- Convenors:
-
Rossella Schillaci
(UT Austin Colab - Nova University of Lisbon, University of Texas at Austin)
Mark Westmoreland (Leiden University)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Panel Discussion
- Start time:
- 26 March, 2021 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
How emerging technologies could expand methodological approaches for visual anthropological research? Session 1: Experimental Techniques
Long Abstract:
Interactive documentaries have become established as a new field of practice within non-fiction storytelling (Aston, Gaudenzi, Rose, 2017). Documentary filmmakers have begun experimenting with virtual reality (VR) as a new experiential dimension that moves towards immersive forms of viewing (Rose 2018; Westmoreland 2020). These new immersive worlds substantially change the role of the audience. Viewers transform themselves into active participants or ‘users’ (Rose 2018), by wearing headsets that isolate them from the immediate world and immerse them into a 360° filmic experience, fully surrounded by image and sounds.
Furthermore, as claimed by general interactive documentary studies (Aston, Gaudenzi, Rose 2017), the team which produces a VR documentary is usually a multidisciplinary team, which link together filmmakers, digital technical professionals, community and subjects filmed. As such, the big promise with new media production of immersive and interactive docs is the potential to reconfigure the relationship between filmmakers, designers, subjects and viewers (Gaudenzi, 2017). The new relationship between the designer of user experience and viewers reconfigure the techniques that enables the viewer to be virtually immersed inside an unusual environment and thus approximate new forms of intimacy with the subjects (Stefanoff 2019).
Accordingly, this panel seeks contributors working with 360° video and computer-generated VR environments to investigate the affordances but also the constrains of immersive storytelling and thereby address possibilities to rethink the process of creation, especially with regard to the concepts of authorship, participation and agency for both the research subject and the viewer.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
The author proposes the development of audio-visual scale-collapsing methods as a way to destabilise an analytical habit of division in ethnography and, in so, advance approaches to ethnography concerned with intra-relatedness.
Paper long abstract:
The author proposes the development of audio-visual scale-collapsing methods as a way to destabilise an analytical habit of division in ethnography and, in so, advance approaches to ethnography concerned with intra-relatedness. For ethnographic work undertaken from the largely dominant perspective that the world is divided into determined and self-contained 'things', it can be seen to follow that relations are consequently located external to and between things. And, therefore, to find relations between things practices of scaling are required (Strathern, 1995, 1999). Scaling up, for example, from the local to the global, or scaling down, say, from kinship to individual person. Scaling from fieldwork to writing this work up. There are many different scaling practices. Questioning this framework, rather than dividing and positioning things as interrelated via scaling practices, this paper is concerned with ethnographic approaches that appreciate things as intra-related, which is to say, things 'only exist within phenomena (particular materialized/materializing relations) in their ongoing iteratively intra-active reconfiguring' (Barad, 2012). In other words, there are no longer relations between 'things', but, rather, relations between relations (Holbraad, Pederson, 2017).
Exploring the practicality of this outlook the author originates the development of 'scale-collapsing methods'. Drawing on the Author's audiovisual project, "•", which involves a dead octopus in a washing machine cycle with a reimagined 360o camera and algorithms that manipulate the resulting footage, it is argued that an engagement with these new technologies affords ways to collapse scaling practices and, in turn, can aid ethnographers in locating their work within relations.
Paper short abstract:
This research project highlights some key finding on how other filmmakers are conducting interview in 360-degree video combine with our own experiment in producing a short video that utilizing some interview techniques in 360-degree video.
Paper long abstract:
The emerging medium of 360-degree video draws in non-fiction media producer such as documentary filmmakers and news video journalists. The interactive, immersive viewing experience creates a perceived environment that strengthens non-fiction storytelling. Non-fiction narratives traditionally rely on interviews with a subject who tell their own stories. The styles and methods that are effective for linear video don’t transfer easily to the 360-degree video. This research project highlights some key findings on how other filmmakers are conducting interview in 360-degree video combine with our own experiment in producing a short video that utilizing some interview techniques in 360-degree video. We created the video using 360-degree video methods and demonstrated different approaches to conduct interviews. Some key points that we considered for this project are; camera blocking and placements, how interviewer/journalists were involved and viewed, how the people were interviewed, and also considering both the visual depictions and the quality of the audio. This project does not aim to provide absolutes or even best practices for interviewing in 360-degree video. Instead, we want to provide guideposts for methods we found informative that others can build on.
Paper short abstract:
Framed within the anthropology of play, psychotherapeutic techniques encounter art therapy, XR and gameplay processes in this interdisciplinary PhD by Film Practice.
Paper long abstract:
My research group is made of adults who all identify as suffering mid-childhood developmental trauma, as a result of being sent away to boarding school as children, between the ages of 4 and 13. My interdisciplinary PhD by Film Practice project is positioned at the intersection of anthropology, psychotherapy and immersive technology. This audio visual presentation provides an overview of their creative engagements with their past trauma. The session documents some of their psychotherapy sessions where participants are given the opportunity to experiment with reframing their past narratives through interaction with a photograph of their child-self, an avatar representation of themselves, and by embodying narratives using plasticine to address dissociation and disorganised attachment patterns. The final part of the presentation will cover how this research is now being transposed into intersubjective gameplay scenarios within a game engine as a way for the participant to regain agency and take back power over a previously powerless situation. The research methodology is been constructed using principles from the anthropology of play.