Tylar Campbell
Deep Roots: America’s Legacy Racial Terror - Revisited (2022)
EMBHD Project (2022) - Black Historical Engagements of the Multimodal
Multi modal engagements as a process for collective remembrance and historical preservation work towards combating the erasure of Black Heritage through Geo-spatial information sharing and embodied immersion known as presence.
EMBD is a project that uses emerging technology like virtual and augmented reality to document, share, and bring to life Black historical landmarks, and settlements that go beyond the archive. Multi-modal anthropology provides a way to re-frame a black history through sensory experiences that redefine fieldwork exploration allowing scholars to recast Geo-located information networks that builds empathy through re-presencing.
This project is entangled with ethics dilemmas and considerations around visual representation in anthropology inherent with new media technologies like VR, AR, and artificial intelligence and their capacity to reproduce harmful power structures (Takaragawa and Smith, 2020). Ethical considerations when dealing with sensitive information like in the case of cemeteries and memorials that must adhere to strict community protocols for informed consent understanding that images are “made not taken” (De Laat, 2004).
The fleetingness of fugitivity runs throughout the project as a conceptual practice that views temporality as a tools for designing experience
References:
Hennessy, Kate and Trudi Lynn Smith. 2018. Fugitives: Anarchival Materiality in Archives, Public (57): 128-144.
Takaragawa, S., Smith, T. L., Hennessy, K., Alvarez Astacio, P., Chio, J., Nye, C., & Shankar, S. (2019). Bad Habitus: Anthropology in the Age of the Multimodal. American Anthropologist, 121(2), 517–524. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13265
De Laat, S. (2004). Picture Perfect (?): Ethical Considerations in Visual Representation. NEXUS: The Canadian Student Journal of Anthropology, 17(1). https://doi.org/10.15173/nexus.v17i1.192
Huell, J. C. (2020). Toward critical nostalgia: performing African-American genealogical memory. Text and Performance Quarterly, 40(2), 109–130. https://doi.org/10.1080/10462937.2020.1776380
