Experimedia (with Keely O'Shannessy) - May 2004

Originally piloted through RMIT Union Arts, screenTest began as an exploration into facial expression and emotional tone in human communication. Through further support from the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, the State Library of Victoria and Nextwave the project was enlarged to become a community artwork exploring personal narrative in the context of mass culture: the individual voice within the crowd.

These narratives were gathered through a general public event at ACMI's Screen-Pit in which passers-by, staff and invited participants could come to a broadcast standard TV studio, and talk about their lives, loves, dreams, nightmares – pretty much whatever was on their mind. While some standard questions were asked of participants, mostly the stories and anecdotes recorded were elicited by listening carefully to what was being said, and encouraging people to 'open-up' about themselves.

In every screenTest carried out there is a moment where the participant looks away from the camera, and one can see them deciding whether to continue with the 'public' version of their story, or to engage directly with 'us' – 'us', being at the time the artists recording the interview, but by extension 'us' becomes the final viewers of the artwork as well. The honesty and readiness of participants to do this was exceptional, and resulted in capturing the human condition with all it's hilarity and horror.

In total 100 interviews were carried out, resulting in over 24 hours of raw footage. This was edited down to 8 hours, and cut into some 1200 clips, each of which was databased according to what participants were talking about. By using custom built database software these keywords were used to create 24 unique hour long DVD's in which each successive clip from the interviews is related to it's 'neighbours' according what is being spoken about by the partcipants.

Finally these DVD's were installed, along with 24 TV's at the State Library of Victoria in May 2004. The televisions were arranged in stacks of 3, somewhat akin to a group of people standing around in a public space. Audience members could walk around and between stacks, thus exploring a 'crowd' of voices. By getting closer to a stack, individual voices and stories become discernable, and the interconnection between these stories, both across televisions and from clip to clip also becomes apparent.