Design Research: Art of the Interview: Home

The article discusses the practice of interviewing artists, focusing on art critic and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist's project "Interarchive." The author describes the interview format as a form of dual discourse, offering an interview by Dieter Schwartz with artist Gerhard Richter as an example. The author discusses the use of interviews in the work of African American artist Renée Green and American artist Andy Warhol. Specific topics include philosopher Louis Marin's work on interviewing, the fetishization of the artist's voice, and Obrist's practice of not interpreting interviews.

An interview with American documentary filmmaker Murray Lerner is presented. He discusses the subject of counterculture and popular music in his 1960s films. He describes his interviewing technique for his films. He discusses his films including "Message to Love: The Isle of Wight Festival" and "From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China."

Part of a special section on the role of interviews in film and television studies. Vicki Mayer discusses the current resurgence in film and media studies of ethnographic techniques and the expected reflections that accompany such methods. She suggests that this phenomenon may have as much to do with the new economy for audiovisual production as with intellectual curiosity. Mayer's own work examines communities of production practice in the new television economy, thinking about these producers in terms of overlapping fields of interactions. Mayer finds that the expansive web of producers and new production contexts has complicated the power relations that frame the social interactions between subjects as those researchers, such as herself, who are invested in ethnographic approaches to production. She emphasizes the importance of interviewers being aware of the way in which their work is becoming part of the professional discourses they are examining.

Interviews have been a key primary data source for research published in the Journal of Consumer Research. This tutorial aims to walk readers through the design and execution of interview-based empirical research on consumers and consumption.

This article investigates the strategies web-writers develop when their audiences respond to them via textual participation. Focusing on three web-writers who want to "continue the conversation," this article identifies five major strategies to accomplish this aim: (a) editing after production, (b) quotation, (c) question posing, (d) naming secondary writers, and (e) textual listening. Using the lens of writer-audience tension, I find that due to these web-writers' perceptions of audience, one that is partially externalized via the website's template, the term "audience" itself may not be a discrete concept, but a fluid, evolving, and recursive one, in other words, ongoing. These perceptions of audience reflect the unending nature of online texts and are exemplified by these five strategies.