Like journalists, documentary filmmakers are increasingly having to compete with the dictatorial purveyors of "alternative facts." Worse, it's happening at the very moment when adept deployers of social media technologies can promulgate blatant untruths with viral ease. Spin doctors emerged in the 1990s and then, a decade ago, satirist Stephen Colbert outed gut-feeling, evidence and logic-free "truthiness," which has now come totally into its own. Outright lies and glaring contradictions are served up without even the gloss of spin. So it's timely for the 2017 Australian International Documentary Conference to address the challenges for the documentarian in a "post-truth" world and, at the same time, assay the—at first glance unlikely—potentials of gaming and VR technologies for generating honest, immersive, interactive engagements with eras, cultures and ideas.
ADELAIDE FESTIVAL: PRESENCE AND STRENGTH Two Adelaide-based companies, Restless Dance Theatre and Gravity and Other Myths, will make their Adelaide Festival debuts this year in Artistic Co-directors Neil Armfield and Rachel Healy’s first of three programs, writes Ben Brooker.
BAD VIDEO, POOR PERFORMANCE
Riled by the inadequacies of works on show in a Nam June Paik retrospective in Tokyo, Philip Brophy is compelled to reassess the artist's status as the godfather of video art.
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