UCL MAL is a student-led research network aimed at developing innovative methods for anthropological practice. We experiment with diverse tools and mediums for gathering data and presenting research, including sound, film, VR/360 video, AI, performance, exhibitions and installations, and explore how they can contribute towards alternative forms of anthropological thinking. If anthropology is to remain relevant today we must develop new forms of practice which can dialogue with more diverse audiences, collaborate with colleagues across disciplines, and disrupt existing models of thought.
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This project proposes to develop an immersive spatial audio composition in collaboration with Guarani and Kaiowá indigenous communities in Brazil. Building on our ongoing collaboration with community elders and youth, this year two members of the community are joining the UCL MAL team in Europe to participate in an artists residency at MONOM Studios in Berlin, where we are collaboratively developing a series of experiments in sound. Each day of the residency we will be broadcasting live from MONOM Studios for the final hour of our studio session, so you can join the experiment.
The Guarani & Kaiowá Jam Sessions have developed a creative collaboration between indigenous community members, musicians, researchers and computer scientists, to explore how our relationship with heritage and ecological knowledge can be reconfigured and remixed. Drawing on sounds from the Guarani & Kaiowá Digital Archive, recorded by community members themselves, this live jam session experiments with the sonic possibilities of archival sound recordings. Mba'ekuaa - the Guarani word for 'technology', 'technical knowledge' or 'know-how' - describes both the content of the recordings, which include the sounds of the construction of a traditional Guarani and Kaiowá Oga Pysy.
This project aims to establish an international partnership between artists, anthropologists, indigenous communities, sound designers and botanists, in an interrogation of the role of sound in ecological knowledge and archival practice. Establishing a creative dialogue between the divergent approaches to ecological knowledge articulated by G&K indigenous communities and botanists at the Escola de Botanica in São Paulo.
This project aims to document the material processes and technical knowledge through which Guarani & Kaiowá ceremonial houses are constructed and the ritual practices that these structures enable. A wide range of recording techniques will be used in the process of documentation. All the recordings will be delivered to the British Museum's Endangered Material Knowledges Program
In this project, UCL MAL will produce collaboratively with the Guarani & Kaiowá indigenous women, a Virtual Museum supported on the Mozilla Hubs platform. This Virtual Museum project seeks to address concerns raised by indigenous communities regarding community access to heritage management by creating a digital infrastructure through which local communities can preserve, curate, and display their material and immaterial cultural heritage.
This project is a collaborative knowledge-exchange between UCL MAL and the Kuñangue Aty Guasu: the Guarani & Kaiowá indigenous women’s council meeting, which this year will take place online In tandem, we are finalising preparations for MAL’s Multimedia Encounters conference, and the translation of this event into an online format invites us to reflect on the parallels between the knowledge practices of indigenous communities and those of anthropologists.
This exhibition examined technologies of capture and perspective exchange, exploring their role in both art and anthropology. Taking place in the context of Higher Resolution, as part of TATE Exchange, we led a workshop that explored how ways of seeing and believing encode themselves into technological objects.
This project aims to create an interactive map showing the incidence and geographical distribution of violence against women in Guarani and Kaiowá indigenous communities in Brazil. This partnership with Guarani and Kaiowá indigenous communities seeks to support indigenous women’s strategies to combat gender inequalities by providing a digital infrastructure that allows gender-based violence to be monitored and made visible.
This exhibition attends to the relationship between anthropological thought and computer intelligence. Algorithms and the anthropological mind both operate recursively, dismembering knowledge as we know it, re-calculating and birthing alternative manifestations of ethnographic data. Our exhibition seeks to probe and push this formal equivalence, exploring its limits and creating new ground for future multimedia encounters. It aims to dissect and examine our own systems of value, to re-think how knowledge is produced, and to create spaces for re-imagining what it means to be (more than) human in a 21st Century mediascape.