Oral Presentation Session

Reviewed by: Society for Visual Anthropology

Of interest to: Practicing and Applied Anthropologists, Teachers of Anthropology in Community Colleges, Students, Those Involved in Mentoring Activities

Primary Theme: Technology

Secondary Theme: The Visual

(3-1270) Visualising the Visible and the Invisible: ethnography and technologies of the unseen

Apophenia—the recognition of patterns within randomness—is, as Hito Steyerl (2016) has argued, a condition of the rapid multiplication of chaotic plumes of data swirling around us, data riven with errors, misunderstandings and half-guesses somewhere between the seen and unseen.  On the other hand, as Lepselter (2016) argues, it is just this sort of “misrecognition” that proliferates in an age when truths are submerged.  Here, apophenia is a survival skill in a paranoid age.  But with the emergence of new digital audio visual technologies and their networked connection through social media, the opportunities for opening up a dialogue between the pattern and randomness, visible and the non-visible, as well as between vision, sound and the other senses have grown. We can today bring cameras to places that were out of access before (think of drones, wearables, life-logging cams) as well as tools and techniques allowing us to visualise data that is not visible in nature (such as bodily and affective reactions gathered from heart rate and sweat sensors, brainwave meters, GPS trackers). That is, our technologies push us to consider meaning beyond the patterns generated by our theories and methods. Through these technologies, our images connect to both the sensible and the insensible through their entanglements with diverse platforms, not only in the present but in unseen futures where those images might proliferate along undisclosed vectors. Finally, the new deployment of these technologies of seeing underscores the salience of a withdrawn unseen amidst the complex objects that make up the ethnographic landscape.  For example, panoramic cameras beget both new techniques of revelation and concealment (Pels 2003), while life blogging introduces the unseen interstices of hyper-mediated lives. Here, our technologies themselves participate in the apophenic, opening shadowy connections to the world, to each other and gesturing to future ethnographic projects that lie on the edges of visibility.  This panel aims to enter this terrain (visible, invisible and imaginary) in dialogue across disciplines, unified only by the insistence of inquiry at the junctures of seen and unseen.

Chair(s)

• Paolo Favero

  Associate Professor
  University of Antwerp

Presenter(s)

• Paolo Favero

  Associate Professor
  University of Antwerp

• Michele Hanks

  
  New York University

• Luc Pauwels

  Professor of Visual Research Methods
  University of Antwerp

• Alissa Jordan

  Human Relations Area Files, Inc.

Organizer(s)

• Samuel Collins

  Professor
  Towson University

Presenter(s)

• Samuel Collins

  Professor
  Towson University

Discussant(s)

• Rebekah Cupitt

  UCL Anthropology

Presentations:

• 4:15 PM - 4:30 PM

  Externalising the inner - ethnographic explorations of the use of trackers and other digital applications for visualising invisible information
  Paolo SH Favero – University of Antwerp
• 4:30 PM - 4:45 PM

  Orbs, Blurs, and Ghosts: English Paranormal Investigating and The Struggle to Render the Paranormal Visible
  Michele M. Hanks – New York University
• 4:45 PM - 5:00 PM

  Problematizing the visible, the invisible and the conceptual: a meta-disciplinary framework of visualization practices
  Luc Pauwels – University of Antwerp
• 5:00 PM - 5:15 PM

  Thinking with Film and Non-Linear Narrative: Visible and invisible relations in a Haitian lakou
  Alissa Marie Jordan – Human Relations Area Files, Inc.
• 5:15 PM - 5:30 PM

  Homo latens: Tracing the Hidden Latencies of Social Media
  Samuel G. Collins – Towson University
• 5:30 PM - 5:45 PM

  Discussion
  Rebekah Cupitt – UCL Anthropology