Polyphony and the Emerging Collaborative Ecologies of Documentary Media Exhibition

Abstract

How do media practices beyond the single screen imagine new ecologies to propel collaborative and co-creative modes in exhibition? How do these practices dispense with a romanticized auteurism, inadequate for multiscalar environmental and political issues that require many different perspectives and strategies? How do these new screen ecologies practices dispense with causal, character-driven linear storytelling? Can theorizations of co-creation move beyond production modalities into rethinking distribution, exhibition, and spectatorship/community/audiences? Can a collaborative polyphony of living, embodied ecologies of co-creative practices be enacted? IMAGE 1. Installation view of Vertigo Sea (2015) by John Akomfrah; courtesy the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University; photograph by Simon Wheeler. In Fall 2018, Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow launched an ambitious online participatory project in the online journal World Records entitled “Beyond Story: An Online Community-Based Manifesto.” It invites readers to contribute short articles about a wide range of documentary practices beyond long-form narrative story structures. They argue that documentary entails a great range of forms and practices beyond the “constricting contours” of a “one-size-fits all framework that is built to neatly hold a compelling cast of characters in their coherent world.”1 Juhasz and Lebow contend that long-form narrative mainstream documentaries use a small number of characters, depend on identification and empathy, arrange actions through “a set of recognizable spatial temporal templates that cohere only nominally to lived reality,”2 and adhere to a cause-and-effect logic. Festivals, theatrical exhibitions, broadcasters, streamers, and funders favor this form partially …