ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces interactive documentaries in digital and audiovisual anthropology. Interactive documentaries allow an audience to actively engage with an interface in order to experience their content. Interactive documentaries explore novel types of vision and offer new affordances to ethnography. By addressing the ways in which different interactive and immersive strategies involve the audience in the documentary, the chapter investigates the epistemological affordances of multilinear storytelling and Expanded Reality. In multilinear documentaries scenes do not acquire meaning from their position in the sequence of a film, but they stand by themselves and show different aspects of people’s lives. Ethnographers can combine these scenes, offering users the possibility to weave multilinear perspectives together and create space for multiple accounts of reality. While multilinear narrations offer involvement through narration, with Expanded Reality (XR) users are immersed in new digital environments. Either by surrounding users with images in productions of virtual reality or by augmenting places with digital media that users can access through their devices, immersive spatial representations create diverse ways to build proximity between users and the documentary subjects. These new ways to reduce relational and spatial distances present ethnographers with new ethical challenges in documentary production.
