Drawing on MIT’s legacy of media innovation and its deep commitment to open and accessible information, the MIT Open Documentary Lab brings storytellers, technologists, and scholars together to explore new documentary forms with a particular focus on collaborative and interactive storytelling. The Lab understands documentary as a project rather than as a genre bound to a particular medium. In the spirit of MIT’s open courseware and open source software movements, the Open Documentary Lab is collaborative and committed to sharing knowledge, networks, and tools. The Lab is catalyst, partner and guide to the future of reality-based storytelling.
Let’s Not Forget the Climate Crisis
As we find ourselves in the midst of a pandemic, a global crisis that could have been largely prevented had we heeded the warning signs and acted sooner, another crisis continues to loom — the climate crisis. Whether or not there is a correlation between these two, the pandemic is a stark reminder that ignoring the warning signs of the growing climate crisis and failing to act will have dire consequences.
Documentarians, artists, and journalists have been sounding the alarm for years and continue to find innovative and effective ways of reporting, providing testimonies and experiences, and sharing information about our climate crisis. As this pandemic makes clear, we have a habit of not paying attention, caring, or changing our behavior even with blatant signs of an emerging crisis. Some media makers are turning to new technologies as well as forgotten ones to draw our attention to this growing catastrophe and to highlight examples of people who are healing the earth.
This playlist showcases projects related to environmental issues, including, among others, virtual experiences in our polluted oceans, augmented urban environments with distant sounds of climate destruction, and collective stories and observations by those most affected. By leveraging innovative techniques and technologies, these projects bring the spatial and temporal scale of climate change to our senses, bringing us face to face with the need to act now.