Interviews on the street

Hi everyone!

When all the groups met and declared what direction their initial projects where going to be, I admit my heart sank. Our New York group had decided to go with a collaborative collage as an image/object describing our first impressions of Farnham. It was a good idea, Joe came up with some interesting image styles that we could go with; based around a vertical symmetry design. It soon became clear at the meeting of the groups however, that a lot of the other groups were going to be doing something similar. We were going to have to do a radical rethink if we wanted to come up with something more original. To be sure, I had had my doubts about the collage idea. Certainly, it could have been really good, but within a tight timeframe, given the small number of times that the group could meet up, I was worried that an image made up of our combined input could easily lack the cohesion that would draw the disparate parts together. In my second year of BA I had seen a project group produce an artwork based around a questionaire, and it had been extremely successful. The big advantage of this kind of work for us would be that it would involve everybody in a non-competitive way and it was a medium that none of us were familiar with, making it an exciting challenge.

At the next New York meeting we all discussed the way we could pursue the idea. Joe has access to a very fine camera, and he has the ability to edit footage, so we could incorporate film-making into the work, since we all have a strong interest in visual media.
In discussions, we had all talked about our first impressions of Farnham, and although some of the surface details of life in Farnham were easily shared by all of us, (small rural town, a bit old-fashioned, inward looking, very white and middle-class), it was clear that there were differences too. Whereas, some of us found the surface features of Farnham slightly quaint, even slightly reassuring in some ways, others found their experience alienating and uncomfortable. As a visitor to other countries and even other parts of the U.K., I know what it is like to walk down the streets of a town/city and feel the unwelcome gaze of the inhabitants. Our group, "New York", is made up of the richly diverse cultural mix that is typical of most universities and colleges these days, especially one as large as UCCA. Some of us felt that in our encounters with the inhabitants of the town they had displayed a certain unease, or even veiled hostility because of our group's cultural diversity.

The nature of these impressions is very personal and difficult to understand unless you experience them for yourself. Our group decided that through random interviews with people on the street, using interviewers from different racial and cultural backgrounds, we might be able to capture on film the subtle reactions of our interviewees to the interviewers. If we could show that there were perceptible differences to our interviewers in the speech and body language of the people we interviewed, we could demonstrate how each of our first impressions of Farnham, were influenced by the first impressions of Farnham to each of us in turn. We were concerned about issues of consent to be filmed, so we arranged to meet Sarah Sutherland to discuss our plan. She thought our idea was a good one and that as long as we made it clear that we were making a film and we asked them if it was ok to film them and that they were adults, then there would not be a problem. As to the issue of how to show those who refused to be interviewed, we understood that we could not use any footage of those who did not give consent to be filmed. We agreed to gather the refusals as statisical information that could be presented with the film, so the audience could see how many refusals each interviewer had received.

We decided that the questions we asked should be as open as possible to allow the person being interviewed to talk without having to think too much about the answer. We would ask whether they lived in Farnham, and for how long, and we would directly ask them what they thought of the students and their impact on the town. On Wednesday 26th September, we took the camera out onto street, with Joe acting as silent, unobtrusive cameraman, and did the interviewing. We agreed to note down our personal feelings about the interviews, before discussing them with the group, to avoid cross contamination. After the interviews were over we decided to meet up again on Monday 1st October, to view the footage, which Joe had edited over the weekend and to discuss the presentation of our project.