Welcome to Fieldsite 3 of the Assembling Animate Data project, a beta research site and interactive archive that aims to decenter the human focus of anthropologic research by assembling other-than-human subjects and experimenting with digital formats in order to animate the data with a degree of agency and voice.
The image displayed represents a cross-section of time and place, a living archive that creates a framework for continued investigation as well as bringing into focus the interplay of different actors. Located within the image are nodes of engagement. Each node asks a question designed both to interrogate the ethnographic subject and to deconstruct the human bias behind the inquiry. The theoretical explanations for each inquiry are supplemented beneath the image.
The answers to the questions are generated by an algorithm that accesses data designated to the Fieldsite 3 archive. This archive is formed collaboratively by different research actors in addition to the anthropologist such as: sensor-based technologies that take physical readings of the site; literary sources that provide historical data; farmers, foresters and land management employees; geo-biochemists and conservation workers; poets, passers-by, and artists; and techno-conglomerate giants' GIS data. Data is stored using an organizational protocol that prompts contributors to allocate agency to their contributions. An example of this can be given with a soil analysis. The contributor would be required to account for the technologies used to perform the test, the epistemological framework from which the process emerged, the nutrient contents, composition and toxicities become 'actors' or 'forces' rather than 'resources'. In addition, they are given a set of identifying tags such as 'age,' 'health' or 'physical description'. Based on these orientating factors, the algorithm constructs narrative answers from a first-person perspective.
The theoretical grounds for this project are located in a critical post-humanist anthropology aiming to render the plurality of emergence and make visible the onto-epistemological constraints that govern difference that Elizabeth Povinelli calls 'geontopower' (Povinelli, 2016).
It is not enough to turn the focus of the sciences beyond the human. Protocols for engagement must be reimagined and upheld by our practices. Though Fieldsite 3 exists between speculative fiction and concrete action, it is an effort towards changing how we think about our data, our selves, and our publics. It is my attempt to set up a structure for myself that can guide, organize and ontologize my future research.
Fieldsite 3 takes place at the 2016 plantation of The Geboortebos in the Gentbrugse Meersen nature park located southeast of the city of Ghent, nestled between the E17, N9, and R4 freeways. The park itself is part of a citywide initiative to establish more green spaces within the city, and specifically more forest. This plan was developed following a study by the Flemish Nature and Forest Institute that identified a significant lack of ecological diversity. Since then specific funding has been allocated towards projects that seek to enhance urban and periurban green space.
This website has been written in HTML5 and is assisted by the technologies CSS and Javascript. The content is stored on a server located in Brussels, Belgium. It is best experienced in the web browser Firefox.
Close this window and engage the green dots to get started...
This website is a beta research site and interactive archive. Read about it here.
This project has been developed by Mary Elizabeth Hogan for Steven Van Wolputte's course: Ethnographic Fieldwork: Analysis and Communication, Spring Semester, KU Leuven, 2020
xWHAT ARE YOU LISTENING TO?
Input summoned Today at 05:15:03.
Measurement followed impetus from Computer to read Input A for 50 seconds.
The signal-to-noise ratio which measures the desired signal against the level of
background noise reads at 94 dB SPL @ 1 kHz, using the A-weighting method of measuring
sound pressure based on what is perceivable to the human ear.
There is a spectrum of audibility.
#Noise
xWHAT IS YOUR NAME? I am called Wild Cherry
or also Prunus avium sp > plantae > rosales > tree. This is my name as given to me by Linnaeus in 1755 who created binomial
nomenclature taxonomy. With this name I am recognizable to Markets that value me at a current rate of 86.00 EUR /tree .
#recognition
xARE YOU THIRSTY?
The soil today was quite dry, I would benefit from Water.
"Quite dry" = 500, measured on a spectrum from about 200 (very dry) to 2000 (very wet).
#health
xARE YOU HUNGRY?
Today the level of nitrogen in Soil was above the reported average.
Input from spectroradiometer applied by FarmerId:001 on June 20 2020 reading is nitrogen R2 0.91 (p < 0.01) at 403, 470, 687, and 846 nm spectral band width.
Input from Dendrometer indicates an average 0.011 square meters variation per hectare.
#health
xHOW OLD ARE YOU?I was born in October in 2016 when
I was placed in The Earth as a sapling and my roots took hold of Soil.I was also born approximately 2 years earlier when I was planted in Container.
Depending on my current height you can roughly determine my age by
calculating the number of centimeters I grow each year.I have lived approximately four years since the Event of
the Harvest of my seedself from my Parent tree.My life cycle is described as short, ranging from 100-120 years.
#birth
xHOW DO YOU FEEL?
Wind is moving at an average of 10-14 km/h from the south to the southwest.
Currently I feel warm.
[Warm] indicates temperatures between 17 and 20 degrees celcius.
The affecting Sea-level atmospheric pressure reads at a comfortable 1010hPa.
#Phenomenological
xHOW ARE YOU?
Our recent geologic history as told to us by the Depletion of Clay and Sand
and the Hyper-presence of what is described as Waste under our topsoil discloses
a dynamic tale of tillage, extraction, industrial activity and dumping. Bricks
were made until there wasn't enough matter to meet the demands of production.
Topological cavities were filled and covered with organic substances yielding
patterns of micro- relief distinct from the flat marshland meadows of my/our perimeter.
We know that some of us were chosen for inclusion because of our ability to absorb sustenance
and remain rooted where there is unimpressive ground water stores.#Time
xWHAT DO YOU SEE?
These images are produced by Micro Camera which I wear around my trunk, given to me by ResearcheriD:001.
Micro Camera is made of an assemblage of Polycarbonate and Aluminum, and given Power by 5 Volt Lithium Battery.
#reflexivity
xWHERE DO YOU LIVE?
My current geographic location is 51°02'20.5"N 3°47'09.9"E as
described by one form of geographic datum which references vertical and horizontal ellipsoids.
Depending on continental plate motion and diurnal Earth tidal movement in relationship with gravitational
effects between the Moon, Earth and Sun, this position can move as much as 10 cm a year.
This area is catalogued as Gentbrugge (Gent Region > Belgium > Western Europe > Europe). A more localised identifier of our
position is the Gentbrugse Meersen, south of the E17 freeway, east of the N9 and west of the Scheldt river.
I am considered local because at one point birds may have carried me to Europe prior to human civilization.
#autochthony
recognition
NOISE "All that is not information, not redundancy, not form and not restraints—is noise, the only possible source of new patterns." Gregory Bateson, Steps to an ecology of mind, 1972
How do we render visible those marginalized by hegemonic orders? Anthropologists must attend and construct their methodologies around a tenant of reflexivity that asks: from where am I speaking and with whom? While this is an important step to giving voice to the voiceless (Spivak 1988) it rests upon a flawed politics of recognition that tries to understand through a narrow definition of voice. While this may attend to certain margins, the focus on voice or speech limits legibility. If we can move beyond communication and learn to pay "materialized attention" (Povinelli, 2016:59) to other modes of signing we may extend our perception beyond human thinking to objects in the world. Welcoming "noise" as a carrier of meaning may open our ears to new patterns.
RECOGNITION “Rather than rejecting the notion of culture and community altogether, [I] argue, the necessity to recognize that communities are created by arguments of identity, negotiated from different subject positionings and imagined through partial, meroscopic visions.” (Werbner 2002: 22)
What are the regimes of articulation? Ethnographic analysis must depart from the assumption that beings are knowable by different names that overlap and conflict. Their naming, classification and order makes them controllable, and manageable objects of capital. Deconstructing the regimes of articulation allows for new ways of knowing to emerge and to demonstrate the role the sciences have in resisting or reproducing them.
HEALTH The construct of health is purported by Enlightenment-era definitions of the ideal human subject: virile white man. Other "deviant" subjectivities continue to be subjected to this index which frames health on a spectrum of vitality between birth and destruction. This idea of health is related to a biontological understanding of life (bios) as distinct from matter (geos) and thus in opposition to non-being, or death.
BIRTH "...some geologists have long thought that although rocks cannot exactly die and definitely cannot be murdered, they do come into existence. Indeed, their origins are the basis of rock classification. Igneous rocks are made up of a small range of crystalline minerals formed from the molten interior of the planet. Most rocks, however, are sedimentary: they are composed as water movies around composite pieces of eroded igneous material, carbonated animals and plat material, and siliceous bits of marine microfauna, and this composites are slowly cemented together by gravity." (Povinelli, 2016: 43)
The concept of "birth" should be understood as an enclosure of "life" by bios. How might "life" be reconceptualized to include other-than-human and non-life subjects? How can we scale the event of birth to include moments of composition that doesn't exist on a human timescale.
AUTOCHTHONY The methodological and analytic practice of anthropology must actively work to oppose methodological nationalism understood as an analytic perspective applied by the human and social sciences that naturalizes nations as a method for dividing groups, governing and identifying difference, and controlling mobility (Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2002). Understanding the historical precedent of binding concepts and identities within geopolitical borders allows the researcher to account for the plurality and co-emergence of existence.
REFLEXIVITY How do anthropological subjects return the gaze? Grounding the research in a postcolonial epistemology makes space for a reflexive relationship understood as co-constructed. The anthropologist must return the gaze to herself and her techno-scientific collaborators.
TIME Opening the research site to other-than-human time scales exercises an important shift in tense wherein the quasi events that "never punctures the event horizon" (Povinelli, 2016: 21) are articulated and their affect registered.
RESEARCHER ID:001
Mary Elizabeth Hogan BE / USA Master's student of Cultural & Social Anthropology KU Leuven Contact
NOTES
Bateson, G. (1985). Steps to an ecology of mind (13th print. ed., Ballantine books). New York (N.Y.): Ballantine.
Povinelli, EA (2016) Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke
University Press.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Inter- pretation of Culture, edited by C. Nelson and L. Grossberg, 271–313. Chicago:
Werbner, Pnina. 2002. The place which is diaspora: citizenship, religion and gender in the making of chaordic transnationalism. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 28(1):119–33. University of Illinois Press, 1988.
Wimmer, A., & Glick Schiller, N. (2002). Methodological Nationalism and Beyond: Nation-State Building, Migration and the Social Sciences. Global Networks: A Journal of Transnational Affairs, 2 (4). https://doi.org/10.1111/1471-0374.00043