Working Artist Statement

My work explores how and why the people care about the past through audio interviews that are mediated by language, audio editing, categorization, and audience control. These recordings are a collection of life narratives, a genre that constantly changes by engaging in the past to better define identity in the present, hopefully providing the interviewee and listener with a better sense of self and community. True to interdisciplinary practice, these stories are manipulated and framed through strategic questions and the use of a musical soundtrack. I further control the context of these oral histories by categorizing each with suggestive titles when posted as a podcast for worldwide accessibility.

This process furthers my investigation into identity related to personal and social expectations. Ultimately, this line of inquiry asks the public to reflect on their life and embrace reality in an autobiographical moment, addressing the questions ‘Have you ever done any research on your genealogy? Is there anything in history that relates to your family story? Do you most value the past, present, or future?’ Inspired by contextualizing methods used by the contemporary artist group Two Girls Working, I use indirect questions to provoke authentic responses such as ‘Do you keep family photographs or heirlooms? How far back do these items date? How do these connections affect your perspective today?’

As an addition element of control, I select each participant according to degrees of separation from my life. This organizational technique is an observation of how we are linked as a community and our interaction through oral, written, and technological forms of communication. To document this process, I record conversations that are mediated by my questions and reactions using a zoom microphone, remediate the content using Audacity, and apply a subtle musical soundtrack using Reason to unify and categorize the work within a podcast which gives listeners the power to choose any number and order of tracks to experience and respond to on the internet.