Questions of the Digital Documentary

In Media Res is hosting a series of short curatorial statements and questions that arise with the emergence of the digital documentary. One in particular caught my attention which concerned the human as document in documentary studies. Discussing documentaries capturing the human bodies sliced into thin sections that are serially composed to an interesting effect Dan Leopold queries,

"This transformation of the human body into a set of quantified data (along with the aesthetic beauty of the abstracted images of each layer) suggests a need to re-examine the status of the document. An old question within documentary studies: at what point does an image, sequence, testimony, archival footage become documentary proper and cease to be simply a document – the raw, brut material that traces lived experience? This question arises anew in the face of the serializations, modifications, and simulations available to media producers through the digitalization of the document."



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