Projects | UCL Multimedia Anthropology Laboratory

How can we respond to planetary crisis? MultiCOP invites a global call to action to participate in muHow can we respond to the planetary crisis? UCL MAL has partnered with Indigenous community leaders in Brazil to cohost MultiCOP - an international conference that bridges science, Indigenous knowledge, creative practice, and civic engagement to transform how we engage with climate action.

WIFI TO THE GODS

How can sound shape Planetary Futures? In October 2024, Guarani and Kaiowa elders travelled to London to participate in a series of events, including this multimedia showcase at the Bloomsbury Theatre.

SOUNDING PLANETARY FUTURES

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. 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.

THE GUARANI & KAIOWA ZOOLOGY MUSEUM

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 Collectioans at UCL, and explores participatory approaches and innovative methods of presenting zoology and natural history collections to a wide public audience.

MBA'EKUAA: ARCHIVAL FUTURES

This project proposes to develop an immersive spatial audio composition in collaboration with Guarani and Kaiowá indigenous communities in Brazil. 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.

OGA PYSY | MULTIMEDIA HERITAGE

The project aims to document the Material Processes and the Technical knowledge through which Guarani & Kaiowa ceremonial houses are constructed and the ritual practices that these structures enable. All the recordings will be delivered in the British Museum's Endangered Material Knowledge Program.

ECOLOGIES OF THOUGHT

This project builds an international partnership between artists, anthropologists, indigenous communities, sound designers, and botanists to explore the role of sound in ecological knowledge and archival practice. It fosters dialogue between the perspectives of G&K indigenous communities and botanists at the Escola de Botânica in São Paulo.

CO-DESIGNING DIGITAL FUTURES

This project worked in collaboration with Guarani and Kaiowá Indigenous elders to explore the role that indigenous communities can play in contemporary conservation initiatives? By developing a community specific design for the Sapelli data collection and visualisation app, created by the ExCiteS research team at UCL, this project the role of indigenous elders in designing the digital shape of diverse planetary futures.

GUARANI AND KAIOWA VIRTUAL MUSEUM

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.

MAKING VIOLENCE VISIBLE

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.

KUNANGUE ONLINE

This project is a knowledge exchange between UCL MAL and Kuñangue Aty Guasu—the Guarani & Kaiowá Indigenous Women’s Council Meeting—held online this year. Alongside preparations for MAL’s Multimedia Encounters conference, moving the event online prompts reflection on parallels between indigenous and anthropological knowledge practices.

MULTIMEDIA ENCOUNTER EXHIBIITION

This exhibition explores the interplay between anthropological thought and computer intelligence. Both algorithms and the anthropological mind recursively dismantle and reconfigure knowledge, generating new forms of ethnographic data. By probing this formal equivalence, the exhibition examines systems of value and opens space to reimagine what it means to be (more than) human in the 21st-century mediascape.

TRANSLATING FUTURES | TATE EXCHANGE

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.

MULTIMEDIA ANTHROPOCENE HUB

The MAL collective uses multimedia approaches to examine the human, more-than-human, and posthuman entanglements present in the context of the ‘Anthropocene’ – a concept which has been both commended and critiqued across academic disciplines. Through theoretical and practical sessions, the MAL collective seeks to rethink knowledge beyond he conceptual divisions between nature/culture and representation/reality in the context of the ‘Anthropocene’.

FROM THE OTHER'S POINT OF VIEW

This project presents an immersive and interactive 360 environment which permits the viewer to explore the different cultural and ecological landscapes of Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil. By using VR/360 video to create an immersive experience of alternative perspectives on human-environment relations, this interdisciplinary project aims to develop practical mechanisms for immersive technologies to change the ways human-environment relationships are perceived and understood.