Thursday 19 November 2015

Planning your Experimental Visual Anthropology assignment for 25.11.

To get you started, Marika gave a quick exercise, which was done in pairs and discussed after her lecture. But those of you who were not present, please try the exercise by yourselves, in a modified form:

You have 15mins to think and prepare a presentation of your "thing" visually:
- write very shortly about it, even one word
- find/ make one image
- make a sound
- make an activity/ even one gesture.
You then have 5mins to do the presentation and have a discussion on it.

For the original exercise people did not choose by themselves, but were given an option by somebody else. Here then options for those who were not present/left early/came late:
Marja: sound and writing (hope I remember correctly?)
Riikka-Theresa: sound
Laura: sound and gesture
Hiromu: word/ writing
Sophie: activity/ gesture
Beatrijs: an image

25.11. we can start with these, then go on to discuss your fuller plans for your experimental visual anthropology project concerning your thing.

Fuller plans should address the issues of:
- how do you intend to study your chosen thing?
- how do you intend to gather data? to document?
- how do you intend to analyze what you find?
- how do you intend present your findings?
Note: these questions might be resolved in one activity (filming/ drawing/mapping/ etc). But think on each!
- and: how will your project be anthropology? how will it be visual (anthropology)? how will it be experimental?

And some resume of themes and concepts and ideas you can use when planning your project:

Anthropology:
- anthropology makes visible everyday things we take for granted, it looks at the small and insignificant, pays attention to detail
- anthropology looks for the perspective of the other (and here: you could think of your 'thing' as the other whose perspective you want to study)
- the importance of rituals
- the liminality, liminal space: traditionally liminality is a space simultaneously inside and outside a culture, a community (btw: this is also how Foucault defines "heterotopy"). Rites concerning liminality take people first outside, but then to bring them back inside. Important in the process are rituals, a guide, and the 'sacra', the objects that pertain to the process and the rites.
- anthropology and art are both things that require your concrete presence

Visual anthropology:
- issue of the role and presence of the anthropologist
- issue of subjectivity/ objectivity, how is objectivity achieved
- a visual presentation is always a unique and individual case (text can present generalizations)
- "intellectual act of seeing"
- " translation"

Things and Archaeology:
Every object is a marvelous archaeological record of everything that ever happened to it.
- "experimental archaeology": trying to use or produce the things, to discover their "real" usage
- garbology and modern archaeology
- things as language  - and then to things as "solid metaphors"
- object biography
- speculative realism: looking at objects as objects, not in relation to people and culture (cf aforementioned anthropological perspective of looking for the perspective and meanings of "the other" and understanding thing as this other)
- OOO: object oriented ontology: what ultimately exists is objects

Experimental visual, artistic research
- anthropology and art are both things that require your concrete presence and experience
- being in a gap (between something) one still is somewhere, not between…
- trying to see, make visible, make tangible the gaps between seeing and recording, recording and reviewing, artistic work and research, writing and artistic work/ research etc.
- gap is part of the meaning
- the camera-subject: not a human subject but human-body-tool/technology combined subject: multiple subject
- multiverse (not uni verse)



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