Peaced2GatherHerstories
Digital Arts and New Media MFA Thesis
Angela Carroll
The Peaced2GatherHerstories project is a collaborative audio and visual intervention into
the practice of narrating history. Experimental animations and poetry combine and render
visual expressions of oral narratives by four female poets of color. Fernanda Coppell,
Jillian Izumi Mizokami, Wendy Mi-Shong Fong, and I are the featured poets. Each
animation expresses our individual and collective goals of understanding our current
positions as women of color by reflecting on our families’ past and present positions as
disenfranchised and noncitizen residents of America. I will exhibit the films as
instillations within community and gallery spaces around the country.
How to Visualize Memory
The memories of the spoken word artists are translated visually through experimental
animation, which utilizes collage-centric stop motion, sound, traditional cell, and found-
footage. The animations are collaged memories and interpretations of history as they’ve
been articulated in the mass media. They do not attempt to solve the problematics of
memory relay, but rather function as counter-memories. They function as hyperreal
articulations of history and time then the linear objective time based positioning of time
that echoes from modernity’s colonialism projects. The shorts critique truth, the
narrator’s truths as well as those historical truths iterated in popular history. These
animations are experiments in the process of memory work.
