»More-than-ethnographic probes«: a new partnership with the interdisciplinary community Milieux Institute (Concordia)

April 2023 - Cluster Member Maxime Le Calvé  traveled to Montréal for a short research and teaching stay at the Milieux Biolab and the Milieux Speculative Life Cluster at Concordia University. He was invited by Prof. Alice Jarry, an assistant professor of Design and Computation Arts (Concordia University, Montréal) who holds the Concordia University Research Chair in Critical Practices in Materials and Materiality.

Together, they conducted the workshop »More-Than-Ethnographic Probes.« This workshop was a fieldwork and a platform for the development of collaborative sketching, writing, and documentation methods. Exploring how to attend to more-than-human collectivities at different scales, from the built environment to cellular activity, the workshop was designed as an inventive anthropological design inquiry within the heavily mediated sense worlds of performative and situated spatial practices, bio-design, HCI, and Medical Imagery. »More-than-ethnographic Probes« invited participants to contribute to an account of scientific cultures of microscopy and XR visualization techniques that pays respect to their embodied experience. The making process was shaped by hands-on conversations through cultural probing: we concocted, in short sessions, playful devices to render and further explore our observations and chats in different labs and residency spaces.

We got hands-on with two other groups at Concordia: the Performative Urbanism Lab for Spatial of Social, and Scenographic Experimentation of the theater scholar Dr. Shauna Janssen and the Applied Perception Lab of the brain visualization researcher Dr. Marta Kersten-Oertel.

The workshop was followed by a roundtable panel at the Uncommon Senses Conference at Concordia on May 4th 2023. Alice and Shauna are both visiting professors and associated members at the cluster in 2023-2024.