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Paper long abstract:

Undoing anthropology requires a fundamental examination of its core epistemic practice: ethnographic fieldwork. Strathern’s concept of the ‚second field‘ highlights the dazzle between field immersement and field description. Ethnographic experimentation has mostly addressed and messed with the relation between the two. Interestingly, the current surge of multimodal anthropologies cannot be fully framed in those terms, as it incorporates a novel, but hitherto overlooked anthropological space: the studio. Traditionally associated with artistic and design practices, the studio stands for the creation of artifacts and things aimed to expand and transform the more-than-human collectives we inhabit. As such, the studio as a site of the artificial has been traditionally opposed to the lab and the field as ‚truth spots‘ of science. Yet, at the core of multimodal anthropology, there is a constitutive relation between the studio and the field that enhances or replaces the conventional anthropological interplay between a first and a second field. The studio serves, first, as a space for speculative anticipation, involving the creation of devices and forms that will fundamentally shape the field. Secondly, it provides a space of syn(es)thetic displacement, performing aesthetic interventions aimed at altering the distribution of the sensible. Drawing from two ethnographic projects mediated by studio processes —a game design process about real estate markets and the construction of a dithering booth for hosting interlocutors— I advocate for embracing anthropology as an interdisciplinary practice of the artificial.