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- Convenors:
-
Angela Torresan
(University of Manchester)
Paolo S. H. Favero (University of Antwerp)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Peter Froggatt Centre (PFC), 02/017
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 26 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
With the global spread of digital technologies, anthropologists who practice audio-visual-sensory research are more than ever challenged by new scenarios. This panel aims to explore concrete "tools, techniques and technologies" for doing audio-visual today and in the future.
Long Abstract:
With the global spread of digital technologies, anthropologists who practice audio-visual research are more than ever challenged by new scenarios. Even in more remote and under-developed parts of the world, they are faced with audiences and research participants who have access to the same means of digital image-making, representation, and dissemination, and who often possess similar sets of technological skills. What does it mean to practice visual anthropology in a world where audio-image making is so widespread? How can visual anthropologists concretely advance their practice in ways that are relevant to both the discipline and those who collaborate with our research? Digital technologies drive us to think about and experiment with the intersection between methods, theory, and ethics in new ways. Sensors, smartphone cameras and apps, VR goggles, trackers etc. have all contributed to offer visual anthropologists new forms and formats to explore different aspects of the world with others and to communicate our research. Considering recent experiments with new technologies, we want to address, in particular, the need for a more practice orientated approach towards methodologies. Questioning the anthropological tendency to provide more meta-methodological reflections than actual methods, we aim to attract contributions addressing concrete "tools, techniques and technologies" (Favero 2019) for doing audio-visual today and in the future.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 26 July, 2022, -Rossella Schillaci (UT Austin Colab - Nova University of Lisbon, University of Texas at Austin)
Paper short abstract:
How can the stories of as mothers and children living in prison, be represented using immersive storytelling? This paper analyses which methods appied,e limits and potential of the virtual reality technologies within the frame of multimodal anthropology and collaborative research practices.
Paper long abstract:
LINKS TO THE VR PROJECT:
- Scene example based on an illustration workshop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGK6aAivCQw
- example based on shooting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lm0Rfl9u6os
Within the framework of multimodal anthropology, I carried out research started many years ago, on mothers and children living together in condition of imprisonment. After having produced a feature length documentary based on participant observation approach, I started practice-based research to experiment different methods and technologies, in the same environments. In particular, I wanted to explore how immersive storytelling might be used in visual anthropological research to better communicate topics that are painful and difficult to represent and to explore the capacity of 360° video to share the experience of oppressive of spaces. Specifically, I wanted to know how 360° video might convey more deeply to an audience, the spaces and affects of confinement as they are experienced by women and children in an Italian special prison for inmates-mothers. In order to explore these topics, I started Doctoral research that mixes theory and practice, with the intent to analyze the production of a VR documentary film (due to be finished by May 2022), combining live action shooting and animation (see up links at demo scenes).
In the attempt to narrate the different points of views of inmates and their children about their lives in confined spaces, we designed a collaboration aimed at supporting the polyphony necessary for a counter-account of the prison life that was open to the imaginations and emotions of children. We employed participatory creative practices adapted to virtual reality, with illustration, photography and digital storytelling labs, all participants contributed to the script for the VR film. This multimodal anthropological research helped me to reflect more about the kinds and qualities of interaction that emerge through storytelling practices and immersive technologies; seeing potentials and limits to create projects that are able to offer a multiplicity of voices and to create stories that can represent complex issues without privileging a particular point of view or story form. I explored how the VR filmmaking process – more than the normal ‘flat’ documentary cinema – requires a deeper collaboration with participants, and a strong commitment to support different media and forms of art, in order to express meanings and feelings about the past and the future, expecially for children.
In my opinion, VR projects might foster the participation of people involved, especially if they are young. Furthermore, new media and multimodal ethnographic practice enable us to imagine different futures both for the discipline but also for the topics we research and might help in the circulation of knowledge beyond the academy, including to a younger public, since VR films are nowadays appealing to youth.
Terje Toomistu (University of Tartu)
Paper short abstract:
Studying the latest wave of emigration from Estonia to the “West” during the global pandemic, 55 people of Estonian origin who are residing in different parts of the world documented in photography and video their everyday environment.
Paper long abstract:
Since Estonia joined the EU in 2004, further boosted by the 2009 economic recession, there has been a significant growth in transnational mobility among Estonian young adults. Studying the latest wave of emigration from Estonia to the “West” during the global pandemic, I invited 55 people of Estonian origin who are currently residing in different parts of the world to document in photography and video their everyday environment. The participants were given 14 themes related to the notion of home which they could explore and contribute to on a voluntary basis. The collected material of over 700 photographs and 16 hours of footage captured mainly by smartphones forms a visual mapping of the young Estonian diaspora from the angle of mediated spatiality. The material invites the participants – the majority of whom were women – to engage with the notion of home as a spatial relation by framing and capturing their surroundings and experiences.
Following the limitations posed by the pandemic on the participatory as well as transnational fieldwork and the availability of new technologies of capturing and sharing audio-visual data, the project contributes to the ever more important collaborative, experimental, and artistic methods in anthropology. The co-creative nature of the project facilitates epistemological critique, providing “multisensory knowing” (Pink 2009), provoking “cinematic imagination” (MacDougall 2006), and envisioning the research participants as active and creative co-creators of knowledge. The material enables “new ways of seeing” with regards to the well-debated questions on belonging, homing, and the self/other in a migrational experience.