FORM

Clouds was an interesting documentary experience particularly as someone who is newer to this techno-artist scene. I appreciated that it was experimenting with traditional documentary form in a way that spoke to the content of the piece.

From an experiential perspective, I found the form interesting, but ultimately hard to actually get into the content. The interaction possibilities brought out my inner attention deficiencies, so I ended up skipping around a lot and focusing on the fun interaction visuals rather than what people were saying in the background. There’s some study that says that we really only pick up 30% or less of meaning from the actual words that people are saying, which I felt applied here as I definitely got more out of the interviewees that were shown speaking rather than when there was very little visual context to the content.

I wonder if I just didn’t get to it, but the content to me seemed a little oversimplified and not super critical. Perhaps because of the form, which gives preference to short sound bytes rather than fuller fleshed out opinions and discussion, I felt that many of the comments ended up being pretty commonly voiced things – I feel like I heard very little that was new (this also may be because Clouds is a like a million years old by tech years). This is especially pointed for people that I’ve had class with or seen give longer talks that deal with some of these topics/questions and very insightful things to say.

In comparison to other interactive documentaries (7 Deadly Digital Sins and Bear71), I felt that this lacked the same kind of focused user interaction that directly tied to a user’s understanding of content/meaning within the film. Or perhaps providing all these snippets and a sort of free-for-all exploration of these sound bytes and popular creative coding sketches was exactly the type of interactive environment that the filmmakers wanted to achieve. The mixing of the mediums was pretty cool.

CONTENT

With a group of classmates, I explored a handful of topics including: What is the future of storytelling?, Is it possible to simulate reality?, What makes satisfying interaction?, Death, Big Data, Are Computers Smarter than People? Building Worlds…

I’m pretty terrible at remembering names and quotes exactly and I was handling the controls for our group, so hopefully these are attributed correctly:

Within the context of Building Worlds, I liked what Ramsey Nassar said about the possibilities that exist with systematic/procedural programming. Particularly as our digitial and physical worlds continue to integrate and merge, the ability to literally create a digital reality (universe) is incredibly powerful.

Bruce Sterlings commentary on aspects of the future of storytelling were also interesting in the context of linearity and possibilities that code and computers open to editing and breaking dimensionalities.

I agreed with many of the challenges/opportunities that people spoke to in the interaction section. In particular, I found a through line in many of the comments that I identified with was that they all spoke to interactions that were/could be satisfying in a way that was larger than the digital/screen. The idea of gestural interaction and the limitation of VR currently I particularly identified with. I thought more could have been said around NUI and invisible interfaces as the future of satisfying interactions.