Entanglements
Entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography
During the conference, Data-visitors will have the chance to explore a selection of the journal’s contributions and outstanding examples of experimenting with multimodal ethnography.
With a nod to café culture, reading rooms, online browsing and digital reading practices, the installation folds together temporalities of past and present, as well as online and offline practices of public participation.
Projects:
Kristin Koptiuch
Koptiuch, K. (2019). ‘Taquerías Conversas: Latinx Immigrants Remake the Flickering Urban Landscape of Phoenix’, entanglements, 2(1): 76-96.
Dynamic digital visualization modeled after the erstwhile social media app Vine provokes unexpected insight into Latinx immigrants’ vibrant impact on Arizona cityscapes. The author’s para-cinematic micro-movie loops track the affective resonances elicited by an evocative form of the architectural uncanny that haunts everyday urbanism in metro Phoenix: taquerias. Intensive immigration brought drive-thru Mexican taquerias, which commonly inhabit structures abandoned by iconic American (now global) fast-food chains (DQ, BK, KFC…), colonizing dead spaces abandoned by sprawl’s centrifugal pull. Taquerias have helped to revive stagnant neighborhood economies, catered to an immigrant-inflected palate, and added Latin cultural flair to Phoenix’s subdued design palette. The movie loops endlessly reenact the “conversion” from fast-food chain to taqueria, performatively disclosing the homely architecture “buried alive” beneath Mexicanized, magical-realist redesign. Like a surrealist’s found object, taquerias conversas trigger affective associations as they conjure prosthetic links to the city’s (Mexican, indigenous) past and inscribe border-crossing transnationalization into vernacular city spaces. As Latinx irrefutably remake the city, many Anglo Phoenicians experience an unsettling psycho-spatial estrangement. By adopting a multimodal approach, the performative effects of the video loops create a dizzying affective experience for the reader, modeling the similarly unsettling experience of driving through the changing Phoenix cityscape. Taquerias conversas upend dominant place-making dynamics, setting in play a migrant-driven, insurgent urbanism that swerves beyond city boosters’ defensive vision of sundrenched uniformity toward embracing a complex, inclusive, transnationalized urban future.
Mihai Andrei Leaha
Leaha, M.A. (2019). ‘Multimodal spaces, atmospheres, modulations. Experiencing the independent electronic music scene of Sao Paulo’, entanglements, 2(1): 143-160.
The article explores the Sao Paulo independent music scene in the form of a collaborative evocation and multimedia experimentation of the relationship between spaces of music listening their scenography and architextural elements, and the movement of their inhabitants in relationship with the aural elements that stay at the core of an electronic music “festa”. The article assumes the agency of the researcher as an integral element of the collaborative endeavor and uses tools such as video, photography and sound as a research language. Therefore, the experience I propose is a multilayered experimental way of talking about local music participation in the Sao Paulo electronic music scene by introducing multimodal accounts that vary from fieldnotes poetry, photography, collaborative videos, collaborative stories of participation at parties, sound recordings etc. The technological mediation of the embodied experiences in electronic music participation must be addressed multimodally. Together with producers and participants, the experience I propose will share part of our participation and technological entanglements in the field.
Panayotis Panopoulos
Panopoulos, P. (2018). ‘Vocal Letters: A Migrant’s Family Records from the 1950s and the Phonographic Production and Reproduction of Memory’, entanglements, 1(2): 30-51.
Among several voice memories, most of them rather vague and opaque, from my childhood years, there is a quite clear and crispy one; it comes from the sound of a cassette tape, which my grandfather, my father’s father, brought back from his trip, in the early 1970s, to Sydney, Australia, where he had travelled in order to visit two of his sons and a daughter, grandchildren and other relatives who had migrated in the ’50s and ’60s. The night before his return flight, the family came together and they recorded that tape, so that relatives in Greece would be able to listen to the migrants’ voices, greeting them and singing Greek nostalgic songs and songs about migration (xenitia[1]). Four decades later, I specifically recall the sound of my uncles’ and aunts’ voices, full of suppressed tears, and a certain Greek popular song from the ’50s, sung solo by my father’s youngest brother:
“I will climb and sing
On top of the highest mountain,
So that my pain, along with the sound of [bouzouki] strings,
Will be heard in xenitia”[2].
Originally, the last verse would refer to erimia (wilderness, desertedness), but in migrants’ lips erimia would often turn to xenitia, in a meaningful poetic gesture of appropriation/ adjustment of the song to their own lived experiences. For years and years, the sound of this cassette, now lost, probably forever, was the most vivid memory I would have from my relatives, before I met most of them in person, years later.
Paulina Semenec
Semenec, P. (2019). ‘Crop, zoom, delete: experimenting with children as classroom photographers’, entanglements, 2(1): 22-27.
What happens when children become ‘classroom photographers’? This paper traces the often strange encounters that photo-making practices with children invites. Drawing on data from a year-long ethnographic study, I suggest that becoming attuned to encounters and processes of image-making (as opposed to the image itself) can provide researchers with new ways of engaging with children; ones in which the traditional binaries between the ‘child’ and ‘researcher’ are always in the process of being re-imagined.
During the conference, Data-visitors will have the chance to explore a selection of the journal’s contributions and outstanding examples of experimenting with multimodal ethnography.
With a nod to café culture, reading rooms, online browsing and digital reading practices, the installation folds together temporalities of past and present, as well as online and offline practices of public participation.
Projects:
Kristin Koptiuch
Koptiuch, K. (2019). ‘Taquerías Conversas: Latinx Immigrants Remake the Flickering Urban Landscape of Phoenix’, entanglements, 2(1): 76-96.
Dynamic digital visualization modeled after the erstwhile social media app Vine provokes unexpected insight into Latinx immigrants’ vibrant impact on Arizona cityscapes. The author’s para-cinematic micro-movie loops track the affective resonances elicited by an evocative form of the architectural uncanny that haunts everyday urbanism in metro Phoenix: taquerias. Intensive immigration brought drive-thru Mexican taquerias, which commonly inhabit structures abandoned by iconic American (now global) fast-food chains (DQ, BK, KFC…), colonizing dead spaces abandoned by sprawl’s centrifugal pull. Taquerias have helped to revive stagnant neighborhood economies, catered to an immigrant-inflected palate, and added Latin cultural flair to Phoenix’s subdued design palette. The movie loops endlessly reenact the “conversion” from fast-food chain to taqueria, performatively disclosing the homely architecture “buried alive” beneath Mexicanized, magical-realist redesign. Like a surrealist’s found object, taquerias conversas trigger affective associations as they conjure prosthetic links to the city’s (Mexican, indigenous) past and inscribe border-crossing transnationalization into vernacular city spaces. As Latinx irrefutably remake the city, many Anglo Phoenicians experience an unsettling psycho-spatial estrangement. By adopting a multimodal approach, the performative effects of the video loops create a dizzying affective experience for the reader, modeling the similarly unsettling experience of driving through the changing Phoenix cityscape. Taquerias conversas upend dominant place-making dynamics, setting in play a migrant-driven, insurgent urbanism that swerves beyond city boosters’ defensive vision of sundrenched uniformity toward embracing a complex, inclusive, transnationalized urban future.
Mihai Andrei Leaha
Leaha, M.A. (2019). ‘Multimodal spaces, atmospheres, modulations. Experiencing the independent electronic music scene of Sao Paulo’, entanglements, 2(1): 143-160.
The article explores the Sao Paulo independent music scene in the form of a collaborative evocation and multimedia experimentation of the relationship between spaces of music listening their scenography and architextural elements, and the movement of their inhabitants in relationship with the aural elements that stay at the core of an electronic music “festa”. The article assumes the agency of the researcher as an integral element of the collaborative endeavor and uses tools such as video, photography and sound as a research language. Therefore, the experience I propose is a multilayered experimental way of talking about local music participation in the Sao Paulo electronic music scene by introducing multimodal accounts that vary from fieldnotes poetry, photography, collaborative videos, collaborative stories of participation at parties, sound recordings etc. The technological mediation of the embodied experiences in electronic music participation must be addressed multimodally. Together with producers and participants, the experience I propose will share part of our participation and technological entanglements in the field.
Panayotis Panopoulos
Panopoulos, P. (2018). ‘Vocal Letters: A Migrant’s Family Records from the 1950s and the Phonographic Production and Reproduction of Memory’, entanglements, 1(2): 30-51.
Among several voice memories, most of them rather vague and opaque, from my childhood years, there is a quite clear and crispy one; it comes from the sound of a cassette tape, which my grandfather, my father’s father, brought back from his trip, in the early 1970s, to Sydney, Australia, where he had travelled in order to visit two of his sons and a daughter, grandchildren and other relatives who had migrated in the ’50s and ’60s. The night before his return flight, the family came together and they recorded that tape, so that relatives in Greece would be able to listen to the migrants’ voices, greeting them and singing Greek nostalgic songs and songs about migration (xenitia[1]). Four decades later, I specifically recall the sound of my uncles’ and aunts’ voices, full of suppressed tears, and a certain Greek popular song from the ’50s, sung solo by my father’s youngest brother:
“I will climb and sing
On top of the highest mountain,
So that my pain, along with the sound of [bouzouki] strings,
Will be heard in xenitia”[2].
Originally, the last verse would refer to erimia (wilderness, desertedness), but in migrants’ lips erimia would often turn to xenitia, in a meaningful poetic gesture of appropriation/ adjustment of the song to their own lived experiences. For years and years, the sound of this cassette, now lost, probably forever, was the most vivid memory I would have from my relatives, before I met most of them in person, years later.
Paulina Semenec
Semenec, P. (2019). ‘Crop, zoom, delete: experimenting with children as classroom photographers’, entanglements, 2(1): 22-27.
What happens when children become ‘classroom photographers’? This paper traces the often strange encounters that photo-making practices with children invites. Drawing on data from a year-long ethnographic study, I suggest that becoming attuned to encounters and processes of image-making (as opposed to the image itself) can provide researchers with new ways of engaging with children; ones in which the traditional binaries between the ‘child’ and ‘researcher’ are always in the process of being re-imagined.