A New Reflexive Turn: Glitches, Carbon Footprints, and Streaming Videos in Visual Anthropology

Abstract

The global climate crisis demands an ethical account for the environmental costs of anthropology. Anthropologists who trouble the boundaries between art and anthropology often ignore the damage done by their mediums. Digital streaming accounts for one percent of global emissions. The increasing reliance on a nearly invisible media provokes a new reflexive turn. This chapter outlines reflexive media in anthropology and beyond. Following the call for ‘patchwork ethnography’ where ethnographers conduct slow fieldwork, glitchy visual anthropology can also decolonize the energy-consuming, anthropologist filmmaker as hero. There are multiple opportunities for visual anthropologists to conduct ethnographies of a new reflexive media—an anthropology that is not anti-aesthetic. Such a reflexive turn explores eco-conscious streaming as part and parcel of ethnographic art, method, and outcome.

Introduction

The global climate crisis demands an ethical account for the environmental costs of anthropology. While fieldworkers can attempt to offset their carbon footprints from air travel with alternatives and taxes,¹ anthropologists who trouble the boundaries between art and anthropology often ignore the damage done by their mediums. Digital streaming accounts for 1% (and growing) of global emissions. Despite the increase in innovations to improve its efficiency, the increasing reliance on a nearly invisible media provokes a new reflexive turn. This chapter will outline reflexive media in anthropology and beyond. While activist film sometimes rejects style and design clarity in order to undermine dichotomies between hi-fi and lo-fi, reflexive media can become more than a proclamation of an anti-aesthetic as a means to reach for authenticity and moral superiority. Recently, ethnographers have called for a new approach to methods such as ‘patchwork ethnography’ where ethnographers conduct slow fieldwork and find new modes of ‘being there’ (Günel et al. 2020). Following this call, a kind of patchwork or, rather, glitchy visual anthropology can also decolonize the energy-consuming, anthropologist filmmaker as hero ‘to solicit a new seeing’ (Trinh 2012, p. 13). These so-called glitches become part of the thematically narrative elements rather than a form meant to promote a certain political agenda compartmentalized from subjects and content. There are multiple opportunities for visual anthropologists to conduct ethnographies of a new reflexive media—an anthropology full of glitches that is not anti-aesthetic. Such a reflexive turn explores eco-conscious streaming as part and parcel of ethnographic art, method, and outcome.

In some respects, the 2019 pandemic relieved the carbon impact on earthly environments. The decreased air and vehicle travel resulted in the so-called ‘Anthropause’ (Rutz et al. 2020) where the negative human impact on wildlife became clarified in the increased survival of species and decreased water and air pollution from fossil fuels (Karkour and Itsubo 2020; LeQuéré et al. 2020). The so-called pause increased other kinds of human impact seen in the increased deaths of animals and plants who depend on human consumption or the increased single-use plastic in the effort to decrease viral contagion (Buck and Weinstein 2020). Another human consumption that increased rapidly and without precedent was internet use, from streaming videos to online conference calls, which in the first few weeks of the pandemic in 2020 resulted in a 200% increase of internet usage (Feldman et al. 2021). This uptick points to an often underestimated threat to our already overtaxed atmosphere—the energy costs of the internet, which in recent calculations is as high as 3.7% of the global carbon footprint.²

The internet has not only been envisioned as a globally and nationally democratizing solution (see introduction of this book), but is often also presumed as a solution to humans’ carbon footprint (Fox-Penner 2014). This is in part because it is relatively less energy consumptive than other ecological stressors, but it is also because for most consumers, internet usage feels immaterial. Indeed, the internet’s materialities lack tactility, visibility, or sonic indications since servers are housed away from humans, most people rely on wireless cybernetic connectivities, and its usage has become ubiquitous (Pasek 2019; Lecuyer 2018). Human consumers only notice the internet when it doesn’t work—e.g. from the glitches in streaming videos or Zoom calls that result from high traffic. Much like the pandemic revealed faultiness that undergirded public health systems and communication, these glitches reveal the amount of consumption behind the internet’s seemingly immaterial materialities (MacDonald et al. 2021). Glitches offer opportunities for visual anthropology as a discipline by opening up to ways in which experimental media can unveil the unseen realities and ignored consumptions created by humans.

Superhuman Sight

Artistic engagements can allow visual anthropologists to render the invisible visible. Sometimes these engagements find purchase with the various capacities of mediums. An increased frame rate, for example, in certain video settings, can capture movement better than the human eye, leading to some filmmakers to prefer a lower frame rate to better capture movement blur and to obtain painterly qualities of colors while others choose to take advantage of such hyperreal visions. The avant-garde filmmaker Trinh Minh-ha, who brings anthropology possibilities of thinking through medium together with experimental turns, has played with juxtapositions of different frame rates in her film Forgetting Vietnam (2015) to indicate different times in the history of war in Vietnam, alternating between high-definition digitally shot scenes from the twenty-first century and low-definition scenes from the 1980s. Anthropologists Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel use go-pros in the film Leviathan (2012), cameras designed with increased frame rates to capture details in sports movement, to portray the movement of birds in flight with superhuman details. The mediums here allow for stories to be told that go beyond the limits of humans as an organism. Such a move toward superhuman sight says something about the stories we want to tell, in that they are valued in the ways they can supersede the limitations of human bodies to reach toward other kinds of perceptions. This move itself, though, can also be reframed as a kind of invasion or conquering of other, even nonhuman, territories.

In The Golden Snail Opera (2016), an experimental ethnographic performance, a snail carries a video camera on its back. The film mixes Taiwanese opera music and aquarium foley to portray the relational beings of ‘friendly farmers’, rice crops, and golden snails (see Fig. 1). The farmers are friendly because they do not exterminate the aquatic snails, but rather attempt to cultivate their crops without chemicals and with nonindustrial alternatives. The cameras portray the blurriness created by water and night scenes of the farmers to offer a multi-sensory performance of mixed, multispecies perspectives. The story is about relationalities among multiple species and the frictions of perspectives. Such a story would not be possible without the superhuman (and cyborgian) vision of waterproof cameras. The story also depends, as the accompanying text explains, on a phenomenological framework of capturing and depicting sensorial experiences. In sensory ethnography, a shift to the senses, grounded in the phenomenological presupposition of a human body, will reveal new frames for how to understand being human and nonhuman. But sensorial encounters are material encounters and they are varied according to an interplay of sensoria and space. Humans can approximate a sensorial encounter of a snail crawling through mud, but by being human, we can never encounter materials the same way a snail does (which does not mean we do not know what it is like to be a snail). To portray sensorial encounters that mismatch with other species, the ethnographers depend on cameras that utilize superhuman sensoria.

Fig. 1

(Source https://vimeo.com/188367219)

Screenshot from Golden Snail Opera

But what if we engaged with the ways in which cameras fail us? Technologies sometimes cannot obtain superhuman sight but rather, disrupt our clear and high-definition visions. Anthropologists can play with the mistakes cameras make, as artists often do. Such errors can be dual purposed: both to represent how high-definition digital medium demands more ecological costs and to represent sensorial encounters that evoke the haptic or alternative visions (Marks 1998). The costs of high definition urge us to reconsider the implicit values of perfectionist sight. The visual anthropologist Faye Ginsburg (2018) calls the ethical relationship between filmmakers and subjects a kind of ‘relational documentary’ that demands an ‘aesthetics of accountability’, reworking a colonial gaze.

Worrying about the grain of images in film and video is not new—an anti-aesthetic of blur made its way into the activist films of the 1960s and 1970s leading to Trinh’s reference in her film to the slogan ‘The bigger the grain the better the politics’. This move worked to embrace a style that was consciously unstylish—proclaiming through their mediums that form itself could be elitist, that it should/did not matter, and that politically progressive documentarians should focus only on content. The disconnect between form and content is itself a fallacy, but thinking through the aesthetics of glitches, as a means to reveal the flaws and costs of the subjects or narratives, offers new possibilities of form that can engage with form rather than dismiss it. As Siddharth Sareen shows, artists such as the Norwegian group Rjukan Solarpunk Academy have been making use of low-carbon art such as textiles and other low-carbon materials as a means to produce stunning works and make statements on artistic impact (Sareen in this book). Visual anthropologists often draw from art theory to open up modalities of anthropology (Stevenson 2014; DeAngelo 2019). With the increased awareness of the energy and labor costs of unseen infrastructures like streaming videos, we can turn to glitch artists and glitch theory for a new reflexive turn.

Small Media Files and the Glitch Arts

As pixelated feet push into the impressions of flowers, the artists of the small media file, I Missed You, take advantage of a ‘glitchcore’ effect of ‘datamoshing’, which is the visual effect of compressing the data of media files to produce overlapping pixelations (see Fig. 2). The small media file features a barefoot caressing flowers and the datamosh allows the softness of the flowers to take over the human skin.

Fig. 2

(Source https://vimeo.com/446293399?embedded=true&source=video_title&owner=120007755 [accessed 22 April 2022])

Screenshot from I Missed You

The media was included in the inaugural Small File Media Festival in 2020 at Simone Fraser University in a session called ‘Sensuous Pixels’ that illuminated the potential sensorial encounters that can be evoked through glitches. Other media files portrayed deliberate uses of glitches that come from hyper compressed files in ways that show how glitches themselves produce sensorial encounters while also acknowledging the energy costs of high-definition streaming video.

The inaugural Small Media File Festival sought to ‘[celebrate] low-bandwidth movies that stream with no damage to the planet!’ The entries were constrained to five megabytes with a recommended goal of one megabyte per minute. As a comparison, a five minute 1080p, i.e. a full high-definition video uses about 50 megabytes per minutes. To translate this to energy costs, 1000 megabytes cost about five kilowatt-hours of energy (Constenaro and Duer 2012) which is the equivalent of 8.9 miles of car travel (see EPA carbon footprint calculator: https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calculator). While these costs of one viewer watching a 60-minute full HD video (approx. 3000 megabytes, equaling 15 kWh or 27 miles of car travel) may make the energy used seem minimal, the ubiquitous usage of the internet and streaming videos indicate a massive carbon footprint of streaming videos. This is contrasted by the fact that streaming video seems immaterial and therefore viewers use streaming services unconsciously. The festival at Simon Fraser University, organized by the film theorist Laura U. Marks and others, was founded upon principles that not only recognize the energy use but also decolonize high-definition media.

High-definition media, in part due to disparities in internet access, imposes disparities of media distribution and knowledge production. In most communities, while it presents an optimistic democratization of such media, including technophile moves to ‘mediatise’ homes, (Aggeli and Mechlenborg in this book), it can reproduce power disparities. Among Indigenous communities in Canada, for example, the award-winning Inuit language film, Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, was largely unseen by Inuit and Indigenous communities when it first was distributed in 2001, due to the lack of local cinemas and digital streaming options in these communities. In response, the Indigenous organization and production company, IsumaTV, created a distribution platform for Indigenous communities and filmmakers that sidestepped the problem of large media file downloads through several innovations such as local servers with pre-downloaded files, community television, and small file media. IsumaTV currently hosts more than 7800 Indigenous community videos in 70 languages and its projects with small media files work to inform local communities of key issues as well as story production. The anthropologist Katherine Sinclair directly links IsumaTV’s work to awareness of environmental impacts of extractivist mining projects in northern Canada (Kunnuk et al. forthcoming). The lack of internet access in these communities means a lack of conversations about the extractivist mining projects that create barriers for the Inuit communities there. In this case, high-definition, high-bandwidth media reinforces colonial violence and small media files can upend it.

Marks and Przedpelski describe how the global disparities of internet speed fall along colonial legacies such that data-poor countries and communities like those who founded IsumaTV suffer greater impoverishment because of their low internet speed and that data-poor countries are also in greater risk for disasters due to a weaker disaster response without fast internet. They call this ‘bandwidth imperialism’ (Marks and Przedpełski 2021). High definition and taken-for-granted fast internet in ‘overdeveloped’ countries, they say, render the energy costs and disparities as unseen and alienated from their media. Projects like these demand an ‘aesthetics of accountability’ (Ginsburg 2018). For Marks and the other organizers of the Small Media File Festival, small file media

create[s] a decentered multitude that sounds a manifesto for alternative ways of making and encountering art and of making (media) art relevant for present social, political, and environmental issues. Small-file media are inherently political in privileging the potential of the unseen and the invisible by focusing on sound and the tactile qualities of the image as well as mobilizing other senses, rather than approaching the image in terms [of] what it represents—as a composition of determinate figures sharply outlined against a set background. (Marks and Przedelski 2021, p. 1)

The festival did not select pixelated videos for their own sake, however, organizers selected files that used glitches, both audial and visual, to evoke emotions and to tell stories. ‘[They] are not just bringing attention to something but also drawing out something from these moving images that already exists’ as the pixel scholar, Azadeh Emadi, said on a panel called the ‘Aesthetic Forum’. Indeed, glitch artists do not often extol the low-carbon footprint of their work but rather enjoy the forms of technological, usually electronically made errors. The group of artists who call themselves glitch artists purposely provoke errors through digital manipulations, circuit-bending, soldering, messing with wires, and rejiggering technical connections. Allison Tanenhaus, a US-based glitch artist, explained to me when talking about her work, ‘It’s really about reclaiming technology, at one point I remember being anxious about how much corporations were tracking us and how much they can scrape my data. I like to emphasize the faults in the system and play with them. I’m inclined to turn perfectionism on its head by experimenting and playing in a self-taught and self-directed way’.

Tanenhaus’ pieces begin with a kind of autobiographical documentation—photographs she takes of her cat or of scenes from her life or old childhood photographs. She digitizes them and then alters coding, usually through a mix of presets and manual alterations within specialized apps, and then produces visuals with those documents. She says that she is interested in the ways in which these forms evoke sensorial encounters or ‘emotional or psychedelic experiences’ for viewers but recognizes herself in these pieces. Thus, the starting point for these glitches is almost ethnographic, empirical observations of being human. When she sees her own pieces, she recognizes the documented starting points but also enjoys the ways in which her phone’s album is just a series of glitched photographs. A kind of privacy gets enforced by her chosen style. In her exhibits, she knows that others do not see the original images but she sees them as an autobiographical timeline. Some of the pieces have more obvious references to scenes than others. In the GlitchKraft exhibition she co-produced and curated with the artist Ben K. Foley, a video shows a reference of jumpy cat images while another hallway surrounds walkers with rainbow optical art floors to make them appear moving (see Fig. 3). Tanenhaus’ pieces include warnings about machines and surveillance in conversational tones (see Fig. 4) such as one that asks: ‘Don’t believe in mind control, OK’.

Fig. 3

(Source From Allison Tanenhaus and Ben K. Foley)

Hallways from GlitchKraft Exhibit

Fig. 4

(Source From Allison Tanenhaus)

Conversational Art at GlitchKraft

The machine is not the only problem in these constructions, but Tanenhaus also expresses her anxiety about the corporations who use these technologies. Glitches allow artists like Tanenhaus to rebel against these corporate powers through the forms that reveal coding or tech errors (in addition to art, she documents digital errors that she finds in public life). Like other glitch artists, Tanenhaus says that part of the fun is the art’s accessibility even though she acknowledges barriers. ‘You don’t need a studio or expensive art materials—all my work is done with my smartphone and apps’.

This tendency toward an aesthetic of do-it-yourself technologies and a sensibility of anti-corporate, error-oriented art allows glitch artists to express errors in ways that undermine neoliberal values of productivity and the ethics of ‘well-oiled machines’. As Tanenhaus explains further in our conversation, ‘[Glitch art] is like veering in the opposite direction of mass-produced media, which is always being pushed to be as high-resolution, fast, and 4K as possible, with maximum filtering to make people look flawless, but attempts to make this seem automatic and effortless, like it’s just the way it is. My work is just as unnatural, but in a deliberately and visibly messy alternative fashion’. The forms engage with the horrors of neoliberal productivity, commodification, and corporate extractivism of personal data, leading her to think through other modes of human extractivism and the human over-reliance on screens. Indeed, the errors themselves call attention to the medium of screens. As Marks (1998) has pointed out, the central issue with streaming video is how audiences perceive its lack of substance. Glitches bring attention to the substance of machines. For example, the datamoshing of I Missed You evokes tactile encounters, forcing the viewer to see the architecture of the digital. If moving images can be understood as ‘haptic’ (Marks 1998) rather than visual, glitches in its rendering can re-materialize the unseen costs of their constructions.

Multiple Visual Anthropologies

In anthropology, the response to the pandemic has been an acknowledgment that fieldwork has always already been ‘patchwork’, in that the division between field and home is a false dichotomy and that short-term field trips and remote connections with interlocutors must be considered valid data (Günel et al. 2020; Tsing 2005). Visual anthropology, too, should respond to the global energy crises just as ethnographic field methods are reframed and reconsidered. Glitch art opens the possibilities for thinking through errors and small file media modalities to utilize low energy consumption techniques. Pixelations, jumpy movements, and sonic irregularities can enhance ethnographic and artistic engagement and answer anthropology’s call to portray aspects of being human from the very data that anthropologists collect, rather than merely resisting style or aesthetics in order to make a point about stylistic elitism.

This call for a glitchy visual anthropology is not meant to prescriptively dismiss high-definition video. Indeed, the superhuman sight represented by increased frame rates, high-definitions, and digital advances have important places when it comes to producing sensorial encounters that speak to human and nonhuman beings as seen with multimodal experimental collaborations like The Golden Snail Opera (2016). Not all visual anthropology must become glitchy. Instead, glitches can be utilized for thematic and ethical reflections. Streaming video is an increasing energy cost, computer tech industries depend on the exploitative labor and forced child labor, and internet infrastructures like data centers besiege places where global digital divides increase disparities. Experimental media in glitch art attends to the costs of form through errors and unveils the faults of a system full of ever-present issues.

Live streaming and high-definition videos are relatively small stressors on the health of our planet, but any response to anthropogenic climate change must be multi-pronged and deliberately reflexive. Glitches provide us with an opportunity of reflection. As energy scholar Michael Fell has pointed out, the impact of environmental stressors varies, so that a just system must allow for flexibility when it comes to solutions such as renewable energy (Fell 2020). A new reflection is especially relevant when anthropologists collaborate with artists from places with fewer resources and lower bandwidths or with nonhuman actors who suffer more from the impending climate crises. When we produce modalities and undertake methods that use moving images, a glitchy framework decolonizes assumptions, wiping away the gloss of high definition. Exhibition Fig. 6 follows this chapter.

Exhibition Fig. 6

(Source Rune Egenes and Norwegian Petroleum Museum [used with permission])

Detail view of a textile with electric bus technical specifications