these projects. And it's gonna be interesting to see what survives, which of these forms, if there's the usual process of reification and hard wiring, hard baking of some forms, or if we're actually gonna see this plurality increase. Lot of big questions in terms of areas like ethics, who owns this material that's online? If you do a cut version, are you the owner or is the person who supplied the footage the owner? Crowdsourcing, what are the ethics of, is there an ethical issue there if you're making money on the backs of what the crowd has produced? A ton of issues on that sector, whole lot of issues having to do with legacy. How will we preserve and hold this moment? How do we keep these artifacts? Many of them are on relatively fragile platforms, platforms that are here today and gone next year. Sometimes they morph over, sometimes they don't. But for historians, or at least the historians of the future, folks with my line of work, when they come back and look at this moment, what will be here to look at? Will they see the various, the huge array of steps that we've taken? So these and a bunch of other questions are things that we'll bring up with the panel. And the format today will essentially be to have a discussion with the panelists. I'd like to introduce them. I'll introduce them as a group and then go through one by one with a few questions so we can talk about who they are, what their work is, and then we'll open it up for discussion. So next to me here is Ingrid Kopp, who's the new media consultant for the Tribeca Film Institute where she runs the TFI New Media Fund. And that's really crucial because that's the place that stimulates, that makes possible a lot of this new work. It's a very new fund. It started up this year, 2011. And basically it's brokering forward fund money. Ingrid has the critical acumen and nose and apparatus to sort of shepherd this money into the hands of the right people. So she occupies a very crucial bottleneck of possibility. She stands between the resources and those out there with a lot of good ideas and so a key decision maker, a shaper of the field. Next to Ingrid is Patricia Zimmerman, a fellow academic. Patty and I have been around the block a few times and know each other for many years. She's professor in the Department of Cinema Photography and Media Arts at Ithaca College, co-directs the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, author of Real Families, a Social History of Amateur Film, Mining the Home Movie, Excavation in History and Memories, States of Emergency, Documentaries, Wars and Democracy. And Patty's, what's really intriguing about Patty's work is that it's really focused on sectors that a lot of other scholars have ignored. So the Home Movie is a great example of a kind of, again, a grassroots approach to media, something that ordinary people do, doesn't necessarily get a lot of public attention, but it has profound private meaning and that's a crucial sector, especially today as we think about collaborative and community-based filmmaking. So that's where some of her work is situated. Next to Patty is Jerry Flajive, who is a senior producer for the National Film Board of Canada, a remarkable organization, one of the world's few that continues to fund the production of documentaries on a relatively large scale. I think Jerry, you said 14,000 documentaries to date, that's an incredible record. And he's been the producer on a number of award-winning films, Water Life and High Rise, prominent among them, and we'll talk about those. He's in the position, he's someone who's really seen the transformation of the industry. He's been there for the long haul, has seen this transformation happen, and he's seen it happen in an organization that has been, I think, really the world's leader. If one had to point to an organization that is doing some of the most interesting work out there, it's the work that's coming out of NFB for a bunch of distinctive Canadian reasons that we will soon discover. And finally, at the end of the table is Shari Freelow, who's senior programmer for the Sundance Film Festival and curator of the New Frontier section there. And the New Frontier section is where this kind of work, installation-based documentary, interactive documentary, the new stuff. It's the repository of the new. And Shari is, in that sense, just as Ingrid is sort of funneling the money, Shari is shaping the taste out there and also helping with the financial, obviously, through that, the financial side. Exhibition is a really crucial sector and that's something that as a festival, as someone who organizes a festival, it's really a set of concerns that she's faced with on a regular basis. Shari, you've been there for 11 years, I think, so you've been there. Yes, yeah, we'll stop at 11 years. Okay, won't count. And I should probably mention that you're also an award-winning filmmaker and artist. You've done installation work as well as film work and your work's been seen in lots of festivals. So you've been on both sides of that dance. And Shari, why don't I just, well, no, maybe Ingrid will start with you because money is where a lot of this begins, so. I think she cut a cat out of that. I don't know. I don't know. We're running out of all. We know that, no, let's do that. That's not a bad idea because that's a, there's an institutional model that covers everything. You guys worry about exhibition, distribution, funding. There've been some interesting changes there and that's probably the rock against which or the metric against which all of the things are measured and then we can see how the rest of us are trying to scramble and catch up and make do. So maybe just to start there, it would be great. I guess let's just start with what do you do? What's a day in your life? What does a producer at NFB do? Well, I do what every other producer does except I'm a civil servant. It is a uniquely Canadian institution, I think, where we're not a funder. We're not a broadcaster. We're not an arts council. We're actually producers and distributors and have been doing that since 1939. So it's, within the Canadian context, our mandate actually hasn't changed in almost 75 years. It's to interpret Canada to Canadians and people in other nations. So I was saying to somebody about the 14,000 films and somebody was questioning, are there really 14,000 stories in Canada to be told? Haven't we done them all by now? So, you know, we do another 100 every year. There's apparently a few people we missed. I think it's part of your citizenship in Canada. You get to be in an NFB film. You just show your passport, you're in. But it's an institution that's survived and thrived and part of that role is pushing the boundaries. It's actually, even though we're a government department, we report financially and legally to the government, but we don't make government films. And there were other bodies like that decades ago in Australia and India and places like that, other places that seemed the influence of John Gerson, but there's really nothing else left like it. So we have this unique independence, editorial independence. And I think we do tell stories probably in a less provincial way than we did 50, 60 years ago because there's a thriving film and media industry in Canada. So we don't need to make the films about Beaver Dams and Wheat, that maybe we did and there's nothing wrong with that that we did 50 years ago. So it's a much broader brief and it may sound strange coming from a civil servant as I am, but we're very director driven. It's the focus is very much on point of view documentaries that come from, are driven by a creative person. And the move into interactive, which really only started a few years ago, it comes from a creative place. It really comes from an embracing the creative possibilities as the film board always has done, not out of any imperative to, you know, for distribution. There are benefits from, certainly from distribution and production costs sides. I wouldn't deny that as a producer that I can produce something like one of the high rise projects we did out my window, which is 13 apartments in 13 cities all over the world, cost about $150,000. If we'd done that as a film, it probably would have been $750,000. But that's not why we did it that way. And I think I'm most excited by the creative possibilities for interactivity. I think I absolutely agree. It's an incredibly exciting time. And I fear a little bit that there is a barrier for documentary filmmakers who are fearing to make the leap. And so the field is gonna be filled up with people who, you know, and this could be seen as a kind of a threat in a way who are not filmmakers and probably aren't even necessarily thinking of themselves as making documentaries. If you're doing a data visualization project or a documentary app, is that a documentary? So I think our legacy of having done as much work as we have over the many years probably gives us a certain cultural license to do the things that we do. There's a deep respect amongst the Canadian public for it. So I totally understand it's not a model of just why don't other countries do this? Canada was, you know, is a big place with a very small number of people in 1939 when it started. So there were historical roots. Norway may be thinking about it. But, you know, you make an interesting point. I just want to follow. So John Greerson starts this operation off and he's very much someone with a sense of both the authorial vision, the director's vision, and at the same time, a notion of a kind of commitment. But this new turn towards interactivity in certain ways can be seen, at least the fear of some traditional filmmakers is that this is exactly taking away some of their control. You're giving the audience a choice in some cases to look at this or to look at that, to navigate this way or that way. So how does that align with, because you said there's this very strong commitment to the director, is this rub against that? No, I don't think so. I mean, I think giving the audience that this, again, as you said, I mean, we're spending a very large percentage of our production dollars on interactive. It's about 25%. So there probably aren't very many institutions in the world spending, but that means we're spending 75% still on linear films. So we're not fearing that that pure director vision of a linear experience that the audience sits down and watches is gonna go away, as you said. But I don't think giving the audience, the users some greater role to engage in how they want the story to unfold takes that away. I still absolutely believe that, and I work with an extraordinary filmmaker, Katerina Sizek, behind the HiRISE project. There, as much as there's talked about crowdsourcing and opening up portals for content and user-gen and all of that stuff, I don't think it works unless there's a creative vision behind that. It maybe isn't one person, but it's perhaps several people, and I think there has to be a strong creative concept there. And so there's still, there are degrees of collaboration, and in our project HiRISE, which is four years, there are some projects that are more collaborative than others. And so Cat is still, there's still a authorial voice there. There's still a sensibility that drives that. And so I don't think it's just, it's trying something out that's a little bit different. And I don't think it's anything to fear. So one of the interesting things that's happening is that these forms, as I've already suggested, often are seen on computers and people navigate their way through it. And that doesn't align very well with the needs of sort of cinemas, you know, the old-style cinema, where you have a mass audience, a collective. And there's, I guess, a trade-off. So you're trading off the experience of being with a mass audience for the freedom to kind of go where you want to go and navigate. I imagine there's also some interesting data trails left behind. Are you able to better understand your audiences and what their experiences are like, where those audiences even are on the planet? And how does that align with the National Film Board's remit? I imagine it's the National Film Board of Canada for a reason, so what happens with things that happen outside the border? Is that an issue? Well, it's shocking to discover that people outside of Canada are interested in Canadian stories. I've reached this point in my life. Canadians generally feel no one else would be interested in anything Canadian. But the shocking news is that the interactive work reaches audiences all over the world on very, very Canadian subjects. And I think that that's opened our eyes to if work is good and it has a universal quality to it, I mean, this may seem obvious to perhaps American producers whose work is seen all over the world. But with documentary films, you often don't know. Our films are sometimes sold around the world to broadcasters who go to festivals. And we kind of don't really know who's seeing them in any quantitative way. With interactive work, there's a stream of data. You see how long people stay. You see, we had a project, one of our high-rise projects, within two weeks of people from 180 countries had come to it. And that's, we have no marketing, we have no massive marketing campaigns to do this. So I think people are interested, again, the shocking news is they're interested in good work. And I think audiences are actually ahead of us often. You know, your point about these prefaces of, you know, it's an interactive documentary. I think it probably will seem as quaint as saying something is a VHS documentary, you know, in a few years. They're just there. There people are open to things and the web environment that they might not be open to in a public environment or coming into a theater. And so I think it's a very fluid exchange. And we're, you know, the maybe troubling thing that is a creative challenge that we learn is people don't stay very long. You know, I mean, I think all of us know our own habits on the web. But, you know, when we started some interactive work as a producer of films that are sometimes feature length to be told, oh, you know, seven minutes, that's as long as people will stick around, is troubling. But, and it may influence whether work, interactive work is made in a more modular way so people can almost take pieces of it. But what we did find is there's often a very high return rate. So people are coming back. You can track that. The same user has come back a number of times. And so I think that the creative implications of that, of responding to that kind of experience data is just too early. Like this is, we're talking a couple of years here since we've been doing this and anybody's been doing it in a way. So one last question, and I hope it's not in politic to ask this of a civil servant. But there are a lot of ways to try to understand this. You folks have embraced interactive documentary or documentary, this new documentary with a vigor that is unmatched. Maybe the French have actually done. The French and Australians are actually doing some good work as well. And Artais for a different set of reasons. And I guess I'm wondering, is this a matter of just having the wit to take quick advantage of technological affordance? Is this a budgetary issue? Could this be a political issue? I know your government is, in step with the rest of the Western world, has moved a bit to the right. Culture is often the first thing targeted. Is innovation part of an argument to keep the National Film Board strong? Or do you see any of those as? I mean, blessedly we're quite removed from politics in that sense. And I think what we've done has been applauded by the government. But I mean, I guess there was just as much of a risk that we would fail, that these would be seen as these sort of laboratory experiments, these weird interactive documentaries that didn't quite work. And so there wasn't necessarily a guaranteed payoff if that had been the reason, which it wasn't. Financially, it's a government agency and cuts will come probably in the future. But yeah, that's not really driving it. I think it came from the top. It came from Tom Perlmutter, who's the head of the Film Boards in around 2006, saying we should really embrace the web as a platform to make things. And a project I did with Kat Sizzak just before High Rise called Filmmaker in Residence, which was one of the first long-form interactive documentaries we did in 2006. We started work on that project in 2004. There was no Facebook, no YouTube, no Twitter. So even saying we're making films to show on the web would have been a somewhat radical notion, but the idea of a website as the creative production was kind of inexplicable in 2005. That was, it's like websites are there to market films. That's their sole purpose, isn't that, right? So it's very, very recent. And I think it wasn't, we weren't putting 25% of our production dollars in day one. There were some small experiments and some small things. And even something like Waterlife, which has had one and a half million unique visitors small over the world, cost $55,000. So it's not a million dollar gamble. And I just recall one of the things you said earlier today, because it's a striking, it's a real endorsement, I think, of the way the National Film Board works. You said you had, you were funded, you put in a proposal to fund a project to do four years of research and you weren't sure what kind of artifacts we're gonna come out. That's right, that's high-rise, that's the project we're doing right now. Which is a, high-rise is a four-year, many media project looking at how we live vertically around the world and we have strong roots and strong storytelling in Toronto, but we've done, part of the project has been in other cities around the world. And so it came out of that Filmmaker Residence Project we did in a hospital where we kind of explored collaboration working with people rather than making a single film about a subject is to spend a lot of time around a subject, around original research and with communities and see what emerges. And so by the time we got to the table with the high-rise idea in around 2008, I think we were trusted sufficiently in that context and I'm privileged to work in a place that gives us that trust where we said we've done deep research, this is a good creative concept. More than half the people in the world are living in cities, billions of us live in apartment buildings, there's something there, but we want it to be platform agnostic, we don't know what we're going to make and they said yes. So we've made a bunch of things so far and we've done installations and live performances and some short films and mostly, mostly it's all up at high-rise.nfb.ca, most of it is web-based work, but we've been approached by a publisher to do a book and we've been approached by radio producers to do radio and somebody from a theater company wants to adapt some of the work for theater. So it's a laboratory within a laboratory and I think we still have the responsibility to do good work that reaches audiences so that doesn't go away. Wow, great. So Ingrid, I'm going to turn to you because we're talking about, so this is the way the state does it and the enlightened state, the socialist paradise. Socialist paradise. So here in the land of the greenback, things work a little bit differently. So you run a new media fund for a film festival. No, yeah, but it is confusing. So the Tribeca Film Institute, which is where I am working on this fund is the non-profit bit of Tribeca, which is this overarching thing which includes the Tribeca Film Festival, which is, so we're part of the same family but we're slightly separate, we're in separate offices. And so the Tribeca Film Institute is the non-profit institute where we support filmmakers with a variety of grants across both narrative and documentaries. And last year we launched this TFI New Media Fund to start exploring interactive documentary funding. So I mean, I've been full of both admiration and green envy for all the work that the NFB have been doing in this space for as long as they've been doing this interactive stuff. And obviously we have a very, very different model because ours is a straight fund. We fund four to eight projects a year the funds range between 50 and 100,000 and it's a straight fund so we don't hold any rights and we don't do any production on our end. Although, I mean we can talk about this later, we have ended up becoming more involved with the projects in this fund than in other funds for lots of reasons because they need the support. So we're trying to build that in. Now in traditional funding, either for a feature or for a documentary, there are a lot of sort of standard things you can look at. You can look at the CV of a filmmaker, you can see what they made before, you know what a treatment looks like, you know what a film is supposed to sort of look like. How does that work with these objects? Right, well I think one of the things that I think was really interesting when we were setting up this fund is although I do agree that a lot of innovation comes from within documentary, I do think that in this sphere the last place I was looking for innovation was generally the documentary community. I mean outside of the NFB and ARTE, there really is hardly, there was hardly any work being done in this space and like Jerry, I've been really concerned with looking at what happened with newspapers online and how when the Times and other sort of big prints, papers they were very nervous about getting online and so you had like Yahoo news and the Huffington Post rushing in to fill that space and for me I was always really concerned that that was gonna happen with the documentary space because a lot of the most creative and clever and truly interactive experiments I was seeing online were coming from the brand space because obviously advertisers are desperate to sell things to audiences who are fleeing from the 30 second spot on television and so there was so much innovation there and so actually a lot of the inspiration I was getting was actually outside of documentary and I was thinking what if we could bring the stories that we really care about that are not selling things that are actually about creating the culture that is important to us to this space and what if we bring all these amazing documentary filmmakers and this incredible technology together so that we can innovate in the space as well and it's not just left to selling things that was really for me a really key part of setting this fund up. And let me just, so that suggests that your role is something of a curator, that you're someone who has a sense of where you'd like the field to go, what you think is what's interesting and what is less interesting and you can in a certain sense use the fund as a way to stimulate a vision as a way to make that happen. Yeah, I mean you're right and I'm also very nervous of that actually because I think one of the things that I've brought to this which is great is that I'm really interested in technology generally and I think it's very interesting for me to have a overarching sense of where things are going and how people are using technology and what's happening in branding and interactive journalism across the field. To me that's very, very interesting and the sort of digital ecosystem is all very relevant to this field. But I also, it's definitely through my lens so one of the things that worries me a little bit and I don't know if this is something that comes up at the NFB but I would hate for this fund and my vision to be this gatekeeper that sort of decides because I've tried to be really non-prescriptive in what this interactive stuff looks like because I really do want it to be open. I want it to be space for open source projects and iPad apps and total transmedia experiences, whatever is necessary for that project. But I'm also, I'm definitely bringing my background to this work and I am concerned that if there isn't more, if there aren't more voices to sort of balance me and to balance this fund that it may become like sort of my vision of what this should be which is necessarily gonna be narrow. Well, I'm grateful actually you're at the helm in this case because you have a very broad vision as far as I can tell and as you just said. And it sounds like the controlling part of your vision is really probably more about quality. It's not about what the form is per se as much as is it gonna be a good example of whatever it tries to be. How do you judge that? Because it strikes me, I mean I've read a lot about this on the web and I'm not really bowled over by the level of criticism of a critical culture. I don't mean in a negative sense but just in an analytic or a evaluative sense. I don't see a lot of, I mean there's a lot that's out there but there aren't reliable voices or many reliable voices that I turn to which one knows, I mean you know who to turn to or at least you know how to assess opinions in the world of linear documentary or feature film. So how do you make those calls? Where do you, how do you inform yourself? Well, I think it's two things. I mean there's the sort of lack of critical voices and then there's also having to write guidelines for a fund which is very specific like you know about this fund, this is what we're looking for, points one, two, three, four. And in order to do that, I mean I had to just make decisions and what I tried to do is just keep it really open. So I basically said, tell us what you're doing, tell us why you're doing it and we'll know when we see it. I mean that really is, I mean I think this will change but right now that is the guidelines. In terms of critical discourse I agree and you know it would be great if there was more discussion around this work. The one thing that I am a bit nervous about though and I mentioned this before when I was talking during the day today is that we need to be able to fail in the space. I think it's so important that there's a space for experimentation and failure, good failure. And one of the things that I do get a bit worried about is, and maybe it's because I'm so interested in the technology as well. So I'm always looking at like how things are built and the technology they use and is it open source and you know what happened with the audience but one of the things that does worry me is some of these projects may seem a little bit gimmicky sometimes and maybe they don't have the sort of slam dunk effect of a great linear documentary that goes to all the big festivals and wins awards and you know it's like you know all the things that it needs to hit in order to be a respected documentary and we don't really have that in the space. So I also feel a bit protective of these sort of little experiments growing up and that we don't wanna like slam them down before they've had a chance to really find their space and one of the things that I think is really important with the fund is that we are allowed to be part of that experimentation process rather than kind of come out the gate saying okay we've solved this. Cause I knew that was never gonna be the case. Oh terrific. So you're in year one, still in year one. No, year two is. Well we've just closed submissions for year two. So yeah, so we're sophomores now. So you're the start of this and besides more money to work with, what's your fantasy about where this could go? If you were to think over the next decade where could this fund go and maybe where could the field go as you look at it? I mean I definitely look at it within the field because I think you know one fund, I mean I'm sure a lot of you know this but you know generally documentary funds tend to be 10,000 here, 40,000 here, maybe 50 or 100,000 if you're really lucky and you know I'm under no, I know that it's a little piece of what you need to get your project made and in the US what we tend to do is you know we sort of become sort of story entrepreneurs and we piece together the funding as we go until we manage to make something and you know so I think it definitely has to be, I look at it as part of the field as a whole. One fund is not gonna be enough but one of the things that I am really, really, really keen on building is more research and development and so this is something else that I brought up earlier. I want more rapid prototyping, I want more experimentation where we can sort of fail fast and better and learn from our failures or good failures, I don't know if there's a word for good failures so that there's really like you know like there is in the sort of startup entrepreneurial community the sense of like you can try things, see what works, see what doesn't work and move on so that there's just more work being produced and more experimentation happening and one of the things specifically with the fund that I really wanna do is because we're not producers so we don't really have a sort of day to day hand in the projects but one of the things we are doing is getting the fundees, the grantees to collaborate with each other so that they're sharing and I facilitate that and then we were also doing a lab at the festival and what I'd like to do is really sort of build more sort of lab support and mentorship in every stage of the process so that these projects get the help that they need in terms of connecting with coders and developers and designers which is really key, thinking about user experience, thinking about all the things you need to think about now to make work in the space. So being able to build that into the fund I think would be really amazing. That's terrific, that's terrific and it makes me think of two comments that came up in today's session that I just wanna mention. One was with regard to a project like High Rise where we mentioned the luxury of four years of research and let's see what happens. A lot of that research was carried out with universities and that strikes me as a very fertile ground. I mean there are a lot of universities, there's a lot of great research that finds its way into poorly read publications and they could have much greater impact in the hands of people that do some creative interpretation of actuality. I think it challenges us as documentary filmmakers to try to be running alongside academic research, academics who are doing leading edge research rather than us, kind of waiting till it's finished is that's an interesting but scary space sometimes to be in. We've done documentaries where there isn't a body of work to support, I've actually had films rejected at proposal stage because there wasn't a body of academic work to sort of support it and we had to push back. So that's a really interesting place to be and I think that is a totally untapped resources that relationship whether it's linear docs or interactive between doc filmmakers and academics. Well so I was just gonna say so one of the things we've just set up in terms of building this collaborative community of practitioners and thinkers is we've set up this project called Living Docs with the Center for Social Media at the American University with Mozilla who do Firefox with ITVS and with Bayvec in the Bay area where we can sort of share information and code and resources around open source documentary practice and I'd love to see more of that, more kind of sharing of resources across disciplines because one of, I've started to call convergence because I keep thinking about it like we're all shmushing media's a shmushing but also industry's a shmushing and silos are breaking down so for me it's like where do we innovate in the shmush and that's how I always, that is my incredibly academic way of thinking about the space. Great, it's a space where we thrive and shmush here so we need to talk. The other thing I just wanna mention because I'm thinking of it now but it also came up today which was the ways and 18 days in Egypt is a great example of this where you can actually learn from good experiences or bad as people interact with these documentaries online you can actually respond and tweak your material to work better with the audience to sort of see what's not working, what could be enhanced and that interactivity between the maker and the user is actually another great affordance and so terrific. So Shari, let's turn over to the world of exhibition. So in order to sort of put festivals into perspective and the challenges of showing interactive documentaries and how users are gonna engage with them, what can you tell us about your years at Sundance and what can you tell us? What have you learned? What have you, in terms of how do we exhibit this material in terms of how users work with it? Well, my original and remaining, continuing role is to select films for the festival and I select feature documentaries, feature films and well, I guess what I've learned is at Sundance we're a discovery festival, we follow the artist and New Frontier has been set up to allow us to continue to do that so it's very much within the continuum of our mission and our interest as a discovery festival in terms of exhibiting and making that work accessible to audiences is a little bit of a different thing in terms of just sort of when people are ready for what. It is often the case and books have been written about this that the artists are ahead of even the mathematicians and the scientists in terms of their paradigms and how they think about things and they certainly are ahead of the audiences but I think nowadays the audience are actually starting to catch up and industries are starting to catch up out of necessity I think, particularly in the film industry. With New Frontier, Frontier was a section of the festival that's always been had an eye trained on innovation, experimentation, expanding the envelope of how to tell stories so it was a natural place to develop a showcase for new forms of storytelling. So we re-inaugurated the Frontier as New Frontier and sort of thought very carefully about how to build a space and really what we realized is that we had to build a culture within the festival culture for this work. It's not so much what corner or what building we're going to show this work but actually how do we nurture a culture for this work or nurture a culture for curiosity for a different kind, a new kind of storytelling. So the way that we built this platform was to think about work that we're seeing in the art world and in new media that speaks a film festival language. It speaks a cinematic language that's accessible so that when people come in and see the work they don't feel like they've read the wrong books and walk out in the midst of a very, very busy festival environment that's really important. The other part of it is the space has to be comfortable, the space has to be social, it has to resonate with not only the festival environment but also with what this work is intending to resonate just generally in our lives. Our daily life is an immersive media installation and so this work, this is a point of accessibility, this work speaks to that fact. So we build something that is not really a white box or a black box but more of a social lounge environment with sexy lighting and couches and lounges and galleries that kind of spin off of the lounges and there's also a micro cinema there that sort of the heartbeat of the venue that we present performances that engage with the moving image as well as panels and forums and presentations and where companies can actually present new technologies to filmmakers who want to get their hands on that. So it's really kind of building a culture within a culture, a festival inside of a festival and figuring out how to integrate this exhibition into the festival at large. So I've been to enough festivals to know that there are many audiences, many different audiences, the people that just go to what are gonna be the award winners and the folks who go to the fringy stuff. How are you seeing that audience grow? Are you seeing newcomers gravitate to that? Jerry mentioned earlier the issue of if our traditional filmmakers are not gonna make the move to the interactive stuff, it's just gonna be the folks coming from in a certain way from outside who are attracted to the technology and the interactivity but maybe don't have the same storytelling chops as that other generation that's, what are you finding with audiences? Is this a young, is there a profile, a demographic profile? Are you seeing this as a growing and new kind of audience that's being attracted to Sundance? How would you characterize that? Well in the beginning when we started in 2007, our very first edition of New Frontier, it was the youngest audience I think I'd seen at the festival, I mean babies even sometimes. Because we were projecting work on the ground and there were children on the ground projecting on the walls of spaces and so it was very playful space and a lot of young people really engaged with that on that level. We also aggressively went for a young audience as well. We developed a curriculum to be able to bring high school and college students into the space because I just had, we had an instinct that, that audience would probably understand and be open to what we were trying to do in the beginning stages. Over time our press department actually started to use a curriculum to talk to the press corps so that to help them talk about the work to develop some kind of critical perspective and a way of talking about it because in the beginning actually they talked about it as art at Sundance and they had to stop that right now. It's not art at Sundance. This is expanding cinema culture. That's what we're doing here. I think in 2009 when the independent film world kind of broke in half. When the recession really hit, it hit our industry especially hard and especially early. We started to see an expansion of the audience for New Frontier. I think when the studios sort of lost their independent shingles and a lot of the companies went out of business, a lot of the executives still came to Sundance out of maybe love for it, out of community, out of shared determination. So there was a love there and people were looking for answers for what to do with how do we move forward when we don't have these traditional ways of funding films and exhibiting films anymore? And so projects like Joseph Gordon Levitt's Hit Record got a lot of attention that year. This is a well-known American actor, has been in Hollywood movies and done a number of independent films. And he started a production company called Hit Record where he would crowdsource films and he would be the creative director. That spoke to a new way, a new paradigm that could be crawling up from the cracks of the broken stuff that was the detritus, let's say, of the old world. So we're starting to get now more diverse audience coming to it. And also a more literate audience too. I think the first couple of years, the press core kind of, we set up a brunch and they talk to each other and the artists are over here and just scared of the artists. But eventually, around 2009, 2010, we couldn't pull them off the artists. Something about maybe just their meat and potatoes, how they saw the movies. I started watching movies online. Most of the people that I know are streaming movies. So there's this notion that movies equals digital technology equals, what's going on in New Frontier? What's going on over there? So I think that there's been a maturation in the audience that I've seen coming through. That's been interesting. So I have a distribution question and it comes from my understanding, when I think of festivals, I think of them as similar actually to the kind of educational thing we do at universities, which is to try to translate, not to use the craziest case, but to sort of figure out where people are and how to help them move into where things are going. And to try to help them understand it, to try to contextualize it, to try to excite them and stimulate them, but not freak them out and overwhelm them. And that sounds a bit like what you're doing with your choices of what's gonna be at New Frontier. Another function of festivals that's different from what we do at universities is that when something's endorsed by a festival, wins an award is nominated, but even shown, it has some credibility in terms of distribution. Distributors are, it's been vetted in a sense. And how is that working in this sector? I mean, we kind of know how it works in the sector of feature films and linear traditional documentaries. But in this sector, does that same logic hold? Are there distributors for this material? Or is this stuff people just put up online and the only revenue model is getting money from a foundation and from Tribeca and... Well, you know, make no mistake. I'm definitely trying to freak my audiences out. But I'm trying to do it before they know it. They're freaked out. It's too late and they're already freaked out. And they're like, oh, wow, it's actually not so bad. It's kind of cool. You know, in terms of the distribution, I mean, with the work that we tend to show at New Frontier, a lot of it is bound for the art world. A lot of it finds a home in museums, in art centers. You know, some work operates within the space of the internet, you know, digital space. But, you know, distribution as you talk about it sounds like you're talking about films. And, you know, and basically that distribution model is widgets, you know, kind of going around. And just recently has it been streamed, you know, stream of electrons into your computer. I'm not sure if the marketplace is headed in that direction for this work. And I say that with some joy. Because I think that the marketplace and Patricia probably will agree with this that the mark, that linear narrative actually is historically derivative. It's, it was, when cinema first came about, we actually had newsreels. It wasn't, it was the, it was the exhibitor, that was the curator of the media. And it wasn't until, you know, there was an effort to sell the work that we had established a linear narrative. So this is actually, this kind of work was kind of going back to the origins of cinema and how it existed. And, you know, I would like to see a new model. I have no idea what it would look like. I only have ideas of how I would, I as an exhibition person, you know, an interesting exhibition and having the experience of being at Sundance and being with Sundance who has a history of taking one genre that didn't have a market at all and actually had built an industry around it through cooperation with various players and, you know, really kind of built an industry where there was none. That there was, it might be some lessons there for this new genre in terms of the key role that exhibition plays to create an audience for a kind of media that otherwise or had previously been overlooked or unknown. And music is probably another really interesting model to look at. The distribution model was just fine and dandy in the days of artifacts, but now that we have, you know, online, the ability to directly access things online, then the performance base actually becomes far more important as a driver of a former of taste. Absolutely. You know, in fact, there was a film that I showed, it was a piece that I showed at New Frontier called Utopian Form Movements by the documentarian Sam Green and Dave Surf. And he actually looked consciously to the music paradigm because he knew this was heading his way to make a documentary that was a live performance using PowerPoint, you know, using digital technology. And it was just, and it is a beautiful piece, you know, just the resonance of like a live performance and the fallibility talking about Utopia was just really just a beautiful match. And, you know, he's been traveling ever since 2010 with this piece, just like a band would. So it's a new business model for a tried and true Oscar nominated filmmaker. Yeah. That's terrific. Thanks. So Patty, we're gonna turn to you for a few questions. And so you're a historian of the form. You've worked on really in the spectrum, the whole spectrum of documentary, as I said, home movies. Have we seen this before? Are there aspects of this development that you think are different from what's come before it? Can we expect the same patterns of containment within a couple, you know, radical innovation and then some pretty frantic attempts to contain it? Or is there something different here? And we've already just suggested that distribution might be a misnomer in this sector that there might be other ways to think of that. What's your sense? I'm gonna speak as a historian of theories and also as a programmer. So I think in this moment, there's a huge tendency in certain sectors to say everything is new and every problem we saw in documentary will be resolved through interactivity, through interface, whatever. So if there's a problem of we didn't have access to tools, now we have access to tools, right? If there's a problem of only people who are heavily resourced can make long form feature documentaries and conflict zones generally white and male from first world countries. Now we have user generated media. So I think that's one moment we're in of just utter utopianism of there's this incredible democratization of tools, ideas, et cetera. So I think that we always see that in documentary. I think you have to be hopeful to be in this field. It's a tough field to be in. So I think that's a continuity. On the other hand, I think that there is, I think as you've pointed out Bill, there's always issues of technology that are always challenging makers. Technologies are not static as anyone here at MIT knows. Every technology in the history of media is made. Every technology has been modded and changed. Every technology has been taken apart and reversed engineered in different contexts as it goes around the world. So I think in some ways the moment we're in is a moment we've been in since 1892, right? What do I think has changed? What I think has changed as people were talking, I thought I'd make a little list. And one thing I think we're moving from is from the one to the many, right? The one film, right? I'll just, I call them the big white whale films, right? Big feature length documentaries. There's still a place for them. I will totally agree that there is. But now we're moving to a more variegated ecosystem with a multiplication of forms. Even a feature length film may have a multiplication of forms and iterations. So back in the day, let's just say when I was in grad school in the 70s, we had Fixity, right? I am going to watch this film, analyze this film, put it in a historical context. Now we have Fluidity. Now we have, I'll just give you my list and I'm sure people here can add to it. Besides long-form feature films, we have search engine documentaries, right? Just based on search engines. We have web archives, Hurricane Katrina archive as one I particularly admire. We have user-generated stories like 18 Egypt. We have live streaming, games and gamification, installation with every kind of technology imaginable, performances that mix analog and digital. We have remix. We have cartographies and mapping projects. We have live music projects. We have music that uses media behind it. We have live music that uses projections. We have multimedia. We have cell phone symphonies. We have music triggered by technology. Technology triggering images. Guitarists triggering a remix algorithm. We have applications. We have a life. We have locative media projects investigating RFID. We have projections on every kind of surface in every kind of space imaginable. We have takeovers of screens where universities put their, you know, go to this talk and then we have artist interface projects. We have sensor projects. We have ARGs, alternate reality gaming. We have phones. We have robotics. You know, I'm sure this isn't an exhaustive list. But what does this all have in common? I just wanted to say this as we talk about like, you know this, you know, what I would call the funeral for the long form traditional documentary, right? You know, here we are at the funeral for it that actually it's just part of this really kind of jungle, beautiful ecosystem of so many multiplying forms. So how could you put a summary on that? I think we're moving from fixed images in documentary to thinking about movable, endlessly mutating, always permeable fluid interfaces. And that's kind of what I see. And to me, it's a really exciting moment. I think it's a moment of incredible confusion as Ingrid said earlier, incredible anxiety, incredible hope and incredible despair. And as one of my mentors, the historian Eric Barno said, in the history of media, there's never been a new technology met without equal parts of hope and despair, right? And I think it's, you know, it's extremely dialectical moment. And that makes it really, really, really, really exciting. So let me ask, as someone, you know, in the trade and the academic trade. In the biz. Literacy is a big issue and as a media scholar, part of your remit at a university is to try to improve the literacy levels of our students who consume quite a bit of media, or at least it's a topic that comes up. Do you think a new set of skills required to take on this plethora of new developments that you talked about, or are students coming already, are kids growing up well-armed and ready to take this on? Where do you see the place for literacies in this? You know, I'm really glad you asked that question. I actually made, I'm a list maker, I'm a very German, so I sit here and make lists. So, literacies. Here's what I think. You know, I teach courses in what I call like fixed old school film, right? Film history, show the movie, you know? Here's the context, here's history, here's the aesthetic. I also teach courses in digital theory. And what's interesting to me is, I think everyone assumes the millennial generation lives in technology and knows more than we do, okay? And what I have discovered is the technology that they live in is corporatized, is individuated, is consumerist, and is a form, you'll excuse me if I make a religious moment here, but it's to me a kind of digital onanism, right? You know, you're kind of there alone doing your thing. So, what I have discovered, you know, in classes and also as a programmer, when I go around kind of proselytizing for new forms of documentary, is I think most students do not have a language to approach this new work. And probably, I would say, as most scholars, like us, don't have a language, because as scholars we are trained to have, I'm gonna lift this up, an image, and it's there, and you can analyze it. So what do you do when the thing starts moving around, and every time you look at it, it looks different? And maybe you're not even looking at an image, you're looking at an interface, or maybe you're looking at an algorithm or a search engine. So, I think we don't have a language for it yet, because I think academia is really old fashioned, and we want our models based on fixity. So, what I find is when I show these works in classes, or when I go around and show them, people get really excited just to have someone conjure up a space where you can argue about these works. I'll say one other point. I wanna pick up on the indie band model. I think that these business models, I get nervous when I hear the word business, but I think they're important for artists. And I think the indie band, indie music model, has been really powerful for so many artists working in new media. And what I see in this paradigm is, don't theorize, accessorize. And what I mean by this is you'll see, you know what I'm talking about, you'll see people who have these projects, right? They're doing live remix with music, live music, all these computers, and you can buy a CD of the music. You can buy a CD of the mix. You can buy the app. You can get the t-shirt, you can get the hat, you can get the sticker. And in fact, at the forum today, someone asked the people from one of the projects, well, you have that t-shirt on for your project, but it's not on your website. So I think this idea of, that that has helped some people to monetize. You know, in my situation, I've had a lot of artists come to Ithaca College and they make a lot of money selling these things, right? Because it's sort of a country of people who collect hats and t-shirts and all that. So I think it's a, you know, we're in an odd, odd moment in terms of odd meaning, exciting, right? Because we don't really know what we think about all of this. And to me, I think the only things we're thinking about are those that are unthinkable moments, if that makes any sense in kind of a Zen way, right? If it's confusing and unthinkable, then it's worth thinking about. And I find myself when I'm showing like those documentaries, right? The, you know, the flat on the wall starts and finishes, character conflict zone, guy with a camera, cry in the audience, feel moved to participate in the bigger world outside the US movies. I find, I'm kind of bored because I kind of know the paradigm. But when I see things, just to give you an example of, this is this artist I really like, China Tracy Kauffé from China. Okay, so the China Tracy project, she builds Chinese hyper-urban cities in Second Life, but China Tracy is also a project where it's like this fake city, right? That has a website and has a mayor and they have press conferences. So it kind of moves and migrates between analog and digital, between being a performance being Second Life. I find myself really interested in that, why? Because it perplexes me. In the way I was trained to think as a documentary scholar, fantasy did not figure into documentary, but now it does. And I made a list of a bunch of projects like that, but I won't bore you with another list. I'll say one moment I see. I think that the history of documentary, I mean, and partly this is so embedded from political movements of the 70s, has often been one of pushing out, right? Here's an argument, push out the argument, convince people, right? It's a sort of can opener idea. Put the can opener on the head, crank it open, pour in whatever idea you have about whatever conflict zone is in the world, put it back on, walk out. I am an engaged citizen of the universe. So I think that kind of push out strategy we still see in some sectors. But what's interested me, are works that are going in the opposite direction. I would call them pull in projects. Projects that are about not being confrontational, not taking a can opener, usually electric can opener to someone's head, but that are infiltrations, invitations, inviting people into a conversation, creating a convening. I mean, there's so many projects like this. And I find this to be new, right? This is no longer about having so much deductive argumentation. I still think there's a role for those works, but I'm really interested in these works that kind of pull in. And I think a lot of these works are not being put in theaters, but are being located in spaces where we never put films in documentaries, clubs, people remixing on walls, people doing live performances out in space. In other words, going to where people are rather than bringing people in to where the work is. And I just think it's exciting. And I have to say, I got this idea not from projects in the US. I think we see projects like this in Asia, Africa, Latin America, where being in public space and creating civil society in small provisional gatherings is absolutely urgent. In countries where there have been genocide or environmental degradation or no public sphere, I can specify this later. So my summary is old school was push out, go build your audience. And I think the kind of new ways that I'm seeing across all these different iterations is more of a pull in. I think it's a, you know, gentler. I know a lot of old filmmakers in this other mode think this stuff is not political. I don't even know what that means anymore. So can I make a point on that? One of the things that I think that goes back to a point I was making earlier though about why I feel like we really need to be in the space because I think you're absolutely right about the pull in versus push out. But the people who are really good at that are brands. And I think that also goes back to, you know, this experience that a lot of, I think people have with technology. I mean, it's called inbound marketing. There's a term for it. And I think it's everywhere and it's really pernicious. And, you know, just even the way when you connect with Facebook, it sort of, it drifts across the internet and follows you where you go. And I mean, I'm not, you know, I'm not a conspiracy theorist about it. I think there's lots of things about it that are fine. Actually, it's kind of, it is the way we're living now. But it does concern me in terms of like where we are in the space. And I think that one of the things that I'm really interested as well with this is actually challenging the technology a little bit. I think what Jonathan Harris is doing with Calbird, where he actually doesn't have video, is really interesting. It's like, do we always need to have video? Why don't we just have a big image and slow the internet down? Or Jeron Lanie's point about, you know, not dumbing ourselves down because we think technology is so amazing. And actually sometimes we can say, well, this is what we want to do and humanize the technology. I think that's really important because the pull-in can be quite insidious as well as very powerful, or insidiously powerful, I guess. Let's open this up for questions. So if you want to make your way over to the mics. Where I was going to turn the conversation, or do we have someone? Where I was going to turn the conversation were actually challenges, and that's exactly what you guys are talking about. There are a lot of challenges that face us. Any others that we haven't addressed because we've talked about quite a few so far? I think I can engage, Patty, on something that you brought up that, and you, William, about literacy. I thought a lot about this in this last show in terms of what was important to the film community to talk about, to address. And underlying that show is this notion, and it has something to do with the push-in, push-out, is that film itself is changing roles. It's no longer to be consumed. It's actually becoming part of our language, how we speak to one another, other. It's becoming part of a certain kind of architecture, a new kind of architecture within the world we live in. So it's a very different role that it's playing. If you think about how we build philosophies and conversations, it's often in exchange of tiny bits of media, bits of stories. How histories are built. Lynn Hirschman-Lieson's work, Raw War, which is a documentary, straight documentary, about the women art movement in America, and how it's been overlooked by historians. And the interactive part, which is called Raw War, where she basically sets up a platform to crowdsource that history. So thereby completely obliterating the paradigm of history-making from a curatorial one to an inclusive one. This is the role of the media is one that is the glue between people and society, as opposed to the entertainment that, or the message. So I think, I mean, what's really interesting there is it is in fact fulfilling its remit as a medium, rather than simply serving from the old information model as a carrier. It's not just a carrier of content. So we have some folks ready to give some questions. I direct this to Patty Zimmerman. Doesn't this make you think a little bit back to the days of early video art, and in terms of breaking the medium and creating civic space, and also in terms of installation and what happened there, I think it really is not a new paradigm, but it's actually just smaller screens, different configurations of that work. Maybe speak to that a little. Sure, I'd be happy to. In fact, I have a note about this. I have a whole index card on that, so thanks for that question. I think when, because I'm a historian like Bill, whenever I hear the word new, I go for my gun, because new always carries with it, not just one history, but many, many histories. And I think as we're looking at new documentary forms or the new arts of documentary, I'm really noticing a lot of both amnesia and anesthesia, both amnesia about these histories, video art, I absolutely agree. I do not think we would have new media interactive documentary without video art. And I'm from upstate New York, where we had the first video art exhibitions in the United States at Syracuse University and at the Ithaca Video Festival. So I live in the middle of that history, absolutely. I would even go back and say fluxes and conceptual art from the 60s, I think is really percolating there as kind of grandfathers and grandmothers, surrealist interventions. I'm thinking about things like Eric Sati's Entracht. I'm thinking about George Entei and the music for Ballet-Maconique. So I think these genealogies are shifting, right? That we're no longer looking at just this forward march of film, but we're now looking at new media as it has multiple tributaries of history coming in. So I really thank you for the video art. I do think in the United States, video art was really important in this notion of the multiplication of screens and the multiplication of places and the multiplication of people, right? Like moving away from the unitary screen. So I couldn't agree more. Yes. That was even non-linear work. I'm just putting it on the mic. Yeah. And you know, I have to give a shout out to the Experimental Television Center, Experimental TV Center in Oiga, New York, which shuttered its doors after 40 years, which was a place that was really an epicenter for technological innovation, video art and screens. A lot of the synthesizers were invented there and it shuttered its doors because the people who ran it are wanting to retire. But one thing that they mentioned at a forum we did last year was there is no need for it anymore with computer technology, right? So when you used to have to go to the X-Germel TV Center to work with synthesizers and do all this. So it is sort of a moment of a garden that flowered and now is transformed into many, many gardens. You might think about it as that the forums actually have already, have always been germinating all this time, but the platform has changed and thereby the access to these forums have changed and the interest has changed. But it's changed the forums as well, right? And it has changed the forums. I mean, if you look at the, you know, the work that's coming out of the NFB, it reminds me of some of the early experimental work that I engaged on in the 80s and programmed in the early 90s, but it wasn't getting the hits, you know, and it wasn't as polished, you know. But so it's a new platform as well. There's something to be said about, we don't know what's in our bloodstream, you know, and it gets executed and illustrated in some way. I mean, I work for an organization that also has been producing outdoor animation for 70 years. So we work side by side with people doing, we have two animated shorts nominated for Oscars this year, that is, it's not unusual for us to incorporate animation in documentary. It's just, you know, given when it's appropriate. So mixing media has just been part of the culture and we never saw it that way. It was only executed in that way, animation in a documentary. Now it's perhaps we're thinking about, you know, a more fluid approach with interactive and it just comes naturally, maybe, without us realizing it. But I do think, I think that that's the motion of what it means when you think about the internet as art as material, you know, and how that changes. I mean, remembering, obviously, that there is this lineage and it was, there was actually as part of documentary fortnight at MoMA. Lauren Cornell from Ryzone gave a talk about sort of documentary and digital art sort of coming together. And someone in the audience actually did make a point about the fact that we sort of started quite late in terms of our presentations and that there was actually this whole history which was very relevant to the conversation that we hadn't been able to touch on because of the time constraints. But I do think there was a bit of collective amnesia. I mean, especially in terms of the sort of new media documentary practitioners today about, and it comes back to the schmush as well. Like, this is schmushing in and we don't even know what that tributary is. One sort of overriding impression one has thinking about the discourse that you've engaged in today is that, or at least that I have, is an old statement my mother used to make as she became more and more impatient with certain sort of commercial developments. She said, what's wrong with the United States is there are too many flavors of ice cream. And I think, I have the feeling there are too many flavors of choice here. That is to say, you've described such a circumstance of emergent chaos that two central questions emerge that I hope everyone would address. The first is that this chaos causes what we might call a kind of cognitive confusion or some of you have used the term amnesia. One, from a historical or intellectual standpoint, this new chaos creates the problem that avant-garde movements, which several of you have been just alluding to, people who think of the artists, who think of themselves as subversive in some way or as driving new possibilities, are merging with people who are completely the opposite of avant-garde, who are ordinary computer, not ordinary, but are different kinds of ordinary people in the society who use computers to make mashups or to make their own home movies. And their inclination, their impulse is quite, it's not the same sort of ideologically self-conscious move that an avant-garde artist may, what an irony that these two incredibly diverse populations, one almost, if not a mass population, a very populist group, in somehow having a convergence with an avant-garde, that incredibly complicates the situation even just in terms of making sense of the kinds of projects that are emerging. So that's a sort of general comment about the kind of confusion I think you've described, but the questions I have are twofold. One, this issue has come up and it's embedded in what I've just been saying. How do you deal with the broad question of what we called in our recent conference here the instability of platforms? William mentioned this early in your discourse. What does an aspiring young documentarian of all, even a diverse one who has some competence across different media platforms do in facing not only the enormous number of choices that are available to her, but also beyond that, the deep, deep question of whether or not the platforms chosen will be around in five years. What do we do with, leaving aside what that means for archivists and librarians and people who want to sort of keep a history of things, what do we do about the fact that we seem to be in a moment in which platforms are so totally unstable? A question that describes a lot of confusion, but actually the answer is very simple. And it's been the same answer from the beginning. You start with your story. And the only difference is it gets confusing if you try to fit the round peg in a square hole. If you're thinking about these kinds of new forms and engaging with them in old ways, in ways that are passive and they're so different and they have to be categorized in a certain way. But if you have a story and you want to tell the story, if you put the script on the filmmaker or the storyteller, these are options to tell the story simultaneously all at once. And it's the same story. It's the story world that we're building. So I would say for filmmakers who are growing up and wanting to tell stories, you don't have to choose one or the other. Start with your story. What is it that you want to tell? And then think about how you could communicate it given these different platforms. And remember that these platforms are not necessarily going to be monetized in the ways that they used to, but you might actually expand your reach for the conversation you want to have, the message you want to give, the world that you want to paint. It might expand. That's what you get out of these new forms that are not yet monetized and who knows if they might not be down the line. Well, one way to respond to what you've said is to say that's a very conservative response. I mean, I like it very much. Because what it says is, forget about this cornucopia of choices you have. Make rational, much more concise and narrow selections depending on what you want to say. Depending on your vision of experience that all the options need not be or are inappropriate for particular kinds of stories. But it seems to me that there are much bigger issues involved having to do with, I'm not even talking about monetizing things, but you want your material to last. And you put it on one system and it's gone. I mean, I'm wondering about that. And even about people who want to fund projects that go on platforms that have not established a lifestyle, a life trajectory. So, get ready. Okay, I think this, it's interesting to me, like when you use the words chaos and instability because as somebody who's spent a long time working in critical historiography, post-colonial and post-structuralist theorists, are constantly asking for instability and for looking at chaos. I mean, if we look at Rana Jigua, for example, Indian historiography argues why is it we cannot discuss the ghosts that don't exist, the specters who are in history, right? So, chaos and instability I think are really important because I think that the work that we're looking at now across all these different forms, actually we're in the realm that art historians call the post-object. So, I don't think we're really looking anymore in the same way or thinking the same way about we are going to preserve this film or this particular interface or this algorithm or this. I think that in the realm of the post-object where the performative and the iterative and precisely the instability and the chaos are part of the build of the work, right? It's almost like the code or the algorithm of the work that we're shifting into a different set of concerns, right? Maybe all that matters is that we can describe what Sam Green did, right? But we may never have a documentation of what that's like because each project, I mean, many of the projects that I'm interested in change wherever they're shown, change in particular locations and it's exactly this chaos and instability that is the break with the past. And then I'm going to just provide something very zen. I think sometimes in Western cultures we want everything to be saved. But everything is always deteriorating and as historians, we know this. I mean, I've spent my whole career looking at work that's not saved in archives, right? And it's just never there. So you're endlessly dealing with absence. So instead of, for lack of a better word, being hysterical about absence, we have to embrace the absence and embrace the deterioration because we don't really want anything to stay the same if we adopt a post-colonial historiography, right? And this means realizing everything will become a ghostly specter. And I know that sounds really theoretical, but I really believe it. And I want to just give a larger, more concrete example which is Engage Media in Indonesia which is a kind of incredible project for the Asia Pacific for environmental and human rights. Technologists, artists, NGOs gathering together, user uploaded, but it's citizen journalism and it's NGOs and it's activists and human rights groups. Now, this emerged out of reformancy movements in the late 90s to create a civil society in Indonesia. Now, for them, it exists online but many communities they work in, in Indonesia or in the Asia Pacific, don't have electricity. So the only way to show this work where there's no bandwidth and there's no internet connection is to put it on a USB stick and bring a generator into Papua where it's a big conflict zone now. But I would wager if you talk to people who are working with Engage Media, the issue is not to save those images but actually to create civil society for debate, for engagement, for public gatherings in Indonesia and rebuild that country and that national identity after Suharto. So I think sometimes we have to really remember that documentary is about being urgent. It's about communicating with others about that which matters which are really life or death issues and they're different around the world but I would just say, does it matter for Engage Media to have this all saved or is there maybe a goal of really working for other issues? So I'm kind of polemical and I apologize. I hope you'll be gracious to me but you raised a great question. That was an exciting answer and I certainly agree with a lot of what you've said. But document, I feel like, I mean, documentaries to me, I've always been really nervous because I used to work in Channel 4 in the UK and commissioning and I was always really nervous about people talking about sort of documentary with a sort of a wide brush because the kind of films I was looking at, then it was films of a certain length but they were so different and they were doing such different things and I think in this space now, I mean I agree, I definitely embrace the instability. That's the thing about it right now that I think is so exciting but I'm really nervous about, like every project is really different and every project has different goals and not all documentaries need to change the world. I think that projects do different things for different people and sometimes they need to reach lots and lots of people and sometimes they need to reach just a very small handful of people but do something in a very particular way and so for me now, what I think is really interesting about this space is just knowing what your digital palette is, that's how I always think about it. Like if you don't know what your options are, so for example, one of the things that really concerns me is a lot of filmmakers or makers or creators in the space are incredibly disconnected from the politics of the internet and they don't really think about open source code or net neutrality or any of these issues which are really gonna affect all these conversations we're having in this room right now. I mean if they change the way the internet works, then all these conversations we're having are gonna change and post-object or pre-object or I mean we're not gonna be able to do the same kinds of work so I think that kind of the politics of the code and the politics of the technology is also really, really important. Knowing what our digital palette is and protecting the bits of that palette that we, which for me is a free and open internet is really, really key. I think I'm just gonna echo some of what's been said. I think while film and video are an incredibly stable platform or we think of them as an incredibly stable platform, there are tens of thousands of independent documentaries that have vanished and nobody seems to care. They could be physically preserved but they aren't and so they're completely inaccessible or gone despite the fact they're fixed in a medium that we kind of understand. So in some ways interactive documentaries are gonna share the same fate that those documentaries already have. There's no question that there's been very, very little discussion about the lifespan of interactive documentaries. I think in some ways it's even an assumption that they'll just date so quickly. Projects we did five years ago look dated to us in a way that a classic documentary film doesn't. And so there's almost this, I'd be happy if nobody's looking at it six years from now. But I think it's partly because of who's been involved and again it speaks to that. I'm not suggesting that only documentary filmmakers should occupy this space, not at all but I think it's often been people who've been doing the hard labor of building interactive sites have usually been doing, they pay the rent by doing corporate work that isn't meant to last. So they don't have an archival mentality that there's some user that needs to see this corporate video, corporate interactive project seven years from now, it's nobody cares really. But I do feel that interactive is already an interactive documentary sensibility is already having I think a good influence on the creativity of linear documentaries because there's simply so many stories that we're never told in the linear form. What a new form maybe does is allow us to look at the old form, that's pretty obvious thing to say, look at the old form in a way we haven't before. And so in a country like Canada and most countries in the world an hour long documentary that's on television is actually 43 minutes, a TV hour. And so magically most of the proposals we received in the last 20 years were 43 minute ideas. It's like every novel had to be 253 pages. So now ideas were turned down, your story is too thin. It won't fill 43 minutes or feature length. It's not strong enough to sustain that. Well now it doesn't matter if it's four minutes it can work either as a short film online for a big audience or as an interactive piece. So I think that's liberating but I think there I really believe there is a sensibility in interactive documentary which is somewhat different and maybe less journalistic to some extent. I think it's drawing in a more artistic approach or something about the peripheral vision the marginal vision that if we said we were gonna make a film about it it would seem trivial but when it's done as part of an art installation there's something human and personal about it and people don't turn up their noses. I guess it's a the challenge to filmmakers, documentary filmmakers is to have a kind of pre-conceptual moment and rather than say I have an idea to make a film it's just I have an idea and let's see what the right form is for that. An excellent example is a piece called Question Bridge. That was a subject of conversation earlier today. And I think about this piece in relation to another film that we showed at Sundance called Love which was an autobiographical story about and these two pieces are stories about black men. Love is a specific story, a beautifully told story this narrative film about a young boy coming of age falling around his uncle who just got out of prison but wanting to establish a legit business. It is a fantastic film and the story that that filmmaker wanted to tell was that specific story. In the case of Question Bridge, the filmmakers, the artists, their story wanted, what they wanted to do was to have black men tell their own story established through conversation not so much conversation but just to tell their own story. So they had this digital platform available to them so that what was really important and it's always important to have a record but I think what was the most important for those makers was to create a conversation amongst black men using new digital technology in a way that has never been possible before because the digital technology enabled these men to speak from a safe space in a very focused way. And the payoff was so enormous, I can't tell you how this thing played at Sundance it played to all kinds of races and all kinds of creeds and colors and having access to a conversation between black men that really just wouldn't be possible outside of the safe space that this digital technology provided. So you can call that and you can have anxieties about preserving this work and certainly I respect that from the Academy but boy did it ever achieve the goal of the makers and boy did it ever contribute to American society by opening up a conversation that was just never possible before. It's actually a perfect segue to my question touched upon it actually but I'll ask it anyway. So throughout this talk of just it seems as though we might all agree that the form of the documentary if anything has transitioned to open up some opportunities instead of just telling a story and having that story exist in its form and perhaps a dialogue would exist after that but that would be it instead of that we have an opportunity here with these new forms of technology to sort of initiate a continuum to start with an idea perhaps and start with a call to action perhaps but importantly keep people engaged in this story or at least I see that opportunity so that the story can just evolve and grow organically so if you agree with that notion would you also agree that the role of the creator has also evolved to encompass not just coming up with an idea or even presenting a call to action for the general public to respond to but also to equip the general public or at least their target audience with the tools to empower them to respond back and to actually empower them to engage in the story to create part of the media. So for example, similar to what you just described I see the artist is coming up with a framework to say all right I want these stories to bubble up on their own and to me that's an important shift. I guess I'm not directing it to anyone in particular but if anyone would like to respond to that. I actually was thinking what is a significant shift we're seeing across all these forms and it is from the idea of an individual director with a kind of logo centric point of view or maybe a political point of view or I would ever give voice to the voiceless make an image of the image list to like I call it the documentary of reparation. Repair something. I think what we're moving towards at least in the projects I'm interested in and again I'm seeing this all over the world and I want us to be really careful that we just don't center everything in countries of the global north. I think we're shifting from this idea of the director of the reparation to the convener and designer of the experience that creates conversations and convenings. I think question bridge high rise of me so many of these projects have this share this and this idea becomes aleatory, right? It becomes unpredictable and the unpredictability of this becomes that which motors the project. I think we're shifting from the idea of a story to the idea of stories. Salman Rushdie calls it the sea of stories not the drip of a story but the sea of stories and he says in our room in the sea of stories we're in the boat, we take our cup and we dip it into the sea of stories and I think that that's a great theoretical model for thinking of these user generated projects. I said earlier in the day I think we're moving from Shakespearean generic models to what I would call, again, my old 70s feminist erupts so pardon me, to what I would call the Scheherazade model of multiple stories. I think we're moving from one kind of sense of temporality to multiple temporalities. We're maybe moving a little bit from time to different spatializations. I think high rise to me emblematize that. It's a space. So I mean where are we is we're rethinking structures and we're thinking of structures in ways that are about thinking of ways of creating conviviality. I think these hard hitting in-your-face projects are still a space for them and but I think in some parts of the world to make a hard in-your-face work is going to put you in jail or you'll lose your life and that sometimes creating spaces for conviviality, I'll give you the example in Indonesia or Malaysia or parts of India, Nigeria, have become really important. They are a mode of survival. I think we're seeing these projects migrate. I don't like this term transmedia because transnational corporations use it. So I try to use the term migratory because it's kind of environmental, right? So do you know what I mean? It's like we're migrating. And so I really thank you for that question because I think it gets to the ethical heart of what so many of these projects people have described. I think we're not looking at big movements as much anymore as we're looking at safe spaces, small spaces, hijacked spaces, occupied spaces, but they're smaller spaces. They're micro-topias, if you will, so thanks. But there is, just to bring it back to prosaic funding and sustainability for whoever the creators are, there are real issues around that because the one thing we do know, it's very hard to get any kind of documentary made. We all know that but with a linear documentary you pretty much know how much it's gonna cost and you can pretty much time it out. I mean, there's all sorts of things that might come up as you make your film but you know what the development period looks like, you know what the production period looks like. You pretty much know how long you're gonna be in the edit and you know what the distribution looks like after that. With these projects, that's not the case at all. And so with 18 Days in Egypt, which is exactly what you just described, you know, it's incredibly exciting for Jigar and Yasmin but they're also like, oh my God, like what are we, you know, what do we get ourselves into because- And when does it end? Because there is no end. It's called 18 Days in Egypt but they realize the story of Egypt doesn't end on the last day of the revolution. And so this project is continuing and also they realize there was a huge digital access issue that a lot of the things they expected to happen didn't happen because you know, one of the things I always say when people say, oh, they'll be user-generated content, I'm like, if you're lucky, the best problem to have is how to moderate that content. Generally, you don't even get any content. So one of the issues they had is having to actually have fellows on the ground in Egypt, you know, taking sort of tablets and phones around to actually collect these stories. And I mean, this is all incredibly exciting. If you talk to either one of them, they will, you know, tell you lots of stories about how they've really changed about, they've changed the way they think about their roles as storytellers. Jigar calls himself, I don't know what he calls himself now, but he has a very, and he comes from an interesting space as well because he used to work in multimedia journalism. So he's always felt quite comfortable, I think, sort of dancing between worlds. But I think it has been quite challenging for them. And I think, you know, looking ahead, there's gonna be a lot of really difficult decisions to make. And I think a lot of this also comes back to, you know, having good partnerships on board so that you do actually have a long-term plan. And maybe there is an extra strategy for you as the creator, if necessary. Because, you know, I still, I always talk about this, but I do always think about people, you know, paying their rent and maybe being able to retire one day. I think it's really important. Yeah, thank you both for tremendous responses. And if I could just follow up quickly. You touched upon a key point which inspired the question. I mean, I see that there are different places in the world and they have different capabilities. It's one thing to look at, you know, the latest iPad that's coming out and think of all the exciting ways that we can use it. That's important, that's great, someone's gotta do that. Someone also has to bring these tools to people who, you know, have a hard time finding water or whatever. Their story still needs to be told and they need to engage, even if it's within their local community. And so I guess just to reiterate, I would see the role of this creator as sort of this amalgamation of the technologist whose responsibility is to, you know, if they're applying for a grant or something, they might scope out the work and say I'm building this tool and these are the features that it's going to have. Perhaps the documentary maker has to start doing, or maybe not has to, but has an opportunity to do something like that. To say, you know, I actually just wanna empower these people in a unique way and this is the scope of the project that I intend to deliver. Would you ever see something like that floating? Well, I mean, one of the things that makes me incredibly nervous in applications is when people talk about giving voice because I think that's the most patronizing, you know, and it's a reflex phrase that people use, but you know, I think looking at technologies now and going back to that idea of the digital palette, you know, people have technologies, everyone has some kind of technology. Yeah, true. And there are ways of accessing them. So I mean, I absolutely agree and I do always think about appropriate technologies and the way that we're creating these stories, but I think that one, actually what has been amazing about this new way of creating stories and creating stories with people is actually really challenging that idea of like the savior filmmaker giving voice to the voiceless. I think that's really, really important. I totally agree and I just wanna raise like another point and this is sort of a Cassandra point, which is, you know, I've been in a lot of forums in the last couple of years where people are so excited about user-generated upload content and I speak as someone who's lived a lot in Southeast Asia, okay, so you hear this, you know, and what I've heard in Southeast Asia and in India is user-generated content, they call it American-generated content, right? And I've heard that everywhere I've been in the global south. So and, you know, I think we have to realize that technologies, networks, and nodes are not the same around the globe and I don't wanna fall back into old 90s talk about digital divides because, I mean, we have places that are leapfrogged, right, Singapore is more technologically sophisticated than the United States, but we have, you know, governments that can shut down different nodes at will. We don't have YouTube in China, but we have a vital underground documentary movement in the D Cinema and I wanna just raise this issue and it's an ethical issue, which is right now an image made is an image that will circulate across many networks, across many nodes, across many countries and it is an image that will be remixed beyond recognition and I think you brought that up this morning. It will be remixed beyond recognition. So there becomes a question of what are the ethics of UGC when we're thinking that works are being maybe made on cell phones in places where if your image is on the internet, the security forces are going to crowdsource you and put you in jail. We saw this in Iran. We've seen it in Burma. We've seen it in India. We've seen it in Indonesia and we've seen it in parts of West Africa, right? So what do we do with this? And I think there's a lot of work being done by Engage Media, by Tactical Technology Collective, by Witness too and I've been working on a project with Sam Gregory from Witness on circulatory media and ethics. So if we say an image made in an image uploaded is going to be recirculated, I think we have to go back to human rights discourse that emphasizes the dignity of the subject and now subjects and uploaders need to realize that the glories of having all these cameras can also be the difficulties of security forces of getting you and putting you in jail or it could be the difficulties of maybe you're not going to get that scholarship to the university because you were in protest movement or you said something. So I just find I have to think a lot to refocus on the dignity of the subjects in a circulatory universe. Is it always important to have an image of everything? Is it always important to have a face? So for example, Witness and Engage Media are working, I think they're going to rule this out soon with a cell phone app that if you're in a conflict area, it'll blur faces, right? So it'll document abuse, but it will blur faces. This has been really very, very important in Indonesia and in the Middle East and in North Africa because we've seen what security forces do here. So I don't mean to be the person who throws the water on the party, but I think sometimes we have to still think about those old ideas from documentary which is about we in the documentary world are telling stories about other people. And I always think we have to always center ourselves by not being centered on ourselves. We have to think about the subjects. Some people are in conflict zones, some are in places where they don't have good water. So we have two more questions and in about eight more minutes. So if I could ask both of you to give your questions and then we can take them on as a pool. I'm going to be over here next year while I take this class. So I'm just here. Hello? I think that Mike's on. I don't think that Mike's on. Sorry, I'll say this quickly since we're running out of time. Sam Gregory teaches a class at the Kennedy School in January. It's an open enrollment class for cross-registration for anyone who's here who's interested. And he's from the witness program. So, and I took his class this January as part of the CAR Center for Human Rights Policy and it was great. I recommend it. But my question is switching back to the question of money. And you brought up a very important point about new revenue streams or being creative with our revenue streams. And I wanted to point out that social enterprise and social entrepreneurship are the big buzzwords these days around here. And then we also have social change media. And it seems that never the two shall meet, at least not around here. I'm taking a class in Harvard Business School, Harvard Kennedy School class on social entrepreneurship right now. And all the case studies are on things like health care, zip car, microcredit finance. And there's nothing in there about media. And so it really got me thinking, like, are there any cases out there where we can show tried and tried well and failed or tried well and succeeded, where we can look to these new tools of doing good by doing well by doing good? Now, we know that in this type of work, we do a lot of good, but we don't always do well. We're not always making enough money to pay the bills. So I really wanted to go back to that question, if you don't mind, and see if any of you are willing to talk about this meeting of these two spheres and seeing if you know of anything where this engagement is happening or if this is a place where we need to do more work. And if so, what do you think? I mean, sorry, just to leap in. I think there's lots and lots of amazing examples of exactly that. I mean, I don't know if necessarily the media makers would consider themselves social entrepreneurs. Some of them I jigger certainly would. He's got a really interesting, I think he's like a social media entrepreneur or a media entrepreneur, but I think there's lots and lots of examples of that kind of work being done through media in really powerful ways. I mean, Paco and Pamela with the reckoning and more recently with Granito have done some incredible work. And I mean, Granito really has affected real world change in Guatemala. And they're creating a sort of a memory, what's it called? The memory? Every memory matters to collect stories with the forensic teams in Guatemala. I mean, I think that that's actually one of the really interesting and really urgent things that is happening in media. I think maybe we are a little bit nervous about calling ourselves anything with the word entrepreneur in it. I don't know why that is, but I think that works happening. We just don't call it that. And maybe we don't get recognized for that as a result. Well, is it compiled somewhere? I mean, it's important that someone who, like myself, is trying to go out there and make the media happen and on bare bones in the beginning and then trying to raise the money and pull it together. And it's really good to have these examples to pull from. And I'm wondering if that seems like a good project if it hasn't already been done to pull them together as a body of work. Has anybody got anything else to say? I have an example, and it's from Malaysia. And I think sometimes we focus so much on media that we forget that larger social, political, historical configurations often have lacks that media can meet. So I'll give you this concrete example, which is the website Malaysia Kenny. It's the oppositional citizen journalism news website in Malaysia. It's started because, as you probably know, Malaysia has a multimedia corridor where it is doing quick leapfrogging development with new technologies. But Malaysia has a lot of film censorship and television censorship for a variety of reasons. I mean, they would call it regulation here in America. We'd call it censorship. But there's an opposition movement in Malaysia. And so what did they do? The Malaysians never regulated the internet because that would stop transnational companies like Microsoft and digital developers from coming into the multimedia corridor. So the internet had an opening. So Malaysia Kenny became this site of citizen journalists telling stories of the opposition movement in Malaysia. Not regulated, not censored, because to do that would be bad for business. Films, narrative films, documentaries, censored. So Malaysia Kenny is now one of the most economically successful internet projects in all of Southeast Asia. Who would have thought it? But again, is it because it's an online citizen journalist project? No, it's because it worked the cracks and fulfilled a need. A need for a kind of civil society public discourse around these economic development issues and political issues. And I think it's a really exciting example. In fact, I was at a journalist conference in Singapore where every major daily newspaper all over Asia was asking Malaysia Kenny how they could have citizen journalism for their big commercial enterprises. So just one example. But the example, I think, requires not thinking about media that can be monetized, but thinking about where in social, political, historical configurations is there a crack? Is there a need? Is there an urgency? Great. I think we have to wind it down here on this very optimistic note. And let me just give a plug to the civic media folks here because that's a place where a lot of these conversations also occur about alternate forms of both gathering information, giving it form, getting it out to the publics that work terrifically in all sorts of cultural spaces. And they have very regular events, so just keep an eye on the website for the Center for Civic Media because that's their core work. I want to thank our panel. It was a terrific conversation. Thanks very much. Thank you.