In anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s exchanges with his colleague Margaret Mead, Bateson described the recording of moving images with camera as an analytical process, a way to sensorially confront a complex social interaction.[note]Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, “Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson on the Use of the Camera in Anthropology,” Studies in Visual Communication, vol. 4, no. 2,1977, p. 78-80.[/note] Recording for my short film Kasiterit (2019) by way of digital film is also an investigative process. Bateson believed that a camera should extend the thought process and vision of its user. It is a means for researchers to explore subjects and for viewers to follow that exploration. However, Bateson and Mead’s collaborative visual anthropological work Trance and Dance in Bali (1952) was criticised for its subjective assessment of Balinese society in the pre-independence era of Indonesia. Anthropologist Fatimah Tobing Rony points out that Mead and Bateson’s film only relies on photogenic, aesthetic elements without being able to give a voice to what they record.[note]Fatimah Tobing Rony, “The Photogenic Cannot Be Tamed: Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson's Trance and Dance in Bali,”Discourse, vol. 28, no.1, 2006, p. 5-27.[/note] For Rony, the photogenic ‘involved three axes: a conversion of time (they exist in the past), place (geographically distant from the metropolitan west), and status (they are captured as the object of the photographer's gaze)’.[note]Ibid., p. 9.[/note] Furthermore, Rony writes:

Part of the consequences of Mead and Bateson’s view of Balinese culture—of seeing what was photographed as pathologised: fey and schizoid—meant that the Balinese were not seen as being subjects of history or even colonialism, for questions of class, location, poverty, disease, child labour, compulsory labour were elided.[note]Ibid., p. 10.[/note]

Rony's criticism of Mead and Bateson, and especially the notion of photogenic, informed the construction of Kasiterit. The photogenic also resonates with what filmmaker and critic Masao Adachi calls ‘touristic footage’, where exotic images have a concealed truth and a dark history that intersects with many of the aspects explained by Rony above: colonialism, class, etc.[note]Masao Adachi, Eiga/Kakumei [Cinema/Revolution], Tokyo: Kawaide Shobō, 2003.[/note] In Kasiterit, touristic and photogenic footage recorded in Bangka is expressedly presented at the beginning of the total 18-minute duration to prelude the development of a fictional narrative, which then transitions to a video recording of the mining process. Such editing aims for varying modes of subjectivity to take place purposely in conflict with one another. The alien-esque landscapes are overlaid with mining footage that looks rough and dirty. The first half of Kasiterit is comprised of video footage recorded in collaboration with unconventional miners during pyschogeophysical field research. A mining situation is shown. Unconventional labourers hire large excavator machines to dredge the landfill.

Secondly, the edit of Kasiterit is sewn together with elements of a fictional narrative told by an artificial intelligence named Natasha. Natasha is an AI character in this speculative world who feels compelled to question its existence as a (living) being. Natasha’s character is developed from an idea of progress by which a situation of techno-escalation creates problems that are always resolved through further technological innovation. It resonates with the characteristics of what Evgeny Morozov calls solutionism.[note]Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: Technology, Solutionism, and the Urge to Fix Problems That Don't Exist, London: Penguin Books, 2014.[/note] In Kasiterit, Natasha experiences moments of melancholy to genealogically reflect upon its existence; it was born from Bangka and Bangka’s tin. Natasha's reflection on its own birth—a process that in writer Greg Egan's science fiction language is called orphanogenesis[note]Greg Egan, Diaspora, New York: Night Shade Books, 2015 [1997].[/note]—is the basis of Kasiterit’s ethno-fictive composition. Kasiterit sees the island’s complicity with global technological developments as an otherwise possibility for thinking about the future.

In discussing the use of fiction in an ethnographically inclined interdisciplinary study, I draw on elements and theories developed by filmmaker and anthropologist Jean Rouch. Rouch explores the overlapping space between documentary film and fiction:

For me, as an ethnographer and filmmaker, there is almost no boundary between documentary film and films of fiction. The cinema, the art of the double, is already the transition from the real world to the imaginary world, and ethnography, the science of the thought systems of others, is a permanent crossing point from one conceptual universe to another; acrobatic gymnastics, where losing one’s footing is the least of the risks.[note]Jean Rouch and Steven Feld, Ciné-Ethnography, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003, p. 185.[/note]

This space between documentation, field research, and fiction emerges as a result of sensory experience that is documented through media technology. The presence of media technology is actively appropriated not only as a subject of study but also a means to produce knowledge. In this case, the film and image production both rely upon digital camera technology, another tin-based machine, to bring forward a critical reflection of material entanglement and value in practice and theory. Furthermore, this artistic approach to film practice, theorised by Rouch as ethnographic fiction, opens a space to reimagine the relation between psychogeophysics as a method and the sharing of knowledge—a process Rouch coined as ‘shared anthropology’.[note]Ibid., p. 44.[/note]

The fictional possibilities inherent to film practice mean that the practice of filming, editing, and presenting a recorded material is never what Dziga Vertov called kino-pravda, or film truth. As Rouch further describes:

Vertov called the entirety of this discipline kino-pravda (cinéma-vérité, film truth), an ambiguous or self-contradictory expression, since, fundamentally, film truncates, accelerates, and slows down actions, thus distorting the truth.[note]Ibid., p. 13.[/note]

Following this theoretical grounding of film practice, ethnographic fiction became the method to extend my practice of psychogeophysics in the form of a research-based artistic output. While mapping and landscaping tin as a historical material in Bangka, ethnographic fiction as a method has allowed the transformation of a sensory experience into a conceptual audiovisual presentation. Despite their overlaps, the two experimental methods, psychogeophysics and ethnographic fiction, are based on an aesthetic approach and the use of media technology. They bring an important shift of understanding to the social, economic, and historical transformations of tin as material.

Kasiterit appropriates speculative fiction narratives as a form of interdisciplinary analysis and speculative guide to Bangka adjacent to the written psychogeophysical guide [Riar Rizaldi’s dissertation]. Anthropomorphised machines in a form of AI provide an imagination to see the broader relations between tin, labour, and Bangka in the realm of technological advancement. Putting the technicalities of artificial intelligence aside and focusing on the fictional aspects of Natasha’s realisation of humanlike origins becomes a means to imagine the potential of human-material relations. The ethnography of mining actors in Bangka from scientists to unconventional miners and the authorities are patchworked with fictional elements such as when Natasha expresses its anxiety about the scarcity of material and analyses the importance of labour in its discourse.  

This text is a lightly edited excerpt from Riar Rizaldi’s doctoral thesis, Politics of Cassiterite: Mapping the Value of Tin as Material through Psychogeophysics of Bangka Island, City University of Hong Kong, 2022, p. 111-113.

The short film Kasiterit by Riar Rizaldi is available to watch on Issue's website from mid-July to mid-August 2024.