Looking forward to participating in the roundtable “Water Under the Surface,” co-organized by Manuel Tironi and Andrea Ballestero, at the 2023 American Anthropological Association meeting this fall.

A Natural History of Destruction is a montage of “poor images” (Steyerl); it provides a documentary witness to Ruhr’s material process of de-industrialization through experiences of collective spectatorship conveyed by a sequence of multiple, individual shots.

Abstract: Steve McQueen’s Western Deep (2002, Super 8 film, transferred to video) opens with a barrage of sound within a pitch-black “cinema-like space”. Critics and observers have described the experience as one in which viewers are subjected to “an oppressive deluge of industrial rumbling sounds in which the “walls and floors shake.” Such vibratory exposure to sound in the viewing space is verbalized as enabling a documentary ‘mimicry’ close to what miners’ themselves experience daily experience. Such projections, however, overlook seminal phenomenological differences between the sensorium of the miner’s ear (Morris 2008) and those visiting venues of the artworld. In this paper, I draw upon my research on “noise-induced hearing loss,” an occupational health category that become formalized and bureaucratized in the 20th century, to begin mapping out differences in the transductive pathways of sonic exposure that shape its aesthetic, legal, and epistemic meanings; such pathways shape whether exposure operates as an aesthetic experience, form of clinical evidence, or a conduit of bodily discipline. In doing so, my work aims to contribute understanding on how the affordances of differently sensitive surfaces and their concretization within historically-specific technical modalities (“O’Gorman and Hamilton 2016) enabled the emergence of competing logics and forms of subjectivity in relation to conceptualization of injury, risk, and loss.

Panel Title: Exposure, Doubled: Sensitized Matter and the Dynamics of Disclosure

with contributions by: Ali Feser, Susan Schuppli, and Cynthia Browne

Discussant: Anna Polze

Abstract: In the wake of the 19th century invention of photography, the historical semantics of “exposure” broadened to encompass a technical meaning; “strictly speaking,” exposure refers to a measure of the light-energy which reaches the plate or film within a given amount of time (Turner 1940) Both wavelengths of visible light, as well as high frequency gamma rays—which are invisible to the human eye but registered in the more-than-human sensorium—can elicit changes on a sensitized surface, transforming it into a document. Photography and film, thus, do not merely represent a subject, but document the effect of exposure, materialized in the form of an object through the synthesthia of touch.

Exposure as a mode of objectification is thus dependent upon documentary devices, materializing in the felicitious mating of vectors and sentient matter, the properties of both conditioning the representational, epistemic, and aesthetic dimensions exposure acquires. As these objectified effects circulate, such acts of exposure acquire other semantic entailments: exposure as a matter of unrevealing or disclosing, proving events as forms of evidence and affecting different publics.

This panel explores this doubled aspect of exposure as both relation and effect, offering new insight into exposure’s conceptual and material valences as it becomes registered across a range of material surfaces and scales—planetary, geological, sonic, and corporate—and differentially mobilized in the making--or deferring—of political, scientific, and ethical claims.

Keywords: exposure, nuclear fallout, secrecy, disclosure, sensorium

What does it mean to conceptualize the making of a documentary film as collaborative work? Can we understand collaboration as a reflexive lens that also attends to the power relations and social differentiations inherent within the film’s fabrication? Such is the proposition of this event. Through this frame we aim to emphasize not only the formal aesthetics of the cinematic object, but also its infrastructure and the work expended through more-than-human relations. Emphasizing flux and movement over genre and medium, the graduate research training group “Documentary Practices: Excess and Privation” investigates the manifold practices that are involved in the emergence of the document(ary), a process that entails the social production of evidence effects, legibility, and expressive value, as well as their contestations.

In this event, moderated by members from the graduate research training group, we will explore how filmmaking emerges through contingent and negotiated relations between filmmakers and film subjects, (recording) technology, rhythms (of the sea), and the sedimentations of history; we will also probe how the infrastructural conditions of collaborative work shape the ever-shifting horizons of the documentary imagination.