Assistant Professor, Iowa State University
Contributor, Platypus, The CASTAC Blog
Research Interests
Algorithms | Creativity | Digital Ethnography | Human-machine interaction | Listening | Performance |
About Ritwik
Ritwik Banerji is an experimental ethnographer, interactive media artist, and saxophonist. His work focuses on the design of artificially-intelligent virtual performers of free improvisation and subjecting these systems to the critique of the human performers whose practices these systems are built to perform. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Iowa State University, where he also teaches human-computer interaction.
Contact
Contributions to Platypus, The CASTAC Blog
View all of Ritwik's posts on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.
People Are Not Fixed Media
Sensory ethnography continually emphasizes that the sensorium is just as much a (product of) sociocultural practice as it is a biophysiological property of the human species (Pink 2015). Recognition of this point has prompted several shifts in ethnographic work. On the one hand, it has pushed ethnographers to include in their writing a greater discussion of how subjects engage with the world through their senses as well as how the putatively biological phenomenon of sensory perception is so highly variable across and within sociocultural milieux. On the other, it has inspired ethnographers to pursue media practices beyond text, particularly through ethnographic film or sound recording (Feld 1991). Regardless of form, this work has greatly increased the possibility for the reader, listener, or viewer to experience with their senses the social environment that subjects inhabit and where the ethnographer conducted fieldwork. (more…) (read more...)