About

One Square Mile: 10,000 Voices is an interactive documentary experience that layers voices from Manzanar's past and present over the physical landscape. It consists of audio augmented reality installations at Manzanar National Historic Site and Little Tokyo, Los Angeles, as well as this website.

Audio recordings are geolocated across Manzanar and Little Tokyo; using a mobile device and headphones, participants are immersed in a soundscape that responds dynamically to their location. Each person's experience will be entirely unique depending on when they go, where they go, and how they choose to explore.

As people wander, they can also record their own reflections to add to the project, creating an evolving tapestry of collective storytelling. By empowering people to share their own experiences, we invite them to consider historical materials not as fixed didactic texts, but rather as starting points for discussion, reflection, and further investigation.

Furthermore, by combining participants' voices with a wide variety of historical and contemporary audio— interviews with Paiute-Shoshone elders, WWII news recordings, Manzanar Pilgrimage musical performances—we also hope to illuminate physical spaces as dynamic, democratic, and richly layered archives in their own right.

Listen:

This project would not be possible without the Japanese American community's decades of organizing to recognize and document the experiences of detainees, or the crucial oral history work of Densho and the National Park Service. We hope it will contribute to the ongoing work of educating the public about this legacy and its relevance to ongoing struggles for justice.

This project is built on Roundware, an open-source software platform for interactive audio. For more information, click here.

Website, app and print design by Sharanya Durvasula.

Directors

Sue Ding (sue-ding.com) is a filmmaker and artist based in Los Angeles. Her work explores identity, storytelling, and visual culture, particularly through the lens of diaspora and physical space. Her recent short film The Claudia Kishi Club premiered at South by Southwest and is now streaming on Netflix. She also directed and produced the Emmy award-winning documentary Artbound: Light and Space.

Sue works in a variety of nonfiction media. She consults and lectures on documentary storytelling, serves as a creative producer for films and series, and leads the XR/emerging media program at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. Sue is an alum of MIT’s Open Documentary Lab and Comparative Media Studies program, and a Senior Civic Media Fellow at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

Halsey Burgund (halseyburgund.com) is a media artist and Emmy-winning interactive director whose work focuses on the combination of modern technologies - from mobile phones to artificial intelligence - with fundamentally human "technologies", primarily language, music and the spoken voice. He has exhibited in museums and galleries internationally, and created installations for the Smithsonian, Ars Electronica, and the California Academy of Sciences, among others. Halsey was a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow, a Research Affiliate at the MIT Media Lab and is currently a fellow at the MIT Open Documentary Lab and an affiliate in Harvard's metaLAB.

Halsey is the creator of Roundware, the open-source contributory audio AR platform, which has been used to create art and educational installations for cultural organizations internationally. His Roundware projects have been covered in the New York Times, Wired, and NPR.

Project Advisors

The Manzanar Committee is a volunteer organization dedicated to preserving Manzanar’s history and educating the public about the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. The committee has organized the annual Manzanar Pilgrimage since 1969, and the accompanying Manzanar at Dusk program since 1997. They led the decades-long effort to establish Manzanar as a National Historic Site, and played a key role in creating its interpretive center. As part of their educational mission, they have also published books and curricula, and collaborated closely with a number of oral history archives.

Alisa Lynch has been Chief of Interpretation at Manzanar National Historic Site since 2001. She has worked for the National Park Service for 28 years, including park ranger assignments at Yosemite, Big Bend, and Mount Rainier National Parks. She oversees Manzanar’s efforts in visitor services, education, publications, exhibit design, social media, and oral history. As a leader in NPS interpretation of Japanese American history, she has lent her expertise to projects at Pearl Harbor, Tule Lake, and Alcatraz Island.

Partner Organizations

Visual Communications is a non-profit dedicated to supporting the voices of Asian American and Pacific Islander filmmakers and media artists. Founded in 1970, VC has been a pioneer in the development of Asian Pacific American film, video, and media. Today, VC’s programming includes the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival; the Armed With a Camera Fellowship; C3: The Conference for Creative Content; and more. The organization also houses one of the largest photographic and moving image archives on the Asian Pacific experience in America.

National Park Service: As steward of Manzanar National Historic Site, the National Park Service conducts historical preservation and oversees a wide array of public programming and educational resources. Manzanar interpretive programs have received honors from The Organization of American Historians, the National Association for Interpretation, and the Public Lands Alliance. As the first National Historic Site of its kind, Manzanar provides leadership for the preservation of other Japanese internment sites, and strives to foster greater discussion and understanding of civil rights and democracy.