Virtual Otherwise Conference Node

VIRTUAL OTHERWISE

The Virtual Otherwise Conference — a collaboration between the Society for Visual Anthropology (SVA) and the Society for Cultural Anthropology (SCA) — is right around the corner! Mark your schedule for the conference and its embedded film festival. Join us at the Concordia Ethnography Lab on June 2 for eight hours of streaming of multimodal panels and films.

The conference organizers seek to engage questions at the heart of anthropology's relationship to the virtual: What promises and possibilities do virtual spaces, practices, and technologies hold out in everyday social worlds? Where, when, and how do people encounter the limits of virtualization, and with what intimate and collective political forms do they challenge its violence?

How can ethnographic practice across a range of mediums — text, film, photography, audio, and digital platforms — enable us to illuminate better the questions of connection, surveillance, access, failure and survival that virtual spaces open up?

JUNE 2 HIGHLIGHTS

Noon: Keynote speaker Constanza Piña Pardo

Visual artist, dancer and researcher, focused on experimentation with electronic media, free technologies and DIWO methodologies. Her artistic proposals are presented in various formats integrating dance, installation, sound performance and social practices. Her work explores noise as a sound, political and cultural phenomenon. She reflects on the role of machines in our culture and the human/non-human technological units, questioning the academy, capitalism, anthropocentrism and techno-heteropatriarchy as opposition to open knowledge, autonomy and enhancement of technical manual work.

Interested in recycling, hardware hacking, soft-circuits, DIY Antennas, handicrafts synths, ancestral technologies and electronic wizardry, she generates her sound project Corazón de Robota (She-Robot Heart) with synthesizers DIY, where she explores the field of audible and inaudible frequencies as physical perceptions, vibrations as cosmic messages, noise and arrhythmia.

7 p.m.
Film Festival

Feminist Storytelling: Engaging The Future Through The Past

This session features inventive feminist approaches to storytelling by directors from Panama, Egypt, Turkey, and Iran who are experimenting with form in 16mm film, home videos, VR media adapted to 2d video, and animation. Mobilizing media tools of the future, these makers tell stories of the past, exploring themes of feminist representation, state violence, revolutionary movement, domestic intimacy, and intergenerational trauma.

More information about the films here.

Check the conference website for the entire programming!

REGISTRATION INFORMATION

The whole program for June 2 will be showcased at the Concordia Ethnography Lab Room (EV Building 10.625) from noon to 8 p.m.. However, we highly recommend that everyone registers for the conference as the organizers want to keep track of all the conference attendants. (If you plan to attend the node activities, you don't have to pay, but you are welcome to do so if you wish to contribute).

Follow the conference's quick and easy two-step registration process to register, which will take you to your AAA account (while you do need an American Anthropological Association account to register, you do not need an active membership) and then to Hopin the virtual platform hosting the conference. The conference organizers wanted to make sure everyone could attend, so they made the process simple and created an inclusive pay scale (on the honour system).

Looking forward to contributing to the conference organizers to achieve "the ultimate 2022 miracle: to totally change your mind about online events!"