In Documentary Across Platforms, noted scholar of film and experimental media Patricia R. Zimmermann offers a glimpse into the ever-evolving constellation of practices known as "documentary" and the way in which they investigate, engage with, and interrogate the world. Collected here for the first time are her celebrated essays and speculations about documentary, experimental, and new media published outside of traditional scholarly venues. These essays envision documentary as a complex ecology composed of different technologies, sets of practices, and specific relationships to communities, engagement, politics, and social struggles. Through the lens of reverse engineering--the concept that ideas just like objects can be disassembled to learn how they work and then rebuilt into something new and better--Zimmermann explores how numerous small-scale documentary works present strategies of intervention into existing power structures. Adaptive to their context, modular, and unfixed, the documentary practices she explores exploit both sophisticated high-end professional and consumer-grade amateur technologies, moving through different political terrains, different platforms, and different exhibition contexts. Together these essays demonstrate documentary's role as a conceptual practice to think through how the world is organized and to imagine ways that it might be reorganized with actions, communities, and ideas.

Foreword / Gina MarchettiIntroduction: Documentary Across PlatformsPart I: Platforms1. Reverse Engineering: Taking Things Apart for the New Global Media Ecology2. Ardent Spaces, Formidable Environments3. Precious Places, Scribe Video Center, Philadelphia4. The Hand That Holds Up All This Falling: The Works of Daniel Reeves5. Cartographies of Impossible and Possible Worlds: The Photography of Michael Kienitz6. Black Soil: Chernozem and Tusit in UkrainePart II: Reversals7. Matrices of War8. Blasting War9. Digital Deployments10. Public Domains: Engaging Iraq through Experimental Digitalities11. Cambodian Digital Imaginary Archive: Genocide, Lara Croft, and CraftsPart III: Histories12. The Home Movie Archive Live13. Throbs and Pulsations: Les LeVeque and the Digitizing of Desire14. Just Say No: Negativland's No Business15. Remixed and Revisited Black Cinema: Oscar Micheaux's Within Our Gates Live Project16. Live!: Reconnecting the Histories of Live Multimedia Performance17. Toward a Theory of Participatory New Media DocumentaryPart IV: Speculative Engineering18. Home Movie Axioms19. Speculations on Environmental Sensualities and Eco-Documentaries20. Speculations on Reverse Engineering: Algorithms for Recombinant Documentaries Across PlatformsAcknowledgementsNotesIndex