Public Secrets: Is the author a secret too?

Browsing through multi-media projects has become somewhat of a pasttime for me; the story of the tranquil, homey town called Pine Point, tragically removed from the United States map as a town, leaving citizens without a place to call "home-town," to the drastically different media project of Snow Fall, a New York Times article that utilizes images, maps, and design to convey the terrifying yet entrancing story of an avalanche at Tunnel Creek. These projects blur the boundaries between author and audience, creating an interactive space that forces us to put aside our traditional notions of the linear way we normally understand that we receive text.

Sharon Daniel's Public Secrets challenges similar notions, so that the project itself is understood as more of a collaborative entity than a direct product of an individual. When browsing Public Secrets in my dimly lit room with a cup of chamomile tea, I felt as very much a part of the project as the multitude of its creators. Truly, the best way to experience the in-humanity contained in the nuances of the prison system is to experience the voices "linked" together, rather than hearing it all from one voice. As Daniel's presents her project, she says "Walk with me across this boundary between inside and outside, bare-life and human-life, and listen to Public Secrets." Surely this experience is one that clearly demonstrates that the thought, "The author is always conceived of as the past of his own book: book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into before and after" (Barthes, 876) is a very common conception that is in fact, incorrect.

"We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single "theological" meaning but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash" (Barthes, 876). Public Secrets is the personification of this very sentence, as it is a multimedia text that takes you beyond linear dimensions into a space that the reader dictates; each reader's experience will be dependent upon the individual path he or she takes throughout the project - whether one clicks on "Outside Life" or "Inside Life," or whether one chooses to follow a certain woman's story to the very end, the linear notion of text is completely non-existent throughout Public Secrets and demands the reader to take on responsibility for the order in which the text is received. In this respect, the author(s) of Public Secrets are in fact entirely "dead", a notion that Barthes would agree with, as their input on the text's functionality within the reader only sets up guidelines for the reader to use. Additionally, the "writings" of Public Secrets clearly come from different authors, different authors that have either complimenting or contrasting beliefs; therefore, Public Secrets simply cannot come up with one, solid, theological premise - i.e, "Prisons are bad" or "The women in correctional facilities are not all convicts" because the premise of the text itself is a "blend and clash" of perspective, author, and "concept"; concepts that conflict within themselves and with each other such as "utopia" and "prison system."

Public Secrets doesn't present a solid, "solution" to the "prison system problem" because the space it creates is built to break down binaries - one of these binaries being the one between "us" and "them." By its very nature, it is a snapshot of history, of present, of possibly inherent future. The authors' "only power is to mix writings to counter the ones with the others in such a way as to never rest on any one of them" (Barthes, 276). Not only are the snapshots of writing blending and clashing throughout this text, each piece of text or writing comes from a background of "heteroglossic" interplay. Therefore, the voices presented in Public Secrets are not the only voices present, but the voices from their histories and the interplay of their histories (Bahktin). In the case of Public Secrets, the authors serve as a function to relay history, snapshots, and ideologies to a public that will interactively transform them in individual ways. And this, this is the beauty of writing, of text - that it can affect change through the use of discourse; it can affect change even when its authors are a secret.