Paper short abstract:

The research – art collaboration gauges the potential of the artistic use of new digital technologies to contribute to social science research. A hybrid media geography combines visual data from digital technologies (3D LIDAR scan, photogrammetry etc.) with personal stories and conceptual thoughts.

Paper long abstract:

This paper gauges the potential of the artistic use of new digital technologies to contribute to social science research. It reflects upon the interdisciplinary collaboration “GEOGRAPHY OF GHOSTS Mapping multiple media/meanings of healthcare for refugees“ between the social scientist Wanda Spahl and the new media artist/architect Dominic Schwab (funded by the mLAB, University of Bern, 2022 call for research - art collaborations ON UN/HEALTHY GROUNDS). The project develops a hybrid media geography based on ethnographic research from Wanda Spahl‘s PhD project about forced migration and health in Vienna, Austria. Visual data from asylum accommodations, medical institutions and public places is collected with digital technologies (3D LIDAR scanning, photogrammetry, open source GIS data, etc.) and combined with personal stories, political statements and conceptual thoughts. The project attends to the in/visibility of refugees in the public (health system), to their place in liminal space, and ultimately to the digital experience of these through the lucid, spectral and inconsistent documentation of spaces and materialities.

In asking what role the artistic use of new digital technologies can play in social science research, we want to reflect upon their communicative potential (What new forms of research results communication emerge with artistic digital technologies?), their epistemological potential (What new insights can the artistic use of digital technologies provide? How can they expand the methodological toolkit of social sciences?) and their dialogical potential (How can the artistic use of digital technologies spark comparative research and exchange with research participants, practitioners and the scientific community?).

Paper short abstract:

We engage with the different dynamics of collaborative practice that involved art and ethnography and unfolded in the context of the INSPIRE Open Space – a workshop/residency - key part of a research project. INSPIRE studies the role of artists and creative practice in and after violent conflict.

Paper long abstract:

In this dialogical performative presentation by two artists and an anthropologist, we engage with the different dynamics of collaborative practice that involved art and ethnography and unfolded in the context of the INSPIRE Open Space – a workshop/residency part of the INSPIRE research project (2020-2024). INSPIRE studies the role of artists and creative practice in and after violent conflict. Collaboration with artists is a key element of the project's methodological approach to explore and highlight the plurality of knowledges. Recognizing the situatedness of knowledges (Haraway 1988) and the embodied and partial nature of knowledge, through artistic collaborative methods we aimed to explore how artists, art and audiences engage with social injustice through personal creative practice. In September 2022, we co-organized an open space with artists who through their personal experiences and methodologies share their practices and created a hybrid, multilayered perspective on the issues related to exile, displacement and political conflict.

Open Space became a platform for intimate dialogue and a collaborative opening towards the other. By crossing art practice with ethnographic methods and reflecting on how different knowledges emerge in such collaborative spaces, we ask how different dynamics embedded in a variety of situated knowledges and positionalities as well as know-hows methodological tools that artists and researchers employ, shape and reshape experiences, perceptions and ideals of collaborative engagements. What type of knowledges emerge as a result? What are the potentials, tensions, conflicts and limits around narrations and knowledges of violence and displacement in such processes?

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on examples from the co-creation of the exhibition 'On Solid Ground' (art and anthropology), this paper discusses how cross-disciplinary exhibition-making might be used to create room for alternative ways of encountering each other- in research projects about migration and in everyday life.

Paper long abstract:

What might be achieved if anthropologists rethink fieldwork practices through creative interventions as a way of relating with the people who are subject of our research? This paper discusses how collaborative exhibition-making might be used to create room for alternative ways of encountering each other- in research projects about migration and in everyday life. Over the last two years I have worked together with two Syrian artists to create an exhibition about trust, hope, and helping hands in everyday encounters between Syrian refugees in Denmark and other inhabitants of their local communities. Drawing on examples from the co-creation of the exhibition On Solid Ground, this paper discusses the capacities of audiovisual media for understanding and sharing personal experiences with strangers and explores the creative potentiality of open ends, gaps, and resistance in building diversifying, critical anthropological analyses. In a time where new boundaries are drawn politically in Denmark between those refugees who are considered deserving of state solidarity and those who are not, the exhibition is a participatory future-oriented intervention that aims to create an experimental ground for people to meet, wonder, and reflect. Between personal stories about creating a new life, new relationships, and new contexts in Denmark as a refugee, the exhibition invites both its creators and visitors to visit the life worlds of others, but also their own. The exhibition is part of my PhD project, and it has been designed and developed together with the two artist and a range of other research participants.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the affordances of a collaborative ethnographic approach conducted with art in all its phases as part of an experimentation with arts-based ways of analyzing and presenting cooperatively harvested insights of the embodied moral self to a wider audience

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic work done among ex-evangelical women in Germany who are part of a global digital community of apostates, I explore a collaborative approach where the methodology is modeled after practices done independently by participants. Early on, it became strikingly clear how critical art and movement was for the participants as they left Evangelicalism for something else, unpacking and 'deconstructing' their old belief systems and experimenting to create new moral selves (c.f. Mattingly 2013). Appreciating their creative ways of understanding themselves and the world around them in different ways, I decided to apply these methods to the ethnographic design itself. The combination of art and movement became a vehicle for me to experience an embodied understanding of how they went through the deconversion processes and became a vital tool for analysis in the form of poetry, walking, dancing, and painting. Concluding in cooperation, the participants and ethnographer will work together to create a final art piece to demonstrate how they as bodyminds have transformed through deconversion. With the intention to go public, I therefore explore the possibilities of expanding the reach of research through artistic abstraction and symbolism, especially when discussing sensitive topics such as deconversion, secularism, gender, trauma, sexuality, and apostasy. Conducting a collaborative ethnography with art throughout all research stages is an opportunity to un-learn ways of doing ethnography that are perhaps too far removed from both participants and the wider public. This approach, I argue, is a creative pathway to knowing otherwise together.

Paper short abstract:

The changes in the hydrosocial lifeworlds around lake Loktak is studied through various creative projects as undertaken by the indigenous artists and practitioners of Manipur, India.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation attends to the ways embodied and ecological issues, bodies and beings living along Loktak have been expressed through art. The Loktak lake in Manipur, India, has been a veritable lifeline of biodiversity ranging from human habitation on floating islands of biomass and conservation area housing an endangered species of deer. The freshwater ecosystem nurtured by the lake can be viewed as tangible evidence of water worlds as distinctive site from which cultural life, amongst others, can be revealed, interpreted and analysed. In the last decades, the hydrosocial lifeworld or the limit of ‘littoral community’ (Asem 2020) has been transformed as development and conservation projects undertaken by various authorities as well as degradation of bioresources by unpredictable climate crisis continued. In such contexts art plays two primary roles: it foregrounds insights and microhistories of past and present, and it registers resistance voicing the human and animal lives locked in dilemma. Art here emphasises the sustenance of traditional ecological knowledge that has nurtured fisheries, community-based and state-made ecotourism, aquaculture. This presentation draws from multiple sources – contemporary iterations of ancient Meitei ballads from Loktak Lairembee Seitharol and Moirang Saiyon, an essay on conservation titled Keibul Lamjao (1973) by author-activist M.K.Binodini Devi, staged choreography and film of Sangai – The Dancing Deer (1984/88), and conservation documentaries, namely, Phum Shang (2014) and Loktak Lairembee (2016) by director Haobam Paban Kumar. The richness of multiple narratives teases the limits of textual analysis but works towards understanding water ethnographies through interdisciplinary/multimodal perspectives.

Paper short abstract:

Cinematography is a practice of enchantment and making material which requires skilled vision and expertise in visualization in storytelling. Traditional light effects used to direct attention and are changing rapidly within contemporary feature film cinematography knowledge, ecology and industry.

Paper long abstract:

Cinematography is a practice of enchantment and making material which requires skilled vision (Grasseni, 2009) and expertise in visualization in storytelling. Light effects can be used to 'direct attention, reveal shape and form, establish environment, characterize objects, develop compositional and story relationships and maintain visual continuity. Light orients space, creates tactile feeling through embellishing objects and faces, and orients time, the day, the season and the period' (Greenhalgh, 2003). The human facial presence "as light" gives agency to the character being played and highlights actors' performance, gestures and choreography. Krista Thompson writes 'The use of light produced through visual technologies generates distinct aesthetic, synesthetic, physiological, and phenomenological effects; creating and denying types of viewership in particular performative and spatial context' (2015). This presentation draws on ethnographic research with feature film cinematographers and encapsulates my experience as a cinematographer and teacher of cinematography students of diverse cultural heritage in London. I question traditional cinematographic positioning (mainly derived from Western painting) on the lighting of different skin tones and gendering, and new ecological ways of using reflectance methods. I use the work of cinematographers Christopher Doyle, Ed Lachman and Bradford Young as examples and argue that some of the writing on attention related to cinema could be of wider use in anthropology (Jonathon Beller, 2014; Peter Doran, 2017; Adrian Ivakhiv, 2013; Laura Marks, 2000).

Paper short abstract:

The French dance research project Raw. Expression brute de la rage will be presented as a model for collaborative ethnography by placing "la rencontre", the encounter, through shared sensory experience as the basis for knowledge construction.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I will present the experimental dance research project Raw. Expression brute de la rage as a model for collaborative ethnography through its creation of a shared sensory experience as the basis for knowledge construction through trust. Funded in 2018 by the French Centre National de la Danse, it was spearheaded by krumper Emilie Ouedrago Spencer, then known as Lady MadSkillz, and dance-artist Laurence Saboye in collaboration with her colleague Isabelle Dufau. Ouedrago Spencer is an established participant in the Parisian krump scene, also performing onstage outside the krump sphere. Saboye and Dufau are established figures within the more intellectually oriented contemporary dance milieus. The project instigators were joined by a team of colleagues, krumpers and others including myself as an anthropologist of dance who contributed from the margins. From the outset, no status distinctions were made amongst team members considered as dancer-researchers, the project having strong ethical foundations at the heart of which lay understanding by doing and sharing. The aim of the project was to document krump in order to "reveal its aesthetic identity, ethical values and its educational and even curative dimension" (Laurence Saboye, 2020). From its inception the project was grounded in "la rencontre", the encounter, a method to avoid objectification and asymmetrical interaction among participants. Relational reciprocity was generated not only through dialogue, demonstration and observation but through moving together using Authentic Movement, a Jungian based system designed to connect individuals to themselves and in this instance connecting individuals to each other.

Paper short abstract:

This paper is a reflection on pedagogy. I describe a course on Culture and the Senses, which draws on my practices as an artist and as an anthropologist. The intent is that students engage with the world and reconsider the boundaries and forms of their knowing. They become, for moments, artists.

Paper long abstract:

I trained as an artist in Canada in the 1970s, then turned to anthropology as another way of doing the same things. I saw both as ways to understand and experience how humans come to know the world—social, mental, and material—in a particular way, in a particular body, and take it as a given, a freely standing reality apart from interactive creation.

This paper is about a class I teach on Culture and the Senses. The key idea of the course is that the senses are culturally mediated, and culture is sensually mediated; the key work of the course is weekly exercises in which students, hopefully, glimpse moments when the way they understand their worlds and the things in it shifts. Not just cognitively, but through, say, tactile engagement or looking in dim light and recognizing how little input their mind needs to organize something they view as constant. Exercises include touching, drawing, photographing, listening, feeling contact of body with environment, and building models through which they consider how “representation” is a sensually informed cultural practice.

Inspired by my own experience, and adapting the work of Tim Ingold, this paper offers a reflection on pedagogy. My artist friends say the student projects are themselves like installations, asking for engagement. I rejoice that the students are out of their minds as they pay attention to the world. I hope that as anthropologists they appreciate that culture is embodied, and that the boundaries of their knowing—of all kinds--are fluid.

Paper short abstract:

We show how artistic practice can help understand nonlinguistic aspects of artificial intelligence, through a multisensory installation informed by ethnographic research. We draw on rituals and symbolism from multiple cultures to create an immersive experience using tactile materials and audio.

Paper long abstract:

We demonstrate how artistic practice can contribute to understanding nonlinguistic aspects of artificial intelligence (AI) as a cultural actor, through the creation of a multisensory installation informed by ethnographic research. Focusing specifically on rituals and spirituality, we invert the common trajectory wherein anthropologists (for example Turner 2001) investigate rituals and shared experiences created through artistic production, then publish their findings as academic texts; we instead draw on rituals and symbolism from multiple cultural traditions to create an embodied experience of ineffable aspects of AI using tactile materials and spatial audio in an immersive space.

This artistic form of ethnography (or conversely ethnographic art) sits alongside approaches such as sensory ethnography (Pink 2009) and alien ethnography (Lenskjold and Jönsson 2017), and aligns with the experiential research cycle of Kolb (1984), encompassing phases of concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualisation, and active experimentation. We see parallels between artistic and ethnographic research – for example, both require the researcher to be both insider and outsider. According to O’Donoghue (2014), this means resisting the imperative to record immediately or force an interpretation from a distance; instead it means immersing oneself directly in the research experience.

Individually we have created ethnographically-informed artworks, for example Ritual (2014) by Walker, The Water Ritual (2017) by Drupka, and Daily Rituals (2022) by Walker. We have collaborated to create a multisensory space devoted to ritualistic and spiritual aspects of AI, avoiding AI’s reliance on language and measurement, and common contemporary practice of using AI to create words or images.