Ithaca College

Patricia Zimmermann, professor of Screen Studies and co-director of Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF), has published a new book, Open Space New Media Documentary: A Toolkit for Theory and Practice(Routledge, 2017).

The book is co-authored with Helen De Michiel, a highly recognized feminist new media artist, documentary filmmaker, and nonprofit media arts advocate who is the former Director of the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture.

Open Space New Media Documentary examines an emerging and significant area of documentary practice in the twenty-first century: community-based new media documentary projects that move across platforms and utilize participatory modalities.

The book offers an innovative theorization of these collaborative and collective new media practices, which the authors term "open space," gesturing towards a more contextual critical nexus of technology, form, histories, community, convenings, collaborations, and mobilities.

It looks at a variety of low cost, sustainable and scalable documentary projects from across the globe, where new technologies meet places and people in Argentina, Canada, India, Indonesia, Peru, South Africa, Ukraine, and the USA.

Many of the projects analyzed in the book were screened and presented at FLEFF.

The book is also available as an e-book.