“Surely the whole point of it is, if a person hasn’t had a voice, the voice that eventually comes out shouldn’t be the voice I want to hear, it should be their own true voice, however that may sound.”
- Michael Riordan, An Unauthorized Biography of the World, 2004

When I began working on this project, the basic idea was to minimally edit a set of video interviews in order to create a series of clips and to post those clips on a website. The clips were not edited into specific sequences or narrative because I wanted my interviewee’s contributions to be published without any interpretive layers added by myself, as editor, designer or author of the project. Each clip would be a discrete object, i.e.; visitors to the site could watch just one or many clips, in any order, without having to engage with the entire project.

While wanting to minimize my own interpretive power, I also wanted to create a site structure that allowed visitors to construct their own narratives and interpretations through search filters and ordered viewing. I planned that the clips would be collected in a website, tagged, and be searchable via the speaker, their project and a vocabulary of terms related to the contents of each interview. At the outset I imagined the final product would resemble an intensive single-subject version of Youtube.

W.O.R.D students making beats

In the end the process of creation became a negotiation between my desire to leave the work open, and a growing concern with design, interpretation and my existence as both subject in, and author of the work. Essentially, as I worked with my interview collection and began constructing the website, I made two realizations: The first was that I was implicated in the field as a subject and the desire to remove myself to focus on the interviewee’s voices was a representational decision and not a move towards greater transparency. I realized that being authentic to the interviewees’ experience of the research process required that I let my voice remain in the edited clips. Including myself in the presented data meant that my ‘authority’ as primary interviewer would need to be addressed in relation to my place within the community of research. Secondly, once I began to ‘author’ my interview data, (instead of trying to simply present it), I realized I was making interpretations that could be used in the development of a site structure to offer a narrative logic for the placement of clips on the site. By offering a narrative structure I was privileging one interpretation, my own, over the users self-selected filters. However instead of limiting their access or misrepresenting my interviewees ideas, thematic frameworks offered simplified access to the rich information in the clips and in the end, made the totality of the project less fragmented and daunting.

The following two vignettes explain in greater detail how the process of creating this project led to my increased presence as subject and author of the work.