This week I attended my first academic conference: EASA2020: New anthropological horizons in and beyond Europe. Which was organised in Lisbon but took place online.
- On Monday I attended the network meeting for Enqa (after first checking in with Vaneasa where not much was going on).
- Tuesday was the keynote by Marilyn Strathern.
- On Wednesday the conference started for real and I listened to the panel Languages of entanglement: mapping the ethnographic modes and media, convened by Melissa Nolas and Christos Varvantakis:
- Alexa Färber: Detangling the different media mobilities in multimodal research
- Sanderien Verstappen: How to make anthropology accessible for smartphone viewers?: A manifesto for ultrashort and low-resolution films
- Harshadha Balasubramanian: An Invitation to Feel Colour and Draw Sound: Proposing Cross-modality as a Participatory Method in Multimodal Fieldwork
- Saadia Mirza: Sensing Landscape as a Media Object
- Vanessa Wijngaarden: In dialogue with research collaborators and the public: Reflexive audio-visual ethnography and dilemmas of production and dissemination
- Alexandra D’Onofrio: From multimodal research to imagining the future of publishing a multimodal monograph
- Mark Westmoreland: Multimodality: Shifting Paradigms
- Followed by a useful Combined Academic Press/Duke Press Meet the Editors session, with Ken Wissoker and Gisela Fosado.
- But it was Thursday’s lab Drawing as Anthropology-Making, led by Letizia Bonanno and José Sherwood, that was the real meat of the conference for me. Such an inspiring double session, which will influence my practice.
- On Friday I rounded off with the first couple of talks in the panel Despite differences? Identity politics and solidarities in/of feminist and queer projects, convened by Anika Keinz and Monika Baer:
- Ahmad Al-Kurdi: “From concert halls to the streets”: (re)framing intersectionality in Lebanese LGBT organizing
- Alexandria Petit-Thorne: “Queer Solidarity Smashes Borders”: queer organizing against the deportation of migrants in the United Kingdom
I did have some editing sessions, after discussing a new version with S. I also talked to a lawyer about my film. On Monday I had my first restaurant dinner since breaking the quarantine, with A on his birthday. I’m keeping up Anki in the mornings, or usually until 15 or so.
This weekend I’ve discovered a childhood dream of mine: Animation. As in making them. Both yesterday and today I was immersed for hours on end while creating my first two animations. It’s nothing short of magic to see the character come to life by moving. I think I sat from after lunch until 21 today. Yesterday maybe from 22 to 3.30. I upgraded Clip Studio Paint from Pro to Ex to be able to animate more than 24 frames (one second, that is, or three seconds for me since I use anime’s classic framerate of eight frames per second). I basically draw one drawing per frame, or at least the moving part of it. I’m sure there are various tricks such as tweening and the like, but I like doing it the classic way, at least in the beginning (plus I don’t really know the programme that well and just wanted to start). The result is a very analogue feeling, where some lines move slightly despite they “shouldn’t”, and small ink blobs appear on certain frames – just as if it was done on film! I was frankly completely blown away by my first animation. And this experience is also super relevant for my research, as it’s about creating a reality.
Japanese
- Flashcards Deluxe: 29 min per day
- Anki: Probably 2–3 hours per day
- Every morning: JapaNews24 ～日本のニュースを24時間配信
Anime
- 2017: Boku no Hero Academia S2, E24–25
- 2018: Boku no Hero Academia S3, E1–5
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