Curatorium: Steve, can you tell us about intermedial composition as it matters to you.
Steve: We hear the words ‘multi-media’ and ‘multi-modal’ a good
deal in anthropology these days. But what interests me is not a simple proliferation of making and presenting research in multiple media and multiple modalities, of sonic and visual enhancements or extensions to what remains a text-centric research imaginary. What interests me rather is a new research imaginary that explores and connects the interplays and interactions of senses, arts, aesthetics, and politics and synthesizes and projects them in and as intermedial compositions. I’m trying to encourage a compositional attitude, as Bruno Latour put it in his ‘manifesto’, a stance of DJ remix, as a new frontier for research. Intermediality means that at both the levels of content and form there is a play of media, a set of juxtapositional performances. And these encourage and heighten reflection and critique, a meta-mediation of research content. Intermediality to me is a way to primally engage media epistemology, to primally engage the relation between how we know and what is unknown. And composition is a way to perform that engagement, to ask how research can embrace the complexities of verbi-voco-grapho-sono-visual presentation, on page, on screen, in installation.
deal in anthropology these days. But what interests me is not a simple proliferation of making and presenting research in multiple media and multiple modalities, of sonic and visual enhancements or extensions to what remains a text-centric research imaginary. What interests me rather is a new research imaginary that explores and connects the interplays and interactions of senses, arts, aesthetics, and politics and synthesizes and projects them in and as intermedial compositions. I’m trying to encourage a compositional attitude, as Bruno Latour put it in his ‘manifesto’, a stance of DJ remix, as a new frontier for research. Intermediality means that at both the levels of content and form there is a play of media, a set of juxtapositional performances. And these encourage and heighten reflection and critique, a meta-mediation of research content. Intermediality to me is a way to primally engage media epistemology, to primally engage the relation between how we know and what is unknown. And composition is a way to perform that engagement, to ask how research can embrace the complexities of verbi-voco-grapho-sono-visual presentation, on page, on screen, in installation.
A net gain to that kind of intermedial composition idea is a politics
of amplification. Amplification not only takes the smallness of three among more than three thousand cicada species and makes their stories larger and more luminous. It takes seriously the responsibility to pump the volume and bring to the big screen the urgency of listening to cicadas, hearing them tell ‘the climate of history’ in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s beautiful book title. Hearing Heat encourages a politics of amplification by engaging the sono-thermometric language of cicadas. That amplification is the urgency for deep listening, and ultimately, the urgency for new forms of collaboration across species and environments, histories and experiences, methods and theories.
of amplification. Amplification not only takes the smallness of three among more than three thousand cicada species and makes their stories larger and more luminous. It takes seriously the responsibility to pump the volume and bring to the big screen the urgency of listening to cicadas, hearing them tell ‘the climate of history’ in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s beautiful book title. Hearing Heat encourages a politics of amplification by engaging the sono-thermometric language of cicadas. That amplification is the urgency for deep listening, and ultimately, the urgency for new forms of collaboration across species and environments, histories and experiences, methods and theories.
Curatorium: Our collective holds onto the idea that anthropology could become all these things. But given that we all still find ourselves working at the very edges of mainstream anthropology, where do you see this all going? And are the edges such a bad place to hang out?
Steve: It’s ironic, but I have the impression that anthropology’s mainstream has become more epistemically conservative, even
if it has become more politically progressive over in 50 years that I’ve been around the field. I often find that the reason for this is a mainstream journalistic and even legalistic demand for a literal
and empirically clean production of knowledge, a demand for ‘professional’ ‘expertise’, imagined as the best way to support projects of indigenous political advocacy, and critiques of the state. Surely one kind of reaction to this is that the edges have expanded. In the last two decades there are surely more people, more projects, more multi-disciplinary competencies, more collaborative experiments, more attempts at 'research-creation' or conceiving and presenting research through creative art practices across sonic, visual, and textual media. So yes, I find the edges to be very stimulating places where many new relationalities can thrive, where many of us can unapologetically remap epistemic territories, and where I can create work like Hearing Heat to focus on the intermedial recomposition of worlds.
if it has become more politically progressive over in 50 years that I’ve been around the field. I often find that the reason for this is a mainstream journalistic and even legalistic demand for a literal
and empirically clean production of knowledge, a demand for ‘professional’ ‘expertise’, imagined as the best way to support projects of indigenous political advocacy, and critiques of the state. Surely one kind of reaction to this is that the edges have expanded. In the last two decades there are surely more people, more projects, more multi-disciplinary competencies, more collaborative experiments, more attempts at 'research-creation' or conceiving and presenting research through creative art practices across sonic, visual, and textual media. So yes, I find the edges to be very stimulating places where many new relationalities can thrive, where many of us can unapologetically remap epistemic territories, and where I can create work like Hearing Heat to focus on the intermedial recomposition of worlds.
Curatorium: How did Hearing Heat find its form?
Steve: Hearing Heat is a project in the making over the last 10 years, and I’m very happy to be able to share this final film form as an intermedial contribution to your curatorium collective initiative for TAJA, with thanks to Lisa and Jennifer for many years of conversation.
Hearing Heat began as a lecture for my university classes on Senses of Place. At that stage I limited myself to the Papua New Guinea material. Like many researchers working in aesthetics I was trying very hard to connect poetics and politics for my students, many of whom had an exceptionally dark sense of environmental anthropology. I wanted to counter any effacement of indigenous agency in the face of ecological devastation. I wanted to offer a different way to think about relations of indigenous ecological knowledge, aesthetic agency, and environmental change and transformation. I wanted to offer them some kind of longue durée approach to political ecology, to think more deeply about the poetics of cohabitation histories.
The Japanese materials came together separately as another lecture in environmental poetics. In an anthropology and film course I was lecturing about Hiroshoma Mon Amour, the Alain Resnais film, from the Marguerite Duras novel. We were discussing this film in the historical context of the many films that set love stories at sites of trauma and destruction. As a further contextualization we watched Ozu’s Tokyo Story. And talking about cicadas in that soundtrack I shared my own history of visits to Hiroshima, and my radiophonic composition of The Last Sound. All of this was very relevant to my students because we live in northern New Mexico, close to Los Alamos, where the atomic bomb was developed and where there is a US weapons laboratory still present. We who live here live with nuclear history every day. The recent film Oppenheimer unfortunately trivializes this history. But the Los Alamos Lab touches the lands of indigenous Tewa-speaking people at San Ildefonso Pueblo and is also surrounded by the presence of Spanish-speaking native New Mexicans. The story of New Mexico and the atom bomb history is far, far more than Oppenheimer’s intrigue tale of international science
and emergent US paranoid politics.
and emergent US paranoid politics.
The Greek materials came together through a period of re-reading Formalized Music and re-listening to compositions by Iannis Xenakis, stimulated both by the discovery of a notebook that I kept in 1972 when I was a student in his composition seminar, and reading Un Père Bouleversant, a touching memoir written by his daughter, Mâkhi. A number of conversations with the Greek anthropologist of sound Panos Panopoulos were also critical. At one point I gave a lecture discussing the Papua New Guinea and Japanese cicada stories at the University of the Aegean, Lesbos, where he teaches. It was Panos who then suggested that I read Listening to the Cicadas, the study of Phaedrus by the classics scholar G.R.F. Ferrari. I had read Phaedrus years before, but reading Ferrari, and then Plato again, I came upon this line: ‘Only the mind of the philosopher grows wings – and rightly so'. I think it was pondering that line that made me want to unite the three stories, to give them thematic wings through my long obsession with acoustemology (acoustic epistemology), the study of sound as a way of knowing, and my equally long methodological obsession with listening to histories of listening.
So I began doing more versions of this as a road performance
show, improvising commentary to a PowerPoint of images and sounds, and then from that improvisation crafting a text, but a vocalic one, one only meant to be spoken and heard, not read. So over the years many versions of this were presented to audiences in the US and Europe. And that’s how the story comes to Australia, with Lisa generously inviting me to present it at the AAS meetings in Adelaide in a very memorable Curatorium Collective session.
show, improvising commentary to a PowerPoint of images and sounds, and then from that improvisation crafting a text, but a vocalic one, one only meant to be spoken and heard, not read. So over the years many versions of this were presented to audiences in the US and Europe. And that’s how the story comes to Australia, with Lisa generously inviting me to present it at the AAS meetings in Adelaide in a very memorable Curatorium Collective session.
In Fall 2020 I was to spend a semester as a visiting professor
at the Center for Experimental Ethnography at University of Pennsylvania, teaching a course on Intermediality, where one of our texts was the then very new Phone & Spear; the group had a lovely online conversation with Jennifer. My plan was to install Hearing Heat as a multiroom museum exhibit as my semester presentation for the Center. But Covid intervened; I had to teach the class online and abandon the idea of an installation. That’s when I decided to condense the text, images, audio, and video into an hour-long film, and shared it via zoom as an end-of-semester presentation for the Center. So Hearing Heat was meant as a 'grow wings' example of what I had been proposing to the students all semester, to engage and present their intermedial class projects
as compositional remix.
at the Center for Experimental Ethnography at University of Pennsylvania, teaching a course on Intermediality, where one of our texts was the then very new Phone & Spear; the group had a lovely online conversation with Jennifer. My plan was to install Hearing Heat as a multiroom museum exhibit as my semester presentation for the Center. But Covid intervened; I had to teach the class online and abandon the idea of an installation. That’s when I decided to condense the text, images, audio, and video into an hour-long film, and shared it via zoom as an end-of-semester presentation for the Center. So Hearing Heat was meant as a 'grow wings' example of what I had been proposing to the students all semester, to engage and present their intermedial class projects
as compositional remix.
The Center hosted an online presentation of the film followed
by conversation with Penn scholars in musical, linguistic, and environmental anthropology. One of the people in the online audience was Jonathan Larcher, a filmmaker and anthropologist who now directs the documentary cinema and ethnographic film program at the University of Paris Nanterre. Jonathan wanted to develop the ‘research as composition’ conversation in the context of French media anthropology, and the next year he and his colleague Damien Mottier, then at Nanterre, now at l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, invited a Paris presentation. From there we came up with the idea to publish the films online with French narration, connected to a small book, La Recherche Comme Composition with an introductory essay on media anthropology and research-creation by Jonathan and Damien, illustrated filmscripts by me, and a postface by Florence Brunois-Pasina, an eco-anthropologist in Philippe Descola’s Nature Culture lab at Collège de France and a colleague of many years, as she works in Papua New Guinea on the south side of Mt. Bosavi. The French-voiced version was published online, with the book, in September 2023, and I’m grateful to you for now making
the English language version available on your site.
by conversation with Penn scholars in musical, linguistic, and environmental anthropology. One of the people in the online audience was Jonathan Larcher, a filmmaker and anthropologist who now directs the documentary cinema and ethnographic film program at the University of Paris Nanterre. Jonathan wanted to develop the ‘research as composition’ conversation in the context of French media anthropology, and the next year he and his colleague Damien Mottier, then at Nanterre, now at l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, invited a Paris presentation. From there we came up with the idea to publish the films online with French narration, connected to a small book, La Recherche Comme Composition with an introductory essay on media anthropology and research-creation by Jonathan and Damien, illustrated filmscripts by me, and a postface by Florence Brunois-Pasina, an eco-anthropologist in Philippe Descola’s Nature Culture lab at Collège de France and a colleague of many years, as she works in Papua New Guinea on the south side of Mt. Bosavi. The French-voiced version was published online, with the book, in September 2023, and I’m grateful to you for now making
the English language version available on your site.
