Proposal: Sisters In Arms is multimedia portrait project that questions the gendered notions of labor, head of household, the female military experience, and conventional ideas of women’s work from the Vietnam era to Operation Iraqi Freedom. This project will create living portraits, which confront and engage these themes vis-à-vis an interactive installation of image and sound.
I have engaged my subjects via audio interviews and story telling sessions. This process allowed me to gain closeness and build trust with my subjects. These interviews captured the subject’s impressions of femininity, socially constructed gender roles, their personal histories leading up to their enlistment, their lives during and after their military service. The process also asked the subjects about their ideas and feeling about motherhood, being in a partnered relationship, their reintegration process after service, and their feelings now regarding the military. The media will be used for both the installation of the living portraits as well as a foundation for the web-based initiative, which will collect the stories and be edited to fit a database framework, which will parse the interviews, by subject, time and geography.
I would like to use the Wonder Woman Residency as a space to continue this project already underway. Currently I have eight subjects stories unedited, ranging in age and experience from different branches of the military. I would like to use the residency to shoot medium format film portraits that I intend to blow up to life size to accompany the audio for the installation. During the residency I will edit and refine the interviews of my current subjects and look forward to the support and feedback of my Wonder Woman peers within the framework of this residency themes of women’s agency within communities and economies.
Week One of the Wonder Woman Residency was jam packed with photoshoots, interviews and meetings. One thing that came out of this week which I would like to address over the next couple of weeks is how one can make the portraits more dynamic than static images printed on the wall. The idea of adding an element of interactivity vis-a-vis animating via a programming language such as processing or in a After Effects was raised. The images would then move and some how transform along with the three to five minute audio pieces which would accompany the images. Also the question of installation was raised, how this will be presented. I am partial to the idea of projecting the images but in what and how so.
