Members of the Detroit Mobile Audio Tour (DMAT) team got to see location-based storytelling rock star Krissy Clark talk at the 2012 Third Coast International Audio Festival last weekend. In her presentation, Clark talked about a couple projects she’s created with audio that can be pin-pointed to a place and at times, listened in that place. Below you’ll find an interview that we did with Clark during the festival’s conference. But first, a little background on Krissy Clark’s “adventures in narrative archealogy,” as she puts it.
The red jugs in this photo marked audio stories on O’Farrell Street. Image taken from http://storieseverywhere.org
Block of Time: O’ Farrell Street is a project that Krissy Clark did on, you guessed it, O’ Farrell Street in San Francisco. Clark put together audio stories from the past and present which could be pin-pointed to spots on this street. She marked each of these stories with a red balloon tied to a water jug and a phone number. Passer-byers could call the phone number to listen to the stories “tied” to the jug. Find out more by going here.
In her project StoryCorps: Hear and There, Clark edited down audio nuggets from the StoryCorps archives. (StoryCorps, if you’re not familiar, captures American oral histories, mostly from close ones interviewing each other.) The thing is, she only took audio with a tie to New York’s Lower Eastside. She then geo-tagged each story and made it available to people using an iPhone App called Getting Closer. Using the App, you could wander around the Lower East Side and stories would start to play as you neared the locations they were geo-tagged to. Unfortunately the App is no longer available for use, but the audio from the “Hear and There” project is still available online. Find out more by going here.
At the Third Coast International Audio Festival last week, Clark sat down with the Detroit Mobile Audio Tour’s Laura Herberg during lunch to answer questions about putting together a location-based audio project like the one we’re attempting for our tour. Click on the audio file below to hear that interview. But before you do, you might want to find out what Clark said in her talk. The festival will post audio from Clark’s presentation (which also included Pejk Malinovski talking about his audio tour Passing Stranger: The East Village Poetry Walk) in the coming weeks. Until then, you can watch a boiled-down version of her presentation in this video taken at the Web 2.0 Conference in 2011.
Below is the video of Clark’s boiled down presentation, referenced in the text above:
In addition to telling location-based stories, Krissy Clark works for Marketplace’s Wealth and Poverty Desk.
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Whitney
Sounds like such fun to play with dramatization. Great idea for the bringing news into stories about people + place. Thanks for the short and sweet clip.