↜ oral history

Char Jeré and Lina Chang

This interview is narrated by Char Jeré and Lina Chang and took place on January 09, 2020 at Brooklyn Public Library, 10 Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, NY 11238 in response to Introduction to Code Societies by Melanie Hoff, neta bomani, emma rae norton and Taeyoon Choi. Char and Lina discuss the following keywords: People, cyborg, thinking, mistakes, library, stuck, afro, fractilism, representation, talking, laptop, human, reading. Transcription by Tsige Tafesse and neta bomani.

༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ This transcription is a work in progress. Please check back later for a full transcript. Thank you! (◕‿◕✿)

Alright. So my name is Neta Bomani and I’m here at 10 Grand Army Plaza at the Brooklyn Public Library and we're here just to discuss the Code Societies cohort and how we are feeling about technology today and perhaps how we are feeling about it into the future. I would like to invite both Lina and Char to introduce themselves.

Char

My name is Char and I am an Afro Fractalist I’ve been living in New York for almost 20 years—right now I’m getting my masters in data analytics and visualizations at Pratt and I’m from Rochester, NY—kinda I guess— I’d rather say I’m from my mom, but yeah.

Lina

So my name is Lina Chang and I currently work with audio recordings and formatting and digitizing analog audio and that kinda got me into working with the oral history project with the Brooklyn Public Library and I work with people all over Brooklyn to like document their stories - prior to that I experimented with audio as a form of art trying to work with different recording styles and thinking of different abstract ways to capture audio. I’m originally from LA, but I’ve also lived in Korea as well.

That’s awesome—thank you for introducing yourselves, I just wanted to ask what brought us here today at the library?

Char

Well Lina and I both work here, we did not know that until you invited us to participate in this project which was really wonderful. I think that it was really nice that you said you would come here to us rather than go somewhere else. I know for me I feel pretty comfortable here and it's a really nice environment to be doing this.

Lina

It was really serendipitous at one point because we were both standing next to each other and I didn’t even plan to be there at that moment and I remember that we were talking about the cellphones and like I saw the phones on the table-

Char

yeah—right— [Laughs]