When we make a documentary about a famous scientist who invented something, there are times when we quote from a letter that the scientist wrote to a close friend, a sibling or his wife. Letters with a special meaning are often connected to the surrounding conditions that led to the moments of new ideas, and about the process or happenings that cannot be included in research papers. We can get a better understanding and somehow recreate the voice of the person who wrote the letter. I’m not sure whether the scientist had considered that the letter would be made public for the future generations, but it is a good example of how something new could be possibly created through saving and archiving a single letter. I’m not sure if this type of “usage” is actually the aim of documenting our research project, but there is possibly something new that could be created from the moment when we decide to record, as a result of raised consciousness and changed actions. This definitely has some kind of effect on our consciousness on how we approach the research as a whole too.
In the case of Traveling Research Laboratory, we always consider how we can “document” while “editing” and producing some kind of “output” all the time so that it is quite difficult to differ these process, but anyone interested in our trial and error process can refer to our deliverables (output) made in 2016.
