The “site” mapped out by Public Secrets consists of approximately 500 statements made by incarcerated women. Their testimony, taken from conversations recorded over a period of 6 years, provides direct evidence of the injustices of the war on drugs, the criminal justice system and the prison industrial complex. These narratives of first-hand experience represent the kind of “speech situation” that Rancière argues constitutes all the “diverse historical instances of politics.” And Public Secrets performs a further “staging of equality,” or disruption of the hierarchical status-quo, by bringing the voices of these incarcerated women into a dialogue within the interface with the statements of other legal, political and social theorists such as Giorgio Agamben, Michael Taussig, Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson, Catherine MacKinnon, and Angela Davis.



While this is a dialogue that I have constructed, through the design of the interface and information architecture, between interlocutors whose perspectives originate from very diverse social locations, for me all of their voices emerge out of a shared ethos and converge in critical dissent.

Begin this path

1. Public Secrets - Design Implementation
2. Public Secrets - Content
3. Public Secrets - Form

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