Migratory Embodied Experiences: The Convergence of Sensory Ethnography and Experimental Documentary

The thesis explores the capacity and operations of video-making to evoke, amplify and transmit our transcultural affects. I draw upon Spinoza’s notion of affect that simultaneously refer to both affect as a change in the state of existence, and affection, which suggests the effect of another body on another. To address this two-sided understanding of affect, I draw upon Simondon’s transindividuality, Bergsonian memory and Deleuzian film theory. I also would like to situate this project within the collaboration between anthropology and art, which takes into account the relational and processual understanding of the individual, and the capacity of our body to affect and to be affected. My ethnographic video project Migratory Affects can be described as an assemblage of particular moments and expressions of transcultural experience unfolding in a particular spatiotemporal setting, which is widened up by the plurality of temporalities, sensoria and realities that we come into contact within the midst of our relational becomings

Displacing theory through the global south

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Introduction: displacing theory, Berlin notes

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

SmellControl: the study of sense of agency in smell

The Sense of Agency (SoA) is crucial in interaction with technology, it refers to the feeling of 'I did that' as opposed to 'the system did that' supporting a feeling of being in control. Research in human-computer interaction has recently studied agency in visual, auditory and haptic interfaces, however the role of smell on agency remains unknown. Our sense of smell is quite powerful to elicit emotions, memories and awareness of the environment, which has been exploited to enhance user experiences (e.g., in VR and driving scenarios). In light of increased interest in designing multimodal interfaces including smell and its close link with emotions, we investigated, for the first time, the effect of smell-induced emotions on the SoA. We conducted a study using the Intentional Binding (IB) paradigm used to measure SoA while participants were exposed to three scents with different valence (pleasant, unpleasant, neutral). Our results show that participants? SoA increased with a pleasant scent compared to neutral and unpleasant scents. We discuss how our results can inform the design of multimodal and future olfactory interfaces