Multimedia Anthropology Lab
The UCL Multimedia Anthropology Lab (UCL MAL) is a student-led research network aimed at developing innovative methods for anthropological practice, forging new forms of collaboration and disrupting existing models of thought. We experiment with mediums such as sound, film, VR/360 video, conferencing, graphic novels, drawing, sculpture, and performance to explore how they can contribute towards alternative forms of anthropological thinking. UCL MAL has organised exhibitions both on and offline, working with organisations including the Wrong Biennale, the British Museum, the Association of Social Anthropology, Modern Art Oxford and the Tate Exchange at Tate Modern. MAL also hosts events and conferences through the UCL Department of Anthropology. Keep up to date here and through our Instagram.
/// I CAN'T BELIEVE IT'S NOT REALITY ///
Panel Discussion with Rafael Schacter
Friday 6th March 2020 | 6PM - 8PM | Room 106 | Roberts Building | UCL Engineering
UCL MAL invites you to join us for an evening panel discussion presenting an anthropological approach to understanding computer vision, simulation, and digital curation techniques as crucial forces that delineate aesthetic value and truth in the post-digital era. Featuring three different curatorial projects from the 2019-2020 Wrong Biennale—Off Site Project, Digital Arts Residency, and Specter World—moderated by UCL Anthropology of Art professor Rafael Schacter, this conversation will inform on major currents in digital creative spaces and their relationship to wider visual cultural movements
link
//THE PORTAL WILL OPEN// MAL @ THE SLADE RESEARCH CENTRE
Thursday 5th March 2020 | 6PM | Slade Research Centre
UCL MAL presents a residency at the Slade Research Centre, exploring ideas around futurisms, thresholds, liminality and displacement. Our ambition is to transform the Slade Research Centre into a portal for exchange between cultural, cosmological and disciplinary points of view. This will take place through experimental workshops and presentations that focus on sound, VR, holography, live collaboration and spaces of social intimacy. In addition we will host an open session of our ongoing reading group ‘Anthropocene Futures’, and a public event built on MAL’s successful series of seminars (which have provided a platform for artists and academics to consider themes such as curating the digital, sonic ethnography, immersive alterity and sensory storytelling).
/// SPECULATIVE IMMERSION /// MULTIMEDIA ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE ANTHROPOCENE
Friday 7th June 2019 | 6PM - 9PM | UCL Main Quad Popup 101 | UCL Festival of Culture| Drinks Reception
This immersive exhibition presents contemporary research on ecological crisis and human futures, in an experimental collaboration by UCL’s Multimedia Anthropology Lab. Over the course of the evening, immersive technologies, visual projections and textured soundscapes will present multiple narratives of the Anthropocene - the geological epoch in which we live. We will consider the diverse relationships between humans and their environments, and the multiple ways these relationships are understood as they transform. Bringing together interdisciplinary works conducted by anthropologists, artists, and sound designers, this event draws on immersive spatial audio, projection mapping, and VR to take us through the shifting ecologies of our times, while inviting us to speculate on alternative futures.
/// TRANSLATING FUTURES /// TECHNOLOGIES OF CAPTURE AND PERSPECTIVE EXCHANGE
Thursday 24th September 2019 | 4:30PM - 5:30PM | TATE Exchange | Hyphen-Labs | Blavatnik Building | TATE Modern
The Multimedia Anthropology Lab present at the TATE Exchange for a seminar/workshop examining technologies of capture and perspective exchange. What kind of futures are encoded in / made possible through technologies of immersion?
MAYA HOPE CHALDECOTT | SOPHIE MEI BIRKIN | HERMIONE SPRIGGS | DEBORAH TCHOUDJINOFF | RAFFAELLA FRYER-MOREIRA.
/// MULTIMEDIA ANTHROPOLOGY NOW ///
Multimedia Anthropology Now draws together anthropologists and artists from around the world in an exhibition of experimental multimedia research. Featuring sixteen different works, Multimedia Anthropology Now creatively explores the role that non-textual methods—such as film, sound, 360 video, projection mapping, drawing and graphic ethnography—can play in contemporary academic practice. Multimedia Anthropology Now tests the limits of everyday media by bringing together cross-disciplinary works that break down institutional elitism to present themselves to anyone, anywhere in the form of a publicly available webpage.