Intersecting Histories: The Story of her Skin by Nyssa Chow (review)

Intersecting Histories: The Story of Her Skin started as a portion of the Still.Life. project, an exhibit presented at the Listening Through Time and Space: An Interactive Oral History Exhibit at Columbia University. Still.Life.'s goal became telling the stories of Trinidad and Tobago women, passed on from generation to generation. Creator Nyssa Chow—who describes herself as a writer, new media storyteller, and educator—used still portraits as well as oral histories and atmospheric sounds to bring these stories to life and to the public's attention. The exhibit's visitors could enter a booth that displayed these portraits on large screens. It then played the sounds and histories surrounding the portraits. For the materials housed on the Still.Life. website, they suggest at-home audiences use headphones to emulate the presentation that took place within the booth.

Intersecting Histories: The Story of Her Skin evolved beyond Still.Life. into its own personal story. This piece takes on a digital storytelling format and is organized chronologically into seven sections. At its core, this story from Nyssa Chow's great-aunt Silla Rosales follows her life and impact on the next five generations of her family, exploring concepts of race, ethnicity, family ideologies, and self-understanding. Written in the first person, this digital story delivers not only oral histories from Rosales; it also includes personal reflections from Chow. Their personal anecdotes create a sense of relatability to the audience and a more inviting and intimate space.

The linear presentation allows online users to completely control the pace by giving them the ability to scroll up and down the page. However, there lacks a way to jump around from section to section. This suggests that the sections are dependent on one another, and this design puts great emphasis on the whole story rather than the individual pieces. The work combines written text, oral history audio, ambiance audio, still photographs, and videos. Chow created the website's interface in black and white. While simplistic, this symbolizes the story that delves into the complexities of race, complexion, and relations and situates it in a time period of black and white photography. The coloring and organization provide a basic canvas to allow discussions and explorations of these topics to be the highlight. It also allows for the images to draw the eyes' and mind's attention.

Intersecting Histories presents the oral histories as audio excerpts in a video format featuring closed captioned transcripts that help the audiences follow along. Designed with a white background and black lettering, the videos offer a smooth transition from text to audio. These interviews document Silla Rosales's life and experiences, challenging normative narratives of the time period within Trinidad and Tobago. Ultimately, these "new" histories, as Chow describes them, give a different perspective of what is known and what can be learned through family stories. These digital stories contain images with ambient sounds, including frogs from Poole, ocean waves, and people gathering. Some include text descriptions, and some connect to pictures. These additions compliment the audio oral histories.

While accessible through various platforms, including mobile devices, computers, and smart televisions, for the best experience, one should view the digital story on a larger screen, due to the amount of transcripts and text. Also, one should use headphones to fully connect with the material by blocking out surrounding sounds. The website includes heavily edited and cropped audio to fit within the digital story's context, and this reviewer could not find a location with all of the oral histories accessible in their unedited forms. In many instances, too, Chow chose to cut out the questions, limiting the ability to analyze the material continuously. All of this potentially leaves out information that could contribute to one's full understanding of the stories. However, Chow's format connects the lines of family ties to the oral history excerpts, selected photographs, and complementary sounds, which makes up for any criticism.

While the Still.Life. project...