For people who live with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis / Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Fibromyalgia and Multiple Chemical Sensitivity syndrome illness is a hidden construct. The body does not display the chronicity of the internal experience. This thesis removes the barrier between what is experienced and what is visible by creating visual means of communicating the body’s hidden experience. The place of the viewer is part of this discussion. Through visual methods digital photographic techniques and the current interest in sensory anthropology the embodied sensory chronic illness experience is explored. The hidden experiences were made visual creating “MeBoxes” and masks which showed both the external and embodied internal experiences of chronic illness. As the process of working with and walking beside the participants developed, I found that the discourse on imaging within the literature was inadequate to show the real lived experiences of those with chronic illness. My interactions with the people of this thesis and the process of honouring their experiences required a model that would encourage the viewer to new and perhaps unrealised depths of participation to understand the participant’s multi-faceted and multi-layered experiences. Part of the discussion is the ability of images to communicate sensory experience as is the case with Munch’s The Scream and Picasso’s Guernica. Through the use of a hypertextual self-scape I show how participants created access to their experiences through their visual representations and through a collaborative approach became composite hypertextual self-scape metaphors.

For people who live with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis / Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Fibromyalgia and Multiple Chemical Sensitivity syndrome illness is a hidden construct. The body does not display the chronicity of the internal experience. This thesis removes the barrier between what is experienced and what is visible by creating visual means of communicating the body’s hidden experience. The place of the viewer is part of this discussion. Through visual methods digital photographic techniques and the current interest in sensory anthropology the embodied sensory chronic illness experience is explored. The hidden experiences were made visual creating “MeBoxes” and masks which showed both the external and embodied internal experiences of chronic illness. As the process of working with and walking beside the participants developed, I found that the discourse on imaging within the literature was inadequate to show the real lived experiences of those with chronic illness. My interactions with the people of this thesis and the process of honouring their experiences required a model that would encourage the viewer to new and perhaps unrealised depths of participation to understand the participant’s multi-faceted and multi-layered experiences. Part of the discussion is the ability of images to communicate sensory experience as is the case with Munch’s The Scream and Picasso’s Guernica. Through the use of a hypertextual self-scape I show how participants created access to their experiences through their visual representations and through a collaborative approach became composite hypertextual self-scape metaphors.

Machine learning is increasingly involved in both our production and consumption of video. One symptom of this is the appearance of automated video editing applications. As this technology spreads rapidly to consumers, the need for substantive research about its social impact grows. To this end, this project maintains a focus on video editing as a microcosm of larger shifts in cultural objects co-authored by artificial intelligence. The window in which this research occurred (2010-2015) saw machine learning move increasingly into the public eye, and with it ethical concerns. What follows is, on the most abstract level, a discussion of why these ethical concerns are particularly urgent in the realm of the moving image. Algorithmic editing consists of software instructions to automate the creation of timelines of moving images. The criteria that this software uses to query a database is variable. Algorithmic authorship already exists in other media, but I will argue that the moving image is a separate case insofar as the raw material of text and music software can develop on its own. The performance of a trained actor can still not be generated by software. Thus, my focus is on the relationship between live embodied performance, and the subsequent algorithmic editing of that footage. This is a process that can employ other software like computer vision (to analyze the content of video) and predictive analytics (to guess what kind of automated film to make for a given user). How is performance altered when it has to communicate to human and non-human alike? The ritual of the iterative frame gives literal form to something that throughout human history has been a projection: the omniscient participant observer, more commonly known as the Divine. We experience black boxed software (AI's, specifically neural networks, which are intrinsically opaque) as functionally omniscient and tacitly allow it to edit more and more of life (e.g. filtering articles, playlists and even potential spouses). As long as it remains disembodied, we will continue to project the Divine on to the black box, causing cultural anxiety. In other words, predictive analytics alienate us from the source code of our cultural texts. The iterative frame then is a space in which these forces can be inscribed on the body, and hence narrated. The algorithmic editing of content is already taken for granted. The editing of moving images, in contrast, still requires a human hand. We need to understand the social power of moving image editing before it is delegated to automation. Practice Section: This project is practice-led, meaning that the portfolio of work was produced as it was being theorized. To underscore this, the portfolio comes at the end of the document. Video editors use artificial intelligence (AI) in a number of different applications, from deciding the sequencing of timelines to using facial and language detection to find actors in archives. This changes traditional production workflows on a number of levels. How can the single decision cut a between two frames of video speak to the larger epistemological shifts brought on by predictive analytics and Big Data (upon which they rely)? When predictive analytics begin modeling the world of moving images, how will our own understanding of the world change? In the practice-based section of this thesis, I explore how these shifts will change the way in which actors might approach performance. What does a gesture mean to AI and how will the editor decontextualize it? The set of a video shoot that will employ an element of AI in editing represents a move towards ritualization of production, summarized in the term the 'iterative frame'. The portfolio contains eight works that treat the set was taken as a microcosm of larger shifts in the production of culture. There is, I argue, metaphorical significance in the changing understanding of terms like 'continuity' and 'sync' on the AI-watched set. Theory Section In the theoretical section, the approach is broadly comparative. I contextualize the current dynamic by looking at previous shifts in technology that changed the relationship between production and post-production, notably the lightweight recording technology of the 1960s. This section also draws on debates in ethnographic filmmaking about the matching of film and ritual. In this body of literature, there is a focus on how participant observation can be formalized in film. Triangulating between event, participant observer and edit grammar in ethnographic filmmaking provides a useful analogy in understanding how AI as film editor might function in relation to contemporary production. Rituals occur in a frame that is dependent on a spatially/temporally separate observer. This dynamic also exists on sets bound for post-production involving AI, The convergence of film grammar and ritual grammar occurred in the 1960s under the banner of cinéma vérité in which the relationship between participant observer/ethnographer and the subject became most transparent. In Rouch and Morin's Chronicle of a Summer (1961), reflexivity became ritualized in the form of on-screen feedback sessions. The edit became transparent-the black box of cinema disappeared. Today as artificial intelligence enters the film production process this relationship begins to reverse-feedback, while it exists, becomes less transparent. The weight of the feedback ritual gets gradually shifted from presence and production to montage and post-production. Put differently, in cinéma vérité, the participant observer was most present in the frame. As participant observation gradually becomes shared with code it becomes more difficult to give it an embodied representation and thus its presence is felt more in the edit of the film. The relationship between the ritual actor and the participant observer (the algorithm) is completely mediated by the edit, a reassertion of the black box, where once it had been transparent. The crucible for looking at the relationship between algorithmic editing, participant observation and the black box is the subject in trance. In ritual trance the individual is subsumed by collective codes. Long before the advent of automated editing trance was an epistemological problem posed to film editing. In the iterative frame, for the first time, film grammar can echo ritual grammar and indeed become continuous with it. This occurs through removing the act of cutting from the causal world, and projecting this logic of post-production onto performance. Why does this occur? Ritual and specifically ritual trance is the moment when a culture gives embodied form to what it could not otherwise articulate. The trance of predictive analytics-the AI that increasingly choreographs our relationship to information-is the ineffable that finds form in the iterative frame. In the iterative frame a gesture never exists in a single instance, but in a potential state. The performers in this frame begin to understand themselves in terms of how automated indexing processes reconfigure their performance. To the extent that gestures are complicit with this mode of databasing they can be seen as votive toward the algorithmic. The practice section focuses on the poetics of this position. Chapter One focuses on cinéma vérité as a moment in which the relationship between production and post-production shifted as a function of more agile recording technology, allowing the participant observer to enter the frame. This shift becomes a lens to look at changes that AI might bring. Chapter Two treats the work of Pierre Huyghe as a 'liminal phase' in which a new relationship between production and post-production is explored. Finally, Chapter Three looks at a film in which actors perform with awareness that footage will be processed by an algorithmic edit. / The conclusion looks at the implications this way of relating to AI-especially commercial AI-through embodied performance could foster a more critical relationship to the proliferating black-boxed modes of production.

Cette thèse en Anthropologie filmique porte sur l’espace habité des Bédouins de Syrie, en termes d’espace humanisé, c’est-à-dire modelé et rendu utilisable par les personnes qui l’occupent. La recherche, tout à la fois anthropologique et filmique, met en œuvre pour la première fois une méthode d’enquête audiovisuelle appliquée à l’étude de l’espace habité nomade. A partir de l’observation et de l’analyse de l’habitation (tentes et abris) d’une famille bédouine syrienne vivant dans un campement aux alentours de Palmyre (Nord-Est de la Syrie), ce travail dévoile comment le mode de vie des Bédouins influence la forme et la fonction de leur habitation. Le texte est accompagné de dix films qui décrivent le campement et les différentes utilisations de l’espace. / This thesis in Visual Anthropology examines the Syrian Bedouins’ living space in terms of humanized space, i.e. built and functionally transformed by the persons living in it. The field research was anthropological, but used the camera as the main tool for investigation. For the first time, this research proposes a filmic investigation method for the study of the nomads’ dwellings. Through the observation and analysis of the habitation (tents and shelters) of a Bedouin family living in a camp near Palmyra (North-East Syria), it shows how the Bedouin way of life influences the structure and the functions of their living space. Ten films describing the camp and its different utilization complement the text.

A travers une exploration filmique menée auprès d'une communauté religieuse de Port-au-Prince, l’analyse des images enregistrées avec les personnes filmées et l’expérience pratique de constructions audiovisuelles participatives, la recherche interroge le système de représentation des adeptes et le rapport qu'il entretient avec la notion de croyance. Elle étudie simultanément par ce biais la réception de formes audiovisuelles spécifiques et l’observation différée des enregistrements en tant qu’outil privilégié d'une anthropologie audiovisuelle appliquée à l'étude des systèmes symboliques de représentation et à leur dynamique évolutive. Cette recherche est marquée par trois étapes de réalisations concrètes selon des paradigmes audiovisuels définis : un multimédia interactif, un film d’observation descriptif chronologique, et un film linéaire poursuivant l’objectif d’une mise en scène de l’autoreprésentation des agents suivant les précédentes étapes collaboratives d’observations, d’interprétations et de constructions audiovisuelles participatives qui forment l’enquête. L’image, sous ses multiples acceptions, est envisagée ici en tant qu’objet transactionnel agissant à différentes échelles sociales, depuis ses usages et fabrications à un niveau individuel jusqu’à ceux-ci à un niveau collectif et transnational. Cet aspect est analysé, d’abord, au moyen de la confrontation successive entre imagerie religieuse produite au sein de la confrérie et représentations audiovisuelles produites par la recherche elle-même et retournées aux agents, et ensuite, par confrontation avec l’iconographie religieuse et les représentations anciennes et contemporaines produites par des sources endogènes et exogènes à l’aire culturelle haïtienne. Le texte analyse ainsi la construction de représentations et leurs effets depuis les expériences pratiques menées avec les individus d’une communauté jusqu’à celles qui intègrent certains évènements sociohistoriques, certains clichés et certaines figures mythologiques d’inspirations vodou ayant intégrés la culture occidentale à travers, notamment, des représentations romanesques et hollywoodiennes ayant eu un fort succès et continuant à alimenter l’imaginaire occidental et haïtien aujourd’hui. / The Haitian voodoo presents a profusion of practices and perceptible representations, symbolic ones, as material as corporeal. He influences the arts and the literature of a whole culture, well beyond the circle of his followers. If it is plural from origin, it was also collected and represented in a multiple way by his outer observers. Forged during a tempestuous history and present, its representation system seems to present a character at the same time persistent and permeable, connected to the faith itself. Through the analysis of worship images, a cinematic exploration conducted within a religious community of Port-au-Prince, and finally through a participatory experience of confrontation of the recorded images with the agents and film construction according to three different modalities, the study attempts to question the representation system of the followers and the relationship which it maintains with the faith. The research also tries to examine restitutions forms and specific visual anthropology tools applied to the study of symbolic representation systems and their dynamics.

Esta pesquisa trata do estudo de narrativa biográfica e trajetória social e da técnica de etnografia sonora no estudo da memória da vida cotidiana dos habitantes do território Bairro Navegantes, Porto Alegre-RS, tendo como ponto de partida a interpretação das formas de negociação dos habitantes locais com as transformações produzidas, ao longo das últimas décadas, na paisagem do bairro. Através da pesquisa etnográfica das formas de trabalho, gestos de ocupação, e sociabilidades dos moradores de dois lugares dos bairros São Geraldo e Navegantes, e das suas formas de narrar as transformações no interior do coração do Quarto Distrito, esta pesquisa pretende compreender o fenômeno da duração da memória do lugar integrando as formas destes habitantes experienciarem a cidade de Porto Alegre. Busca-se contemplar as tensões, as diferenças de visões de mundo, e estilos de vida dos diferentes atores da cena social etnografada, relacionando-os às distintas práticas sociais no bairro como chave interpretativa das possíveis acomodações por parte de seus habitantes das transformações espaço-temporais do lugar. / This research is a study about biographic account and social path and the audio ethnography technique regarging the study of inhabitants' everyday life memory in the Bairro Navegantes territory, Porto Alegre, Brazil. The interpretation of dealing methods of the local with the transformations produced in the area's landscapte throughout the last decades is the starting point of this study. Through the ethnographic research of the forms of work, occupation acts, and sociabilities from Porto Alegre's neighborhoods of São Geraldo's and Navegantes' inhabitants - and their ways of accouting the transformation in the inner area of Quarto Distrito - , this research aims at understanding the place memory duration phenomenon integrating the ways these subjects experienced the city of Porto Alegre. Moreover, it aims at contemplating the tensions, the differences of worldview, and lifestyles of the diverse actors of the ethnographic social scene, relating them to distinct social practice in the studied area as interpretative key to possible accomodation for the space-time transformation of the place by its inhabitants.

Alaska, which has been the 49th state of the USA since 1959, is a very unique locality according to many viewpoints. Although it is a part of the civilized Western world, it presents one of the last well- preserved wildlife on the Earth. Although Alaska is gradually settled by immigrants, native people have to deal with their dilemma connected with assimilation for many centuries. They did not create their own new culture - its cultural specifics are still defined by combination of original cultural patterns of Yup'ik and Inupiat Eskimos and natural tribes Tlingit, Haida, Athabaska, Aleut and imported cultures. My work is a study of clashes between civilization and nature resp. civilization and original ethnic groups and it goes throughout structural analysis of audiovisual artefacts, in this case visual records and films from fictional and non-fictional category. The subject of my analysis is a method and variability of possible approaches to Alaska presentation by audiovisual means and mainly examines formation and development of stereotypes in presentation of wildlife and human lifestyle in their specific conditions. The advantage of my research is a limited locality and relatively lowly explored area and also overview (even numerous) of audiovisual materials in its own way. Next to the...

Esta pesquisa trata do estudo de narrativa biográfica e trajetória social e da técnica de etnografia sonora no estudo da memória da vida cotidiana dos habitantes do território Bairro Navegantes, Porto Alegre-RS, tendo como ponto de partida a interpretação das formas de negociação dos habitantes locais com as transformações produzidas, ao longo das últimas décadas, na paisagem do bairro. Através da pesquisa etnográfica das formas de trabalho, gestos de ocupação, e sociabilidades dos moradores de dois lugares dos bairros São Geraldo e Navegantes, e das suas formas de narrar as transformações no interior do coração do Quarto Distrito, esta pesquisa pretende compreender o fenômeno da duração da memória do lugar integrando as formas destes habitantes experienciarem a cidade de Porto Alegre. Busca-se contemplar as tensões, as diferenças de visões de mundo, e estilos de vida dos diferentes atores da cena social etnografada, relacionando-os às distintas práticas sociais no bairro como chave interpretativa das possíveis acomodações por parte de seus habitantes das transformações espaço-temporais do lugar. / This research is a study about biographic account and social path and the audio ethnography technique regarging the study of inhabitants' everyday life memory in the Bairro Navegantes territory, Porto Alegre, Brazil. The interpretation of dealing methods of the local with the transformations produced in the area's landscapte throughout the last decades is the starting point of this study. Through the ethnographic research of the forms of work, occupation acts, and sociabilities from Porto Alegre's neighborhoods of São Geraldo's and Navegantes' inhabitants - and their ways of accouting the transformation in the inner area of Quarto Distrito - , this research aims at understanding the place memory duration phenomenon integrating the ways these subjects experienced the city of Porto Alegre. Moreover, it aims at contemplating the tensions, the differences of worldview, and lifestyles of the diverse actors of the ethnographic social scene, relating them to distinct social practice in the studied area as interpretative key to possible accomodation for the space-time transformation of the place by its inhabitants.

Esta pesquisa trata do estudo de narrativa biográfica e trajetória social e da técnica de etnografia sonora no estudo da memória da vida cotidiana dos habitantes do território Bairro Navegantes, Porto Alegre-RS, tendo como ponto de partida a interpretação das formas de negociação dos habitantes locais com as transformações produzidas, ao longo das últimas décadas, na paisagem do bairro. Através da pesquisa etnográfica das formas de trabalho, gestos de ocupação, e sociabilidades dos moradores de dois lugares dos bairros São Geraldo e Navegantes, e das suas formas de narrar as transformações no interior do coração do Quarto Distrito, esta pesquisa pretende compreender o fenômeno da duração da memória do lugar integrando as formas destes habitantes experienciarem a cidade de Porto Alegre. Busca-se contemplar as tensões, as diferenças de visões de mundo, e estilos de vida dos diferentes atores da cena social etnografada, relacionando-os às distintas práticas sociais no bairro como chave interpretativa das possíveis acomodações por parte de seus habitantes das transformações espaço-temporais do lugar. / This research is a study about biographic account and social path and the audio ethnography technique regarging the study of inhabitants' everyday life memory in the Bairro Navegantes territory, Porto Alegre, Brazil. The interpretation of dealing methods of the local with the transformations produced in the area's landscapte throughout the last decades is the starting point of this study. Through the ethnographic research of the forms of work, occupation acts, and sociabilities from Porto Alegre's neighborhoods of São Geraldo's and Navegantes' inhabitants - and their ways of accouting the transformation in the inner area of Quarto Distrito - , this research aims at understanding the place memory duration phenomenon integrating the ways these subjects experienced the city of Porto Alegre. Moreover, it aims at contemplating the tensions, the differences of worldview, and lifestyles of the diverse actors of the ethnographic social scene, relating them to distinct social practice in the studied area as interpretative key to possible accomodation for the space-time transformation of the place by its inhabitants.

Orientador: Etienne Ghislain Samain / Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Artes / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-05T12:12:36Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Mendonca_JoaoMartinhode_D.pdf: 28651885 bytes, checksum: a3cb2d85eebf61c030b2d5f5e380178d (MD5) Previous issue date: 2005 / Resumo: Este trabalho tem como objetivo principal delinear e esclarecer as inserções da antropóloga norte-americana Margaret Mead nos campos da Antropologia Visual e da Antropologia da Comunicação Visual. Através dos recursos da Reserva Técnica de Bolsa (FAPESP), foram adquiridas obras da autora pouco conhecidas no Brasil. A partir delas, levantamos todos os seus envolvimentos com o uso das imagens fotográficas e fílmicas. A consideração conjunta das principais reflexões escritas da referida antropóloga sobre o tema permitiu, então, diferenciar suas proposições programáticas (na forma de artigos) daquilo que efetivamente realizou, em termos visuais, ao longo de sua obra. Nesta última, selecionamos, para um exame mais detido, um trabalho fotográfico específico e analiticamente complexo ¿ Balinese Character (Bateson e Mead, 1942) ¿, no sentido de delimitar princípios metodológicos gerais, capazes de presidir à constituição de um discurso antropológico não ancorado exclusivamente na expressão escrita. Uma série paralela de fotografias, organizadas cuidadosamente na dupla perspectiva dada pelas expressões verbais e visuais, foi constituída de maneira a possibilitar uma reflexão efetiva em torno das questões tratadas no texto que ora apresentamos / Abstract: This work is about the relations between visual and verbal expressions in the anthropological discourse. The major focus is on the uses of the images (photographs) in the researches and publications of the anthropologist Margaret Mead (with her various partners: Gregory Bateson, Paul Byers, Ken Heyman and others). Sixty two verbal-visual compositions are presented to demonstrate the potentialities and the limitations of the verbal and visual expressions arranged side by side. The results show us that the propositions of Margaret Mead must be reconsidered in the light of the different uses of the images in her works. In this way, a part of the history of Visual Anthropology is delineated and indicates significatives possibilities of enrichment in this and in correlated fields of the humanities / Doutorado / Multimeios / Doutor em Multimeios