Sensory Data and Surrealist Ethnography: Introducing the Concept Activation Game

• In Event: Postfoundational Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

Objectives
This paper responds to the post-foundational condition of qualitative research, by returning to the surrealist impulse within ethnography. We discuss a research project working with young artists (under 19) in an art gallery in the UK, studying the relationship between art, pedagogy, and sensation. We treated the gallery as a space for experimenting with the relational and pedagogical capacities of art, mobilizing sensor technologies as part of a surrealist experiment in ethnographic data collection.

Theoretical framework
Through its periodic encounters with surrealism, ethnography has found techniques for engaging with sensation, affect and more-than-human relations that exceed interpretation and rationality. Schwanhäußer and Wellgraf (2015) identify ethnographic surrealism as a ‘minor’ line in anthropology, referring to the surrealist impulse as a ‘rogue tradition’ with its inception in France in the 1930s, when the boundaries between anthropology and art were not yet consolidated (Antle, 2015; Clifford, 1981). The surrealists’ fascination with inhuman affects, drugs, trance, dreams, ritual magic and ghosts did not preclude a deep interest in science and technology (Braidotti, 2019), and a commitment to a kind of objectivity that sought to bypass the authorial subject, in order to allow thought to manifest itself (Maclure, 2013; Schwanhäuber et al, 2019). We explore surrealist ethnography as a theoretical framework that responds to demands for innovation within qualitative inquiry (St. Pierre, 2017).

Methods
We focus on one surrealist research protocol that speaks to the post-foundational concern with contingency and qualitative data that is pre-personal, pre-individual, pre-subjective, and pre-conceptual. We created a “Concept Activation Game” which included a set of cards with key concepts on one side, and a set of surrealist commands on the flip side, offered as “activations” of the concept. Concepts included affect, sensation, sense, atmosphere, time, attunement and intensity. The game was meant to trouble ideas about stimulus-response in the sensory environment, destabilizing the relationship between language, body and milieu. To simulate the feeling of a game, we designed an embossed tablecloth, a set of game-like instructions, egg-shell timers for tracking time on task, and arranged a set of five electrical skin sensors on the table, with a projector streaming live biodata from the sensors (when worn) onto the gallery wall. Five players were guided by someone in a white lab coat to wear the dermal electric sensors. Treating the devices as playful ‘scientific’ gadgets was deliberate (Tironi, 2018).

Data
Sensory data was revealed to belong to the shared environment. Photographs, artifacts, and other field notes will be discussed. The protocol questions the nature of data, provoking the players to attend to the surreal relationship between sense and sensation, concept and meaning, language and action, underscoring the ways in which causal agency is imagined or speculative.

Conclusions
The project problematizes language as timed “order words” and “pass-words” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), connecting the five players as parlour-table spectators of their collective pre-conceptual materiality. Rather than framing this sensory ethnographic data as representing intensities that belonged to the individual human, the surrealist game scatters the signal into the atmosphere.

Authors

• Laura Trafi-Prats, Manchester Metropolitan University
  Presenting Author

• Elizabeth De Freitas, Adelphi University
  Presenting Author