Interactive Documentary | Initial Presentation of Ideas

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As part of the Interactive Documentary course (DIGF-5008) at OCAD University (DIGF-5008), I’ve brainstormed a few ideas for my final projects. Here are my concepts, in ascending order of interest:

1. Digital Obsolescence

According to Wikipedia and the National Archives of Australia, digital obsolescence is “a situation where a digital resource is no longer readable because of its archaic format”.

There are two categories of digital obsolescence:

1. “The software needed to access the digital file becomes obsolete.” (ex: Flash games)
2. “The hardware needed to access the digital file becomes obsolete and thus no longer available.” (ex: floppy discs)

We’ve all experienced a wide range of technology in our lifetimes that are now obsolete. We fondly remember an old video game we used to play, or the arduous process of photography and filmmaking from “back in the day”. The idea here would be to look deeper into the shared nostalgia of obsolete technology.

Output: A virtual museum of obsolete tech

2. Connecting the African Diaspora

I’ve grouped a series of three mini ideas that fall into a theme I like to call “Connecting the African Diaspora”. That said, if I go in this direction, I would only select one of them.

Output: Bringing histories to life in a virtual format

2a. Telecommunications

 This would look into the different ways people on the continent connect and have connected with family members living abroad. As a child, phone calls made using calling cards and letters with printed photographs were the main ways my parents stayed in touch with our family members who lived in Congo, the US, and in Europe. I have very vivid memories of them going out to purchase calling cards for a certain number of minutes, and when the minutes were running out, a voice would interrupt the discussion to announce how many minutes were left.

 It’s amazing how today, my family can instantly video chat in real-time for as long as they want thanks to apps like Whatsapp, which is the messaging platform of choice in multiple African countries.

2b. The Black Film and Video Network

 A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a very interesting article by Amanda Parris on CBC Arts. Titled, “An oral history of the Black Film and Video Network”, the article details the history of “one of the most powerful training, advocacy and lobby groups in Black Canadian film history”.

As someone who is very passionate about media representation and media produced by people from the African Diaspora, I was excited to learn that such a collective had existed in Canada. Canada’s Black population includes immigrants and children of immigrants from various Caribbean and African countries, as well as descendants of slaves. Thus, this media collective, in my opinion, is a great example of connecting the African diaspora.

2c. Traditional Fabrics

This would be a visual exploration of fabric prints across the African continent. These prints come in various patterns, don different names (wax prints, kente, Ankara, etc.), and are used in a number of garments.

These fabrics hold a special place in my heart because my grandmother and aunt are seamstresses, and the former taught me how to sew when I was 7 years old and has made me a few garments with these fabrics over the years.

3. The Politics of Language

This is the idea I’m the most excited about, but I’m still unsure about what form its output would take. The theme is multifaceted, but I’ll begin with my own relationship with language.

As hinted earlier, my parents are immigrants from Congo, a country that was beginning to decolonize itself from Belgium just 9 years before my mother was born. Thus, French is considered the official language, and there are four national languages (Kikongo (Kituba), Lingala, Swahili, and Tshiluba). That said, there are over 200 languages spoken in the country, and less than half of the population (47%) is fluent in French. Kinshasa, and many other African cities that were formally colonized by French-speaking European countries are now becoming some of the largest French-speaking cities in the world.

Growing up in Canada, my parents would speak French with me and Lingala with each other. Although I didn’t and still don’t have strong feelings about the language, I am very aware of the language politics here in Canada because I was enrolled in French elementary and high schools here in Ottawa. French, here, is both a colonial language and a language that has continuously been repressed by anglophone Canadians. At school, I learned from my French-Canadian teachers about Règlement 17 (the French language ban in schools), and every year, we celebrated Franco-Ontarian Day. My after-school program included other students from English-speaking schools, who would make fun of us all for being francophones. In a way, I felt a sense of unity under this language.

That said, the parallels between the colonial (as opposed to the Indigenous) languages becoming official languages here in Canada and in Congo are not lost on me. Language issues are also not exclusive to these two countries.

Through this project, I want to explore the various facets of language politics, and the varied and sometimes conflicting feelings we have about the languages we speak, write, read, hear, and don’t understand. Here are some additional sub-topics that came to mind when working through this idea:

• Requiring English proficiency tests for people from countries that the UK colonized
• Passing down your language to your kids (and the guilt that comes when you don’t speak your parent’s mother tongue)
• Accents: the ones that are desired and seen as “sexy” vs the ones that are mocked and coded as unattractive/hard to understand
• The kinds of languages people want to learn (trends in popularity)
• Language shame & embarrassment vs pride
• Dying languages
• Finding content in your language (and how it could play into the digital divide)
• The contentious debate between subtitles and dubs
• Translations
• Memes about being #bilingual, the community, and the connections languages create