Interactive media! and documentary /photography

Interactive media is a new(ish) idea which I think is a reaction to the internet, and many other issues. With the rise of people journalism, new internet realities and creation of media becoming something that a vast majority of people in the world have access to, media is not something owned by a few people at the top of the pile, trained in media production or business. With even the big news corporations using public journalists, there is a change in public being injected with an idea.
Interactive media has sort of grown out of this. There are several types of interactive media; the most obvious is interactive gaming. In things like Second Life, you can create a new reality, a new identity, and build new places- you work with others from around the world for this. There are also less scary things; people get obsessed with Farmville, or Candycrush- where you play against others and can win "money" online to build new things/get bigger farms. This encourages audience engagement and interaction with each other and the game.
There is also many strands of interactive art work, which are all quiet exciting and new. These could be online, as this: http://weavesilk.com/
 which is a website which encourages you to make video art based on the music. There are other interactive online art works, such as
There is also more traditional interactive art works, like this:

 Which is a wall on a street, where everyone can interact by writing their wishes on the wall, before they die.A similar one is this photo portrait "masher" which appeared in New York. The video takes photos of all of its visitors, and mashes them together, based on your eyes and face movements. It is meant to be about the fluid-ness of identity, gender etc etc

http://www.flong.com/projects/reface/

Similarly, I visited an installation in London called the "House of Pain", where you go into a house, scream as loud as you can, and watch the house light up and explode with colors, for everyone to see.


A similar interactive installation is this video, in which a room reacts to movement and voice, with blinds, floor movements, lights and mirrors. You experience depends on you, and how you act and sound:

There are also interactive music videos, such as this one by arcade fire, where you put in your address and the video uses google maps to rein-act scenes where you live. There are also more, where you can play a instrument in the band.


Finally, (and most importantly) there are also many online documentaries.

One of my all time favorites is this one by Jigar Metha, "18daysinegypt", which is an online documentary using the media of citizens- tweets, photos, video clips, documents, accounts- to map out the 18 days of revolution in Egypt. In the documentary, you can walk through google maps and interact with different sources, pick days and times and find out time spans and what happened when- it is like a giant online visual map of the 18 days of revolution.

http://beta.18daysinegypt.com/



here is another, an interactive documentary, with photos, soundscapes, videos and accounts of what it is like to live on this small Hawaiian town La'ie, from the disappearing voices of the elders, who knew traditions before the tourists came. The documentary is about re-capturing voices (especially the natives) told from their voices. This is interesting because it is a western film maker coming in to try and help these native Hawaiians regain what is being lost, through a medium of film- this relates to what I want to do.

http://www.kupunainteractive.com/



Interactive photography:

The main idea for interactive photography is the idea of Googlemaps- which millions of photos documenting and recording earth- an interactive, objective view of the human inhabited world. These images are very interesting and both create an online reality while also representing an outside reality to as much extend with as little human intervention as possible. There has actually been so much google maps street art- for instance this website: http://googlemapsart.wordpress.com/ which "finds" images from satellites and puts them in galleries:


There have been others who use google maps to comment on society- such as this image, one from Google, but has "clouds", when you zoom in, these clouds are actually words associated with each place, via news patterns. The more you move around, the more it becomes clear how news language shapes our idea of continents (by how they change)
http://imaginarylandscape.fr/



There are numerous "interactive" photography sites online, showing panoramas of famous cities. Though interesting, this doesn't have any narrative. I have been doing some internet searching, and actually found some really interesting photo documentaries online.
One i really liked was this:
http://hollowdocumentary.com/
Its an interactive soundscape and photo documentary of Mcdowel County.