I presented a brief talk at the ECREA pannel “The digital future of reality: interactive documentaries as tools to process and tackle complex representations of the mediated world” in ECREA Lugano

In particular I was presenting:

14:45 – 15:00
The agency of the algorithms as actors in the field of the audiovisual culture
Q. Berga
Open University of Catalonia, Faculty of Computer Science- Multimedia and Telecommunications, Barcelona, Spain.

Related work

You can find some of my publications about webdocs and related subjects here:

Some of the biblography cited in the talk:

  • Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (2003). Metaphors We Live By (2nd edition). Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.
  • Bertelsen, O. W., & Pold, S. (2004). Criticism As an Approach to Interface Aesthetics. En Proceedings of the Third Nordic Conference on Human-computer Interaction (pp. 23–32). New York, NY, USA: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/1028014.1028018

 

  • Karen Barad

Abstract

And finally here is the abstract of the talk:

The agency of the algorithms as actors in the field of the audiovisual culture

Observing the technical evolution of how society has been sharing images in motion we can describe a transition from chemical processes found in early cinema, passing by electromagnetic techniques with video and television, to the contemporary dominance of digital processes. Even though all three methods coexist today, the digital have become the predominant one that allows remediation of the older methods and at the same time have brought genuine methods to produce, realize, distribute and consume audiovisuals. The digital medium allows creating, viewing and transmitting images by encoding only the information of those images into binary data that can be processed, stored or transmitted thanks to the network infrastructures.

In this computational and networked ecosystem, many artefacts have been developed such as personal computers, digital cameras, mobile devices, virtual reality devices, augmented reality technologies, and many soft technologies such as codecs, computer vision, communication protocols. We can observe how all of those artefacts, belonging to the contemporary audiovisual field, use computation, hence algorithms.

We center our attention on the agency of the algorithms as new actors in the process of mediating reality and how they determine ways to create, consume and disseminate stories. Algorithms have not an specific representation, they are invisible if we understand them as operations. Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) are considered to be the point of contact between the user and the computational process. As GUIs are not the algorithm themself, they use metaphors, symbols and representations to show and to hide the operations that the algorithm is capable of. In this article we analyse the GUIs of audiovisual editing tools to reflect on how the interactions and representations of algorithms are handled. Focusing on i-docs, we compare three types of interfaces: those for non-linear film edition (Premiere like software), authoring systems for i-docs (Klynt, Korsakow and Eko), and finally we review few tailored i-docs that use web standards such as HTML, Javascript and CSS.

We pay attention to the fact that digital medium allows both; the remediation or virtualization of older media and the redefinition of media itself, determined by network and computation possibilities and constraints. We conclude the article with a classification that invites to think on how GUI are connected to the nature of this digital medium.

We end up with some open questions for further research on how to visualize the choices done by algorithms when storytelling assisted by AI or complex algorithms, and how the agency and presence of algorithms interfere in our notion and perception of reality as a mediated post-human interaction.