ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 is titled “Working Principles.” This chapter summarizes and weaves together the central ideas argued in the book about open space new media documentary. It posits that open space new media documentary flips documentary from the top-down directorial model to a collaborative, distributive, and horizontal practice. It contends that the twelve projects analyzed in this book carve out space for dialogue, inquiry, and investigation about crises, political struggles, social issues and traumas. These projects utilize strategies identified as iterative, malleable, fluid, collaborative. They structure their material and artifacts in mosaic structures across the analog, digital, and embodied. Here, open space new media documentary is where technology meets people meets place. These new forms of documentary necessitate new interdisciplinary theorizations that combine into an analytical mosaic. This model of new media documentary interweaves concepts from literary theory, design theory, avant-garde art practices, relational art, social practice art, ethnography, critical historiography, and performance theory. Analyzed through the lens of this interdisciplinary model, open space new media documentary creates locations for conversations, discussions, ideas, and relationships not found elsewhere. As a nexus of people, place, and technologies, open space documentary is always a work in progress. Four key theoretical and definitional constituents define open space documentary: small places, designing encounters, polyphonic collaborations, inviting spaces. Ten strategies comprise the open space new media documentary toolkit: circularity, collaboration, community, complexity, composting, connection, context, continuum, conversation, cost.
