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The desktop screen as research site– Ethnographic film on new terrain

In the light of Internet based forms of communication and the rise of social media the desktop screens of our computers, mobile phones, or tablets have become our primary sites of worldly interaction where we meet people, create images of ourselves, and live out social relations.

In this paper, I therefore want to propose the desktop screen not only as an important site of ethnographic research, but also as a possible filming location for a new mode of ethnographic filmmaking that fully embraces the digital age. I will discuss a range of films that are all solely created with a screen recording software. These cameraless “desktop documentaries” are set on their protagonists’ computer screens and thus not only convey their individual use patterns but also directly recreate their particular user experiences.

My film “Intimate Distance” for example, is a collaborative cinematic experiment for which I asked three transnational families to record their daily webcam conversations over the course of several months. The film I edited out of this material offers a very intimate insight into the fascinating communication rituals, with which people who are separated by migration organize a transnational family life via Skype. Whereas text-based media ethnographies on this subject like Madianou and Miller (2012) and Longhurst (2013) have gathered their data only through retrospective interviews with their research participants, my approach also makes visible the real-time unfolding of immediate experience in such an instantaneous form of communication.

By taking cues from contemporary video art projects by Natalie Bookchin, Kevin B. Lee and Mohammed Bourouissa I want to invent the desktop documentary as a new a visual anthropological practice that directly engages, in both form and content, with those technologies that shape our global present. I argue that the task of ethnographic filmmaking facing the digital age might not lie in producing new documentary imagery, but rather in making sense of the vast amount of digital images that are already out there, that our research participants generate themselves and share on a daily basis. The desktop documentary might thus offer a cinematic form that allows us to arrange, to condense, and to curate such imagery in order to map out its social significance.