Co-investigators William Uricchio , Vivek Bald
Project Website http://opendoclab.mit.edu/
Project Start Date March 2012
The Open Documentary Lab has teamed up with IDFA DocLab to create Moments of Innovation, an interactive exhibit and online research project exploring the long history of inventive documentary practices.
Internet, cellphone cameras, big data, interactive games, and other technologies have created an explosion of new methods of storytelling that is transforming the media landscape. The Open Documentary Lab, located in MIT's School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, explores the challenges and opportunities these changes present for the makers of today’s documentaries.
Founded in 2012 as a research initiative within the Comparative Media Studies / Writing section, OpenDocLab builds on MIT’s impressive legacy of media innovation -- from Technicolor to one of the world's first video games, "Spacewar." MIT’s accomplishments in film include pioneering work in Direct Cinema by Ed Pincus and Richard Leacock, who tapped the new availability of portable sync-sound cameras for documentary work in the 1960s and ’70s, and early explorations in interactive cinema by Glorianna Davenport, who used digital technology to involve audiences in narration in the 1980s and ’90s.
The lab’s official launch in March 2012 -- an invitation-only summit titled New Arts of Documentary -- highlighted the goal of the new initiative: to bring documentary scholars, media makers, technologists, and curators together to investigate cutting-edge developments in authorship, textual form, technology, and interactivity. Since then, the lab has pursued what Wolozin calls “interventionist research,” collaborating with top film institutions such as the Sundance Institute, the Tribeca Film Institute, the National Film Board of Canada, and community groups to tell documentary stories and to identify opportunities for social impact.