[...] quick online)



why use design as a template for reworking ethnography?
*the design process is generally oriented toward transforming (or cooking) “raw” information into “useful knowledge,” a guided mutation of “mere ideas” into “workable concepts” or a “feasible design” that then becomes an “object” (in all possible meanings of the term) in the world*
design: techniques for “working out” and “working through”


charrette شارت
a balance between structure and flexibility
1. active deconstruction: (to arrive at collaboratively, of the work's otherwise obscured underlying composition) to focus on:
•ethnographic specifics
•theoretical frameworks
•(writing) style
•how arguments are constructed
•
2. projection: (to engage a bit more seriously in speculative, comparative, and synthetic thinking)
•sorting activity, posting on the wall
•identify clusters of concepts that could form new and potentially unexpected categories
•to select a few of the clusters that you feel (individually and collectively) are useful for generating possible new avenues for speculation
•
3. reconstruction: (dedicated to innovation)
to develop a “rapid prototype” for a new ethnographic/research form, method, or mode, using the clusters of concepts they had identified as interesting and useful for speculation
•thinking about possibilities for how (ethnographic/research) material can be analyzed, argued, collected, or presented, and needed to be something other than a verbal description
•using  pechakucha presentation style (20 slides, 20 seconds each, a constraint intended to keep the students on their toes and to prevent dwelling on any single point for too long)
•presentation could tell us as much about how the group worked as much as what they specifically worked on

developing various ways in which stakeholders (traditionally have little or no part in the production of ethnography/research: readers, informants, the public) can be brought into the process of crafting and meaningfully manipulating research/ethnographic materials

slider --> to “mix” and “remix” (ethnographic) data
to fit their contingencies
to leave open agendas that might be brought to the data
to create an infrastructure that allows to experience first-hand the theoretical constructs one uses in text

https://ethnocharrette.wordpress.com/
#research group workshop reading, charrette method
take Nicholas Shapiro's “Attuning to the Chemosphere”

•to redesign pedagogical practices for training researchers
•collaborative initiatives in which research designs could be analyzed, experimented with, and transformed.


...................................

“may all your problems be technical” (said by Jim Gray oft-quoted U.S. computer scientist)
=/= understanding what to build, for whom, for what purposes, and how their usage of the technologies will evolve over time

...................................

many artists today work within the regime of the stereotype, manipulating mass-cultural imagery ==> hidden ideological agendas are exposed [supposedly]
(artist's view:) “stereotype = something arbitrarily imposed upon the social field” therefore something relatively easy to depose [<-- they can't be more wronge]
(artist's self-grandious fantasy is that) “they pose a threat to those in power”

juxtapose
superimpose
interpose
==>
expose
oppose
depose

an artist like Kruger --> gesture (and not action) --Owens--> *stereotype's transformation of action into gesture*

positionality inscribed in language by the personal pronouns ‘I/we’ and ‘you’ --> manifesting the subject positions of partners in a conversation
(the third-person pronoun is a ‘non-person’ designating an objective existence, and not a subject position)

-linguistic class of deixis: here, now, this, that [--> carnal discourse]
-linguistic class of deictic: I, you [--> directly to the addressee: acquires body, weight, gravity]

she addresses ‘me’ ==> double address : oscillate between the personal and the impersonal ~ inclusion & exclusion --> to welcome...

personal pronouns ~-> ‘shifter’ ==allow==> speakers to ***shift from code to message*** (~ from the abstract to the concrete)

(for Barthes:) operation of messages of the mass media: ***to personalize all information, to make every utterance a direct challenge, not directed at the entire mass of readers, but at each reader in particular*** @constantvzw streaming hypothesis
(‘The Fashion System’)

(a too common) artistic strategy: *contradictory construction of the viewing subject by the stereotype*
(a too common) artistic address: *struggle over the control and positioning of the body in political and ideological terms* [--> in which stereotype plays a decisive role @Laura]

(?do you want me to be your)
worshiper
citizen
consumer
producer

(for Foad, and for most contemporary artists:) [*]stereotype: an instrument of subjection, to produce ideological subjects that can be smoothly inserted into existing institutions of government, economy, and sexual identity
“stereotype = to disavow agency”
(Owens on Kruger)

images of the nonproductive body
stereotype of action: worker, rebel --emphasising--> body's institutionalization: factory, family

for Laura, in fascist media regime: ‘the body is dismantled as a locus of practice and reassembled as a discontinuous series of gestures and poses --> “body = semiotic field” ==> *body inscribed into the register of discourse*

[artistic common views:]
(stereotype uses) deterrence, [according to Baudrillard:] dissuasion, promoting passivity, receptivity, inactivity, docile bodies [<-- i challenged this in my master thesis on shyness and passivity in performance art]
stereotype replaces *physical violence* with *semiotic coercion* (--> that is why it is often seen in art the use of direct physical contact to counter that idea)

stereotype --> rhetoric of intimidation --> it poses a threat to the artist --> the artist bears witness to the state of affairs --> signify threat to the audience --> gesture (regarded as threat) ~ *apotrope* (a gesture performed with the express purpose of intimidating the enemy into submission, #omen, apotropaic, averting the evil eye, to turn away harm, --> mithridatic) --> artwork is thus engineered to produce an immediate subjection, (by reiterating a stereotype) imprint the stereotype directly on the viewer's imagination + (through juxtaposition) force us to decode them

(Foucault's notion of) power = effective immobilization of the social body

(the idea of) woman immobilized (turned to stone) by the power of the gaze

*medusa* had the power to turn to stone all who came within her purview (...is she the one who can turn stone back to person?)
to petrify, a producer of figures

Owens's medusa myth: proto-photographic
Perseus makes the medusa's relationship with her image indexical (and not simply iconic) ==> serve as the support for a long chain of discursive and figurative events... --violence--> the *specular ruse* ['medusa effect'] whereby medusa is inserted into discourse --> she becomes an object of depiction, narration, analysis (she will never get a chance to tell her side of the story)

medusa in:
•Perseus: (in Ovid) turn power into vulnerability and vulnerability into power
•Freud: (in Das Medusenhaupt) displaced representation of female genitalia, as a fetish, an emblem of castration, girl's realization of her own ‘castration’ <== “to decapitate = to castrate”
•Helene Cixous: (in The Laugh of the medusa) as apotrope: “we are going to show them [prists] our sexts”
•Haraway: (in Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene) the lady of the beasts is a potent (apotrope?) --> “dashing the twenty-first-century ships of the heroes [motherless mind children] on a living coral reef”, chthonic powers in Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds and beyond
•Owens:

Kruger as a model of artist is like Perseus in medusa myth

Lacan's imaginary order: a dual relationship (symmetric & immediate opposite) between consciousness and its other (in the play of reflection in the mirror)

ego: imaginary construct by the capture of the image (in the mirror)
see [...]