A brief article on Korsakow in the Spanish daily newspaper ElPaís, including comments from Florian and Matt. The article was written by our grad research assistant Irene Serrano. Thanks Irene!

Some weeks ago, the Korsakow team received an encouraging email from Grayson Cooke, an interdisciplinary scholar, media artist, and Senior Lecturer in the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Southern Cross University in Lismore, Australia. Cooke, who is also the Course Coordinator of Southern Cross’s Bachelor of Media degree, wanted to say hello and share his Korsakow film, ‘Live Audio-Visual Performance in Australia’.

‘Live A/V in Australia’ is a documentary that draws upon the experiences and voices of eleven Aussie A/V performance artists, in order to explore how, in Cooke’s words, they “negotiate the parameters of this practice, this weird hybrid practice that incorporates random assemblages of laptops and controllers and mixers and Wiimotes, with notions of narrativity, performativity, interactivity and improvisation.” We decided to send Cooke some questions regarding the way he has used Korsakow to organize his work.

Why did you decide to use Korsakow?

I initially learnt about Korsakow from Adrian Miles, who teaches at RMIT in Melbourne. Adrian presented it as software for database narratives, and the projects he demonstrated were creative and oblique, refusing that “intentional” or linear navigation model that “informational” websites tend to foster. I’ve been thinking lately about what “online documentary” means though – as in, what are the possibilities presented by this form? What does it mean to move this essentially linear media form into an interactive environment? – and it struck me that Korsakow could also be used for non-fiction or documentary projects very nicely. The keyword tagging system allows an author to loosely determine the clustering or association of video segments, so you can maintain that thematic coherence that we would normally associate with the notion of “documentary”, but, because the tags can be hidden and this association can happen “in the background”, the user is provided enough freedom and choice to have an explorative, open experience, fulfilling the “online” aspect of the notion of online documentary.

What can you tell us about your use of interface design and the visual distribution of the project’s contents?

The interface form has essentially been determined by the contents, and thinking through the most interesting way to present that content given how Korsakow structures a project. The interface has the video window and seven thumbnails, because I wanted users to have plenty of options at any one time. The main thing here is that I’ve gone with text in my thumbnails, rather than images. The footage all comes from a series of interviews I did with live audio-visual performance practitioners – a mix of VJs, musicians, new media people, and media academics, 11 people in total. Because the clips are just talking heads, the content is essentially textual. And, because each person appears in 10 or more clips, I couldn’t very well use an image from the inteviews because the thumbnails would all look the same! So I realized I was going to have to use text in my thumbnails, and I decided to mainly use interesting – funny, kooky, ironic, incendiary – phrases from the interviews as the thumbnail text. So, each clip kind of “advertises” itself via these phrases, and they all compete for the viewer’s attention.

How have you organized the contents of your documentary?

In the interviews, I was asking people questions about audio-visual relations, narrative, performativity, relating to the audience, gender, and funding opportunities, so I’ve cut out brief 1-2 minute excerpts from the interviews that explore these key aspects of live a/v performance. I’ve then tagged these excerpts with two or more keywords according to the gist of the excerpt. I’ve got about 120 clips, and I ended up with something like 30 or 40 keywords, with maybe 10 of these being particularly “popular”. The result is that I’ve got these kind of “venn diagrams” of interlinking theme clusters, but (and this is the cool thing about Korsakow, I have to say), they operate in the background and are represented by the thumbnail phrases, which may or may not bely the nature of their contents. So, there’s a kind of “effect” of randomness operating, where the navigational experience is simultaneously guided (by the author), intentional (on the user’s part), and random (that’s Korsakow’s doing!).

What are the possibilities/paths when exploring it?

Because I’ve got seven thumbnails used at all times, and each clip is tagged with two or more keywords, there are always plenty of options open to the user. I’ve left it up to Korsakow to determine how the keywords “fight it out” for space on the menu! The way it seems to work is that at any one time, maybe half of the thumbnails will actually relate to the same keyword, but the rest will usually be a mixture of the other keywords each clip is tagged with. Though again, because the thumbnail phrases may or may not give a clue to the contents of the clip – e.g, a thumbnail phrase like “I kinda hated working with actors” might be tagged with the keywords “film” and “starting out” – the user won’t necessarily be aware of this distribution. I kinda like this disjunct – for me, this is what sets this project, as a possible form for what “online documentary” might mean, apart from more conventional projects that would be premised on giving the user a sense of informational mastery, and therefore assuming a user who “knows what they want.”

That said: I’ve had various responses from users asking to be able to browse the project by interviewee, or by keyword. Maybe I have to re-think it after all!

For what kind of projects would you recommend the use of Korsakow?

Well, this is in part a “length of string question.” I mean – obviously it needs to be a project that is open to the kinds of logics underpinning Korsakow’s structure, and would suit more exploratory or experimental projects. But that just means it would suit exploratory, experimental people. And I think everyone should be like that! So, what kind of projects would suit using Korsakow? Everything!

Written and researched by Irene Serrano

In summer 2010, the Brazilian multimedia producer Giovanni Francischelli led a Korsakow workshop in Campinas, a city located in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. “I work with web-documentary films and I found Korsakow an excellent tool to develop such projects, so I decided to use the software in workshops on the subject”, he told us via email.

During six days, he covered some basic concepts about interactive narratives on the web and afterwards, he encouraged the participants to create a collaborative piece of work with the Korsakow software. The result is a documentary, titled Artista a praça, about a traditional hippie fair for crafts that happens in the city of Campinas on the weekends.

The Feira de Artesanatos de Campinas occurs every Saturday in a square in the Cambuí neighborhood. In its forty years of existence, it has become a meeting point for young people, families, art lovers and tourists. Nevertheless, the artisans who sell their craft pieces have recently been dealing with a very common issue in these days of increased globalization: the ‘Made in China’ products that some merchants have incorporated in the fair at a cheap price. Francischelli explains: “The nomadic hippies and artisans, former founders of the fair, had their space limited and were isolated in a corner next to the bathroom.”

Artista a praça covers this matter through the voices of eight people who have been involved at different levels with the fair for many years. According to Francischelli, “The video brings testimonies from several people who watched the changes in the fair, and also tries to explore the hippie spirit in people who have been or are linked to the hippie culture. The basis of the documentary is this transformation of values, the difficulties of modern society and the portrait of a popular heritage of the city.”

The Korsakow film introduces the topic via a short soundbite from each interviewee addressing something crucial that summarizes her/his general opinion. As each individual comes into view on the screen, a preview for his/her testimony appears in the interface. Thus, it is possible to navigate à la carte through the various perspectives on the changes in the fair. This documentary covers sensitive themes – the disappearance of handmade crafts in favour of industrialized production of goods; the square as a key place for communities – in a very suggestive manner. And instead of using Korsakow for conceptualizing, it has been employed as a way for organizing the contents with a hippietextual approach.

Written and researched by Irene Serrano

An interview with Florian Thalhofer on Korsakow & non-linear storytelling by Matthieu Lietaert.

In Media Res is a scholarly website “dedicated to experimenting with collaborative, multi-modal forms of online scholarship.” For their September 5-9, 2011 theme issue, five individuals offered their own brief insights into the world of Interactive Documentaries. Contributions included Ben Miller’s thoughts on Korsakow SNUs and POCs (‘Documenting Change in Points of Contact’) and Jen Proctor’s discussion (‘The Case for the Slow Internet’) about a rather resonant NPR spoof. All the entries are well worth reading.

When I was a child and my father read bedtime stories to me, he always finished with the same question: “And what is the moral of this story?” Then he usually answered the question himself. Suspiciously, the moral of the story was most often related to stuff that had been going on in our family, or in school: To succeed in life, one has to be nice to one’s brothers, do one’s math homework, or help one’s mother do the dishes.

I learned that the moral of the story is a trick the narrator uses to make the listener do something, or believe something, that he thinks is important. As a kid I felt like I wasn’t taken seriously by my father, and even today, when a film comes up with that moral thing, I feel like there is someone disrespecting my brain.

Later in life I became a story-teller myself.

I love to learn about people and I love image and sound. I became a documentary filmmaker. But I don’t want to share a moral, or tell people what thoughts they should have in their brains. Usually, as a documentary filmmaker, I end up in situations where, of all the people that are around, I am the most clueless. So why should I – the clueless one – be the one to explain to an audience how things work?

In 1997, around the time I discovered my interest in storytelling, I also found my fascination with computers. That led to the development of Korsakow. For the last three years I have been working together with Matt Soar and our programmer Dave Reisch who has rewritten the code of Korsakow from scratch, and built the foundation from where we can further develop the application.

For my own work, I almost exclusively use Korsakow and, depending on the way you count it, I have made between 7 and 45 Korsakow-films. Last year, for the first time in my life, I also made a linear film (ie a film that is the very same every time you look at it). This film is called Planet Galata, a portrait of a bridge in Istanbul, and the people living on and around it. Planet Galata was made for French/German broadcaster ARTE, and is a linear film and a Korsakow film. So there are two versions. It was an amazing experience to make a linear film alongside a Korsakow-film. In a nutshell: The linear version of Planet Galata created some kind of moral, or message. I tried not to, but the film – the format of linear film – made me do it. It is the format of linear film that demands a moral, or a message. The author can fight it, and maybe some great masters of filmmaking sometimes succeed, but the linear film monster demands a moral.

I believe there are two roles the author can have:

The master of the story. The author predefines, and pre-thinks the experience of the viewer. In a linear film, the author cannot avoid being the master of the story because, in the end, a linear film has one – and only one – concrete order, and the author has to take full responsibility for it.

That said, also non-linear, multi-path and flexible-structured projects are usually made by authors who still take the role of masters of the story: The experience of the viewer, the order of things, has been pre-thought by the master. The order is certainly more flexible than in a linear film, and these multi-path films do not always look the same every time you look at them, but nothing happens that the author did not pre-think.

The medium of the story (Korsakow is a tool that allows the author to be the medium of the story). Here the author prepares the material, the bits and pieces of the story; he can also be present as a voice; he can state his view, or his opinion, just like in any linear film. The difference is that the author creates the rules of the film, but he does not pre-think the film. And that allows him to tell stories that are usually very, very difficult to tell in film, stories that are inspirational, but that don’t have a message or moral.

Stories – without an opinion.

{ This text was originally written for a talk given at Visible Evidence in New York in August 2011. }

In this engrossing and complex new Korsakow film titled Archiving R69, Monika Kin Gagnon explores what it means to deal with a creative project that remains unfinished after its creator has died. Gagnon’s father, Charles, was a distinguished Canadian artist and filmmaker who passed away in 2003, leaving behind notes and a rough cut of a film he called R69. The film was intended to be a study of his friend and fellow artist Yves Gaucher, and included footage taken inside their studio, around the neighbourhood, and at the opening of their group show at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal in 1970.

Gagnon fille has combined these elements with new material on her own process to create a reflexive and evocative document about a politically fraught time in Québec’s history. The project also reveals an unanticipated use for Korsakow: the nonlinear ‘completion’ of a linear project that would otherwise have been unfinishable. View Archiving R69 here.

We’re delighted to announce that the entire Korsakow dev team (Florian, Matt, Dave) will be attending OVC 2011 in New York. Our workshop, Database-Driven Narratives, is currently scheduled for Sunday.

A couple of days ago a young man, Lalon Sander, came for a visit, to do an interview with me. He is studying journalism at the University of Leipzig, and currently doing research for his diploma. His paper is about “nonlinear storytelling in online media”, and he asked excellent questions. The questions of a young brain, a brain that was wired in the time of digital. The world is so fundamentally different today from what it was, in the time before computers (the time, for example, when my brain was wired).

Lalon gave me a present. Maps of his trips trough Planet Galata. Each SNU* indicated with a dot. He handed me the first map:

A trip to Planet Galata (lower right button clicked).

“Oh, you must have gone through it in a hurry!” I said immediately, without much thinking. I have to say: I have never seen a mapped out journey through a Korsakow-film before. So I was a bit surprised to be able to read this kind of information out of it so quickly. I saw it immediately, because of the clear structure of the clouds, and because a few more lines that I would have expected were missing. These missing lines would have indicate the next overlaying structure that I had built in – with awareness – and that one did not show up in the graphic. I saw, that whenever a new link, that led out of the current cloud had come up,  Lalon had immediately clicked it.

“No. I was not in a hurry”, Lalon replied, “it is just, I always clicked the lower right button.” It took me a moment to think that through and then I realized that this strategy was exactly the equivalent of going through Planet Galata in a hurry.

I have to say, Planet Galata, as it is now, has a very strict and relatively simple structure. Basically because I used a lot more brain – or maybe better: explainable thoughts** – than in previous projects. The structure of the online-version of Planet Galata*** was done in a hurry. We were running late and our focus was clearly the linear film at that time****. The structure was done in more or less a day.

Then Lalon showed me an other map: “This is when I always clicked the upper left button. The result of the map did not surprise me, and I laughed.

A trip to Planet Galata (upper left button clicked).

Then he showed me a third map and said that this is basically a combination of both previous maps.

A trip to Planet Galata (combined map).

“Interesting that there is such a clear centre”, I said, pointing to a dot in the middle of the map marked E1. Lalon looked into a list: “This clip is called ART-SCHOOL”, he said.

That hit me. I shivered. What he could not know but what I knew: ART-SCHOOL was a very special story. I had massive discussions over this SNU when I discussed work versions of Planet Galata with the commissioning editors. I had a very, very strong feeling about this clip, and it was the only SNU my commissioning editors would not allow me to put in. In fact the ART-SCHOOL-clip, that in the end made it into Planet Galata*****, was the second version, with a different text. This clip was the compromise we agreed on in the end or maybe my commissioning editors had just given up. I never really understood why this SNU was so controversial. Also, I could never really express in words why it was so important to me.  “I have a very strong feeling about this story” – that was my argument.

Lalon’s map now showed this SNU right in the very center of Planet Galata. I had not planned this. But it made so much sense to me. It felt, it feels like, Korsakow had read my thoughts.

Lalon Sander explaining his trips.

(*) SNU: Smallest Narrative Unit – the equivalent of a scene in a linear film is a SNU in a Korsakow-film.

(**) Because I had to explain what I was doing to my commissioning editors for this project.

(***) There is a linear film as well, that was broadcast on ARTE television.

(****) The reason for that in itself is very interesting and it would be worth reflecting on, in an article on its own. In short: there is a market for linear films, the linear film was sold already and there was hope to sell it to other broadcasters as well, so the project should be polished and be finished in time.

(*****) …of the Korsakow-version of Planet Galata. No version of the ART-SCHOOL story became part of the linear film.

This is the French version of the ART-SCHOOL-SNU:
For the German Version (with English subtitles) please click here.

We are very pleased to announce the release of Korsakow 5.0.5, which sees the introduction of some neat new features – and we squashed some bugs for you, too. Some highlights: an expanded set of default interfaces to choose from, including a few that Florian designed especially for Planet Galata; depth (or z-axis) control of widgets in the Interface Editor, meaning widgets such as Previews can overlap; background colours and/or images for interfaces, with live preview; smoother viewer experience, including fade in and fade out of all sounds; k-films viewed and then paused online can be continued or restarted; and, k-films now expand or shrink to suit the viewer’s browser window.

Update your current version* of Korsakow by downloading 5.0.5.3 and replacing your older version of the application. (*To find out which version of Korsakow you currently have, open the application and go to Korsakow > About Korsakow. Look for the Version number, not the Build number.)

Please note that the Manual will be updated steadily over the next couple of weeks to reflect all these changes.