02/04/2004 11:09
Herve Constant - FRANÇA








I’m at present working on a project based on photos, performance and sounds.


The most recent, is about a series of photos of workers taken at a Market Research company in England.



Project 1. The photos are a series of portraits of people in front of their screen. I wanted to show different mood and humour depicting their characters. Their relation to an abstract presence; not having any personal and precise idea of their interlocutors.

So far, the inclusion consisted of around 20-30 portraits. Recently I’ve included photo details in the projection. I’ve done some recordings of diverse sounds such as voices, music etc.

A short response by Marc Goetz to the newest project undertaken by Herve.

I feel the still images convey something of the tedium involved in this work, and the sounds/music one hears when on hold, and finally the excerpt of the interview are very effective as an overlay. I also feel that the rate at which the images change is well chosen, serving to underline the slowness of the passing of time in the unit.
It’s very beautiful.'
Hervé photographed interviewers on the job, either waiting for a call to come through on an automated dialling system, or engaged in administering an electronic questionnaire to respondents over the telephone. The pictures are therefore authentic, though some shots are more stylised. The pace of market research work of this type can be quite slow, leading to spells of boredom, and fatigue, assisted by the repetitive nature of the work, where telephone interviewers tend to not only spend hours each day asking the same questions over and over again, but are quite often doing this for several days at a time. Even though the projects may vary with regard to their subject matter, the structure of the questionnaires overall is almost identical.

What Hervé's work also shows, is the diversity among the interviewers, with regards to culture and origin, and this is important, as it addresses questions of cooperation and tolerance, since people from as far away as South Africa and North America happily work alongside those from the Ivory Coast, Ghana, Italy, France, Nigeria, Germany, Russia, Austria, Spain, The Netherlands, South-East-Asia, and Britain, and no-one appears to find it unusual in the least. I feel that this is a significant aspect of the piece, demonstrating how equivocal people can be about differences between themselves and others, and that it is quite possible to get along, to work side by side, to embrace the uniqueness of others, and to be friends. Living, as we do, in a world where some governments try to restrict certain peoples' movements, where difference is all too often portrayed as something threatening, we ought perhaps to consider the example we see here.

The audio accompanying the pictures is predominantly of background sounds from the unit. The general 'brouhaha' that greets one on entering into the call centre. In my opinion, this piece provides a window into the world of not only market research, but of call centre work in general (which I can claim to have some experience of), and, of course, the chosen unit in particular.

Finishing on Beethoven's 'Fuer Elise' is a particularly nice touch. It's not only an example of what interviewers hear while waiting to be connected with a suitable potential respondent, but it also represents a different life, which many in this industry perhaps, but in this unit in particular, either dream of, hope for, or work towards, reminding us that there is a greater purpose to life than this.

If you want to see the video and more of the work you can actually go to: www.herveconstant.co.uk

enviada por fundacion gugg und c






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