Dokfest Forest


data-driven identity


For the 26th edition of the Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival, FIELD designed an identity based on the festival’s film submission database.
 
Set in a thick and obscure forest like the wooded surroundings of Kassel, the colourful spheres form a sculptural representation of the programme – each of them represents a film, video, or installation work shown at the festival.
 
Typography by Atelier Capra, Kassel.
A unique structure emerges from the forest when hundreds of these individual objects come together – like the festival brings together artists and visitors from all over the world, regional talent and established filmmakers, professionals and interested locals.

About the Process

 
The festival’s Call for Proposals in spring asked submitters – besides the general information – to evaluate some “soft” facts of their own work:
How political is your film? How entertaining? Is it educative?
In a custom built data visualisation application, these self-assessmemt parameters were compared with the general statistics of the submissions; the age and gender of the artist, the country of origin, the production budget, etc. in classical 3-dimensional coordinate systems.
 
Each film is represented by a sphere, with the size showing the length of the work. When two films coincide in all 3 parameters, meaning their spheres would sit in the same position, they cluster around this position like grapes on a vine. A generative colour palette assigns a unique shade to each represented work, which it keeps throughout all diagrams.
 
The resulting sphere structures were translated into a 3D environment and staged in a generated forest.
The poster, catalogue, cinema banners and invitation cards featured different allocations of parameters. Revealed from various perspectives, the sphere sculptures float above the treetops, scatter the ground or hang in the green.

About the Concept

 
Instead of a set theme, the festival identifies its core topics from the submissions; from the contents that artists and filmmakers chose to address in their works. The generative concept underlines this openness – with the structures being determined by the final selection, just weeks before the festival took place.
The evaluation of the statistics helped the festival team to identify interesting correlations and overlaps in the contents of their programme. A number of interesting allocations was laid out in the festival catalogue.
 
See more images and graphs in our flickr set.