Notes from a Popathon
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Julie Koeie/ Notes from Popathon #3 London 14-‐15th of June 2014 Coming from a visual narrative training in film design, I was convinced that I wanted to produce well-‐arranged and aesthetically flawless stories for the rest of my life. That perception gradually changed, as I found that real engaging narratives somehow seem to rise from the dialogue and interaction with others. Travelling the Middle East co-‐facilitating workshops in citizen journalism and hands-‐on video production, I soon learned that a fixed narrative might be fascinating and engaging, but that it has limitations as to supporting an underlying structure of networks that provides multiple voices to be expressed. This is why I find web-‐native storytelling and Popathons intriguing; it is as if indulging in all these experiments gradually revealing, where the quite powerful structure of media is heading, as the technology that provide tools for narrating is rapidly changing towards digitalization on various levels. I had the long waited pleasure of not only attending a Popathon, but also mentoring the hard-‐ working teams, attending the 3rd Popathon in London 14-‐ 15th of July this year. Here follows some words and reflections on the third Popathon in London, a collaborative workshop for coding and co-‐narrating web-‐native stories. The Teams During this Popathon, two teams joined up, based on participant’s projects that they generously opened to collaborative experiments. James Milton introduced his quiz-‐ based project ‘Interweb Compatible Annual Loyalty Test’, a first person experience, with static video-‐ shots of an interviewer, accompanying you through a Kafkaesque multiple-‐choice game. James quickly associated with Jordie Montevecchio that is currently working on a documentary on an elaborated, fully functioning democratic system in a South American prison block. Jordie was looking to expand on interactive and game-‐like features for the project, and both concepts seemingly worked around challenging our views on democratic systems. The team number two, taking the inventive name Popaquestion, consisted of Helen Wright, presenting her and Hugh Lewis’ The Global People Project, and Mari Shibata, introducing the initial stages of an online, collaborative and artistic project. Both projects bravely challenge the far-‐reaching potentials of the web, opening the platforms to a variety of voices. Discussions During the weekend, the two projects’ regular presentations raised interesting discussions on challenges not only concerning the projects of this Popathon’s participants, but possibly anyone working with online interactive narratives in the initial stages. Though welcoming failure definitely is fruitful in the process of experimenting, it appears that certain complexes continuously manifest themselves at the core of developing web-‐based storytelling. Block 7’s gamifyied web-‐ doc, giving the user a multiple-‐ choice interaction with characters in the prison, firstly received feedback that questioned whether there
were too many clicks through the interface, before reaching the actual story. An overall challenge here became how to merge a game-‐like interactivity with the weighty narrative based on Jordie’s research in the prison block – making the coding, user experience and visual design work together in order to convey an engaging story of hardship and survival in a rough prison. The team Popaquestion, which expanded on wide participation when questioning a range of people on universal topics such as love, sparked an interesting dialogue on, what I think is an on-‐going complex in ‘big data’-‐ projects; finding the entry point for engagement across a wide sea of material. More general, critical questions to ‘global’ web-‐based projects could be shaped as: “How to frame the multiple perspective?” – in order to sidestep the relativism of the web, imaginably leading to a sort of indifferent reply. The further outcome James and Jordie’s team Block 7 quickly dipped into the development and design of an interface, containing numerous pages for a user journey based on continuous decision making through various scenes in the prison block. In this case, the implantation of images and characters based on inmate’s stories sharpened the level of association with a fist-‐hand experience of a life lived in imprisonment. In my opinion, the project’s underlying research based on real encounters with inmates in the prison block, seemed to feed the multiple-‐choice feature with a sense of authenticity, echoing the strategies of survival in the assumed user’s ‘free world.’ Popaquestion tried out different models for integrating live-‐feeds into the interface. The main concept was to present multiple global answers on questions of feeling happiness, fear etc. However, when searching the word ‘fear’ at Twitter and Instagram, the feeds revealed some disturbing results, which didn’t exactly correspond to the team’s ideas for a website. This may be an example that exactly points to the complexity of conceptualizing narratives using tools that generate somewhat uncontrollable representations of data flowing around social media, the voice of potentially everybody. At the end of the weekend, the team introduced an ‘engine of exploration’ based on video-‐ filmed replies originating from The Global People Project. The interface allows the user to search for the interpretation of a specific feeling at a specific geographical spot, giving opportunities to find contrasts and similarities across the world in a simple way. Also, an extra layer was pitched, in which the users themselves upload their answers to the same questions, adding to a growing set of data. The project turned out to be an encouraging example of how to frame and narrow big sets of material, and to further expand on the content through online contribution. Perspectives I will briefly suggest some further perspectives on the learning from this weekend, especially the media-‐material used for Popathons.
It is common that storytellers bring their data in form of photos, stories and video-‐clips to the collaboration to be remixed, hacked, re-‐used and built upon in collaborations. During this Popathon, we met some obstacles related to image and video content, as some material had to be enclosed due to broadcaster’s copyright on yet unreleased documentaries. Another addition to this challenge is that some projects may still be so fresh that they do not yet have media material to build upon. Initially it could be an issue of image sourcing; spending an amount of time on ‘Creative Common’ -‐searches for the perfect material. Another immediate reply could question how important visual material really is for prototypes created at Popathons. However, in the spirit of making in collaboration, a future experiment was suggested, by which visual storytellers bring cameras instead of external hard disks. It would be intriguing to see how these projects would evolve, being clean-‐ slate collaborations between moviemakers and coders, everybody bringing their ‘craft’ tools to the workshop. All in all I’m deeply impressed by the enthusiasm brought to the Popathon by all participants, their collaborative skills and working spirit. And thanks to Philo and Gilles for making this happen once again. I’ll look forward to a next Popathon and am already keen to see, which innovative learning will develop in the near future. Facts The word Popathon is a derivation from Popcorn + Hackathon. (For those still new to the field; Hackathon is a further descent of hack + marathon; meaning fun weekend for coders, to put it very simply.) Since Mozilla launched Popcorn in 2010 and an accessible interface that allows users to add web elements to videos in 2012, the open source code-‐ library behind it has expanded on Github, offering a growing collection of available resources to experiment with interactive storytelling. However, Popathon participants does not necessarily build their coding solely on the Popcorn JavaScript library, as professionals from various fields of narrative storytelling, design and computer science team up, bringing their specific skills to the development of new interactive stories for the web. Block 7> James Milton/ www.themanfrommofo.com Jordie Montevecchio/ http://matchboxmedia.org/ @jordiefilm Mohammad Khaleel Jaffer/ @MKJaffer Popaquestion > http://basilesimon.github.io/popathon-‐london/cover.html Helen Wright and Hugh Lewis/ www.globalpeopleproject.org / @helenwri Mari Shibata/ theinterculturalist.com/ @intercultralist
Facilitators Philo Van Kemenade/ philovankemenade.tumblr.com / @phivk Gilles Pradeau/ @Learningtocount Mentors Ricardo Davila Otoya / @davila_otoya Basile Simon / basilesimon.fr / @basilesimon Julie R. B. Koeie / cargocollective.com/juliekoeie / @jurobako #Popathon Github > https://github.com/mozilla/popcorn-‐js Thanks to the Impact Hub Westminster for hosting us @impacthub Open source July 2014
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