Roderick Coover

Visual research and the new documentary

ABSTRACT This paper reflects upon theoretical, practical and ethical issues facing the production of interactive documentary cinema projects that are based on in-depth, disciplinary, intellectual and/or artistic research questions, such of those concerning anthropological observation and visual studies. The paper considers ways in which perceptions of how documentary images function in digital environments impact documentary practice and production. The interdisciplinary paper draws upon writings in poetry, philosophy, visual studies, cinema studies and art with special attention given to the writings of Dai Vaughn, Nelson Goodman, Charles Bernstein, John Berger, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Michael Renov, as well as to cinematic and digital works by Sharon Daniels, the Labyrinth Project, Jean Rouch, Samuel Bollendorf and Abel Segretin, among others.

Hearts and Minds: the Interrogations Project

Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project is an interactive virtual reality narrative performance made for the EVL’s CAVE2™ large-scale 320-degree panoramic virtual reality environment that visualizes stories of violence and the post-traumatic stress experienced by ordinary American soldiers who became torturers in the course of serving their country. During the American-led counterinsurgency and counter-terrorism campaigns in Iraq in the years after 11 September 2001, the torture and abuse of detainees was a commonplace tactic.

Hearts and minds: The interrogations project

Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project is an interactive Virtual Reality narrative performance developed in Unity for the CAVE2™ large-scale 320-degree panoramic virtual reality environment at the Electronic Visualization Lab (EVL) at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). The work provides an experience of true stories of abusive violence, battlefield torture and post-traumatic stress during the American-led counterinsurgency and counter terrorism campaigns in Iraq in the years after September 11, 2001. The immersive virtual reality environment of the CAVE2™ is used to communicate both difficult truths about torture and to produce an affective impression of the how these practices were experienced by individual American soldiers.

Something that happened only once

Recorded in Coyocán Plaza, Mexico City, this panoramic motion-media work looks at the actions of actors and non-actors recorded on a city plaza on a busy Saturday afternoon. Using dynamic layers of photographic imagery, songs, and found sounds, the work presents lives caught in moments of flux to raise questions about subjectivity, displacement, and travel. The panorama also explores formal relationships between word and image, interweaving seven overlapping narratives that are written by Deb Olin Unferth and put to music by singer-composer Jodi Gilbert and saxophonist Michael Moore. The evocative work follows a female protagonist, a male counterpart, and other characters in a manner that suggests narrative but never becomes it. Instead it’s an expression of temperament or a consciousness – a searching, a longing, a loneliness.