Showcasing new and unexpected forms of digital documentary storytelling
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Past events
DocLab at SXSW 2012 12 Mar 2012 at 15:30
IDFA DocLab presents two sessions on interactive documentary at SXSW. With Jeremy Mendes (NFB), Marshall Heald (SBS Australia) and Caspar Sonnen (IDFA DocLab).
Exhibition: Expanding Documentary 2011 25 Nov 2011 at 10:00
Interactive installations, immersive performances and other unexpected representations of reality, presented by IDFA DocLab, Paradocs and Brakke Grond.
Live Cinema Event: Stories We Love to Forget 23 Nov 2011 at 22:00
An evening packed with embarrassing, true stories told live on stage. With Micha Wertheim, Paulien Cornelisse, Kevin Allison (The Risk Show) and someone reading an excerpt from their adolescent diary.
Couscous Global
Social networking site with a twist: rather than looking for friends, users seek out opponents for debate and discussion.
Couscous Global is a platform for discussion and debate among today’s teenagers and young adults, “the first generation growing up in global social networks, and online.”
But Couscous Global is a social networking site with a twist: users are not looking for friends, but for opponents. The site is an offshoot of Dutch TV channel BNN’s Couscous & Cola (Couscous and Coke), which was also shown on Al Jazeera International.
Its motto is Noam Chomsky’s famous assertion that, “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.”
The site was online for one year, from August 2008 to September 2009. Its makers collected short films from all over the world in which young people raised issues that others then responded to.
This resulted in “debates” (chains of related videos on specific subjects) and “motions,” which allowed visitors to take a stand on a given subject, which other people then responded to with images or text. Although the emphasis was on political and social issues (“The moral and economic superiority of the West is over!”), there was also always space for more frivolous matters, as witnessed by the motion: “Fashion is only for beautiful people!”
Tags Digital Culture, DocLab 2009, Interactive, Shorts / Series, Video, Watch Online
Project details
Year of development :2008, ongoingCreated by:Maartje Nevejan
