ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 is titled “Why Open Space?” It argues that open space documentary is where technology meets people and place, positing a circular relationship between documentary actors rather than a triangular one. Open space new media documentary practices are place-based and collaborative, moving across the analog, the digital, and the embodied and employing multiple interfaces. These new forms of documentary feature aggregated storytelling, on-the-ground stories, community engagement, and user-generated histories. They expand documentary ecologies into collaborative, iterative, and process-oriented forms. The chapter postulates a theory of open space documentary that rejects enclosure, operates with permeable borders, and engages dialogical relationships. To elaborate this theory, the chapter weaves together environmental theory, landscape architecture, design theory, literary theory (Umberto Eco), avant-garde modernist arts practices (Fluxus), relational art theory (Nicholas Bourriaud), social practice art (Grant Kester), new media theory (Douglass Rushkoff), and political theory from the World Social Forum. The chapter concludes by explaining that the book focuses on twelve participatory new media projects that gather people together in specific places to address conflictual issues and to build future scenarios. These projects are dialogic, collaborative, permeable, encounter-driven, focused on microterritories and process. The projects feature works from Argentina, Canada, China, India, Indonesia, Israel, Palestine, Peru, Syria, Ukraine, and the United States, as well as transnational works.
