Date of Award

8-2015

Level of Access Assigned by Author

Campus-Only Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts (MFA)

Department

Intermedia

Advisor

Owen F. Smith

Second Committee Member

Gene E. Felice

Third Committee Member

Nathaniel Aldrich

Abstract

Filmmakers traditionally use conventional methods and theories of film production. In these settings, the role of the author and audiences is usually fixed with traditional conceptions. The filmmaker makes the documentary and audiences are exposed to a fixed-length content in a passive condition. Audiences do not have any control over the message they are exposed. Although, recently new and innovative methods of documentary filmmaking and its representations are experimented by filmmakers, there is a lot to discover in this gray area. Documentaries are missing such crucial elements like allowing audiences interact with the content individually, offering organic designs that provide a higher level of participation over the creation and the representation of the work. The established 20th century tradition of experimental methods of creative processes can be a useful tool for reconsidering the processes and methods of documentary production. Relinquishing control of the author, allowing participants control the decision-making processes, and open-ended structures can be used in the production and the representation of the documentary making practices.

In this thesis, the aim is to implement experimental methods of creative processes to create a more engaged documentary making, and information gathering purposes. The process and the representation of works are different than conventional ones. The idea of participatory creative process expands the nature and the representation of the human dimension, which is after all, one of the key aims of much documentary work. Relinquishing the control of an author from the creation of a documentary can provide multi-dimensional results both for artists, participants and audiences.

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