oral history

Traces is a collage of text, spoken word, sound, and digital projection. The text forms durational video and audio composed into 17 sections (excerpts included), which are triggered over the course of an hour in a continuous fashion. The video was designed to be incomplete and unfold over time--drawing attention to the chance encounter each person may have with it. It does not reveal the totality of its content, part of which falls outside of the frame. I worked with archival materials as I built this project (oral histories and personal collections). I was interested in these sorts of personal collections being displayed and open for perusal. As private spaces become redefined by digital possibilities, information is readily transferred from one form into another and meaning is subtracted and added along the way. Traces is my own collection. Photographs become data, which initiate recordings that are transcribed and then re-recorded. These then become projected text, and finally transform into granulated rhythmic pulsations and fragments of words, which becomes a vastly layered resonant soundscape felt as vibration through the body.

(Source: ELO Conference: First Encounters 2014)

This public research/community project explores the use of database narrative in the process of “counter-storytelling” using oral history and Critical Race Theory (CRT) in a public history touch-table project. The research is based on a case study of an ongoing digital humanities project at the historic Kimball African American War Memorial Building, built by black veterans of WWI in 1928 in the southern coalfields of West Virginia. The Kimball Project’s aim has been to further develop the significance of the renovated Kimball African American Memorial, which was once a vibrant center of local community life for all ethnicities and races. A central goal of the project is to create an identity as a national treasure and unique destination for historical tourism through the innovative use of digital information technology. One of the objectives of the project has been to involve the community in telling their own historical narratives using iPhone and iPod-based mobile journalism tools for incorporation into the Memorial’s exhibits, digital content, and to upload these stories to the Memorial website. The focus of this presentation is the research, development and design of an interactive, database narrative-driven touch table experience physically located in the Memorial’s exhibition space, as well as an interactive website. The database narrative uses a rare book discovered in the process of research and collection of artifacts and documents – a book of social protest poetry, entitled War Poems, written by two young black women, sisters Ada Tessabell Peters (age 18) and Ethel Pauline Peters (age 17) while students at the West Virginia Negro Collegiate Institute in 1919. The research and project present a paradigm shift in theory and practice for cultural workers engaged in mining invisible voices of the “Other” vis–à–vis “majoritarian” representations of race in digitally interactive public histories. (Source: author's abstract)

Calling America" is an internet-based oral histories project that explores the possibilities of popular communications technologies in the practice of participatory journalism, documentary and the preservation of people's histories. 

Artist Statement

"Calling America" is an internet-based oral histories project that explores the possibilities of popular communications technologies in the practice of participatory journalism, documentary and the preservation of people's histories. Calling America programs make use of cellular telephones and related technologies in conjunction with blogging platforms in the process of producing blog-based documentaries—or blogumentaries—concerning various sites of activist and grass-roots led organizational practices in the United States. Program 1: March on the Pentagon A diverse group of activists from across the U.S. record their journeys to the historic March on the Pentagon, March 17 2007. Beginning seven days prior to the event each contributor recorded a daily audio blog entry via land-line or cellular telephone in which they reflected on their personal and political motivations for protesting the war in Iraq, discussed strategy and acted as citizen journalists documenting their travels to Washington D.C. from throughout the United States. 

(Source: 2008 ELO Media Arts show)

[Murmur], a documentary oral history, records aural stories and memories and geolocates  them exactly. Now in its ninth year, this ample, well-curated archive features stories from twelve cities on four continents and loads quickly on mobile device.

(Source: Description from the Electronic Literature Exhibition catalogue)