Where There’s Smoke and the Generative Documentary: A Conversation with Lance Weiler

Lance Weiler is a renowned innovator of storytelling forms, with his projects often blending technology and live events and blurring fiction and nonfiction worlds. Founder of Columbia University School of the Arts’ Digital Storytelling Lab, Weiler’s work over the years has featured stories that are dispersed across multiple platforms and often told with global participation on a massive scale. Regardless of the number of narrative threads at work, the technology deployed, or the size of the audience engaged, Weiler’s work is notable for its evocative storytelling and personalized experience. Clarity of concept or theme is one glue that seals the diverse elements together in his projects, as well as a skillful use of objects, both physical and virtual, that connect the audience to the story, to each other, and to the world of making and reflection.

In April 2019, Weiler’s Where There’s Smoke premiered as a physical installation at the Tribeca Film Festival, and the artist planned to tour the show.¹ Shortly thereafter, the shutdown from the pandemic ended those plans abruptly. Weiler then developed a virtual version of Where There’s Smoke, incorporating some seemingly unlikely tools from the online world—videoconferencing application Zoom and the whiteboarding platform Miro—alongside home movies, experimental video, photography, and live performance. The online experience of Where There’s Smoke is unique for its nonlinear navigation and almost infinite “playability.” A mix of oral history, medical crisis, family drama, and crime mystery, the story weaves through personal tragedy and trauma and leads the participants through memories and healing zones. Throughout the experience, space is given to reflection, individual and collective, to connect our stories with Weiler’s and our fellow participants’ stories. Loss and restorative groundwork are jointly shared.

I was able to go through the online Where There’s Smoke several times, with each experience quite distinct and new material discovered on each passage. I was struck not only by the scale of the project in terms of volume of materials deployed in the story, but also by the diversity and moments of poetry and beauty in the work. In June 2021, I interviewed Weiler via Zoom about Where There’s Smoke and his use of the term “generative documentary” to describe the work. We discussed the work’s potential for reimaging the documentary genre as well as its possibilities within healthcare, specifically in the field of narrative medicine.

It’s almost like an in-betweener. It has the qualities of an escape room mixed with elements of an alternate reality game fused with immersive theater combined with cinematic qualities and interactive documentary. You could call it a “generative documentary.” A work usually starts with something I want to explore, and I take an iterative approach toward it. Much of my work, even my fictional work, is a process of excavation. My work often explores memory, is about surfacing truth, even my fiction work. Where There’s Smoke sparked from a moment of feeling incredibly overwhelmed by the medical realities of my dad’s terminal illness, finding out that my parents hadn’t planned for their end of life, and…not knowing how to go forward.

I could have made a linear piece, but I wanted to delve into the idea of being clouded by grief and the challenges of navigating care for a loved one—especially in terms of the bureaucratic structure, the disconnect in language, and the number of the challenges represented within a healthcare system. I could have made a documentary, but there was a moment where I thought, wow, this is just so traumatic. It was devastating because of the news that my dad was getting, but it was also traumatic in terms of the way it was handled.

I thought, why is this so difficult? Why is the compassion missing? What happened to the empathy in this exchange? I became aware of narrative medicine as a practice. I wondered, what if I was able to explore the grief I’m feeling? What if I was able to shape an immersive experience rather than a documentary film or linear format? Could I create something that evolves over the course of the grieving process, and what might that look like?

I had grown up in a firefighting household, and my dad was a volunteer firefighter and amateur fire scene photographer. When I was a kid, my dad introduced me to photography. We would listen to fire scanners and then race off to take photographs of things that were burning. There was a part of me always wondering, was it possible my dad had something to do with the blazes that disrupted our lives? There were many questions around that possibility and numerous loose ends.

The last part was that my dad was an enigma. There was a side to him I didn’t know. As he was dying, the piece became a way to have a chance to talk and process it. I tend to process things by making, and it was something I needed to say. Later, I realized I was making a grief ritual.

Where There’s Smoke is a story of my father and has elements of a memoir, but at the same time, our story, my dad’s and my story, becomes a springboard to allow others to reflect on their own lives and loss. Participants contribute to the larger narrative, like a tapestry.

Afterward you explore a box of artifacts that were my dad’s. You are instructed to find a map, two flashlights, and an envelope that says, “Please do not open until the end of the experience.” A door creaks open, exposing a burned-out hallway. Using the map, you move through the set of a burned house. When you enter the main room, everything is charred. The map guides you to several objects that allow you to unlock the stories that are hidden within the room.

The objects—including a rotary phone, a walkie-talkie, a cassette, and a 35mm camera—are devices used for communication. The found story fragments present contradictory information via my dad’s 35mm slides as well as audio recordings taken from my interviews of him. Some fragments talk about my dad being a firefighter, but one talks about an arsonist on the force. One talks about our house burning down. Other materials are about the medical side of his experience.

Some objects talk about our family and our history, our interactions, the family dynamic. You might come into the room, and you might never get a story about the fire, but you’re standing in a burned-out set. You might think the burned-out set is a metaphor for terminal illness. Or you might enter, only get the story about the fire, and miss other elements. When people come out and compare, they have experienced different things.

Underlying the piece is the idea of memory and memory as highly subjective. When I talk to my brothers about our childhood, we have different perspectives on our past. We might agree on certain facts, but the emotions that we feel, or the nuance, or what we choose to describe, or what we’re focused on is different. The generative format is a way to explore these shifts. This is a “documentary” evolving, and it’s different each time you go through it.

It’s a living organism because others can add to it as well. I have hundreds of cards that were drawn at the Tribeca installation, and we have all the Miro boards from the virtual shows. For the longest time we’ve assumed the final piece (the film, or whatever you’ve made at the end of the process) is the artwork––and the journey to get there is messy. What if the act of making a work is the artwork?

It’s like the film Fitzcarraldo (1982, directed by Werner Herzog). You’re pulling a huge boat over a mountain in the Amazon and you’re fighting all the elements. But what if you leaned into the process side and didn’t adhere to the traditional structure of a documentary? What if, instead, you explored the idea of those formerly known as “the audience” as participants within this emerging piece. What I’m doing is not dissimilar to what a documentary does. I’m searching for the truth in this piece, but there’s such a level of complexity to the story: the issue of somebody being terminal; the dynamic between a father and a son; the skeletons that emerge from the closet, the secrets left unsaid…all these things are difficult to navigate.

The tasks to keep my father alive were getting in the way of him dying with dignity in a humane way. Keeping him alive was completely counter to his quality of life at a certain point. I wanted that tension to be there for the person going through this. But I also found that the generative quality allows for people to be participants within this experience in a way you don’t get an opportunity to do within a traditional documentary. This piece brings in the social impact potential of storytelling. Stories lead to reflection, can transform, and can produce action. Where There’s Smoke leaves people reflective. I don’t think it could be as powerful unless it was participatory and generative.

I challenged myself to think how this could reach more people. The task was to move from a four-person, forty-five-minute physical installation experience—to scale up so more people could go through it. I had used Miro for a bit in my classes; I’ve been using Zoom for years. I challenged myself to imagine a new version of this, because I don’t see it as an adaptation. The online Where There’s Smoke becomes its own thing. Much of the work I do evolves, and they are multi-year projects. They are never quite one completed thing. They end up becoming ecosystems. In some instances, they are multiple different incarnations or branching experiments around a core story or core concept I want to explore.

The themes explored are the same, but the executions are quite different. Where There’s Smoke is similar. It is an evolution, iteration, not necessarily an adaptation. Many people were apologizing to me: “I am so sorry you can’t do the physical installation the way you want. It must be heartbreaking to have to do something virtual, let alone in Zoom and Miro.” But I was excited by the opportunity; I felt like Miro moved at the speed of creativity. It was moving so fast, and it was this beautiful, infinite canvas challenging how we interact with the internet.

Miro models a physical space I can be in, you can be in, and we might not be in the same place at all. It’s like being at a music festival, and we are trying to find each other. I’m over at one stage and you are at another, and we’re texting back and forth trying to find each other. That’s very much the aesthetic of what navigating grief has been like for me.

I was totally liberated by the virtual version of this. With the physical version, if I was honest with myself, I was hiding behind the mechanics of it because my dad had just died. The project was a diversion at that point in time from the feelings I was having. When the pandemic hit with such incredible loss, I found myself examining the feelings I had and began to make art and collaborate, taking my father’s 35mm slides and making new generative pieces from them. It was as if my dad and I were making art together.

We had people who visited many times. They commented on how it was different each time, whether it was the board evolving in a way that they hadn’t expected or them seeing parts of it that were unknown. It functioned as an evolving database narrative, pulling from a collection of fragments. Those fragments expand based upon participation by audience members.

The generative side of that, which is always evolving, is quite unique for interactive work. Many times, an interactive work will be approached by an artist as if they are thinking, “We’re going to finish this site, or browser based I-doc, and it will have a beginning, middle, and end.” It’s like Jean-Luc Godard famously said: he makes films that have a beginning, middle, and end, but not necessarily in that order. The nonlinear nature of it is a radical departure.

Those two things became a real driver, but one reason I moved in an experimental way was that I wanted to create something to serve as a discursive design artifact that would allow people to have discussions around end of life. How do you help somebody care for themselves when they don’t really want to do it? When someone is in denial about what is happening and doesn’t make plans for it, what can you do?

In the initial incident with the doctor, I had gone in with my wife because my mom was too overwhelmed to go. We asked questions because we needed to go back and tell the rest of the family what had transpired. My dad could not process the fact that he was terminal. He kept saying: “Okay, well, when it’s gone” and the doctor would say, “It’s never going to be gone. It’s going to kill you.” My dad couldn’t process that.

Dr. Rita Charon, who founded the Narrative Medicine program at Columbia University, came as the installation was wrapping up at Tribeca. She went through and was quite moved. We’ve collaborated numerous times over the years. At the core of this is the desire for connection, which is what narrative medicine is about. I left that day from the doctor’s and drove my dad home. I kept thinking I’m going to make something and through making it I’ll be able to, and my family will be able to, heal. Maybe it can help others heal. Maybe it could fit with what the narrative medicine program is doing at the university—and now we’re collaborating on ways to bring elements of Where There’s Smoke and digital storytelling into a series of workshops.

We had a mix: some people would talk to each other, and others would be silent the whole time. There was an element of being alone and together, which feels like what grief is like. When somebody is dying, people don’t know what to say to you. They try to be kind. You can be around a lot of people, but then the question starts to become the same question and they only get to a certain level. You feel even more alone and frustrated by the whole thing.

Sometimes people introduced themselves to each other during the experience. But there was something powerful in being alone and together. It was reflective of the pandemic too. That was at the core of it. You felt alone, but you could be connected through virtual things, which felt like pale comparisons of what it is to be together. That is quite different from what it feels like to be in a room with someone, or to be able to embrace somebody, to hug somebody. It’s just different: two dimensional versus being there in the real world.

I want to explore more deeply the question: Can you have personalized documentaries for each audience member? That flies in the face of what a documentary is. I have the story of my dad and me, but then we have all these other stories that are in a tapestry of healing together. What if stories surfaced through the virtual component and then were performed or engaged within a live performance? What if it takes on a Theater of the Oppressed approach, where some of the things that are surfaced in the virtual side then become manifest in the real world through performances that others can see. It becomes this Moebius strip, folding in on itself.

I am also experimenting with nonfungible tokens. Using the blockchain in a way that asks, what is it like to have art that fades over time like a memory? I will use NFTs to enhance the experience—for example in ticketing around the event, to enable people to have some of the art from the experience. But what if the art fades or transforms over time, and it’s another form of expression around the piece? It becomes an extension of a piece. I want to explore blockchain as a storytelling form and subvert its transactional nature.

I intend, as my mom heals from a stroke, to do recordings with her and weave more of her voice into the piece. We have had conversations with museums about the possibility of my dad’s work becoming part of a permanent collection and doing something that would allow the project to live in a museum space. The challenge is in terms of archiving and defining what it is.

Archiving usually comes from oral histories, visual case studies, or written texts about what an immersive installation was, but it’s difficult to experience what an installation was like. I’m hopeful that in the case of Where There’s Smoke, a design challenge in collaboration with a museum would mean the work itself would take on a timeless nature. How does this work get archived in a way that others can experience it?

Another area of exploration is how digital storytelling might integrate and weave into narrative medicine practice. This centers back to the origin of where it all started. The project’s coming full circle now. I am in conversations with the Narrative Medicine program, and we did our first medical academic conference with it this past June at the Comet Conference in Como, Italy. Those are some of the things we have been working on as well as an art book around the project.