May 28th, 2010 - Installation
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 to a specific community, in an isolated place, which may be where the viewer is standing. Selections from the interviews may also focus on communities in flux in the Jonestown area, as this is a region of mining communities with transitory populations, and Jonestown itself has also had several different groups of inhabitants that came after the Peoples Temple.
Susan (June 4th, 2010 at 10:23 pm)
I am wondering what the objective of the piece is. Will it draw on a local folklore about the massacre? Are you intending to show how outsider incidents leave their stamp on a community and how it views itself? I’m a little unclear how the historical event will relate to the problems of the mining communities, or what the viewer is to take away.
Also, can it be experienced by only one person at a time? Or, a small group?
Aaron (June 19th, 2010 at 2:20 pm)
Hi Susan, thanks for the comments. My main interest is in
how Jonestown sort of broke down and became a part of its
surroundings, both culturally, through stories, for example, and
materially, through objects from Jonestown that were distributed
throughout the area. The reason why I mentioned the mining
communities was because the coming and going of Jonestown seems
to be in a way an extreme example of what is constantly happening
in this area–one mine closes, another mine opens, drawing a
different set of workers from another country; also after the
Peoples Temple, the government settled a group of Hmong refugees
from Laos in Jonestown for a short time; at one time ownership of
much of the land in the area was claimed by Venezuela.
I would imagine it could be experienced by a small group. I
think what’s most important is that the size of the room and
sound levels mean that, in the center of the room, one can’t hear
anything except for the loud nature sounds, and when one walks
toward a wall, one mainly hears, and can distinguish, the voices
coming from that specific wall, and I suppose the group would
have to be small enough that there would be freedom of
movement. There are also some technical issues such as,
what is the smallest size room in which the sound separation is
possible, and what kinds of cues would cause the audience to
approach the walls.
In the beginning the primary feeling I wanted the viewer to
experience was one of isolation, by the combination of images and
narrative, and so a solitary viewing experience would have
helped. But while this feeling would be an interesting side
effect, I don’t think the conversations I’ve captured necessarily
lend themselves to that.
martha king (June 9th, 2010 at 11:55 pm)
I am interested in your proposed use of absence within this piece and the performative implication of the viewer as they move between speakers and directional viewpoints. Following on from Susan’s comment my sense is that the number of viewers at any one time would radically alter this experience.
You mention that you are interested in communities in flux and I wonder whether you intend to explore this notion of movement through the video projections or whether they will remain static images? Also you have mentioned that the video images will be five minute loops, is there a reason for this duration and will it be a particular time of day? How will the duration of the image loops relate to the duration of the sound and to the viewers temporal experience?
Again related to Susan’s comment on purpose I am wondering how much contextual information you intend to give your viewer and whether it is important for you or not that the viewer makes the contextual connections between times and spaces inherent within your source materials? Are you intending for this installation to be an experiential, poetic and therefore almost abstract experience for the viewer, through your use of sound and emptiness, or is this a reflection on a specific place? Perhaps both?
Aaron (June 19th, 2010 at 3:21 pm)
That’s an interesting idea–I had initially intended to just use
the static images of Jonestown, but I might experiment with
incorporating some footage of driving away from there or
searching the bushes for pieces of the commune, at certain
moments in the loop. Five minutes was just an average,
since it’s just a static environment shot I’m not sure the end of
the loop will be obvious, or that there will be key visual
moments that the viewer associates with moments in the
audio. However, if I insert clips of movement I might try
to more closely tie them to specific moments in the audio,
although having them randomly emphasize different moments in the
audio would probably be more interesting. I chose to film
around noon for the painfully strong sunlight.
I am assuming viewers will come with a general knowledge of what
happened at Jonestown. The audio and video selections will
be more impressionistic, less explanatory. To answer your
final question, it is both, it is about the abstract experience
of the space, but it’s important that the viewer bring their own
specific assumptions and impressions of Jonestown, because I
think it will be more interesting when the images and audio
contradict them.
Thanks for the questions, I think my next blog entry and video
mock-up will answer some of them in more detail.