People Say
Iain Mott

audio demonstration

Chinese Whispers is a sound art project to be run as part of “Long March – A Walking Visual Display”, an ongoing initiative by the Long March Foundation (www.longmarchfoundation.org) creating and exhibiting contemporary art installations, performances and events at points along the Red Army's historic Long March trail. Chinese Whispers will use the universal construct of storytelling as its basis and involves the sharing of stories. The work will address the impact of reform in China by asking individuals to tell stories about their lives and how change in the economic and cultural landscape has affected them. Chinese Whispers will be a collector of stories, an active oral history project that acts as a conduit for transmission. It will interweave narratives from multiple locations so the listener can reflect on stories from varied perspectives.

Chinese Whispers will be distributed in a number of separate installations along the trail from Ruijin in Jiangxi Province through to Beijing. Ideally the project will run for an extended period, capturing stories from a wide geographical and temporal space. Each site will pose a particular question asking about the affects of change. The question will vary subtly from site to site to reflect local conditions and the work will offer the flexibility to modify the question in response to important changes in circumstance. I wish to collaborate with Chinese visual artists on the project. Their involvement will provide local knowledge, to create visual materials and strategies for the work's implementation at each site.

The installations will each have a device such as a telephone for entering stories, loudspeakers and a computer connected to the Internet. Computers will be unobtrusive, if visible at all, and no monitor will be used. Text panels will describe the project and state the question. The loudspeakers in each installation space will play a constantly changing array of stories from around the country. On picking up the phone, the stories will stop and the participants will hear the question spoken in their local dialect over the phone and be prompted to speak. They will then tell their story. Once they hang up, they will hear fragments of their own story over the loudspeakers and new interwoven narratives from around the country accompanied by pre-recorded environmental sounds corresponding to the origin of each voice. Eventually these stories will run their course and new narratives from different locations will be introduced until another participant refreshes the cycle with a new story.

If we view the work as form of oral history, the individual installations will have the unusual quality of being both interviewer and published outcome. In ordinary interviews, the interviewer may bring items such as news clippings or photographs to spark memories and to offer points of reference. They do this to encourage new ideas and disrupt any pre-existing narratives that the interviewee may have honed over the years, delivering the same details of their lives over and over to family, friends and colleagues. The items act as “facts” and leave the interviewer free to ask the questions “how” and “why” rather than “what”. Objects in the installation will similarly serve as facts. They should act as ideas to lead the participant to unexpected places, places within their memory they may not have explored. Caution must be observed however not to frame the participant in a context foreign to them. If they feel their stories are being used for some purpose they don't understand or some purpose to which they feel apart, they will be reticent to communicate. The question asked of them must therefore be direct but fairly neutral and not loaded with other agendas. The installation too must be somehow familiar, yet offer a challenge to the participant's way of thinking.

Data transfer, or story sharing between sites, will be achieved using peer-to-peer networking or an automated emailing process between machines. Each computer on the network will share compressed audio files and database files created at each site. In remote areas where Internet connections are unavailable, mobile units (perhaps installed on trucks) will bridge the gap, collecting stories and providing playback, before reconnecting with the network at a suitable location to share files with the rest of the sites – an idea suggested by Lu Jie from the Long March Foundation. Database files will contain information about each recording such as its origin and other information including where pauses occur in the speech. Playback will be composed locally on each machine in a semi-random fashion. Narratives to accompany fresh recordings will be selected with an even geographical and temporal distribution. For example a storyteller in Yunan may hear four stories in addition to their own: a recent story from Beijing, one from Huining made the same day, an old message from Kunming and one from Jinggangshan made at the very start of the project. The integrity of each story will be maintained, so even if a particular story is broken off to introduce a new story from another time and location, it will later recommence at the place it left off. The database files will be used in the selection of recordings and to find suitable places to interweave new material, for example, at the end of a long pause in the speech.

Figure 1. Diagram illustrating one mobile and six fixed installations

Through storytelling and story sharing, Chinese Whispers will establish a discourse between remote communities. It will create a form of cultural exchange and an outlet for creative expression. It strives to find commonalities between people by providing a window to shared hardships, shared hopes and concerns. As well as being a means for communication, the piece will act as record, a growing bank of stories recorded at specific times and locations. That the work's content is derived from the public means it becomes their character, an imprint of various communities involved. In the beginning, the work will be empty. As stories are added, its aesthetic value will become enhanced. Much like any other forum, people will listen to the ideas of others, then synthesise their own in response. In this way “cultures” will develop in the work, with dialogues established over distance and time. The work will however differ greatly from Internet chat rooms. One major difference is that new stories will not obliterate the old. The system will reach back at varying depths in the strata of its narrative memory. Audio will be used to communicate stories rather than text and the system will automatically juxtapose material to create contrasts and unexpected relationships. The use of site-specific environmental sound to accompany each voice will provide insight, illuminating and contextualising each voice.

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