Category: Interactive Narratives Studio

The Archive as Project

–> read web publication

About the publication

This web publication is a part of vnLab publishing series. This new, web-based format called PubLab was developed to bring together digital books, interactivity, custom design and interoperability.

Archive as Project is a re-edition of a paper publication with the same title, first published by Archeology of Photography Foundation in 2011, which summed up a conference organized in Warsaw that same year. It is the first publication of the series of vnLab & Lodz Filmschool web publications.

This book is an attempt at rethinking the archive in a post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe that is still facing the need to work through its 20th century past. Within this process, in the discourse of which such notions as truth and justice keep resurfacing, archives and their uses have come to play a considerable role. In this sense, The Archive as Project should be understood as a continuation and expansion of the problematics of the seminar Archive Fever. The Archives of Contemporary History and Art in Poland After 1989 (Warsaw, 2009), a forum for (art) historians, curators and artists to discuss the topic and problem of the “archive” in the context of the post-socialist transformations of this part of the world.

However, it is above all photographic archives, which seem in recent years to have been going through a phase of great public interest and increasing significance, that are at the center of this book. The question of the role of the photographic archive – not only for the humanities, but also for artistic practice and politics – the perspectives it opens and eventual risks it engenders, is one that seems crucial in the wake of the “archival turn” that we saw taking place since mid 90s.

vnLab’s productions in the competitions of the 36th IDFA International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam!

Close, and The School, a World, two projects produced by vnLab in 2023, have been recognized with nominations at the world’s largest festival dedicated to documentary art, IDFA 2023.

Close, a Japanese dance-based VR experience by Hana Umeda, was among the projects selected to participate in the IDFA DocLab Competition for Immersive Non-Fiction. In this category, dedicated to works made for AR, VR and Mixed Reality technology, Close will compete against 12 other projects for a prize worth 5,000 euros. The international jury includes Arnaud Colinart, Jessica Brillhart and Joy Mawela.

Meanwhile, the interactive documentary The School, a World, directed by Iga Łapinska, is competing in the IDFA DocLab Competition for Immersive Non-Fiction category alongside 9 other digital projects. The grand prize awarded by an international jury consisting of Jay Kim, Miri Chekhanovich and Zuraida Buterjest amounts to 5,000 euros.

The festival will run from November 8 to 19, when the winners of the various competition categories will be announced.

 

For more information, see: festival.idfa.nl

Publab – toward a standard for web publications

the future of reading

We believe that web publishing is the future of both reading and visual literacy. At the vnLab Interactive Narratives Studio we have been working on a set of tools that would allow us to create contemporary digital publications in the full sense of the word. We see value in combining the traditional model of binding content (giving it coherence through the common “frame,” of an autonomous publication) with the accessibility, addressability and interconnectedness of the internet.

PubLab is an attempt to create not only an efficient, green and future-oriented technology stack, but also a contemporary, sensuous reading experience. Thus, it is as much about technology as it is about UX and design. We put all our designs through tests to see how our proposed solutions interact with the audience, whether they seem readable to them, and whether they interfere with reading immersion. The quality of the graphic design is key for us.

what is PubLab?

PubLab is a toolset – not a platform – to enable the creation of web publications, as defined by the W3C.

what is a web publication?

A web publication is a set of content organized into a whole that can be read through a standard web browser.
According to the definition formulated by the W3C, such publications:

  • take full advantage of the capabilities of the Open Web Platform (the internet)
  • can operate both online and offline
  • can comply with accessibility rules
  • can be linked to other content on the internet
  • can be annotated / commented on

why web publications in the first place?

Today, a digital publication in the established form of an e-book (in EPUB and derivative formats) is different from a website – both ideologically and technologically. It follows the idea of book as object that can be put on shelf rather than the ideas, and possibilities, of the Open Web Platform. From the point of view of the publishing industry this makes sense, because it only slightly shifts the way business is done, but from both the reader’s and creator’s perspective it produces a set of serious constraints:

  • EPUBs need separate apps to read the publications, creating additional complexity – you have to research and choose your app: which one feels best, which can synchronize your notes across devices (and not many can), and when you have chosen, you are effectively locked to the application (because there is no way to transfer your highlights and notes between apps). What is more, many applications are bound to a specific class of devices, or worse – to devices of one specific vendor.
  • the reading experience of these “books” cannot be designed, because it is the app that decides on the reading experience – as a result, all digital books look the same, which is frustrating both for readers (boring!), and for designers, because today’s web allows for fantastic control of typography & layout.
  • e-books can’t take advantage of the possibilities of the contemporary web: audiovisual content, advanced interactions, custom audio (i.e. audiobook functionality)

reading is a sensuous experience

All those who emphasize that it is important for them to read a book in its printed form emphasize the sensousness of the reading experience. This sensouousness is related to the texture and smell of the paper, typeface, graphic design, etc. None of this is provided by modern digital publications.

More so, reading today is multimodal: we read – often the same thing – on different devices, in different contexts: in the bus we read on our smartphone, at home we might switch to a tablet, and look up videos while discovering new contexts, while in the car we change to an audiobook format, etc. The question that arises is not only about what an optimal digital reading experience is today, but also how reading itself is changing as a result of the impact of the internet.

The challenge is to find a form of reading experience that would be relevant to contemporary ways of interacting with cultural content. Which, in turn, is increasingly hybrid, less text-dependent.

This is why, at least as we understand it, the W3C defines web publishing as “a vision of the future of digital publishing.”

our stack

  • our publications are progressive web apps (PWA)
  • these apps are in fact static web pages – they are composed of pure html + css, with an addition of javascript
  • at the stage of preparation of the publication, we separate form and content: we treat the content of the book as its source code, which we “compile” with our tools into the final form of the book
  • the content marked up with the markdown language is our source code – we are working on extending the syntax to include multimedia elements (images, sliders, galleries, video, objects, embeds)
  • using an external API – Hypothesis – we were able to add device-agnostic annotation features to our stack. Hypothesis is not yet ready for the general user, but it is the most developed web annotation tool available today

It is necessary not only to comply with the W3C guidelines or to be aware of similar projects, but above all to take advantage of the developing infrastructure for metadata exchange that is necessary for this new type of publication to find its way into library catalogs and their search engines. Here a key reference point is COPIM and their projects, such as the Thoth metadata exchange system or the work of the Open Book Collective.

our benchmark publications

further PubLab publications, as well as experimental publication formats produced by the vnLab, are on the way!

the PubLab Collective

In November and December 2022, we organized a public seminar, Digital Publications Today, dedicated to web publications at the Krytyka Polityczna think tank in Warsaw, Poland. Out of the seminar, the PubLab Collective arose. Contact us if you are interested!

The School, a World – interactive observational documentary

Sławek runs through the fields with a metal detector. Marzena is browsing Facebook in the barn. Adam with a bending barbell breaks the world record in weightlifting. Only cows still go to school. Where? In Chlebiotki, a small village in Poland.

Barely 60 people live here. On Sunday they go to church and during the week everyone does their own thing. Houses are rimmed with thuyas to ward off neighbours. In the evenings everyone is online. Dreaming of something different. There is an empty building in the village. It used to be a school, built by a community effort. But there are almost no children in the village anymore. So Wojtek bought the run-down school and for 8 years has been trying to turn it into a business, with no success so far.

The School, a World is an interactive documentary based on observation, annoyance and love. Each chapter is devoted to one of 8 characters. The immersive sound leads the narration. The film’s director grew up in the village. The school was her home. She returned after 20 years to seek traces of her past and found a whole, complete world.

Iga Łapińska – director. She is involved in documentary, oral history, editing and self-promotion in TV film channels. She wanted to be an academic, which is why she studied Polish philology and film studies, but she much prefers practice to theory. For the Stopklatka TV channel, she has conceived and produced programmes about cinema such as Prywatna historia kina, 100 kultowych filmów, Ja tu tylko oglądam and 8 i pół filmu. She directed the 6-part web documentary Krótki kurs kultury romskiej. With Ewa Jarosz, she invented an Instagram educational series for young people entitled. Nina_innahistoria  about a teenage girl in a Polish-Jewish town before World War II (main prize in the KARTA Center (Ośrodek KARTA) film hackathon; project not yet realised). Until the age of fifteen, she lived in Chlebiotki, a small village in Podlasie. She talks about it in the documentary The School, a World, which is her interactive debut.

Ewa Jarosz – project manager, historian, Judaist, activist associated with the food cooperative movement. Graduate of the Jagiellonian University, University of Southampton and the Tischner European University. Enthusiast and practitioner of community management of common goods, interested in the history of grassroots social action during the communist period. For The School, a World project, she co-created the concept, interactive narrative, archival layer and editorial.

 

The project was financed under the Ministry of Education and Science programme within the framework of the “Regional Initiative of Excellence” for the years 2019-2023, project number 023/RID/2018/19, funding sum PLN 11 865 100.

Interactive Narratives and Essay Film Studio at 39. Kasseler Dokfest

During Kasseler DokFest, we will present the activities of our two Studios.

The Interactive Narratives, Digital Scientific Publications and UX Studio is dedicated to the study and development of new forms of narratives arising from the use of digital interactive technologies in documentary film and related forms such as film essay. The Studio was founded on observation of transformations in the area of in 21st century documentary which became a field of experimentation with audiovisual language and creating new models of narration as well as a place where film meets with other media: photography, literature, animated film or computer games. In the result of diverse experimentation within the documentary, media and digital technology, interactive documentary forms evolved. These constantly question and shift traditional roles of the author and the viewer. According to the Studio, composing viewer’s emotional engagement in the interactive form demands not only good storytelling but also creating the whole new world to explore. This requires working in a brand-new environment which include interface and user experience designers as well as coders and creative technologists. The Studio will present excerpts from its productions and a fragment of the i-doc The School, a World by Iga Łapińska and Ewa Jarosz – the largest production of the Studio so far.

The aim of the Essay Film Studio is to radically expand the research workshop, to develop new methods and new forms of thinking – thinking with images, sound and editing. It is an attempt to reinvent the form of the film essay by drawing on contemporary forms of audiovisual communication, the genres, languages and conventions of contemporary cinema and the internet. As part of the Essay Film Studio, this year a first series of workshops was organized, led by the world’s foremost experts in the field of essay film, including Laura Mulvey, Mike Bal, Cathrine Grant, Kevin B. Lee, Chloé Galibert-Laîné, Assaf Gruber, Eyal Sivan and in which selected participants from all over the world could work on their projects. As a result, the Essay Film Studio now serves as the production home for several essay film projects, including the award-winning film Subtotals by Mohammadreza Farzad, Mike Bal’s It’s About Time! Reflections of Urgency and, yet to premiere, Solaris Mon Amour by Kuba Mikurda. The participants of the seminar were also asked to contribute an anthology about the method, in which the gestures of many essayists are analyzed. During the session representatives of the Essay Film Studio will present excerpts of the film projects and take part in a panel discussion about making and producing essay film as an epistemic practice. The films produced by Essay Film Studio are subsequently presented at festivals.

November 19

39th Kasseler Dokfest

1:30 pm

For more information follow the link.

Results of the vnLab Interactive Narrative Studio competition for 2021!

On April 26, 2021 the vnLab jury composed of:

Andrzej Sapija, Krzysztof Pijarski, Magdalena Soboci?ska, Paulina Borkiewicz, Katarzyna Boratyn

settled the competition for participation in the artistic and research program of the vnLab Interactive Narration and UX Studio. Krzysztof Franek, Katarzyna M?ka-Malaty?ska and Kuba Mikurda also participated in the evaluation of the applications. Andrzej Sapija was invited to participate in the work of the jury in place of Piotr Mikucki; Professor Sapija’s voice proved invaluable in the discussion on the applications, for which we would like to thank him.

Interactive Narrative Workshop 

Szko?a ?wiat – the team represented by Ewa Jarosz
Zarastanie– the DIGIART team (Angelika Cebula, Jakub Ciosi?ski, Kinga Bo?kiewicz, Sebastian Duran, Iga Filimowska, Adam Grygierzec, Mateusz Brzezicki, Jakub Gad)
Krajobrazy ?rodka – Marta Zgierska
Cicer cum Caule – Anna Desponds
Internet platform for the online presentation of exhibitions by foreign artists living in Poland – ZA*Grupa (Vera Zalutskaya, Yuriy Biley, Yulia Krivich), * foreign artists living in Poland.

 

It is worth emphasizing that this year the level of applications was extremely high, which made the members of the jury face a real challenge. For this reason, honorable mentions were also awarded to the following two projects:

 

Inhibitor – Wojciech Olchowski
51% – silent voice of the majority – Karolina ?migiel / UNI-SOLO Studio

 

The Interactive Narrative Studio team will make every effort to support the development of these projects.

We would like to thank the members of the Artistic Council for their participation in the Jury’s deliberations.

We congratulate all the contestants and look forward to working with the teams accepted to the Studio.

Thank you!

The vnLab Interactive Narrative and UX Studio Team

Chapter 1: Why social pictures?

In this interview with Nathan Jurgenson, we open the first of eight chapters of the project. Nathan Jurgenson is a social media theorist and author of the acclaimed book “The Social Photo: On photography and social media,” which will be released in Poland this fall. In the following weeks, Marta Zió?ek, Karol Radziszewski and Miros?aw Filiciak, among others, will present their commentary in the form of artwork, gesture or text.

We invite you to watch a teaser of this conversation:

The entire conversation as well as subsequent chapters and installments of the project will be published on a dedicated website.

GO TO THE PROJECT WEBSITE

Why pictures? – art and research project

The Interactive Narratives and UX Studio at vnLab in collaboration with Krytyka Polityczna, Jasna 10, Krakow Photomonth and View: Theories and Practices of Visual Culture academic journal are launching a long-term artistic and research project entitled Why pictures?

Its initiators and curators, Witek Orski and Krzysztof Pijarski, together with contemporary theoreticians and practitioners, will look at the global republic of images, searching for the democratic and communal potential of photography.

We are interested in the reflection on the contemporary status and circulation of images, as well as – or perhaps above all – their agency, texture, and life. The whole project is divided into chapters – within each chapter we would like to initiate an artistic and intellectual exchange, which will consist of reactions to the opening conversation and to statements and gestures of predecessors and predecessors.

Subsequent chapters and episodes of the project will be published on a dedicated website.

GO TO THE PROJECT WEBSITE

Makeshift

Makeshift is a documentary project about Bosnia and Herzegovina, about the recent war and the processes of rewriting history after the truce. The project focuses on documenting sites where crimes were committed against civilians, through the prism of their reintegration as public places. All the work resulted from the author’s research based on UN and ICTY court documents. So far, it has been presented in the form of three solo exhibitions, several group exhibitions, awarded in competitions and published.

Makeshift.vnlab.org was created in the vnLab Interactive Narratives Studio at the Łódź Film School, under the supervision of studio managers Katarzyna Boratyn and Krzysztof Pijarski and in close cooperation with Michał Szota, who took care of the graphic design and programming.

Go to the project website

Paweł Starzec – photographer, sociologist, documentalist. Mainly interested in correlations between space and its context, and in envisioning broader processes through their aftermath and peripherals. Visual sociologist, working in the field of modern iconography and visual narratives. Lecturer and academic teacher, creator of workshop programs, current member of Azimuth Press art/education collective. PhD candidate at Applied Sociology Department of University of Warsaw, student of Institute of Creative Photography of Silesian University in Opava (MA). Musician and sound artist, currently playing in Mazut, and solo as Industry Standard or Centralia. DIY / zine culture enthusiast.

In December 2018, I hired myself for a short time at the Amazon fulfillment center in Sady near Poznań to see from the inside how one of the biggest companies in the world operates on a micro scale. In this way, I started working on the AMZN project, which main aim is to shed light on the entire functioning of this internet giant: from the materiality of huge warehouses, to working conditions, to specific corporate culture and versatility, to visions of the future, created by the company management.

How can we relate to them and can we even take our future back from the hands of the world’s wealthiest people? How can we support those fighting for workers’ rights and, in a broader perspective, equality and social justice? Amazon is just an example, albeit an extremely powerful and clear one, of what our whole reality may soon look like. Or how it already looks: hidden behind a smooth online store interface and an almost windowless warehouse walls. Dressed in exciting technological metaphors, hiding the exploitation and inequality of wealth, knowledge and influence.

AMZN is a multi-media, multi-threaded project, the core of which is a series of photographs of the company’s warehouses. It is surrounded by a narrative of workers’ struggles contained in collected union leaflets, stories of mutual solidarity in the age of growing automation, and my attempts to recreate oppressive work procedures.

Most of these elements are connected by a website specially designed by Rytm Digital studio and produced at the Visual Narratives Laboratory at the Łódź Film School. Amzn.vnlab.org is thus a kind of interactive warehouse containing not only artworks, but also articles, excerpts or quotations, becoming both a separate whole and a supplement to exhibitions in art galleries.

Go to the project website

Tytus Szabelski – photographer and visual artist, born in 1991. Graduated Journalism and Social Communication at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland, and photography at the University of Art in Poznań, where he conducts his doctoral studies. He worked with Center of Contemporary Art in Toruń, Miłość Gallery in Toruń and Krytyka Polityczna magazine. Awarded with scholarship of the city of Toruń in culture (2012 and 2016). Finalist of Polish and international contests for best art master’s diploma work (e.g. The Esteemed Graduates of Polish Academies of Fine Arts 2016 in Gdańsk, Poland, and StartPoint Prize 2016 in Prague, Czech Republic). Laureate of Konrad Pustoła memory scholarship for socially engaged photographer (2017), participant of Parallel – European Photo Based Platform, program dedicated to young photographers and curators (2019–2020). Former editor of Magenta, online magazine dedicated to contemporary photography, now editor of Postmedium art academic journal.