Born: Tallahassee, Florida, 1942

Susan Hiller has said that her work is 'trying to approach a kind of reconciliation of rational and irrational factors'. In her latest work, Witness, she has gathered first-hand reports of encounters with UFOs or aliens posted on internet sites world-wide. Hiller sees this activity as related to older forms of confession, ways of placing fears into the public arena. Gathering this information becomes an exploration of a kind of contemporary folklore, one in which alien contact is offered as explanation for the inexplicable. Extraterrestrial beings might be likened to the gods, giants or angels that have been seen as mysterious agencies in other times and cultures.

The soundtrack plays these accounts in all their original languages; at first it sounds like babble, but gradually individual stories can be isolated. The work draws on the experiences and storytelling abilities of a huge range of people, hinting at broader spiritual gaps in contemporary society.