ETHNOGRAPHY &amp DESIGN: MUTUAL PROVOCATIONS (CoLED Conference)

Our lab brings together our respective work in digital ethnography and design interventions, which explore surveillance, choreographies of power and the making of a policed state. Our lab is a space for mutual provocations between technologies of surveying and ethnographic ways of seeing. The lab exposes participants to automated investigation techniques employed by the state. These techniques are also used to inform researchers, journalists, and activists seeking to witness events in the digital age. How can ethnographers engage these tools to augment an ethnographic output? How can ethnographers engage these tools to create collaborative outputs with their interlocutors and communities?

We will provide ongoing technology training sessions for ethnographic practitioners interested in getting hands on experience with the tools of surveillance. By focusing on where technology meets surveillance, the lab is a space for thinking through interventions. The lab provides an introduction into forensic and facial recognition techniques while facilitating dialogue around the experiential knowledge that arises from learning and working through these programmatic techniques and languages. The lab encourages participants to envision a creative dismantling of designed power systems: Once you have learned to find faces, you can also obfuscate or swap faces -- providing camouflage, subversion, or protection. Can ethnography inform biometric design to create methods of anti-profiling? How can ethnographic expertise inform critical consciousness and disruption of mass surveillance? Our team: Marcus Guttenplan, a designer with experience working on networked applications for government and experimental research into possible interactions of a hyper networked future, and Erika Barbosa, a visual ethnographer studying the materiality and design of power and oppression through LA county officer ride-alongs, and work with LA-based community organizers.

Meet at the Welcome Table at 2pm, and follow the workshop organizers to the area where they have set up their lab.