From Interaction to Personalisation: What Happens When We Become Part of the Story

It took about 15 years to accept that the documentaries of the 21st century might be “interactive”. Moving from a linear media to a non linear one has challenged the role of the author in the creative treatment of actuality - as subjects and the users are now directly involved in such creation.

But a new shift is about to disturb our idea of what a narrative is: the oculus rift places us in a world that composes itself in real time while we are exploring it, and data mining allows us to personalise stories to their final users. What happens to our understanding of reality when we become the protagonists of hypothetical worlds? In this presentation Sandra Gaudenzi explores how the evolution of interactive factual narrative challenges our understanding of agency in the digital and physical world.

About the speaker

Sandra Gaudenzi started her career as a television producer and then moved into interactive television, to finally specialize in the field of digital interactive narrative. She has taught interactive media theory at the London College of Communication (University of the Arts London) during thirteen years, completed a PhD about interactive documentary at Goldsmiths, and is now Visiting Research Fellow at the University of the West of England. She co-convenes the i-Docs conference and is Creative Director of its website. She also mentors projects, organises trainings, curates conferences such as WebDox, blogs, researches and runs a monthly meet-up in London on new interactive factual narratives.

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