Balloons in Bhutan is an online documentary by Jonathan Harris that explores the idea of Happiness in Bhutan. Bhutan takes happiness very seriously, measuring Gross National Happiness as opposed to Gross National Product to measure its socio-economic prosperity. With this in mind, Harris created an interactive documentary style piece, where he asked a diverse range of people questions about their happiness, and rewarded them with a certain number of balloons, depending on how they rated their happiness. He asked each person five questions: what makes you happy now in your life?, can you tell me a little more about yourself?, what is your favourite joke?, what is a memory that makes you very happy? and, after asking them to choose a balloon and write a wish on it, why did you choose that colour balloon? He split each of these questions into individual, very short pieces entitled happiness, identity, imagination, memory and hope. He spoke to a total number of 117 people, creating a collection of close to 600 short, relatively unedited pieces that involved the audio piece of the question/answer and an overlaying, corresponding image.
Harris has created a number of different pieces that represent the idea of interactive online screen media. In their piece ‘We’re happy and we know it: Documentary, data, montage’, Jon Dovey and Mandy Rose discuss one of Harris’ earlier pieces ‘We Feel Fine’. We Feel Fine is a project that involves a system searching the web for mentions of ‘I am feeling’ or ‘I feel’ in blog posts every few minutes, and recording the sentence the phrase is within. The system is also able to record information off the corresponding blogs such as the authors age, gender and location, and records this alongside the sentence, creating a large database of human feelings, which has the ability to be analysed and used for larger data purposes. In the Dovey and Rose piece, the authors mention that, by telling Harris’ story, they hope to make clear that “the Web is now a vast repository of social information that is potential documentary content. The live and changing nature of that data is a new affordance. We Feel Fine is not static, but generative”. They note that during his schooling days, Harris saw the fragments of information left behind by bloggers and other web users, and saw that some of this information had the potential to be grouped together, creating an interesting new way of analysing people and gathering information. While Harris and his partner on the project Kamvar hope the piece “makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life”, they managed to create something almost revolutionary, something that can completely change the way that myself and other online screen media makers think about our work and the impact it can have.
Turning back specifically to Balloons of Bhutan, there were many noticeable recurring themes within the piece. To start with, the basis of Harris’ piece was the idea of happiness, exploring the happiness of people in Bhutan. Questions relating to happiness occur right across the piece, with the overall premise of the piece following the theme of happiness and what makes people feel this way. Another key theme I noticed when engaging with the piece that was probably a little less obvious than happiness was colour, specifically within the balloons in the project. While the project was photography based with audio overlaying, many of the images featured balloons, with some of the videos also including discussions on the subjects favourite colours and their feelings towards them.
When thinking of themes for projects, it’s easy to instantly think of themes relating to the actual story you plan to create. In the case of Balloons in Bhutan, happiness was quite an obvious theme of the piece. However, it is important to also look at some of the less obvious themes that can occur within pieces, things that subtly tie the pieces together.
Assignment three asks us to create an interactive piece that displays both variability and modularity, and asks us to think about our pieces in smaller fragments that can be tied together with a common theme, such as those present in Balloons in Bhutan. When choosing our group for this project, we were asked to look at the classic production process of an online screen media piece, and rate each step with regards to what we enjoy most and where we think our skills lie. Of the entire process, I rated the process of actually coming up with an idea the lowest as I find it very difficult actually deciding on solid ideas that I have some passion about. I do, however, quite enjoy researching, writing and actually producing content, so it was important for me to find a group of people that complimented some of these skills. My group officially consists of Liv, Jackson and Natalie, and I look forward to seeing the work we complete. With the semester break just around the corner, we need to take some time to think about some potential themes for our own piece, and begin brainstorming ways that we can create something that is both modular and variable, while also being interactive.