I’m very pleased to announce that Spectre has been added to the MIT Docubase Lab, a curated database of the people, projects, and technologies transforming documentary in the digital age. The folks at Docubase believe that documentaries play a vital role in our democracy and that today’s technologies and techniques offer new creative possibilities for expression.

“For sheer innovation and unpredictability, few things can compete with the emergence of a new media practice. Conventions, orthodoxies and routine have not yet set in. Virtually anything is possible. Consider the earliest years of film, radio and television – before any rules or best practices or institutional mandates existed – when media makers could engage in unparalleled levels of experimentation. Today, this untamed creative fervor can be found in the new documentary – a fast-emerging form that includes interaction, participation and community-creation.  This development has served as a catalyst, challenging our inherited notions of story, transforming it and at times moving beyond it.  It affords new vantage points, and requires new literacies…

‘Unruly’ best describes the amazing documentaries that we’ve gathered together in docubase. True, all share an interest in innovation, in tapping the potentials of digital technologies to tell their stories. But the similarity stops there. Interactive, collaborative, location-based, community-created, parts of larger trans-media experiences … the projects gathered here defy easy categorization. They are made by and with communities, journalists, citizen-activists, film and video makers, game-designers, community organizers, data-visualizers and ordinary people. Some production teams model themselves on the conventions of film, others on games, and still others invent new ways of describing their work. Why so complicated? Because we are witnessing a rare moment that is in equal parts creative and inchoate…

The collected projects and the ideas they stimulate offer ways to build a community of participants, to capture the unruly brilliance of our moment, and to envision and create the future of the documentary.”

– William Uricchio, Professor of Comparative Media Studies, Principle Investigator, Docubase Lab

 

Check out the MIT Docubase platform here