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WORLD ANTHROPOLOGICAL UNION

CONGRESS 2024​

Paper

Rendering "Outer Space Ethnography" Experimental: Speculative Visual Experimentation to Access Inaccessible Spaces

presenters

    Alkim Erol

    Nationality: Turkey

    Residence: Spain

    Universitat de Barcelona

    Presence:Online

The ethnography of space consists of a phenomenological territory which surpasses the presence of physicality and physical territory (Kessler, 2012). Rather, it embodies a mental territory which is prominently shaped by the limits and boundaries of human cognition. Thus, the extreme scales and contingencies of physically inaccessible spaces and alien agencies are adapted to human cognition and vision through distinct forms of data visualizations (Rector et al., 2015). Through these visual forms, the unfamiliar and unimaginably vast is translated into something fathomable and visible (Smith et al., 2015). The ethnographical field of research is mostly shaped by the diverse visualizations that offer a mimetic view of the territory of outer space and its celestial objects (Kessler, 2015). These visualizations are chiefly crafted by combining empirical data and conceptual imagination throughout the process of data-visualization. Hence, this accentuation assigns astronomical visualizations to be speculative by nature since they are more ‘mental’ than ‘physical’. The ‘mental’ and speculative layer of astronomical visualizations opens a door to use speculation not only as a method but also as an object of inquiry in outer space ethnography. In this paper, building upon on-going visual and multimodal anthropology research on astronomical images, I will present some speculative ethnographic visualizations of outer space and of some celestial objects created through Artificial Intelligence programs with the aim of proposing an alternative method of accessing inaccessible spaces and alien agencies through speculation and rendering ethnography experimental (Ballestero & Winthereik, 2021). This research forms part of the ERC-Consolidator Grant “Visual Trust” (2021-2026, www.visualtrust.ub.edu).

Keywords:

Outer Space, Ethnography, Speculation, Data-Visualization, Artificial Intelligence