• PRECIOUS THING

• (1999)

Digital Art • Recoded interviews • Intergenerational • Legacy work

When Mark Ball was Artistic Director of Fierce Earth, he commissioned Robert to create Precious Thing, an online artwork sharing the stories and experiences of older lesbian and gay people living in Birmingham.

The work developed through a period of conversations, interviews and audio recordings made with participants, creating a repository of personal histories and lived experiences. This approach followed Robert’s earlier work Civil, in which he had undertaken a similar process of listening to, recording and sharing the story of Quentin Crisp.

The form of Precious Thing centred around an interactive tray of eyeballs. As the cursor moved across the screen, the eyes rolled and shifted, each one representing a different participant. Selecting an eye played that person’s recorded interview. By removing physical representation, the work deliberately moved attention away from appearance and towards voice, memory and experience. This device also offered a level of anonymity, which was an important condition of participation for some contributors who wished to share their stories without appearing online.

Through Fierce Earth, Robert was supported by Anne Parouty and Sakab Bashir of Emote, who worked with him to develop the interactive website and bring the audio interviews into a publicly accessible digital form.

No known documentation of the project survives.