Kara E Miller, California State University, Long Beach
New Orleans 2019: Experiencing / listening
This is a collaborative experiment in sensorial politics that explores embodiment by pairing virtual reality experience with bio-metric data in a multi-modal ethnography. Myself (Kara Miller) and Scott Wilson, both anthropologists, are combining emergent projects to design and create exchanges that reconfigure and reframe social and personal interfaces and engagements. We experiment with imparting bodily forms of knowledge through immersive, virtual technologies in order to question unstable worlds and the role of experience in meaning-making. We hope that this work on mutuality and relationality encourages enactments of moral aspirations. With implications for decolonization projects and de-centering hegemonic subjectivities, we platform new ethics in knowledge production and show how society moves science. Through radical research modalities in participatory media, this project insights sentimentality through dynamic media tools and combines those with bodily information in order to showcase relationality in human experience and point to the contingencies of human physiologies. With implications for undoing determinism in human experience, this work interrupts entrenched worldviews and traces power through the physical body in the name of greater public good. New moral arrangements are necessary for changing human conditions. We utilize public science to reshape experiential infrastructures by imparting felt senses of otherness, or care.