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Contribution short abstract:

In what ways can visual economies of Everest contribute to furthering our consideration of ecomedia?

Contribution long abstract:

Dr Jolynna Sinanan is a Lecturer in Digital Anthropology in the Department of Social Anthropology and the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in Trinidad, Nepal, Australia and Cambodia and has published widely on digital and data practices, digital visual communication, intergenerational mobilities, work and gender. Her books include Social Media in Trinidad (2017, UCL Press), Visualising Facebook (with D. Miller 2017, UCL Press) and Digital Media Practices in Households (with L. Hjorth et al. 2021, Amsterdam University Press). Jolynna's current research focuses on mobile media and mobile livelihoods in the Everest tourism industry.

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Lorenzo Ferrarini is a documentary filmmaker, photographer and sound recordist, and lecturer in visual anthropology at the University of Manchester.

Contribution long abstract:

Nyimajun (working title) is a film on ecological change in rural Burkina Faso, approached through the story of Sibiri, a ritual specialist whose altar is threatened by transformations precipitated by the construction of a dam. The film follows the entanglements of human activities that create environments where certain plant and animal species prosper, and others disappear. Among them, the spirits with whom Sibiri works at maintaining a precarious balance between humans and wilderness.

I will present excerpts from the film and connect its visual and acoustic poetics to ecocinema, here meant as a form of filmmaking that attends to the complexity of environmental relationships.

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Contribution short abstract:

This presentation explores how the sounds of biodiversity might be translated into artistic forms that extend their scientific significance in the public sphere, by showing local social realities and imaginaries of nature, focusing on a collaborative project in the Calanques outside of Marseilles.

Contribution long abstract:

How can aesthetics become a tool for the assessment of biodiversity in ways that provide opportunities for co-production and participation, the creation of new knowledge and support for conservation initiatives ? Typically, it is visual approaches that dominate considerations of this question. They involve ways of seeing biodiversity in the landscape that can range from its pictorialization for aesthetic appreciation to its abstraction into non-representational forms for scientific analysis.

This project takes another approach to the aesthetic evaluation of biodiversity, exploring its representation through sound and its perception through ways of listening, rather than relying on images and ways of seeing. It aims to connect ideas about what a sustainable, biodiverse future should look like with what it should sound like. Specifically, it explores how the sounds of biodiversity might be translated into artistic forms that extend their scientific significance in the public sphere, by showing local social realities and imaginaries of nature. It considers this question in the context of polluted landscapes where visual perception alone may obscure the value of their biodiversity. It focuses on a particular case: the chemical pollution and ‘nature based ‘conservation of a landmark feature of the industrial Calanques – the ‘reclining chimney’ (Cheminée rampante) – in a biodiversity hotspot. It treats this case as an experimental scenario for combining scientific systems of data modelling involving ecology, bio-acoustics and acoustics with perceptions and representations of that environment, involving anthropology, film and psychology.

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Contribution short abstract:

Alastair Lomas is a photographer and filmmaker undertaking a PhD in Social Anthropology with Visual Media at the GCVA. He uses large format photography, alternative developers and cyanotype printing to examine the relatively new practice of seaweed cultivation on the west coast of Scotland.

Contribution long abstract:

'Seaweed Saves the World' is the working title of an ongoing project examining the emergence of seaweed cultivation on the west coast of Scotland. Seaweed is currently being hyped as a panacea for numerous world problems, from food shortages to fossil fuels.

Based at a marine science research institute in the potential 'seaweed capital of the UK', Alastair follows his interlocutors as they move seaweed between sea, laboratory, nursery and farm with the aim of cultivating it. In the process he examines the labour, knowledge practices and spaces required to make crops cultivable at sea, and interrogates the boundaries between 'wild' and 'domesticated'. He also questions what the possible futures of this nascent industry might be.

Alastair's practice is informed by the shared origins of anthropology, photography and marine science. In particular he draws on the work of amateur botanist, phycologist and photographer Anna Atkins, who is believed to be the first woman to make a photographic image; the photographers of the Challenger Expedition, a founding moment in marine science that also saw the collection of early anthropological data; and Alfred Cort Haddon, the marine zoologist-turned-anthropologist who led the first anthropology fieldwork expedition and for whom recording devices were an essential tool. Taking cues from the ways in which his scientist interlocutors are exploring the uses of seaweed as an alternative to unsustainable and environmentally-damaging practices, Alastair also engages with the material properties of seaweed to make a home-made developer for his fieldwork photographs.