Transcript Introduction powerpoint

Visual Ethnography & Creative Intervention
SM4134
An advanced-level research-creation laboratory
Linda Lai
January 20, 2009
on the key components of the course:
ethnography
[source: documentary cinema] visual ethnography
[source: contemporary art] research-based artmaking, performativity (a cultural tactic)
[source: Cultural Studies, contemporary art] critical
intervention
• [source: anthropology]
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CULTURAL STUDIES as impulse
Contribution from Cultural Studies’ POV: 以小見大
-Broad theses/discourses of culture and society /
ideologies / common sense etc.
↕
Specific site with specific individuals and practices in
everyday life dramaturgy
[“culture is ordinary” (Raymond Williams); culture as
everyday fabric]
-Our (ethnography) is a process of clarification to
maintain differences via giving a voice to individual
experiences.
CULTURAL STUDIES as impulse
Contribution from Cultural Studies’ POV: 以小見大
ultimate concern:
power
subjectivities
Power: not an abstract, top-down force, but…
structures of power in concrete everyday settings
and in various locations such as class, race, gender,
sexual orientation, different formal institutions, policies…
Subjectivities: the possibility of the individual to “participate”
in culture and assert one’s humanness, whether to resist,
to appropriate, to subvert, to deconstruct…
Basic orientation grounded in Cultural Studies
Michel De Certeau’s dedication page in The Practice of Everyday Life
*De Certeau’s science of ‘singularity’:
Local-ness…
People (subjectivities) beyond monumental value…
The voice-less, the unrepresented…
…the limits of representation
*Creativity, artistic vision (CIL, SM4134)
The specific, the particular
The observable, the empirical…
*Everyday creativity: small battles, occupying a specific position
*Performativity: emphasis on tactics, especially a response to alienation
or the hostility of urbanity via physical presence (occupation) of
concrete space, e.g. walking the city
More key theorists who contribute to an emphasis on the
particular and the micro-levels of culture…
Antonio Gramsci
“Hegemony” – power is, most of the time, not in the form of coercion,
but as common sense, as bottom-up voluntary practices
Michel Foucault
Techniques of the self (we translate the effect of power into justifiable
practices via methods and routines for the “care of the self”)
Fernand Braudel
“Long duration” of everyday practices to view historical processes;
alternative economic history…
Erving Goffman
Presentation of the self in everyday life dramaturgy: roles and persona,
back-stage Vs front-stage, impression management
Naming the course…
Ethnography
Visual anthropology
Visual ethnography
Visual culture
Ethno-methodologies
Intervention
Creative Intervention
Theory & Praxis / Theory =(is) Practice
Photography in the traditions of
visual sociology & anthropology
(concern):
*use of still photographs as a
methodological tool in social research
*use of photographs as a means of
presenting social research
Visual anthropology:
…concerns
• the examination of visual communication in the
everyday domain
• the critical analysis of visual methods of
anthropological documentation
• the critical analysis of visual productions of the
cultures under study.
• Initial focus:
In 1970s on film and television as documentary
methods
*What is ethnography?
a research methodology unique to anthropology
BEING THERE…MAKING ‘DOCUMENTS’ (≠ objective records)
What to observe, what to study:
• a/ social processes (formalization of relations and abstract
reasoning)
• b/ rituals (everyday rituals unique to the group, proceduralism,
situations that lead to the formalization of relations and abstract
reasoning)
• c/ exchange mechanisms (interactionism emphasized)
• d/ self-narration (mythical dimension)
NOTE: all the above aspects are observable by the researcher’s being
there.
Definition…(cont’d)
Atkinson:
a method or set of methods that ‘ involves the ethnographer
participating, overtly or covertly, in people’s daily lives for an
extended period of time, watching what happens, listening
to what is said, asking questions – in fact, collecting
whatever data are available to throw light on the issues that
are the focus of the research.
Ethnographic research
A narrative based on ethnographic research:
“The Auction”
Sarah Thornton, Seven Days in the Art World (Granta Publications,
2008), pp. 3-39.
Visual Ethnography paradigms
1 : Using cameras and other recording technology
to gather data
How the camera records, recording = collecting data? What kind of data?
2 : The studying of non-verbal data produced by
cultures – visual representation of reality
3 : The studying of visual objects
4 : Presenting research findings with images and
media other than words
Recommended: on contemporary art relevant to the course
[examples of recent publications]
Archive Fever: uses of document in contemporary
art (Okwui Enwezor)
Six Stories from the End of Representation (James
Elkins)
Critique of the term “visual”
W.J.T. Mitchell’s essay, “There are no visual
media” (2005) in Journal of Visual Culture
provides a good counter-discussion…
In the end, no medium involves solely one level of sensory experience
A project on Yunnan women…
http://www2.bc.edu/~lykes/voices.htm
What we would do in this semester…
*the ethnographic use of film, photography, and new media
*ethnographic research on visual artifacts and projects of
visual representation
*exploration of artistic strategies to transform research
process and findings into a personalized work of art
*studying visual artifacts in which the work of ethnography
is embedded
Collecting for creative intervention…
Hiroshi Sugimoto
Blurry architecture series
http://sweb.cityu.edu.hk/sm4134/2009/Hiroshi_Sugimoto/hiroshi_sugimoto.ppt
Assignment: for consultation in next meeting
*a possible specific subject for final assignment
*ethnography via photography:
Field photography/field collecting –
Photograph things with a future tense
Discover via collecting, observing, being there,
photographing