For this project, I appropriated one of eight oral history interviews with Lottie Kaplan Spitzer, a woman who immigrated to the United States and worked as a garment worker and union organizer in Chicago during the 1910s. The original half-hour interview, collected by Senior Honors and the Feminist History Research Project  and made publicly available through the California State University Long Beach’s Virtual Oral/Aural History Archive, covers Spitzer’s experiences navigating the job market, learning skills in various garment factories, and enduring the long hours, meager wages, and harassment that many workers (particularly women) were subject to at that time.

By dicing and reordering audio from the original interview, this project offers a  reimagined oral history that dramatizes the sometimes hostile work environment that Spitzer experienced as well as her response and relationship to both the individuals and conditions of that environment. The conflicts in the original interview (such as slapping her boss in response to sexual harassment and disappointing her highly educated father by working in a factory) are spun to highlight the presence of men’s power in her life but also her defiance of that power.

While I have spent some time removing background noise, the audio could still use some refining to clarify the voices and hide “the stitches” between audio clips. Though, I appreciate some of the moments where the cohesiveness of the storytelling voice falters and becomes disjointed.

As for the theoretical implications of this project, some questions that are currently on my mind include:

1. What are the implications of creating an oral history that’s fictional but still sounds archival? (Is this propoganda or is it creatively “lying the truth”?)
2. Since this interview was originally conducted in the 1970s and subsequently made digital and public, what does the material translation of this interview imply in terms of power and access to the archives? I’m considering Derrida and Mbembe here.
3. How is this project similar to and different than poems I’ve created using found text from archival documents? The creative processes felt very much the same, although the media are completely different.

For this audio experiment, I sampled a recording of “Hush Little Baby” to create a rather annoying string of “mama” interjections. This turns the original lullaby, intended for a parent or caretaker to sing to soothe a child, into an attention-getting gesture that a child would direct at their mother. With an Arkansas women’s prison as the original context of the recorded audio, this role reversal in both the intention of the lullaby and the audience-perceived meaning of the it intrigues me.

 

 

A digital photo collection hosted on Tumblr, Things That Say “No” captures and categorizes publicly posted messages that dictate “no” to each T rider, patron, passerby, and everyday Bostonian. Enabling a viewer to scrutinize each train platform, bank, park, street corner, and cafe at which they themselves could be told what not to do, the photographed messages reveal a collective rhetoric for how order and control are maintained in Boston’s urban environment. The collection seeks to study, understand, and question the discourse in which city-dwellers find themselves submerged, often without their attention or awareness.

As a whole, these digital photographs paint a picture of the federal, state, and municipal laws; capitalist business concerns; and shared social values that exist in Boston’s dense and, at times, chaotic metropolitan landscape. Since the cross-section of signs appear to reflect cultural interests in public safety, health, and transportation; business operations and consumerism; and private property, all of which are typically dictated and enforced by laws and social practices, each photograph has been categorized based on one of these interests. In this way, the collection examines the publicly posted sign as a symbol of power, often delivered by a public or private institution.

Within this context, Things That Say “No” strives to draw attention to the ways in which citizens’ free will is restricted by the public agencies, businesses, and even individuals whose lives intersect with ours, as evidenced by these public postings. Constantly “hailing” us as citizens and consumers, these signs—posted by “the powers that be”—tell us again and again how to behave. With posts labeled with locations and the times and dates captured, each photograph serves as evidence for a moment that I personally was “hailed” by one of these messages. The collection offers the temporal and physical location of each interpolation to show the persistent and inescapable presence of these power structures.

This collection also examines the object of the publicly posted sign that says “no” by categorizing each based on its material presentation. These characteristics too seem to reflect the power (or the imitative presence of power) that these institutions have over their messages’ audience.

Since each photograph was captured and categorized by me, one individual citizen, the collection also talks back to the entities that posted these messages. Taken on various commutes using a humble iPhone, the photographs call the political structures they belong to into question through the radical act of collection. The photographs become part of a private archive—mine. In this way, the power that these signs reflect is co-opted or undermined. The messages become part of a personal experience, the signs objects to be considered as material and memory. The photographs in Things That Say “No” could fit into an archive curated by Public Works, the MBTA, or the Parks and Recreation Department, or perhaps be of interest to researchers examining urban planning, public transportation, or property law, but their existence outside an institution makes them politically radical. The collector herself says “no” in return.

http://thingsthatsayno.tumblr.com/