Micro Phenomenology Crash Course. Practical Tips and Tricks for Fieldwork with First-Person Experience

Maxime Le Calvé February 10, 2024

As the latecomers entered the room of the workshop that morning at the cluster “Matters of Activity”, they encountered yet another head-scratching scene. In small groups, the participants were silently enjoying some collaborative stone gardening. Kat Heimann, our instructor from Aarhus University, was moving deftly from table to table, making sure we were diving into her “stoning game,” as she called it. After a little while, she asked our little group: what was a moment that especially surprised you?

The Micro-Phenomenology Crash Course from Feb 7 to 9, 2024 focused on collecting lived experiences through a specific interview method. Organized by Zeynep Akbal and myself at MoA, the workshop featured the exploration of two VR pieces from the Stretching Senses School project: “Subterranean Matters” and the “Virtual Sensing Knife.” Read the full ethnographic story there.

Rubbing as fieldwork: Workshop on site writing with technologies of captures, with MELT, Shauna Janssen and the Speculative Realities Lab at Kunstgewerbemuseum

Maxime Le Calvé December 18, 2023

Last week, in collaboration with the SpecLab, I had the privilege of inviting MELT (Ren Loren Britton + Iz Paehr) and Shauna Janssen from Concordia University for a three-day workshop/gathering at the Kunstgewerbemuseum, with Claudia Banz as our host. The vibrant group of participants and the museum's cosy atmosphere created a splendid contrast against its spacious and brutalist architecture.
Ren and Iz led the morning sessions, while Shauna unfortunately had to remain at home. However, her insights on “Site Writing” continued to resonate with us throughout the workshop. In the afternoons, the SpecLab team presented multiple resources related to our ongoing research on brain data navigation at Charité. The focal point of this presentation was the early-stage prototype itself, which can be seen in the image above, as neuroscientist Melina Engelhardt interacts with the data.

MELT introduced us to their tools, such as the Collective Conditions, an exercise called "Warming Up to Theory," in which we danced several texts that they had selected, and the "Rituals Against Barriers."

On the first day, we used "frottage" to connect with the area around us. Inspired by Shauna's guidance, we continued with "frottage" and rubbings using technologies like Lidar and photogrammetry scanning apps. This allowed us to rub objects that are usually kept behind glass, like those in display cases. We imported these rubbings into mixed reality glasses and continued rubbing with them.
On the second day, after speaking with neurosurgeon Thomas Picht and our colleagues from the Image Guidance Lab at Charité, we started thinking about brain data and our neurosurgical case study in terms of rubbing. How can we effectively rub with the spatial information to better understand it? We had a productive and relaxing time, and we're eagerly anticipating our next workshops at the Kunstgewerbemuseum. We'll be exploring how to engage visitors with the material processes and the enjoyable work of craft people through immersive installations and score. Stay tuned for more on the "Quasi-Makers" series event at KGM.

Lin taking a photo of her rubbings with Claudia and Ren at the workshop table — Claudia, Lin & Ren enjoying the results of the rubbing during the final public workshop session on the Friday afternoon.

Neuroscientists Melina Engelhardt and Robert Schenk grasping for brain tracts in our prototype at KGM, assisted by creative coder Warja Rybakova ©Maxime Le Calvé

The visiting scholar as ethnographer: fieldwork at the University of Oxford

Maxime Le Calvé November 30, 2023

Fieldworking art-science: a tour of the “Yet, it moves!” exhibition at Copenhagen Contemporary with EER

Maxime Le Calvé June 26, 2023

Two weeks ago, I was invited in Copenhagen by the EER project (Experimenting, Experiencing, Reflecting; Olafur Eliasson Studio + Interacting Mind Center at Aarhus University) to conduct a graphic ethnographic intervention at an idea-seeding experimental workshop. Our stay there started with a tour of the newly opened “Yet, it moves!” exhibition at Copenhagen Contemporary, an ambitious art-science project that a number of EER members helped develop, curated by fantastic curator Irene Campolmi, featuring the work of the fabulous Helene Nymann, and the wizard anthropologist Joe Dumit working his good spells in the background.

In a low-key synchronicity event prefiguring some of the motion-driven mystics of the afternoon’s theme, I bumped into my new colleagues on the bus to the exhibition after a difficult train trip. The exhibition space opened recently at an ancient shipyard at the end of the bus lines. Crowds were converging there for CopenHell, a festival for heavy metal lovers. Curator Irene Campolmi opened with a line by Galileo, using a famous sentence of his as a lever, catapulting us instantly to speed: “The earth is in the center of the universe, and yet it moves!” The show brings the visitors to an estranging encounter with the perception worlds of modern science, stretching from the cosmos to the brain and back. At the tip of the artists’ fingers, science data and imaginations of matter commit with each other into cosmic assemblages. They all usher us onto a moving map of what we are in their various ways. The movement of the world – and us in it – becomes the foundation of purpose and cause, cutting together apart the lab and the studio. On the left of the sketch, one can see the piece Helene Nymann created for the show: a sculpture on a pink podium adorned with a QR code etched on brass; a video, and an inquiring web device. That work wants the visitors to remember what to remember. Their remembrances are then located on the “carte de tendre.”

There is a heavy orb in the lobby that moves smoothly. Try and set it in motion: the model of the world becomes an empty form that takes meaning only through the dynamic flows of perspective it enables. “Try to get the orb or yourself moving – through movement, you might discover new knowledge.” The pulsations inside us are brought in direct continuity with the vibrance of the universe. Dorte reaches for the binoculars and sets her gaze in motion – a shivering focus can bring things to dance again.

Datastreams flood through us in the ultra-high-definition audio-video installation of Ryoji Ikeda. The piece Dataverse is displayed in a huge room on three panes, three acts of a spacetime opera shown simultaneously with bombastic data sound triggering macroscopic unfoldings of picture matters throughout cosmos bodies. The feeling of awe turned us momentaneously into a Wagnerian audience process, sitting on the hard floor in the dark. A few members of EER, more inclined to keep moving, probed the work very close up, meeting with the pixels and disrupting the illusion.

The next piece was also monumental as a projection of monumental proportions. It showed us the inside of a glacier’s “throat” shortly before its collapse. Jakob Kudsk Steensen scanned the mighty being and presents video footage, points, and meshes, juxtaposing them into an intricate inner landscape. “My parents were mountaineers,” a subtitle told us as the subwoofers hummed deep subglacial tones. Everything else was dark save for the doorstep to the next enlightening experience.

The next piece was the much expected carte de tendre “Futur Continuous” video poetic piece of Helene Nymann. “Maybe the future is a memory you can remember, something you don’t want to be repeated.” “It’s time to draw a new map.” Situating us into an emotion landscape was an innovation of a female writer in the 17th century: together with friends, they invented a way to place the itinerary of a love journey. Helene crops out the map with a generative AI to remember the future of our human voyage. She stages herself and others into a dark loving affair with our grim perspectives and what we will leave ahead of us. What we will remember of the future. “Try to remember how your memory will make the future feel.”

The last piece of the show is a thinking bowl. The “Brain Pond” by Jenna Sutela is inviting the visitors to touch its rims and the water is keeps. A microphone picks the sound of it, mixed with sounds of prior interactions and whales and cosmos. The sound is not as “live” as the intrically written concept announces it, which makes the piece if yet interactive perhaps more uniformoulsy evocative of cosmic ripples and neural sparks. Kids love to touch its ears, Irene tells us, and we touched and tried to get the heavy brass bowl to sing.

“Yet, it moves!” points at the rich experiential world of science. Movement is one of the ways It is be deeply erroneous to think science worlds as disenchanted and waiting for the intervention of the artist or humanity scholar to reenchant them, as Natasha Myers points out in her ethnographic notes on how biologists encounter plant-sensing (2015). Much like the popular physics writing on quantum in the 1980s and 1990s, this exhibition pays attention to the emergence of new contemporary languages to articulate mystic experiences between science and art, into slightly grim future that still believe in human potential.

EER project

Yet, it moves!

Writing Fieldwork with Chat-GPT: An Ethnographic Report "in the style of Anton Chekhov"

Maxime Le Calvé June 12, 2023

“I saw everything, so it is not a question of what I saw, but how I saw.” Anton Chekhov, Letter to Alexei Suvorin, SS Baikal, Tartar Strait,September 11, 1890 (2008)

I present here a series of graphic field notes drawn on site during the 'Driving the Human' event at the Cluster of Excellence “Matters of Activity” on May 10, 2023, along with ethnographic text co-written with ChatGPT. One of my favorite books on ethnographic writing practice suggests that the best companion for writing ethnography would be Anton Chekhov, who in his pioneering work on Sakhalin Island intended to write with “scientific and literary purposes in mind”. (Narayan 2012 : 3) Using an AI and prompting it to write 'in the style of Anton Chekhov' made me feel like I was partnering up with the great playwright —or almost so. Sometimes I had to edit a lot, sometimes I had to let in a few sentences that clearly showed that a non-human intelligence was at work. Chekhov would approve this mode of sketching things up, as shows this excerpt from a letter to his brother in 1899: “Don’t smooth out the rough edges, don’t polish; be clumsy and bold. Brevity is the sister of talent.”(2008) If the accidental lyricism of the IA works well with this motto, it also plays around a current limit that the Russian writer also recognized as his: As he wrote to a friend in another letter dating from 1897, uncannily relating to the state of ChatGPT at the moment: “My sins are unintentional because, as I am only now beginning to understand, I do not yet know how to write longer pieces.”(2008) Together with my drawings, the "taste of the hand" and the flavor of the AI combine to create — I hope— a reading experience as joyful as its making.

Read the essay there: https://stretchingmaterialities.pubpub.org/pub/ds0pgumg

Conducting a 3D sketching workshop as fieldwork: Drawing and telling neuroanatomical landmarks spatially at the Speculative Realities Lab, Charité Berlin

Maxime Le Calvé April 23, 2023

How does the sense of space, and the haptic creativity associated with it, affect the teaching of anatomical knowledge? How can current practices be explored by shifting them to other techniques? In this first workshop of the SpecLab, together with HCI scholar Paulina Greta Stefanovic and neurosurgeon Thomas Picht, we challenged a group of participants from neurology, neuroscience, computer science, clinical linguistics, design and art to tell us "anatomical stories" using a 3D sketching tool. After a short introduction to the research project and a short tutorial, the participants jumped into the 3D sketching action using the free program Gravity Sketch.

The technological infrastructure was difficult to deal with at first, but with some inventive ways of overcoming a problematic internet connection, we were able to have participants share virtual rooms while moving around the same physical space. The new SpecLab space is a perfect playground for collaborative 3D sketching interactions. We hope to keep it as empty and spacious as possible. With the pass-through technology of the newer standalone headsets, we didn't have to worry about collisions. This gave the typical virtual reality technology a hint of what augmented reality might look like: the user is no longer alone, secluded in the headset. A wide range of shapes and materials were tried out that day, from arterial visualisations to images of neural forests and cartoon characters.

The last part of the workshop was a "hot seat" situation without a seat: several participants volunteered to tell us the stories they had created in the 3D sketching tool. Cathy, the first participant who took the floor, started with the sketch she had made: a view of the cortex and a sketch of the hypothalamus. She explained the manipulation she is currently doing in the lab, as part of a team working on the treatment of epilepsy. I then asked her to do it again, this time sketching the story 'live' as she went through the same narrative sequence. After a little hesitation ("it wouldn't be optimal"), she responded beautifully to the challenge and sketched the elements of her demonstration again in real time. That was fun! She seemed quite happy with her performance (despite an obvious preference for a cleaner 3D image that could be imported, she said). It was an exciting first result.

Next up was visual artist Vinh, a student at KHB Weissensee. He began by changing the scale with a majestic gesture: the previous cortex sketch became a small dot in 3D space, and he immediately began drawing a folded piece of paper in the air. "This," he told us enthusiastically, "is how I get students to engage with art in museums". The students start by folding a piece of paper, then draw a part of an image they like in the exhibition and pass it on to another person who continues the drawing without knowing the previous part. Vinh demonstrated how this works by drawing in this mode for a few minutes while talking about his pedagogical work in this context.

This was a very relevant conceptual contribution to the workshop, as we were discussing different ways of making learning processes more engaging through sketching techniques. I personally felt that he was still sketching in 2D - but he started using 3D extruded shapes and then it became really interesting. What if we introduced the use of 3D sketching for museum visits, we asked ourselves in the final discussion.

This shift from flat to spatial was an important theme throughout the session: participants described tricky anatomical structures in the brain that could not be guessed from 2D images (Thomas), or drew spatial representations of neurons from historical sources to illustrate a conversation about degenerative diseases (Wendy).

Some of the participants had to be "put on the spot" to perform in front of the audience. Linda, a student on the UdK Product Design Masters programme, happened to be particularly graphically eloquent with her 3D technique. She first announced an omelette, but seemed to change her mind at the start of the narrative sequence and ended up demonstrating how to cook an egg, sunny side up, "with ketchup". Linda was obviously more familiar with 3D tools: she made an egg with a brush that creates circular shapes, and asked us how to duplicate objects (she ended up sketching every single pan). This humorous final story said a lot about the nice atmosphere that the sketching activity had created in the group: an openness that is not always easy to emulate.

In the final discussion, we reflected on the different modalities of learning through sketching - for example, sketch mapping as a way of learning a cartographic representation by drawing it many times. Sketching can be a way to disrupt the perfectionist glow of the 3D material used in scientific imagery and bring the focus back to the performance itself and the many ways it brings people together.

Special thanks to Milena Burzlaff for the amazing support!

Note to self: on scaling way up ethnographic research into interdisciplinary reflections “beyond the normal procedure”

Maxime Le Calvé April 20, 2023

When my colleague anthropologist Laurence Douny landed a job at the cluster Matters of Activity, she probably didn’t expect her long-time research object on wild in West African silk would ignite the fantastic exhibition project DAOULA | sheen. Joined by Karin Krauthausen and Felix Sattler, team managed to go beyond the anthropological exhibition, beyond the way results are usually presented. They bridged convincingly anthropology, materials science, microbiology, design, cultural theory and curating (and as careful critical scholars, they made sure anthropology also reflected its approach). They brought together, using the exhibition as an adjacenting device, communities of silk weavers, imaging specialists and wordsmiths across continents. As Karin shared with me: “The idea of the exhibition project was to accompany the interdisciplinary research process on African materials and by doing so activate a space of reflection for each discipline to go beyond its normal procedures.” It is the paramount case of an exhibition-as-research that turned right, with engagement from every side, fascinating documentation from local video and audio artists, partnership with the local museum for a show on the spot. Karin again: “Four interview films of the South-African film maker Thabo Thindi and his composition of the film material from Burkina Faso (his ‚director’s cut‘ so to say) are at the center of the exhibition.”

The last months of the show are already upon us, and this tour came across as a deeply matured story on a social aesthetic phenomenon. “In Burkina Faso ›daoula‹ is a term meaning ›sheen‹ or ›charisma.‹” How do these women shine in society while communicating their emotions? How do craftspeople make deal with microbes to get them to dye the clothes? What do biofilms have to do with this traditional process? How can designer translate the work of caterpillars into onsite text sculptures using similar growth algorithms? How to bring the community to share their techniques while shining back on them the importance of endangered traditional everyday arts? Many more questions are asked and answered in this marvellously weaved exposition at Tieranatomisches Theater in Berlin. Sometimes, interdisciplinary is not just wishful thinking, and wisdom comes pouring out of these insightful constellations.

More info on the MoA website

Special thanks for Karin Krauthausen for her comments on a previous version of this text, who made sure that I got it write: this is not an anthropological exhibition. It is much more than that.

Taking a break from/as fieldwork

Maxime Le Calvé March 11, 2023

Fieldwork in the art-science VR scene: Sophie Erlund & the Experimenting, Experiencing, Reflecting group @PSM Gallery

Maxime Le Calvé January 29, 2023

Yesterday at the PSM Gallery in Schöneberg (Berlin), Sophie Erlund was presenting half a day of workshop and presentations around her VR piece Nature is an event that never stops. She has been working on that piece for the last six months, and it will be on display until 25.02.2023. It’s fantastic, definitely worth a trip to this part of the city where a cluster of galleries is established, on the opposite side of the canal from the Neue Nationalgalerie.

The artwork is a collaboration with the EER group, a mixed bunch of scientists and artists interested in playful approaches to inquire into perception. They offer pathways between cognitive science and installation art, using a “French” method to conceive and evaluate these hybrid setups: microphenomenology. The cognitive scientist Katrin Heimann interviewed visitors and presented her first conclusions in the first part of the workshop in text-heavy slides. She invited us to close our eyes as she channeled the experiences “in first-person” that she had collected. In the second part, Karsten Olsen presented his work on “cultural transmission,” the cognitive mechanism that is explored in the piece by Sophie Erlund. How are sketches or colors transformed as they are memorized and transmitted?

Microphenomenology is the child of the philosopher Claire Petitmengin. The method is elaborating on a technique called the “elicitation interview” which was invented by Pierre Vermersch (1994) and further developed in collaboration with Nathalie Depraz and Francisco Varela as a “phenomenological practice” in the book On Becoming Aware: A pragmatics of experiencing (2003). It is a delicate practice, a deep dive of the interviewer and the interviewee into the sensations and thoughts that occurred during a targeted experience. Claire Petitmengin has conducted research in contemplative science for the last 30 years. The method she teaches indeed shares many principles with meditation, evolving self-inquiry into interpersonal approaches. The method came to me in a new light influenced by the work of EER member Joe Dumit: what if we took it as a contact improvisation exploration inside and around a phenomenon? That day, we centered the interpersonal perceptive field on the lived experience of unprepared visitors going through the VR “film” of Sophie Erlund.

The final panel featured the artists Sophie Erlund and Helene Nymann, the neuroscientist, poet, and brain activist Pireeni Sundaralingam, and the anthropologist and cognitive scientist Andreas Roepstorff. It was introduced by Helena Herzberg, the art manager of PSM Gallery. The session was touching on many topics ranging from cognitive flexibility in school kids to funding schemes for art-science endeavors. Excellent both in content and shape, this two-hour conversation strokes a powerful chord. The participants took the context of EER and the production of the VR piece as a start. The focus went quickly to the serious political implication of bringing together in playful ways the knowledge of cognitive neuroscience and that of artists. Challenged by the audience, speakers stated the urgency of encouraging resistance against the pervading rigidity of the educating system, as well as the uncertainty-adverse societal context. Staging and sharing more-than-human perceptions, as Erlund does so masterfully in her VR film, is one of the many ways to champion tender attention to other people's experiences. As the EER member and play scholar Amos Blanton puts it in the end: bringing children and adults into creative exercises brings up the fears of failing and coming short. Yet the moment when they become engaged in the aesthetic activity, these fears dissolve and the joy of tinkering takes over. Hearing these words, I lifted up my head from my iPad for a short moment, reflecting on graphic ethnography and my experience of teaching ethnography through drawing. So much food for thought today, and great insights on how to frame an art-science VR experience. The panel, as well as the other interventions of the day, were documented and will be available soon on https://www.eer.info/

All the info is on the website of the gallery.

Sharing my sketchy fieldnotes on the spot with anthropologist colleague Andreas Roepstorff w/ ©Yoonha Kim, exchanging first-person impressions in embodied way at the end of the day.

Teaching Digital Neurosurgery as Fieldwork: Mixed Reality and 3D sketching at Speculative Realities Lab

Maxime Le Calvé January 29, 2023

At the Digital Neurosurgery seminar led by Prof. Thomas Picht this week and the next, we had the pleasure of hosting a demo by the software editor BrainLab. One of their researchers visited us at the Speculative Realities Lab, bringing along crates of high-tech gear. He presented to the students, and later to the staff, how the mixed reality could play in their Suite. Using Magic Leap AR glasses, a group of seven could explore a brain data set through the Elements neurosurgical planning software suite: a head of a patient with colorful tracks running through the white matter was suddenly floating in space. They multiplied, as students were invited to play around in the room with them. They could manipulate them by poking at them with a virtual laser.

This tool is introduced as a way to plan surgery, yet also as a powerful pedagogic tool for medical students. I could have a look at the questionnaires filled up the next day by the students and they highly appreciated the experience overall, most of them find it a useful addition to the program —an additional modality into the “anatomical intermediality” of medical training (Hallam 2020). The appeal of 3D images is used as a prestigious mark of futurity.

“Students ‘engage in reshaping their experiential world’, learning specialised vocabularies along with ways of seeing and acting that, it is argued, reconstitute persons – whether living patients or dead bodies – as ‘object[s] of medical attention’ ”

— Hallam, 2020, p. 102 quoting Good, 1994, 72-73

In the next room, on the other side of the wall, I was organizing a very rudimentary 3D sketching workshop using the commercially available app Gravity Sketch. The students ended up creating collaboratively a fuzzy scene, with a parrot and a palm tree, and lots of other scribbles.

This was a lot of fun, and curiosity spread as they were exchanging the headset to share what they had created with one another. The students reminisced about the white matter tracts that they had just seen on BrainLab. This same type of eye candy makes the neuroanatomy mixed reality application look so futuristic and appealing. 3D lines become a kind of play dough and the engagement was obviously higher than with the neurosurgical software. We concluded that combining both of these setups, a joyful interaction together with serious neuroanatomical content, could lead us to an even more potent pedagogical experience. During the next session, we explored the visual power in action in the digital image and how they shape medical practices (Burri 2013). We explored the multifarious ambiguities lurking underneath the apparent opposition between the “beauty” of an image and its “objectivity.” The conversation elevated as we went through a strange case: how and why is it that a medical practitioner can call a tumor “beautiful”? It feels like eye candy comes in many brands and many flavors.

Awake Surgery as Fieldwork: snippet from the "Sketching Brains" participant exhibition project at Charité Berlin

Maxime Le Calvé September 26, 2022

Awake surgery has been a hot spot of neurosurgical research and a growing site of interest for journalists and scholars. The idea is simple yet radical. The patient has a tumor that lies close to the “eloquent areas.” Removing this tumor puts at risk their cognitive abilities, in particular those related to speech. Instead of waiting for them to wake up in order to assess potential damage, which may then be irreversible, why not keep them wide awake during the process, and simulate with low-current electricity the effect of potential lesions on the brain? The result is a very atypical surgical situation with a speaking patient, a patient which is aware of what is happening in the room. This calls for a mastery of the atmosphere around the patient, an atmosphere that requires perfectly rounded-up teamwork to even out possible stressful situations. Here is a draft of one of the graphic ethnographic “series,” that I am presenting in the “Sketching Brains” participant exhibition at Charité in Berlin.

That morning as I follow Katharina Faust to the OR, she tells me about the “very big tumour” she will have to expurgate from the patient’s brain. The patient is an artist. The OR is quiet, that particular patient seems quite sedated. Katharina bends over the patient, and with a very soft voice, greets her and asks her how she’s feeling today. Mehmet Tuncer, a junior resident who will be stay in contact with the patient during the whole operation, is already at her side. He has already built a relation of trust with the lady? The sounds are ushed and the movements are quiet.

Three students are in the room this morning: the OR keeps it character of theater and it is very usual to have a small audience for the neurosurgeons at the University Hospital of Charité, which is the leading training center in Germany and in Europe. A few more signatures for Katharina, who seems to be signing papers all day, even a few away from a feat of surgical mastery.

The skull of the patient is held into a metal clasp, between two dented spikes, as in any other neurosurgical intervention. What is usually a routine affair of a few seconds take longer when the patient is awake, as this is one of the least comfortable feature of the intervention: feeling one’s head stuck into a jaw of steel. A decent amount of local anesthetics makes it a bit easier. The instrument is shown to the patient to reduce her anxiety, with a few sympathetic words.

A little electric trimmer buzzes in the hands of Katharina as she clears the space where she will incise the scalp. At the site where the outside world is about to smuggle in, a generous spraying of antiseptic solution is keeping the danger of a bacterial incursion at bay.

The head of the patient is also “registered” for the virtual representations of the screen to match with the actual body. A stereoscopic set of cameras is helping the system keep track of the scene, orienting itself of the bearing of the four balls assembled into a cross. On the three big screens of the OR, the scans show the bulky tumour in dark, dangerously close to the colorful lines hinting at the presence of language tracks pathways in the connective tissues of the white matter.

When the trimming is done, Dr Faust covers the patient’s head with adhesive blue paper protections. Only the site of the craniotomy will be apparent from this side. On the opposite side of the bed, an assemblage of machines has taken over part of the vital functions of the body for the length of the operation.

My tablet is running out of battery. The last image I can sketch is in the middle of the langage mapping: as Katharina is touching the brains with a pair of electrodes, triggering a temporary inactivation at a determined point, Mehmet is showing to the lady a set of images. Every time Mehmet says “anomie,” it means that the word, like “hand” or “cat,” came out wrong from the patient’s mouth. Katharina then duly puts a numbered piece of paper on the area she just probed, and registers it into the machine with a long pointer. Another round of images focuses on actions. This series of linguistic tasks, coming straight from neuroscientific experimental processes, makes it possible to assess if that specific part of the cortex is critical to the speech functions. The lady is getting tired, but the key information is in. The resection can start! It’s a impressive moment which I won’t be able to render today in the graphic form, as my iPad calls it a day. Next operation is two days, later. That’s exciting!

Conference-as-fieldwork: EASA 2022 in Belfast

Maxime Le Calvé July 28, 2022

So happy to be in Belfast for a dip into our fleshy community of scholars! Ethnographers can’t help it, they attend conferences ethnographically. Here is a graphic report.

The ethnographer at work.
Sitting in the corner that will offer the clearest picture is more often than not a deliberate choice.

Got into deep third-order discussions on observation and self-observation and what's coming after that, at the Third Order Observation Lab at #EASA2022 thanks, and very happy to meet the folks of the Sonic Art Research Center. @QUBelfast @EASAinfo @_johndarcy pic.twitter.com/XwPmNxvwmH
— Maxime Le Calvé (@MaximeLeCalv1) July 27, 2022

Teaching-as-Fieldwork: Open Design studio course "Growing Senses"

Maxime Le Calvé June 13, 2022

The Open Design Master students are moving forward on their Laboratory Project, with the common topic of »Growing Senses«. Laboratory Project is the main studio teaching of the third semester of this program between the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Buenos Aires and the Institute for cultural and media studies of Humboldt University. As the mid-term presentations are approaching, I sat with my colleagues designer Frank Bauer and architect Bastian Beyer for a feedback round. Many projects are emerging: we are joining them to design shape-shifting shading devices, protocols for sensing emotional territories, outer heart fountain flows, plant ritual accessories for extra-planetary life, mycelium spatial collaborations, and garden-based divinatory systems.

“In the classroom as in the field, anthropology demands an openness to encounters with the unexpected, a disposition to the moment and its surprises, their unpredictable knocks and occasional gifts.“ (Pandian 2019, 67)

This is a quick graphic report, straight from my fieldnotes.

»About clouds, robots and the sea – thoughts on the aesthetics of metabolic formations, biodiversity and new ecologies in art and design« - Artist Talk with Clemens Winkler, Babette Werner and Anne Duk Hee Jordan, 28.02.22 @TAT

Closing an Exhibition-as-Fieldwork #TAT #StretchingMaterialities

Maxime Le Calvé March 24, 2022

The half-year duration of the research process-based Stretching Materialities exhibition at Tieranatomisches Theater has come to an end. The last weeks were full of events, contrasting with the sluggish covid vibe that has plagued most of the exhibition. The pandemic did not seem to restrain much from the experimentation itself, however. Having a public yet intimate place to work, with opening times and visibility, translated into the strong sentiment of having a hub ready for docking new fast-paced projects, such as the Stretching Senses School, or the multiple performances and talks that bloomed nearing the end of the event. What is an exhibition-as-research? The multifarious experimentations to relate space to objects-in-process is part of what “curation” meant in the first place.

“In the seventeenth century Robert Hooke, we might note, was the Royal Society’s first curator of experiments. (The word ‘‘curator’’ was first used to refer to an officer in charge of a museum collection around the same time as the founding of the Royal Society.) Furthermore, the world’s first university museum – the Ashmolean, which opened its doors in 1683 – was also a venue for the public demonstration of scientific experiments.” (Basu & Macdonald 2007, 2)

Experimenting with space, things, and people, the exhibition is an alchemical lab for the making of atmospheres conducive to astonishment, wonder, and knowledge. Bringing the right colors and the right arrangement together, under the right light, with the right timing, and with the right story, curating is an art and a science, as well as a boundary method where scientific and artistic disciplines can overlap and feed each other. Hosting a successful feast isn’t an easy feat: trial and error are part of the investigative endeavor.

Sound-Performance »Scattered Diffusion« von Mascha Kobylenko, 28.02.22 @TAT — Sound-Performance »Scattered Diffusion« von Mascha Kobylenko & Siamend Darwesh on 28.02.22 at TAT

Was it an exhibition-as-fieldwork or fieldwork-as-exhibition, or just exhibition-as-place-of-work perhaps? Twice during the last week, a team of DJ and VJ had a gig at the center of the exhibition space, with micro sounds and images captured from the environment: the performance »Scattered Diffusion« by Mascha Kobylenko & Siamend Darwesh was a perfect illustration of the concept of the exhibition. A portable microphone and a smartphone with a microscope add-on were handed out to the participants, wirelessly feeding the node-based mixing software of the two artists standing in the middle of the rotunda. The central round sky-light appliance served as a round projection screen for the images of textile, stone, hair, and many other textures explored by curious hands. Mascha was part of the five mediators that were hired to process our unruly research processes and help make them digestible to the visitors. Soon, members of that team came to us with new ideas for participative performances and installations. They participated in stretching the exhibition space and playing around with the boundary conditions of our curatorial experimentations.

Clemens Winkler and Skander Hathroubi around the dust filtering machine from the the lab of Regine Hengge @TAT

The previous week, Clemens and Skander were setting up the ultimate phase of the microbiological air sampling, a microperformative installation to which the visitors contributed with body particles and dust from their own habitats. Among other atmospheric phenomena, including a much-photographed artificial cloud, the “Algorithmic Weathering” installation of Clemens Winkler is demonstrating the permeability of the exhibition space to the outside atmosphere. The captured invisible population of airborne beings would flourish later as a bacterium culture. They will be archived and exhibited again.

Final video documentation of the exhibition *Stretching Materialities,* here the Virtual Sensing Knife and Haptic Hanbok vitrine by Yoonha Kim and Maxime Le Calvé

After a relaxing closing event on March 4, the team met for the last time in the exhibition space to have the final setup documented. It was anticipated that the exhibition would be complete only on the last day. The long maturation of the concepts and their weathering through countless tours and modifications has enriched considerably the flavor and scope of our initial schemes.

“I was born like this”: portrait shot of Natalija Miodragovič in her knitted willow “Haptic Nest”, with Ümit

The professional video artist Ümit worked his magic on our us and our exhibits, shooting “hero” portraits of the curators in the hanboks of Yoonha Kim. “I am a professional, I do everything,” said Natalija as she reluctantly accepted to appear in the video. Acting as being busy on the stage where we have been occupying ourselves for so long didn’t feel so odd: in fact, that felt like a theatrical process coming to fruition, with the “money shots” popping up naturally as they have been rehearsed and performed many times. Exhibition-as-research is a messy method assemblage based on the performative aspect of any science of the real, as John Law would have it.

“Method assemblage, we are learning, needs to be about more than representations. But eitherway – whether we are talking about representations or objects, it becomes clear that truths are not the only arbiters. In an ontological politics we might hope, instead, to interfere, to make some realities realer, others less so. The good of making a difference will live alongside – and sometimes displace – that of enacting truth.” (Law 2004, 67)

As I have learned from co-curating Stretching Materialities, that task boils down to letting the stories we want to tell show us how to tell them, and tell them many times until a robust and faithful one takes hold of the place.

Note to self on performing fieldwork: Vincent Moon's Live Cinema @SomaArtBerlin

Maxime Le Calvé December 3, 2021

For my generation, Vincent Moon is an important image-maker. Part of the Blogothèque team, he was at the forefront of music videos, shooting amazing international bands and solo musicians as they were staying in Paris, while on tour. Shot in intimate settings or while walking in the scenic streets of the French capital, he brought a distinctive craftmanship touch and new freshness to documenting musical artists which immediately seduced the audience of the first social media addiction waves. My wife was born and raised in Valparaiso, Chile, and she has also known the work of Moon since an early age. The video artist started to travel with his camera to capture musical moments in various exotic places, still under the banner of his “take away shows”. This part of his work continues to grow in order and magnitude, as illustrated by the mind-blowing recent collaboration with the Icelandic composer Olafúr Arnalds, “When we are born.”

Vincent Moon is already in another place, however, and he has shifted level over the years. The subsequent period of his work turns to document healing ceremonies and rituals around the world. With his project Petites Planètes, Moon collected an impressive scope of sound, music, and video work, that are available through his label. The quality and the depth of his material would make any visual anthropologist blemish and reach for academic excuses.

Last week in Berlin, Moon presented his material in an audacious performance installation at Soma Art, an underground art space in Wedding.

The artist was VJing his own material, producing a soundtrack to a collage of his now-familiar footage. The exhibition space, with its industrial high ceiling, freshly painted in white, was vast and inviting. Young kids were running around, letting the parents sip red wine and delve into the colorful universe of Moon’s travel. A few cushions, benches, and a colorful carpet were enough to provide a cozy feeling to the audience. The delivery of the performance, quite in tune with the material, was devoid of false pretends. Jumping around like a house DJ, Vincent Moon was visibly feeling at home with his crowd, his pictures, and his soundscapes. This playful and lively way of showing footage of initiation and healing ceremonies came across as an honest manner to convey a creative and spiritual journey and share it with the public. Not a devilish “tour de force”, but a straight-forward “tour du monde” and a simple message of inspiration and creativeness, shedding sunlight through the icy rain of Berlin’s darkest moment of the year.

Fieldwork as stretching senses: "Stretching Materialities" opening at Tieranatomisches Theater

Maxime Le Calvé September 19, 2021

Last week came a big step into our experimental exhibition-as-research: the public opening, which unrolled as a final sprint, a hectic evening, and a sudden relief. Here on the picture our colleague Binru Yang is taking the VR elevator, a transporting epistemic device inspired by the novelist Roahl Dahl (1972) and by the iconic video “The powers of ten” (Charles and Ray Eames, 1977). Wearing our Haptic Hanbok, she is set to explore the “hidden activities of materials and spaces” which can be experienced interactively in a set of 6 different “levels.” The piece that Yoonha Kim and I have curated, researched and produced in collaboration with a fantastic team, is called “Virtual Sensing Knife and Haptic Hanbok.” They consist of a vitrine, a research-process image gallery, a VR experience, a garderobe of silky soft haptic wearables and a performative ceremonial to put them on.

The opening was the first event in presence of our research cluster in a very long time! We had a nice little crowd, quite mixed, of colleagues, friends, families, and members of the public.

Few days before: Christian Stein, architect of the VR elevator, is taking a first try into the Hapit Hanbook. The crew is prepping the prototype: Mohammad Fardin Gholami (macromolecular physicist & electrical engineer), and Yoonha Kim (anthropologist and fashion designer).

Two weeks before: Bringing together the haptic wearable and the VR experience, the sound designer Nico Espinoza developed with us a patch on Puredata which is translating the interaction of the atomic force microscope into a sensuous multimodal experience. What a ride! We will keep developing this piece in the next months, and expand this collaboration between anthropologists and immersive interaction artists in a workshop series, the “stretching senses school.” (Read more on “Virtual Sensing Knife and Haptic Hanbok” in this previous post). The exhibition is open until end of January, come visit us and join the fun at the Tieranatomisches Theater Berlin!

Curating as Fieldwork: "Stretching Materialities" #TATBerlin #MattersOfActivity

Maxime Le Calvé June 26, 2021

Quick report on the first round of installation of the “Stretching Materialities” exhibition at the Tieranatomisches Theater in Berlin, with the Object Space Agency team: Clemens Winkler, Claudia Blümle, Natalija Miodragovič, Yoonha Kim, Nina Samuel, and the assistants Lara Ladik & Marie Trabandt. After many months of preparation (including creating a virtual tour as preliminary fieldwork), the curatorial team is finally on site. Together, we go through the space that has now become strangely familiar, handling ideas that we have been already stretching in many directions. Things fall into place, as we decide how to curate the common vitrine at the entrance. The discussion is easy, the agreement comes with few words, in an atmosphere of trust which testifies of a long process of working up the materials and space together. Here in green, the fruit of our rapid decision process appears: a projector will beam a texture and the title on a backdrop to the vitrine.

Problems are handled one by one as we go through the space, each of us describing again in a few sentences the concepts and practical configurations that were adapted to the rooms in the last couple of weeks. Here the computer scientist and literature scholar Christian shows where the VR goggles station would stand according to his plans — a member of the staff will equip the visitor with the head-mounted displays at the entrance of the rotunda. The architect Natalija anticipates a series of difficulties: that’s the best angle for a picture of the most impressive view of our exhibition, this stand shouldn’t be in the way. An alternative is quickly suggested and adopted.

As we scatter to keep working on our scenes and processes, Natalija draws with her hands in space the shape of the rattan structure that she is currently weaving with her team, for Clemens and Claudia. (Why is neon green so often the color of virtuality? asks Yoonha, looking over my shoulder while I’m drawing this)

With our site-specific installations being actually installed on-site, some surprising effects are showing. Here, the cloud installation of Clemens Winkler can enter into an impressive “post-production style” vibration as the huge membrane of the daylight ceiling appliance is set into vibration. Nina Samuel climbs on the ladder to try it out.

Team Object Space Agency is conferring around the ever stretching concept of the exhibition “Stretching Materialities” — what a performative title! That was all before the two last days, during which the whole process took a leap forward — more coming very soon!

Join the fun on the 29.06.2021! (or see our theatrical 360° soft opening in replay accessible on this page:

https://www.matters-of-activity.de/en/activities/5902/exhibition-stretching-materialities

Fieldwork "Down the Scale": Listening to neurons #Institut für Physik HU Berlin

Maxime Le Calvé June 8, 2021

Friday 28th of May. Yoonha Kim and I head to Adlershof, a suburban campus of the Humboldt University of Berlin which is home to the Institute of Physics. Mohammad Fardin Gholami, our colleague from the cluster Matters of Activity, is happy to show us his working place, in the lab for macromolecular physics of Jürgen P. Rabe. Together we are preparing a VR installation for the exhibition “Stretching Materialities.” The project name of this work is “Virtual Sensing Knife.” It is a speculative simulation of the Sensing Knife — which is itself speculation between physics and neurosurgery.

The Sensing Knife is a project initiated by Prof. Rabe and later expanded by Fardin: the idea is to turn the sensitive probe of an atomic force microscope (AFM) into a neurosurgical tool that would “sense the brain material as it also can cut through it.” In order to further explore this idea and the imaginary that it encompasses, I am developing with a small team a VR installation which is bringing the visitors to encounter brain tissues at the level of the cell, and experience the boundary between zones of different densities (the typical case study in neurosurgery is the ablation of a tumor).

The coming together of a team of anthropologists, designers, and scientists has brought the project to unexpected paths. The aim of today is to “listen to a neuron” with one of the AFMs — an idea that came to Fardin during a visit of the sound designer Nico Espinoza.

Fardin has just received a few samples of HT22 cells from the team of Thomas Picht at the department of neurosurgery of the University Hospital of the Charité. Originally collected from a mouse’s hippocampus, they are multiplying and freely floating within a pinkish solution that nurtures them – whereby healthy cells actually interact and adhere to the Petri dish's inner surface. In this experiment, we are aiming to come to touch and listen, “as if with a stethoscope,” to an individual living neuron. The cells keep on floating, for now, maybe aware of our plans, perhaps already oblivious of their previous form of life and the act of scientific violence that has sent them to swim freely again. In a comment to an earlier draft of this text, Fardin wrote: “they are sure alive, their perception of environment might change as we perturb it with an oscillating probe...that’s exciting for me to think, I like to think that they are aware of mechanical perturbations surrounding them. «

The AFM sits in a box that isolates it acoustically from the outside world. This machine is constituted of two parts: one inverted optical microscope, on the right, makes it possible to adjust and control the action of the AFM, on the left. The AFM stands on three legs above the sample, which is moved underneath. The AFM has been invented in 1986, and the technology is in constant development ever since (see Dufrêne & al. 2017). The device is built around a swappable microcantilever often made of silicon dioxide, probably one of the thinnest, finest, and most sensitive human manufactured measuring artifacts. It is used to scan objects whose size is so minuscule that they are impossible to see with visible light — because the wavelengths of visible light are literally too large to interact with such entities. The originality of this technique is to bring a sensing needle into close contact. In the realm of physics, as Karen Barad reminds us, there isn’t any actual “touch” but only force fields: “The reason the desk feels solid, or the cat’s coat feels soft, or we can (even) hold coffee cups and one another’s hands, is an effect of electromagnetic repulsion. All we really ever feel is the electromagnetic force, not the other whose touch we seek. (…) Electromagnetic repulsion: negatively charged particles communicating at a distance push each other away.” (2012, 209)

Rotating knobs, Fardin is controlling the position of the tip of the cantilever on the microscope. The first generations of AFM were actually probing the surface of the materials by scanning and touching them. “We were destroying a lot of what we were touching” – the voice of Prof. Rabe resonates in my head as I am writing these lines. He has presented several times already this technology to the team and told us a few stories that link him, his lab, corporations, and some lucky students who became millionaires by developing the next generations of these costly machines. After destroying many of their objects of study, the physicists adjusted the mode of operation of the machine: the AFM now conducts its scan by hovering directly above the material, rather than touching them, feeling the repulsion and attraction fields and figuring out the resistance and elasticity. The cantilever oscillates and the scanning is effectively produced by figuring out the perturbation of this baseline frequency. However, the researchers also used it to manipulate protein single ribbons, “blow” circular protein into perfect loops or carve their initials on the surface of cells. This is how Jürgen Rabe came up with the idea of using it as a blade to perform surgery at the level of the cell — a surgical cut which would not harm the organism but only elegantly separate matter and let it bind and cohere again almost immediately together through its inherent activity (see collective article 2021 on the “informed cut”). Of course, the professor is perfectly aware that this is an overly ambitious project, and he sets it into the longer-term using a grand historical backdrop: “it took 15 years for the American to land on the moon”, he says with a smile when someone raises the question of the feasibility of this project.

Meanwhile, Fardin is observing the cells within the pinkish solution – a few drops of the pink solution were within a plastic Petri dish containing the cells. Fardin points to a grid with a red point on the screen: the red point isn’t centered and keeps moving erratically — the vibration frequency of the cantilever is picked up using the reflection of a laser, and the red point indicates the alignment of the laser with the photodiode (sensor to detect the reflected laser). The restless motion signifies that there is a micro perturbation impacting the reading of the movements of the cantilever. He checks out the scene directly using the optical microscope: “That cell is hanging to the cantilever!” he says, showing us the culprit. Joining to his words his whole body, he mimicks the clinging as if he was hanging his body to a bar (or a cliff). His understanding of the situation is embodied, he is entering into correspondence with both the AFM and the cell by propelling himself onto the microscopic stage.

As Natasha Myers has shown in her book Rendering Life Molecular (2015), “molecular modelers’ responsive bodies are attuned to subtle molecular forces and affinities; they hitch rides on the molecular movements they model and allow these intricate forms to inflect their gestures and affects.” (Myers and Dumit 2011, 240) A leading brand of AFM has chosen for name “Nanosurf”: that name brings me to picture the macromolecular physicists and AFM operators riding the matters’ wave as they scan their reliefs, sliding on top of magnetic force fields.

Like a blind person with a stick, the researcher is probing the material which lies beyond the scope of their perception, their senses augmented by information inputs that can take multiple shapes — 2D or 3D visualizations. Their prosthetic crystalline fingers, sensing matter down the scale, are sometimes portrayed as submarines sounding the ocean’s floor. The perceptive body of the researchers goes down the scale with their instruments, with their hearts and souls: “Modelers transduce these affects through their body-work and propagate these gestures through performative articulations that excite others into action.” (Myers and Dumit 2011, 241)

The company MicroMotion, one of the manufacturers of the cantilevers, has used the submarine as a key visual on its promotional material sent in the expensive boxes of cantilevers (“The content of this box costs 4.500 euros”, as a label reminds the lab visitors in bold characters on a transparent box the size of an old Nintendo game cartridge). One of these posters was adorning the wall of the lab on my previous visit. The imaginary of the immersion “down the scale”, as the title has it, brings back the dreams of the 19th-century explorers and their taxonomic enterprises, the discovery of unknown territories: “you never know what you might catch”. Moreover, it points again in the direction of the immersion of the experimenter into a fluid medium that they're experiencing through their sensory immersion, sounding the bottom floor of matter. Calling it a practical “pun", Helmreich reflects on the etymology of the verb “to sound”: “sound as fathoming has its etymological moorings in the Old English sund, "sea," whereas sound as vibration reaches back to Old English swinn, "melody”. (2007, 624)

©MoA & Itaru Yasuda, Virtual Sensing Knife, excerpt from research process

Not unlike Stefan Helmreich in his astonishingly immersive text “An anthropologist underwater” (ibid.), I have been dreaming with a small team of transposing the machinic sensorial immersion of AFM into a VR installation. “How have underwater soundscapes come into audibility for humans? Devices that permit listening across different media-from water over into air environments (like the inside of the sub)-are key,” writes Helmreich (ibid. 624). In the project "Virtual Sensing Knife”, Fardin, Yoonha, and I are working with a sound designer and an interaction programmer to produce a simulation of Prof. Rabe’s vision for a knife that senses and cuts, down at the level of the cell. This multimodal anthropological project proceeds as an inventive and iterative ’sounding‘ of the potential intra-actions between physics, design, and neurosurgery. We are exploring techno-poetic paths to relate to the more-and-less-human status of neuronal tissues. That endeavor broadly encompasses Helmreich’s “immersive soundscape, submarine cyborg and transductive ethnography”. “Each group of neurons, any cut or isolated circuit can be thought of as a subject with relation to the rest” (Dumit 2006, see also 2014) — this immersive field trip may provide an understanding of the profoundly alien agency of the neuron: The neuron is both a figure of the convertibility of humans and machines and an illustration of the hypo-subject embedded into the microbiome context (see Helmreich 2015).

Here is a verbatim of my oral attempt to explicit that prototype and our research project during a presentation last week at the cluster:

“This is the prototype we have, which is the work of Itaru and Nico. What you’re looking at is the first step of this iterative process. We had to decide what to do first. (…) We decided to first work on just this kind of blob of virtual material. This virtual material would be probed or sounded with a handheld device, which makes it possible to encounter one type of material. The sound that you hear is triggered, modified, and changed by the way you interact with the matter. (…) There is always sound in the background, which is the vibration of the oscilloscope of the sensing knife, which is trying to touch something that is at the bottom of the scale. The crispy noise that you can hear are perturbations, in form of information of the neuron, what is happening. The next step is to create different blobs with different types of sounds, and then of course the exciting part of this working with different materials that are colliding together. Understand what is happening when you have different digital materials that are closely intertwined together and that has a boundary. The idea behind that is to make this invisible boundary sensible and to make it tangible in different ways, not only by touching. (…) But I wanted to hint at this very old text on VR by Michael Heim explaining that VR can be a way to “train and enhance receptivity.” And a strategy to induce a more receptive atmosphere is exactly what we’re working on and having empathy for other beings. We’re developing a way to relate to other entities, non-human entities like the cell of a brain for example. “

I would like to thank Yoonha Kim, Fardin Gholami and Anne Delle for their comments!

Fieldwork at Zoologische Lehrsammlung #StretchingMaterialitiesExhibition #MattersofActivity #HumboldtUniversity

Maxime Le Calvé May 14, 2021

A few days ago, Nina Samuel and I were invited to visit the pedagogical collection of the Zoological Institute at the Humboldt. As a preparation for the exhibition “Stretching Materialities” at TA T, we are conducting fieldwork on the activity of the materials of collection objects, attending to the ways humans try to passify them – and how the materials keep counteracting their efforts. Gerhard Scholtz, who directed the institute for a few decades, and Ines Drescher, a trained biologist who is taking care of the collection since 1999, brought us around and told us the stories of the place. We were also witnessing a passage for the collection, as our cluster colleague John Nyakatura is officially taking over the direction of the collection.

This collection is a “Lehrsammlung”, a pedagogical one. Unlike a research collection, it is an everyday companion to the many people who work and study at the institute of Naturkunde. Huge glass vitrines in the hallway keep the bulk of these objects, which are both exhibited and stored away, always at the visual reach of passers-by. They are supports to tell zoological stories, stories of evolution, reproduction, and anatomy. They document and convey the immense diversity of animal life in its many realms. They express a great variety of the many inventive ways that artists and scientists have been trying to preserve their shape and colors or to copy them at other scales.

Many specimens are kept bottled up into “schnapps glasses,” with preservative liquid keeping the bodies away from oxygen and from the passage of time. Some of the glasses present the same animal dissected in thematic ways, to highlight the nervous system or the digestive one. All glasses are labeled with the Latin name of the species and an inventory number. The first thing that escapes is color, says Gerhard Scholtz. The “schnapps” has to be refilled regularly too, because it escapes as well, however tight the glasses might be. This escaping of color brought me to think of the concept of the fugitive that Trudi Lynn Smith and Kate Hennessy have been working out in the ethnographic collection of British Columbia, which they retrieved from a tour in the archives: “Fugitive objects, for Ann, are the things that cannot be preserved because of their inevitable material deterioration, their obsolescence as techno-logical systems, or their precarity as orphaned or unclassified residents of the archive” (2020, 115). Color photographs turning magenta over the years bear witness of the impossibility of the preservation mission that ethnographic documentation came to be imbued with – which is here mirrored in the zoological collection. Animal diversity and their kaleidoscopic colors are fading away out there too.

The glass contents seem to have least suffered from the passage of time: they become protected from air, from insects, from vibrations, and… from inquisitive hands. Other ways to preserve include various substances that are now considered poisons, and cannot be left laying around into a pedagogical collection. Our hosts tell us many stories related to this or that object. We get to weigh a tooth of an elephant, to observe closely wood carved by castors, get a look at glass or plastic models.

After the presentation of the vitrines, we head to the back room of the collection. I take out my 360° camera to give you a glimpse of the peculiar atmosphere of the place.

This whole space used to be only one vast room, Ines tells us, it was hosting the museum of the Tieranatomisches Institut (the veterinary anatomical institute). It used to have a gallery hanging on its wall. After the war, the Marxist Leninist made this space into their office, divided the space, evacuated the collection, and put up typical East German wallpapers. The pedagogical collection took again possession of the premises after the fall of the communist regime. Poorly funded, the collection and its guardians have been trying their best to maintain the objects into the best possible conditions, fighting the best they can against invisible and mighty enemies such as moth, dust, and clumsy student fingers. According to Smith and Hennessy, the fugitive brings the object into a zone of indeterminacy, between the archival and the unarchival – and here between the pedagogical and the unpedagogical perhaps (ibid.)

The collection entails a huge amount of wall charts, which are still in use despite the hegemony of the PowerPoint presentation. “Some people will show 80 slides in a session. But when you have these on the wall for one hour and a half, you watch them also in moments of inattention. That’s called impregnation learning,” says Gerhard Scholtz. Some of them are printed in color lithographs, others by hand with Indian ink and color pencils. As one can see in the video, several rooms are now full with them, as the team decided to salvage the collection of the Freie Universität Berlin by accepting to store them, showing a dedicated affection to them. An exhibition at the TA T was curated by Gerhard Scholtz a few years ago to show a selection of them (2019, Zoology in Pictures. The Wall Charts of the Zoological Teaching Collection) – many of them have highly decorative value too. “Name a price!”, jokes Gerhard Scholtz. Nina and I wished we could acquire a few but the collections of the university are secured out of the grasp of visitors by their passionate guardians.

However, the minuscule scale of some of the visitors makes the collection difficult to guard. Looking around the collection for testimonies of material activities, Gerhard and Ines fish out a bat whose wings and skin got eaten up by moths. One can now see the cotton filling that replaced the muscles of the creature. Collections are ecologies by themselves, as my colleagues Tiziana Nicoletta likes to remind us, in her ethnographies of the insects at work behind the scene and actually under the floor paneling (2017). The chemicals that used to repel and exterminate them are now forbidden to use, complains Ines. In many boxes, provisions of adhesive moth traps testify of the desperate effort to limit their disastrous scavengings.

Ines shows us another example of the damage made by moth to the specimen. However, she confides that the main decaying force to this collection remains human: the many generations of students who have handled the samples keep flowing in and out of the institution. The “digital natives” may not understand the value of these analog knowledge sources of this fragile collection: “I want to do genetics anyways”, they would say. One of the most important bodies of objects, which is still in use, is the collection of tissues, which sits in several large wooden cabinets. Each of them encased in glass sheets to be inspected by the microscope, they are highly vulnerable to mistakes in instrument manipulation (see Scholtz 2011). Before we leave, we get a peek at the huge teaching hall, which comes in handy in Covid crisis time, as many students can sit together while respecting the necessary social distance.

Generations of students have used up the collection – they are the reason for its existence and a factor of its decay.

Bonus: did you ever wonder how the Greeks had the idea of the cyclops? It hit Gerhard Scholtz once, as he was doing a research stay at the collection of Paris Natural History Museum.

The nasal cavity of the skull of an elephant can be misinterpreted as a giant eye socket. During the epoch of Homer, it is possible that the skulls of elephants could be found in the Mediterranean. "I wasn't the first to have the idea," he says humbly, there was already a text about this from the beginning of the early 20th century. An imaginary skeleton picture collaging together that animal skull to a human body, a small cardboard with an excerpt of the Odyssee, and an illustration of the cyclops: The huge skull that adorns the hallway stands for the ambiguity of the zoological remnants and the imaginary they trigger. It seems also displaced in time, directly imported from a mythological past of the golden age of a colonial era, into which animals still played an active role in everyday locomotion and real anxiety for the explorer. What's your story, cyclops? Today your name is "nobody."

Fieldwork at home: Kombucha's Mattering Dance

Maxime Le Calvé April 25, 2021

This morning, it’s the first time I am making Kombucha since we have moved to this new apartment in Kreuzberg. While I get the good old routine back on track, I get a podcast running: I’m catching up on the fascinating Lecture Series for an Interdisciplinary Audience hold by our Cluster speaker Peter Fratzl at Humboldt, “Interdependence of Structure and Function in Biological Materials.” The visual insight hits me as I move the big glass mason jar from the top of the cupboard to transfer it into bottles, provoking a stir inside. While Peter replies to a question on cellulose, its structure, and intrinsic activity, the cellulosic material of my Kombucha culture starts dancing before my eyes. Captivated, I immediately bring the jar to the window and start filming it in action.

This is a rare phenomenon. Most of the time, most of the older cellulose tissues remain anchored to the top layers, their fibers intricately and inordinately weaved into the body of the mother. I had to separate again my culture in two jars to get it to thrive again in our new home. When transporting a kombucha culture from one vessel to another, or when starting a new one, part of the colored tissue usually lingers in the bottom of the fluid. However, if these aged tissues get activated again, the resulting carbonation provokes the formations of bubbles, some of which get trapped in the nets of fibers. Captured in the right moment, these bubbles look like the heads of anthropomorphic spirits in dresses of silk. Set in motion by a liquid spire, the tiny figures swing and whirl into a hypnotic dance. Straining my imagination, I can see them holding their etheric hands around the liquid column.

In his seminal text “Nubes cum Figuris”, Dario Gamboni points out the “interpretation of the clouds as a modern paradigm of the artistic perception and creation.” (2009): “The blurry and ambiguous contours of clouds make of them ‘weak forms’ (in the sense of Gestalt psychology) par excellence, all the more as they are subject to constant motion and change. The fact that they appear in the sky predisposes them to be interpreted as the images, the disguises (as in the myth of Ixion and Iuno) or the messengers of heavenly beings.” (2009, 247)

As Carlo Severi theorized, these ambiguous images are traps for the seeing and traps to the thinking: “pièges à voir, pièges à penser.” (2011) The clouds of this soon-to-be-ingested liquid atmosphere are kept standing up, hanging on their bubble pinheads. They appear to me as Asian figures drawn in loose golden ink strokes, as they go in a dignified other-worldly procession.

Kombucha makers are cultivating a certain intimacy with their microbiological partners in the craft. At some point, the velvet clothes of their mothership appeal to them as a friendly and delicate body without organs. Watching their fringes moving in the micro streams can provoke aesthetic emotions akin to that of looking at the clouds of the sky. Like sailors, Kombucha makers use all their senses to decipher the temporal shifts and changes of the bottled-up milieu, in order to navigate the process. This micro performance happens in the midst of the domestic stage – in the chaos of my kitchen on a Sunday morning. One of many weekly rituals to keep the home and its inhabitants’ microbiome ecosystems up and running. It meets in satisfying synchronicity the humdrum of epistemic epiphanies in material science delivered by Peter Fratzl, another ritual entangled with a knowledge ecosystem – “cellulose is the most abundant organic material on the planet,” he says. Kombucha produces one of the purest forms of that material that one can find in nature. The filaments procure to the colony a solid base to share and prosper, as well as fine garments to engage in mattering dances. Using text and video to “transduce” the energy of the dance to you and to “immerse” you in its fluid medium, I’m trying to convey the sort of intimacy which grows through years of practice – and the joy of the sudden insight.

Join our Ferment-Activity Club this Wednesday for a “refresher workshop”!

Poster of the meeting #1 of our fermentation club, following up on the “Shelf Life” workshop.

Highlight from the Kombucha Refresher session: Cluster PI Jörg Niewöhner happily shared with us his mixed feelings regarding his Kombucha brewing practice. With permission of Jörg Niewöhner.