Dale Hudson and Patricia R. Zimmermann

Documentary’s Augmented Realities

Dissatisfaction with virtual reality (VR), particularly its distracting headsets, has percolated through popular culture and more artist-oriented milieus: it often causes fatigue and nausea; it has an awkward interface often involving clicking a controller to move or retrieve objects, it often results in the “uncanny valley” (i.e., revulsion, rather than empathy, for human-looking avatars and robots). AR has increasingly been adopted as the technology of choice by noncommercial makers. AR apps, for example, allow for location-based tours of historical places. For documentary practice, AR has become a way to engage viewers on site as well as online, a characteristic that has become more important after the screen fatigue of two years in lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Our presentation expands beyond conventional conceptions of AR as a mobile app to consider other ways that material and perceptual reality can be augmented by virtual and machine-generated layers. We consider projection mapping of digital images onto physical objects such as buildings, a kind of shared public AR, alongside individual private AR on an app. We also include laptop-based work that uses machine vision to visualize invisible histories, such as natural and built environments that no longer exists, as well as invisible realities such as air pollution. Finally, we consider uses of film that augment reality by reworking legacy documentary realism. We reject techno-solutions propagated by technology industries but instead argue for a use of digital technologies when they contribute to augment and critique what passes as reality. Some add digital layers of historical context over camera viewfinders. Others redesign the directional compass of maps to add the depth of time. Still others reframe documentary realism to situate humans as only one actor in larger ecosystems or produce sounds from data visualization on air pollutants invisible to human eyes.

Dale Hudson is an associate professor at New York University Abu Dhabi. He is co-author with Patricia R. Zimmermann of Thinking through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places (2015), author of Vampires, Race, and Transnational Hollywoods (2017), and co-editor with Alia Yunis of a double issue of Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication on “Film and Visual Media in the Gulf” (2021) and Reorienting the Middle East: Film and Digital Media Where the Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea, and Indian Ocean Meet (forthcoming, 2023). He programs exhibitions for the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF) and coordinates Films from the Gulf for the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) Film Festival.

Patricia R. Zimmermann is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Screen Studies and Director of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF) now in its 27th year at Ithaca College in Ithaca New York. The author or editor of ten books, her most recent are Documentary Across Platforms: Reverse Engineering Media, Place, and Politics (2019) and Flash Flaherty: Tales from a Film Seminar (2021). She is co-author with Dale Hudson of Thinking through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places (2015). She is Editor-at-Large of The Edge, the online magazine dedicated to countering the mainstream, published by the Park Center for Independent Media (PCIM)

Dale Hudson
https://nyuad.nyu.edu/en/academics/divisions/arts-and-humanities/faculty/dale-hudson.html

Patricia R. Zimmermann
https://www.ithaca.edu/faculty/patty