Daniel+MSA

by Sarah Young
 * Media Specific Analysis**
 * Public Secrets**

"Public secret" is the term Sharon Daniel uses to describe the prison system. We, the public, know that it exists, but, in an effort to protect ourselves, we refuse to know the details of that existence. The piece itself is made up of a series of interviews with women incarcerated in the California state prison system. The project is part of the work of the advocacy group Justice Now, and is necessary, according to Daniel, because of draconian media bans that the California correctional system put in place after egregious abuses of prisoners were brought to light in 1993. For more information on Daniel's project and the philosophy underlying it, you can read her essay on the subject here.
 * Overview:**


 * Textual and Media Features:**
 * Clearly defined "enter" and "exit" animated sequences begin and end the piece. During each, Daniel narrates the experience of entering and exiting the prison.
 * Music plays under her animation and black rectangular bars move across the white screen. A similar effect occurs in the exit sequence.
 * The bars shape and reshape themselves, but always define the space as clearly black or white, inside or outside. In the exit sequence, the black shapes finally retreat and we are left with only whiteness.
 * A menu on the left hand side allows you to navigate through sections. In each, the black and white sides of the screen represent "inside v outside," "bare life v. human life," and "The public secret v. utopia.
 * Smudges, black and white respectively, mar the white and black halves of the scene.
 * Each section, black and white, contains parts of quotes, artfully arranged in all capital Helvetica-like font, mostly from the women prisoners, but also from activists and Frederic Jameson. When you click on them you can both hear the woman's voice speaking and (if you choose) read the transcript.
 * If you click to know "more" about either the speaker or the topic, you are taken to a screen where more all caps semi-quotes are presented inside of a series of gray boxes which divide them from each other.
 * The format remains the same throughout -- you can listen to the women, or read their words, or both. There are no visuals, only voices speaking out of a black and white background.


 * Reader Experience:**
 * The experience is framed for you -- an introductory screen explains the text's navigation and warns of profanity.
 * The seemingly straightforward, linear structure of "entrance" and "exit" is belied by the overwhelming number of choices that are available to you within the "prison" itself.
 * If you allow your mouse to drift off of the text for a moment, the voice abruptly stops. A blue bar indicates how much time is left in the recording. There is also the option to read the transcript as they are read.
 * The voices -- even the voices of the same person are divided from each other -- isolated. This effect is made further by the gray bars which divide each entry caption from each other on the sub-pages.

In her statement on this work, Sharon Daniel writes:
 * Analysis:**

"Three years ago, on visiting day, I walked through a metal detector and into the Central California Womens' Facility. It changed my life. The stories I heard inside challenged my most basic perceptions - of our system of justice, of freedom and of responsibility. Walk with me across this boundary between inside and outside, bare-life and human-life, and listen to Public Secrets"  Certainly, the entrance and exit sequences are designed to mimic the experience of entering and exiting a prison -- even the warning about foul language seems in the spirit of the sorts of cautions you get before entering any sort of officially dangerous zone, though I'm not sure that effect was intended. In any case, the apparently straightforward, linear experience of the opening is belied by the sheer number of testimonials that you can listen to. Each time you click "more" there is more, more, and still more. The not-so-subtle effect is to draw attention to the sheer number of lives that are imprisoned.

The shaping and reshaping of the black bars in the opening sequence also suggests the extent to which the prison is a "public secret." If we read the black bars as representative of the prison itself, it is simultaneously there and not there -- we can see it, but never get a sense of its actual shape or dimensions. When it fades away entirely in the exit sequence, it may suggest our willingness to return to happy ignorance, even as the voice-over explains why that is not an option for Daniel. A rather obvious observation is that hearing the women's voices humanizes them. More interesting is that the piece does not compel you to listen -- there is always the option to delve deeper or to avert your eyes. This supports Daniel's claim that the piece puts you in the position of "witness" rather than "reader."

The division between black and white at first seems to represent how the women are irrevocably separated from the outside world. There is black and there is white -- inside and outside. However, the editor's introduction to the piece notes that:

"The very design of the project -- its algorithmic structure -- calls our attention to the shifting borders between inside and outside, incarceration and freedom, oppression and resistance, despair and hope. Throughout your navigation of the piece, the fine lines demarcating such binaries will morph, shift, and reconfigure, calling any easy assumptions about 'us' and 'them' into question. Rather, inside and outside mutually determine and construct one another, sketching powerful vectors of relation between individual experiences and broader social systems." The internal gray boxes which separate each quote from the other seem to function in the same way. On the one hand they accentuate the multiple was in which these women have been separated -- from the lives of others, from the outside world, and from themselves. On the other hand, they also shift according to a "treemap" algorithm, which generates a box just large enough to enclose the text.

Of course, to an extent, the experience has already been interpreted for you. Daniel's text and voiceovers tell you what to think about prisons. The voiceovers, too, are in first person, suggesting that we are witnessing through her eyes and not our own. Similarly, the presence of Frederic Jameson in the cells next to the women, and the "What you can do" links suggests a particular theoretical perspective and an activist impulse. The piece is not trying to let you see what you see and come to your own conclusions about it. Rather, Sharon Daniel invites you to see //what she saw// in order that you may agree with her conclusions.

1. Many other genres have gathered and compiled oral accounts -- documentaries, non-fiction works like Voices from the Storm, art installations, etc. What are the advantages of presenting these accounts digitally? Or, if there are no distinct "advantages," how does the digital medium affect the piece's message?
 * Questions:**

2. What is the significance of the emphasis on text and speech in this piece? There seems to be a conscious decision to include no images, either of the women or of the prison itself. Any thoughts about what philosophy might have informed this choice? Thoughts about how the piece would be different with images?

3. Any expose risks encouraging voyeurism. Does giving the reader the choice of which quote to pick, which woman's life to explore, increase that risk? If the goal of the piece is entirely political/activist, is that an important consideration?

4. The structure of the piece simultaneously accentuates the alienation and division of the prison experience and makes it easier for the reader to navigate the text. Does that ease with which the piece allows you to get your bearings miss an opportunity to convey the experience of being "inside" more fully?

5. Erik Loyer, the designer, has said that the treemap algorithm in the piece which fits the size of the box to the size of the text and a second algorithm which distributes that text in an aesthetically pleasing configuration within the box are "combinations of the individual and the authoritarian conforming exactly to the dimensions of content while organizing that content to conform exactly to the structures that enclose it." I thought this was powerful, but would have had no idea of the algorithmic nature of the piece had it not been explained to me. Does this further illustrate the necessity of knowing some programming in order to really understand e-lit?