ABSTRACT
As media forms, webdocs and i-Docs currently exist at the cutting edge of experimentation in new technologies and platforms. Critical research and writing on webdocs and i-Docs have developed in relationship with and in response to the emergence of interactive digital documentary making as a new artistic and industry practice over the last decade. Earlier literary and cinema-based approaches become inadequate for addressing four distinct aspects of interactive documentaries, all of which can be traced to specific technological innovations and which can be studied via experience design. Many recent critical works address interactivity in a range of ways that dance around the core insights and methodologies of experience design. The design aesthetic counters expectations of a traditional cinematic immersion, as do the embedded videos of surveillance camera footage of the animals in the park, both of which reinforce the theme of surveillance and control.
