ABSTRACT
The will to contribute audiovisual testimony about catastrophic events and social suffering is readily observable across the globe. Tens of thousands of people have delivered on-camera attestations of shocking experiences to local or broadly affi liated visual archives. These archives, in turn, are benefi ting from the emergence of new media technologies for the capture, assembly, storage, and circulation of the gathered materials. In our latter twentieth and twenty-fi rst century “era of the witness,”1 media testimonial initiatives-be they offi cial, grassroots, guerrilla, transitory, insistent, or any combination thereof-participate in the creation of ethical communities by bringing testifi ers and testimonial witnesses together at the audiovisual interface.
