Viewfinders: Exploring Traveling and Landscapes via Augmented reality

Viewfinders is an international collaborative creative arts research project that connects travel experiences with mobile creativity. The mobility and functionality of devices like smartphones means that audience engagement with content no longer needs to be a passive viewing experience but can involve interaction, participation, and even location-aware and/or responsive content. Viewfinders is an online project that incorporates all these elements to create a navigable augmented landscape composed of places visited, generated by mobile users in the form of brief travelling shots. It aims to recreate and explore travelling, contribute to the study of mobile cinema, compare various forms of moving image media (with a focus on interactive and i-doc experiences), investigate the possibilities of collaborative and practice-based research, and examine working with peer-generated content (Cammaer and Schleser 2017, 2018). The idea for this project was first presented and submitted for peer review at the 2017 MINA (Mobile Innovation Network Australasia) Conference and i-Docs’ Docuverse Conference, both in Melbourne, Australia. In 2018, the online curation platform was exhibited at the Invisible Geographies exhibition of FLEFF (Finger Lake Environmental Film Festival) and the Mobile Utopia exhibition at Lancaster University, UK. Finally, the Viewfinders i-doc prototype was launched at the 2017 i-docs symposium in Bristol and is discussed in detail in a chapter of an ebook, Docuverse: Approaches to Expanding Documentary (Cammaer and Schleser 2017). This chapter aims to situate the project within a historical and theoretical context pertinent to the study of interactive documentary, linking it to various other forms of adventurous film practices, particularly those that speak to the Canadian experience and those that aim to expand the notion of documentary. In the context of documentary and the often-cited reference to its Griesonian definition of “the creative treatment of actuality,” Viewfinders explores the creative components at the intersection of content creation and technology innovation, understanding documentary as an experiential medium more than a narrative one.