Judith Aston

The Polyphonic Documentary project: relationality and extreme heat

This talk will present our thinking and some of the practical outcomes to date from the ‚Polyphonic Documentary‘ research project (www.polyphonicdocumentary.com), initiated by Judith Aston and Stefano Odorico in October 2020.
The project’s aim is to explore the potential of interactive documentary for promoting interdisciplinary dialogue and exchange in a context of climate emergency and increasing polarization.
Our starting point has been to develop a working group of scholars and practitioners from within the i-docs community. We are currently working with over 80 people across several continents, with around thirty active participants at any one time.
We have been collectively exploring. tools, methods, and possibilities within the group, to help shift our own thinking and understanding. Our next step is to consider how these can be applied to wider interdisciplinary and community-based contexts.
Bringing together some of our participants, our talk will focus on our latest co-creative intervention around extreme heat and climate change. This intervention explores polyphonic approaches with a view to creating a replicable model that can be used in other contexts.
The project builds on the traditional experimental film form to explore new ways of approaching polyphonic, relational and transformative narratives that we believe are needed to sit alongside more dominant dramatic forms.
It also responds to the urgent need to co-create collective, non-anthropocentric and sustainable approaches to media practices and the future in general. This relates to the urgency of rethinking our engagement with the world through building our capacity for relational thinking.

Judith Aston, UWE Bristol, UK is an Associate Professor in Film and Digital Arts at UWE Bristol who divides her time between research and teaching. She is co-founder of i-Docs (i-docs.org), elected chair of the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Film Committee and a longstanding board member of the Journal of Media Practice and Education. She set up the Polyphonic Documentary Research Project with Stefano Odorico in 2020 to focus on her core interests in complexity, dialogic communication, emergence and multi-perspectivity within cross-cultural and interdisciplinary contexts. She has published widely on these topics, has a lively group of PhD students exploring them with her, and is actively applying her work to creative health/post-carbon futures research contexts.

https://people.uwe.ac.uk/Person/JudithAston