More-than-ethnographic probes: Workshop & Round-Table

The CURC in Critical Practices in Materials and Materiality and the Milieux Biolab are happy to host anthropologist of art and science Maxime Le Calvé (Matters of Activity Cluster of Excellence, U. Humboldt) for a four-day workshop (April 28th to May 3rd). This event is designed as a fieldwork and a platform for the development of collaborative sketching, writing, and documentation methods. Exploring how to attend to more-than-human collectivities at different scales, from built environment to cellular activity, the workshop is envisioned as an inventive anthropological design inquiry within the heavily mediated sense worlds of performative and situated spatial practices, biodesign, HCI and Medical Imagery. “More-than-ethnographic Probes” will invite participants to contribute to an account of scientific cultures of microscopy and XR visualization techniques that pays respect to their embodied experience. The making process will be shaped by hands-on conversations through cultural probing: we will concoct, in short sessions, playful devices to render and further explore our observations and chats in different labs and residency spaces.

The workshop will conclude with a round-table at the Uncommon Senses IV Conference (May 4th, 4PM), including Alice Jarry, Shauna Janssen, Stefan Helmreich, Maxime Le Calvé, and Brice Ammar-Khodja.

Maxime Le Calvé is an anthropologist of art and science, currently postdoctoral research associate at the Cluster of Excellence “Matters of Activities” (HU Berlin). In his latest ethnographic project, he is exploring haptic creativities and cartographic practices in neurosurgery. Visual ethnographer, he is making use of digital drawing as an investigative device. He is also curating virtual reality experiences, which he frames as collaborative art-science inquiries aiming to stretch the senses of anthropologists and of their publics. He trained in general ethnology in Paris Nanterre and owns a PhD in social anthropology and in theater studies, from EHESS Paris and FU Berlin. He has published on the ethnographic study of atmospheres (Exercices d’ambiances, 2018), on performance art, on music, on Berlin, on brains, and on ethnographic training. He acted as curator to the exhibitions Field/Works in Lisbon (2020-2021), Stretching Materialities (Berlin, 2021-2022), and the ongoing participant exhibition Sketching Brains (Charité, Berlin).