Optic Matters
Participation is about co-presence.
Such co-presence during the TEK interviews, however, materialized unevenly across locations.
Though absent in body, the BearWatch researchers were still materially entangled with these interviews through the physical presence of camera rigs, microphones, digital optics and sound to required to technically facilitate such presence.
This creates a paradox: while technology enables co-presence across distances, it also reconfigures intimacy.
The very materiality of cameras and screens imposed an external logic onto the interviews. The remote gaze doesn't merely observe, it conditions the unfolding of the interview, shifts power, affect, and ways of knowing in ways that were not reflected on before the conducting of the interviews.
"Detour" to Cut 2 to trace the ways in which camera equipment provided different terms of engagement in other parts of the research project.
Or,