ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the database as a cultural form as it has been taken up by interactive documentarians. It describes two key database desires – the desire to escape narrative as a dominant mode of organisation for documentary and, flowing from this, a desire to foster polyvocality, producing a space in which multiple voices might speak. The ability to accumulate large amounts of information, the combinatory possibilities of user actions and computational processes, and the many ways in which information might be structured, characterise the database. Avant-garde documentary highlights the possibilities that emerge from reconceptualising plot as a field of narrative possibilities ‘where randomness, repetition, and interruptions are rampant, and where search engines are motored by desire’. Filming Revolution also exemplifies interactive documentarians’ desire to produce forms of polyphony through database practice.
