The Non-fiction Installation as a Form of Being-With

This paper will look at the various aspects of documentaries to look at how they present a relationship of being-with between the viewer and the subject. Starting with Bruzzi’s update of Nichol’s taxonomy of the documentary. We will analyze how these forms present the documentary subject to the viewer. We will be focusing on how this enacts a relationship of being-with the other through a feeling of presence. We will see how being-with and our responsibility to the other is fundamental to the documentary. From here we will look at contemporary non-fiction installations to see how this relationship of presenting the other to the viewer has helped develop the emerging form. We will see how the documentary form has been transformed by installation. How its nonlinear format has created new ways of presenting this relationship responsibility to the other to the viewer. We will look at our relationship to media as found in Flusser and see how it relates to the idea of otherness as found in Lévinas ontology.