Before moving on to talk about my own creation of an interactive documentary, I want to use the examples discussed in this section to develop and clarify the language I am using to explore nonlinearity in i-Docs, and which I will use to discuss my own i-Doc. The vocabulary I engage is drawn from various models for addressing interactive media, from geography and media studies. My sources include Ash’s theorisation of the interface (Ash, 2015), Wood and Coleman’s experiments with analysing interactive digital media (Wood, 2007; Coleman, 2010) and Nash’s typology of interactivity in i-Docs (Nash, 2012). I also draw on Adrian Miles’s Deleuzian readings of temoprality in interactive documentary and other Deleuzian work on interactive images and interfaces (Sora & Jorda, 201; Barker, 2012). My approach mobilizes Manuel DeLanda’s thorough excavation of Gilles Deleuze’s ontology (DeLanda, 2002), using this explication of nonlinear spatiotemporal ontology to theorize the ontology of these digital interfaces. Here, I clarify four concepts that are important for understanding and describing nonlinearity in i-Docs;
spatiotemporal architecture, the relationship between the virtual and the actual, attractors, and the tension between contingency and entrainment.
The first three ideas are from the work of Aylish Wood on digital interfaces. Here I reiterate her arguments and excavate their Deleuzian origins. Wood’s exploration of digital interfaces as ‘spatiotemporal architectures’ is very helpful in elucidating the workings of an i-Doc interface (Wood, 2007, p. 86). Importantly, the term ‘spatiotemporal architectures’ does not imply a fixed spatiotemporal distribution. Rather, Wood’s term stresses that digital interfaces need to be understood as a
collection of virtual capacities that can be actualised in myriad ways through interaction (Wood, 2007) and transform the media they enable access to. Wood follows Deleuze in using the term ‘virtual’. Virtual properties refer to a system’s real but un-activated capacities; for example the capacity of a child to grow adult teeth or of an ice-cube to become liquid. These properties are no less real for not being currently actualised because they structure the behaviours of that system.
In explaining the relationship between virtual and actual properties of interfaces, Wood borrows another Deleuzian concept of the ‘attractor’. Attractors are tendencies that influence which of a systems’ virtual capacities become actualised (DeLanda, 2002, p. 35). Many systems, although their trajectories are not determined, follow similar patterns because they tend towards common attractors, such as a tendency towards equilibrium (DeLanda, 2002). However, when systems have multiple attractors they have a ‘choice’ between different destinies’ (DeLanda, 2002, p. 35). Applying the concept of attractors to digital interfaces elucidates how their virtual architectures are continuously actualised and re-actualised through user interaction (Wood, 2007) and how user ‘attention is distributed across a range of possibilities’ (Coleman, 2010, p. 276). This is a valuable framework for understanding i-Docs because, in interactive documentary, the plurality of attractors is foundational to the construction of nonlinear spatiotemporal imaginaries. Almost all i-Docs offer users a choice of pathways through them, and this structures the spatiotemporality of i-Docs as a malleable medium that can be transformed through user interaction.
Also key to understanding the spatiotemporality of i-Docs is, as we have seen, the fact that the multiple attractors are made visible to users so that they have an active experience of contingency, agency and openness. For example, in the i-Doc Gaza
Sderot the four screen views - faces, map, topics and time – are always visible as
competing attractors, emphasising that the option selected is only one of the possible ways the i-Doc can be viewed. Like the nonlinear systems Delanda describes, Gaza Sderot ‘continues to display its virtuality even once the system has settled into one of its alternative stable states; because the other alternatives are there all the time, coexisting with the one that happens to be actualized’ (DeLanda, 2002, p. 75). Media theorist Adrian Miles has argued that the persistent availability of the system’s virtual properties is what characterizes the temporality of i-Docs. For Miles, traditional film editing is a process where the virtual potentials of the material, present for the editor, are curated into an actual film presented to the viewer (Miles, 2014, p. 71). Interactive documentary, meanwhile, takes on what Miles terms, following Lev Manovich, a ‘database’ model where virtuality is visible to the user even after the ‘completion’ of the i-Doc. This gives the i-Doc a structure that can be understood, following Deleuze, as ‘crystalline’ (Deleuze, 2013, p. 75), one within which the virtual and the actual are visible together and ‘in continual exchange’ (Deleuze, 2013, p. 73).
The co-presence of the virtual and the actual is key to understanding the spatiotemporal architecture of i-Docs because it undergirds the contingency that gives i-Docs their formal openness. This contingency makes the i-Doc temporality
generative because it allows material to be brought into new relations, thereby
generating new meanings. However, equally important to understanding the nonlinear spatiotemporality of i-Docs is recognising the forces through which some virtual potentials are hindered and constrained. This force can be termed, following Delanda, ‘entrainment’. As I explored above, entrainment emphasizes how the
multiple trajectories assembled within a system are held in certain configurations. As DeLanda describes, trajectories can become ‘entrained’, influencing each other’s rhythm and development (DeLanda, 2002). For example, animals’ hibernation cycles are entrained with cycles of plant growth, while humans’ sleep cycles are entrained
with the oscillations of day and night. Entrainment allows ‘many independent sequences of oscillations to act in unison, to become in effect a single parallel process’ (DeLanda, 2002, p. 115). This is achieved in different ways by different i- Docs, but generally can be recognised in the way that i-Doc contents are held in relation to each other, as I have discussed in Gaza Sderot and Journal of Insomnia. Entrainment is key term for understanding how content is organised spatiotemporally in i-Docs as well as for understanding how agency operates within them. Added to the idea of the virtual and the actual, it shows us how potentials are constrained as well as produced in the i-Doc interface.