Patricia Zimmermann, professor in the Department of Cinema, Photography and Media Arts and codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, was an invited speaker at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Futures of Entertainment Summit, November 10-11, 2011.
Zimmermann spoke on the panel "The Futures of Nonfiction Storytelling." Her presentation advocated for a more international, permeable, collaborative, and mutating consideration of documentary across platforms and forms that are volatile and shifting.
Her talk outlined the ethical and political issues related to a theory of open space documentary in a human rights and environmental context and provided examples of programming for open space digital forms from the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival's new media initiatives in online digital art and multimedia/live music projects. She also explained the Open Space/Singapore/Southeast Asia curatorial and research project (sponsored by Nanyang Technological University and the Shaw Foundation in Singapore) as it mapped the relationships between new media forms and practices emerging in Southeast Asia.
The Futures of Entertainment is an annual event which explores the current state and future of media properties, brands and audiences and the way these groups interact and intersect with one another. It brings together professionals from academic and the marketing and media industries to discuss how communication between media producers/brands and audiences are changing, and how the nature of storytelling is shifting in a digital era.
https://www.ithaca.edu/intercom/article.php/20111116215213665