Does it need subtitles?
Incorporating travel and interviews into my work was a new way of working for me, as most of my work is interactive or game-based. It was good to get feedback from the lab, although the conversations seemed to die out after the first few weeks. It was especially helpful to have expressed my ideas in writing before traveling to Guyana, as it was easy to stray from what I initially felt the project should be. At the moment the final product seems to be leaning more toward short video, but I imagine I will continue making several more versions after this.
Looping video and interview audio from one of the four walls, and nature sounds from the center of the room.
This is a rough stream-of-conscious edit of some video clips and quotes.
I got back to the states this week with 120 minutes of recorded interviews, which is less than I expected (3 40-min interviews–I actually did a fourth but screwed up the recording), but they all touch on the themes that I was interested in. I also traveled to Jonestown and recorded footage there. I will post some mock-up videos next week to give a sense of what the walls of the installation might look/sound like.
It was an interesting anthropological experience, studying an extreme moment from my own culture through the eyes of another. In a way we were looking at this strange cult phenomenon from a similar point of view, and it felt like I made a more immediate connection with my interview subjects through a shared interest. More so than say if I were just studying the local culture.
From the interviews I recorded, some of the threads that interest me are:
- The transitory nature of the land—the clearing of land for Jonestown, and later the clearing of Jonestown by fire. I interviewed the man who was in charge of clearing the land (above–it’s almost a shame that I’ll only be using his voice, since he’s sitting
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In one room, each wall is covered with projected video. The video is of the empty field in Guyana that used to be Jonestown, where the Peoples Temple massacre occurred in 1978. The video will be from the perspective of someone standing in the center of Jonestown, looking out in each of the four directions. Each video will be a five minute loop of the daytime landscape. The sound in the center of the room will be loud nighttime jungle sounds from Jonestown. There will also be speakers by each of the walls playing audio from interviews I conduct with local Guyanese about their interactions with members of Peoples Temple Agricultural Project, whom I will be in Guyana interviewing from May 31st to June 15th.
The night sounds in the center of the room hint at the “white nights” where Jim Jones gave his most paranoid and apocalyptic views of the outside world. The loudness of the night sounds will also force the viewers to approach the different walls in order to make out the content of the audio interviews.
The selections from the interviews will make few overt references to Jonestown or Jim Jones, but will be referring …
This project will involve visits to the small municipalities around Jonestown, Guyana, where the Peoples Temple massacre occurred, and interviews with residents about their memories of interactions with the commune and how it and the tragedy affected their lives. The interviews will be mapped to specific locations on Google Earth, creating a peripheral contour of Jonestown, a place that no longer exists and whose remains cannot be seen by satellite. I will be tracking the locations of interviews using a homemade location-mapping device with a GPS-enabled microcontroller.
One goal will be to illustrate the small surrounding towns as living entities that we come to know through the jumping-off point of Jonestown. The mass suicide is often the first and last thing someone from the U.S. thinks of in relation to Guyana, as if the events happened on a deserted island. I am interested in the small, nondescript port, mining and border towns in developing countries, the types of places rarely read about. I lived at a border town in West Africa for two years, and my subsequent work was influenced by meeting people and hearing their stories, my glimpses into their interesting lives.
Rebecca Moore, author of Understanding Jonestown …
