I met with Tahireh and Smriti a couple of weeks ago and we started discussing some alternative techniques for stimulating engagement using video.  We been researching and testing a variety of engagement tactics as part of our Watercasting project funded by the Wellcome Trust.  Tahireh brought up recent Cartier Award winner and American artist Jordan Wolfson’s proposal that maps out a process for remixing expert knowledge and exposes it’s manners of constructing narrative, its subjectivity, and the common threads that provide (in this case string theory) its transference across contexts and thus problems in the physical and natural sciences.

Wolfson’s method which we have adapted here is simple.

1. A public health expert leads a ‘1-on-1′ tour.
2. The conversation is recorded.
3. The recording is transcribed.
4. The transcription is remixed.
5. The remix is performed.
6. The performance is filmed.

The resulting document then transmits a sort of hybrid expertise, which can then be used as a stimulus for further engagement.  The interesting thing about this process is the number of translations the ‘expert’ testimony goes through.  It also repeats this testimony, and this points to possible variations in the forms of the remixed narration of public health research discourse:

• Is the testimony/tour a dialogue between the ‘expert’ and the ‘lay person’?
• Are there biases that crop up in the discourse pertaining to medical vs cultural terminology, gender, race, or age?
• What happens when experts from different disciplines narrate an ostensibly common issue, concept or pattern?  Are their interpretations similar, or do they vary?

The goal of this process is to use the design element of unity to bring together widely varying narratives that are themselves internally consistent, but through which the seams of their detailing may emerge when sewn together with others.