multimedia
anthropology
lab.
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 different disciplines, and disrupt existing models of thought.
How can we rethink futures in ways that are multimedia, multimodal, and multivocal? This project explores the role of diverse methods, mediums and voices in the construction of knowledge: ecological and technological.
How can we cultivate collaborative planetary futures? Over the last four years, UCL MAL has been working in partnership with Guarani and Kaiowá indigenous communities in Brazil to develop innovative methods for research practice. This October, Guarani and Kaiowá elders are coming to London to co-host a dynamic events series of multimedia performances, immersive installations, workshops and panel discussions. Learn more about these groundbreaking events and how you can get involved.
How can sound shape planetary futures? In October 2024 Guarani and Kaiowá elders travelled to London to participate in a series of events, including this multimedia showcase at the Bloomsbury Theatre.
How can Zoology collections be rethought by Indigenous communities in Brazil? This project invites Guarani and Kaiowa communities to engage with the Grant Museum of Zoology Collections at UCL, and explores participatory approaches and innovative methods of presenting zoology and natural history collections to a wide public audience. In doing so, this project aims to challenge the historical exclusion of indigenous voices from the practices of natural history curation, narration and display.
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.
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
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.
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 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 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 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.
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