MIT Open Doc Lab x IDFA DocLab: Research results & focus areas

The MIT Open Documentary Lab will explore several projects at this year’s festival to see what can be gleaned about future media habits. We will identify new user experiences, techniques and tools that artists are piloting and survey audience reactions.

This research report concludes the research focus of the R&D program of past two years: on creating community in hybrid festivals.

During the past festival edition, Uricchio presented the research focus of the IDFA DocLab R&D program for 2021-2022: hybrid spaces that support and mix both digital (online) and analog (‘real world’) encounters.

The past two years of the R&D Program concluded with white paper from Uricchio that explores the battery of augmentation technologies and techniques used by communities, documentary makers, and artists to claim, reclaim, and reimagine their public spaces.

The second year of the R&D Program concluded with a new white paper from Uricchio on the potential in new media strategies of ‘story-finding’ as opposed to conventional modes of storytelling.

After the first year of the R&D Program, William Uricchio (MIT) reported on the research conducted during the 2018 festival. With a focus on documentary and AI, the paper examines several works from the official DocLab selection.