Paper 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.