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Generations HIV: An Interactive Video Storytelling Booth
In 2010, The HIV Story Project created the interactive Generations HIV Video Storytelling Booth. It functions like a photo booth but instead of taking pictures, it records video testimonials about people’s experiences with HIV/AIDS.
Generations HIV focuses on how people from different generations were impacted and affected by HIV/AIDS, encouraging communication between them. For that purpose, participants are asked to identify with one of four age brackets: the generation that grew up before AIDS in the Seventies; when AIDS first appeared in the Eighties; during the epidemic’s peak in the US in the Nineties; and since the disease has become more manageable, but not cured, in the 21st Century.
The booth then offers visitors 3 pathways of participation:
1. Record a question geared towards a specific generation based on the 4 decade demographics. For example: A 20-year old may want to ask someone who grew up in the 1980s what it was like to live during the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
2. Listen to questions posed by other booth users, and record their answer in response.
3. Record their story for preservation in the Archive.
This online archive is now the home to videos recorded in the Generations HIV Interactive Storytelling Booth and made available for public viewing. With over 1,000 videos, representing individuals from all walks of life, the Generations HIV Archive provides a unique interactive platform for experiencing the history and impact of the HIV/AIDS Pandemic.
To date, the Generations HIV Interactive Storytelling Booth has been staged ten times in San Francisco and Oakland, CA; in 2012, the booth was staged in Washington DC at the International AIDS Conference. Generations HIV seeks to voice the stories of communities who are underrepresented and has fostered strategic partnerships with local and national nonprofit health and social service organizations in order to create and support that dialogue.
Four decades into the global AIDS pandemic, HIV/AIDS still affects millions of people every day. Watch their testimonials here.