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Topic: Multimedia Encounters: Experimental Approaches to Ethnographic Research

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CONFERENCE PROGRAMME

TUESDAY 12TH JANUARY

17:45 - 18:00 | Introduction: Multimedia Encounters

Raffaella Fryer-Moreira (UCL)

18:00 - 19:30 | Opening Panel: Knowledge Otherwise

How can anthropological knowledge be thought otherwise? What might the implications of this be for research practice and communication more broadly? This keynote panel introduces the core themes of the conference by bringing together three contemporary thinkers and the unique ideas that each mobilise in their critical engagements with knowledge.

• 18:05 | Professor Haidy Geismar (UCL)

• 18:25 | Dr Ludovic Coupaye (UCL) | The Anthropology of Techniques and the Technniques of Anthropology

• 18:45 | Kuña Jaqueline Aranduhá (Kuñangue Aty Guasu / UFGD) | Decolonising anthropology: a perspective from Guarani & Kaiowá indigenous women

• 19:05 | Panel discussion

19:40 - 20:40 | Kuñangue Online: Opening Ceremony

WEDNESDAY 13TH JANUARY

16:00 - 17:45 | Panel 1: Knowledge in Times of COVID

The global pandemic has radically changed the ways in which anthropological research is conducted

and communicated, transforming how knowledge is produced, taught and learnt in institutions around the world. The transition to digital and remote working practices has required us all to develop new methods, leading us to interrogate established knowledge formats which had remained unexamined for too long. While this brings new challenges, it has also presented new opportunities through which knowledge can be both produced and understood. This panel explores these questions, drawing on research from diverse ethnographic contexts and reflecting on the experimental methods that have arisen in these times of uncertainty.

• 16:05 | Rae Jereza (Binghampton University) | Co-producing ethnographic place from afar: Digitally mediated ethnography in the time of Covid-19

• 16:20 | Fiona P. McDonald & Benjamin Day Smith (University of British Columbia) | Multimodal Approaches to Digital Tools for Immersive Learning Environments in the Anthropocene

• 16:35 | Steffen Köhn (Freie Universität Berlin) & Nestor Siré (ISA Havana) | Screen- walks: Exploring digital connectivity with the help of desktop cinema

• 16:50 | Robert Lemelson (UCLA) | “Tajen: Interactive”: Complementing a Canonical Text with Contemporary Interactive Visual Ethnography

• 17:05 | Fabiana Assis Fernandes (IDAC) | Kuñangue Online & Participative Research

• 17:20 | Panel Discussion

17:50 - 18:00 | Break

18:00 - 18:30 | Keynote Presentation: Rafael Schacter (UCL)

18:30 - 20:30 | Panel 2: Multimedia Anthropology in the Anthropocene

The global scale of environmental change has caused shifts in human-ecology relationships, problematising the division between nature and culture, and demanding new ways of understanding the worlds in which we live. This challenge to nature-culture thinking also challenges us to develop a new concept of knowledge, one which is not grounded in the subject-object divisions through which western epistemologies have been shaped. The diverse human-ecology relationships of others, and the specific ecological concepts they are grounded in, have led to an increased appreciation of the role of sensory experience in knowledge. This panel explores these ideas in both content and form, drawing on technologies of immersion to examine the ecological and ontological diversity presented by the lifeworlds of others.

• 18:35 | Hermione Spriggs (UCL) | Traps as Artworks and Artworks as Traps

• 18:50 | Ignacio Gutiérrez Crocco (CIGIDEN) | Exploring alterity on the face of disasters: an immersion into the 1960’s earthquake from the Panku

• 19:05 | Bert Gilbert (Independent) | Sensoring Sound: Mapping the Invisible

• 19:20 | José Sherwood (University of Manchester) | Indigenous Futurisms: On Jaguars and Onto- Epistemologies

• 19:35 | Iman Datoo (Emergent Knowledge Bureau) | Kinnomic Botany: Freeing the Potato from its Scientific and Colonial Ties

• 19:50 | Maria Fernandez-Pello (University of Texas at Austin) | Soil science, soil fiction: experiments with dirt magic and film apparatuses

• 20:05 | Discussion

20:30 - 00:30 | Kuñangue Online Panel 1: Report on Mapping of Violence

THURSDAY 14TH JANUARY

16:00 - 17:45 | Panel 3: Multimedia Bodies

How do multimedia representations of the body alter our relationship to ourselves? This panel explores how multimedia encounters with death, beauty, trauma, and divinity shape our experiences, and how they are understood. What kinds of identities are constructed through our encounters with sound, VR, and AI? How might this shape he ways in which these aspects of human experience are researched, and how that research is shared?

• 16:05 | Yiannis Christidis (Cyprus University of Technology) | A Final Preparation

• 16:20 | Ye Funa (UCL) | Beauty +: You are living in the desert of the real, but I’m in the beautiful

• 16:35 | Samuel Tettner (University of Manchester) | Ethnographic Experiments on Sufi Sama through Collaborative Sound Art Installations

• 16:50 | Juliet Brown (UCL) | VR Encounters with Developmental Trauma

• 17:05 | Panel Discussion

• 17:30 | Break

18:00 - 18:45 | Keynote Presentation: Chris Watson 18:45 - 20:30 | Panel 4: Rethinking Sonic Ecologies

What does climate change sound like? What kind of knowledge does this present? This panel explores

the relationships between sound, knowledge, and ecology, drawing together researchers from diverse disciplines to examine the particular ways in which sonic engagements with our surroundings can shed light on human-ecology relationships. When traditional divisions between nature and culture are questioned, how can immersion in sonic ecologies offer new forms of multispecies understanding?

• 18:50 | Giuliana Funkhouser (San Francisco Art Institute) | Data Sonification + Perceptual Geographies

• 19:05 | Megan Gette (Duke University) | Ordinary Schizophonia

• 19:20 | Maria Nastase (UNATC) | Sonic Images: Pixel Sonification in Photographic Image

• 19:35 | Mark Peter Wright (UAL) | Microphone Check

• 19:50 | Panel Discussion

• 20:20 | Break

20:30 - 00:30 | Kuñangue Online Panel 2: Guarani and Kaiowá fighting against COVID

FRIDAY 15TH JANUARY

16:00 - 17:45 | Panel 5: Algorithmic Thinking

How can concepts challenge their own mechanisms of production? Can we develop methodologies of practice and thought which unsettle the very processes through which they emerge? This panel explores how recursive mechanisms can be coded into methods of practice and thought, asking whether algorithms can challenge their own instructions, or if designs can undermine their own foundations. How can these case studies propose a model of knowledge that is capable of redefining itself, where alterity is the method, rather than the object, of research?

• 16:05 | Anna Mladentseva (UCL) | Recursive Alterity: Experiments in Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence

• 16:20 | Mohsen Hazrati (Akademie Schloss Solitude) | Fāl Project AR

• 16:35 | Isadora Dannin and Stratton Coffman (MIT) | Proof of Concept

• 16:50 | Zach Mason (Lancaster University) | Machine Learnt Landscapes

• 17:05 | Panel Discussion

• 17:35 | Break

18:00 - 18:30 | Keynote Lecture: Lior Zalmanson

18:30 - 19:00 | Break

19:00 - 20:00 | Concluding Round-Table: A Conference Otherwise

How can a conference be thought otherwise? This concluding round-table examines the processes through which this conference was produced, and the partnership between UCL MAL and the Kuñangue Aty Guasu which took place in parallel. When an academic conference is posed as a variant of an indigenous online assembly, and vice versa, what can we learn about the ways in which knowledge can be produced, shared and understood?

• Rozi Sukosd-Kosa (UCL)

• Raffaella Fryer-Moreira (UCL)

• Fabiana Assis Fernandes (IDAC)

• Kuña Jaqueline Aranduhá (Kuñangue Aty Guasu / UFGD)

20:00 | Closing Ceremony from the Kuñangue Aty Gatsu