AGITATING IMAGES

ur conversation this week engages the work of media anthropologist Craig Campbell, with a special attention to the interconnectedness of his academic work, curatorial practice, and programming of experimental media. Campbell talks openly about his dual influences: of the intermedial ethos of Fluxus on his understanding of fieldwork encounters and philosophy of curation; and of the soviet constructivist avant-garde on his concept of “agitating images” against archives and history. He also shares with us his reflections on the dialectic of collaboration and authorship that animates the mobile curatorial platform Ethnographic Terminalia, as well as his pedagogical work at the Intermedia Workshop he directs at UT Austin.

raig Campbell is an Associate Professor in Department of Anthropology at University of Texas, Austin.

Director of the Intermedia Workshop and, in 2015-2016, Fellow of the Cornell Society for the Humanities and the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future.

My research has most recently been concerned with the realm of ethnographic and documentary images. The research and visual experiments that I undertake explore the possibility for failed, defaced, degraded, manipulated, and damaged photographs to activate interpretive fields typically unacknowledged in conventional ethnographies and histories. This intermedia and aesthetic approach pushes the sensuousness of the world back into an intellectual and scholarly understanding of it. This work necessarily involves careful attention to archives and archival theory.

Ethnographic and regional interests: Siberia, Central Siberia, Indigenous Siberians, Evenki, Evenkiia, Reindeer hunting and herding, Travel and mobility, location and place, Socialist colonialism, early forms of Sovietization.