Strolling
Apart from starting to know Amsterdam a little better, some other things happened during these walks. First, I noticed a gap between my image of Amsterdam, dominated by underground life and anti-establishment movements, and the Amsterdam before my eyes, filled with tourists and trendy appearances. This gap triggered my curiosity. Where were the people of the Amsterdam I imagined? Did I just make it up in my head? I decided to start a stroll through the virtual city of Amsterdam’s audiovisual news archives and see who was living there. I chose to present my findings in an interactive software environment where users are invited to stroll through an audiovisual archive curated by me. This is part of a project proposal for a web documentary that has resulted from my interest in figuring out what could be a cinematic experience in a digital medium such as the Web.

Cinema and the Web
Cinema has been designed to reproduce the experience of a fictional reality. Its physical infrastructure, the narrative conventions and the expectations of the audience all contribute to this immersive experience. In contrast, the Web combines quick access to information with active or operative interaction (clicking, swiping) and the promise of a direct connection with a surrounding physical and social reality. The quick access to interconnected bits of information results in short spans of attention, thus inducing a process of constant dissociation. In addition, the responsibility for their behavior and navigation takes users constantly in and out of experiences. This is completely different in cinema, where a constant flow of mental interaction reinforces the continuous and deep attention of viewers who are not distracted by any other stimuli.
As a filmmaker I want to investigate how the qualities of cinema can be transferred to the Web, while dealing with its fragmented structure, its operative interactivity and its promise to connect the user to its social reality. I had worked on this before in my web documentary 'MAFI.tv'. Strolling online in an audiovisual archive seemed an interesting new way to continue these investigations.

One City Ago

In the audiovisual archives of news shows, I found the people that I had expected in the streets, but that I couldn’t discover in the present. It turned out that they had been living in the eighties: squatters, students, and working class strikers. They were idealistic and desperate, energetic and chaotic, and quite often they were standing up together in strong solidarity. I saw them in some thousand fragments from the eighties alone, collected in press pools without audio commentary.
I decided to present a selection of these fragments on a website, inviting users to recombine the fragments interactively and to build a unique path: 'One City Ago'. By presenting these fragments in a clear and simple structure, they work as points of access to the landscape of social relations in the eighties. The user can navigate to any fragment at any moment, based upon his spatial sense of location within a grid of images. If the user keeps viewing fragments ‘passively’, without operating any of the very simple interaction facilities, the site simply starts a new sequence. In this way, a continuous flow of images may create an effect of deep attention, while the site offers the basic controls every user is familiar with. I call it slow interaction: operational interaction doesn’t have to be too demanding in order to provide the user with the power to decide into which direction a story may unfold."

Interview by Jan-Ewout Ruiter, January 2015