Expedition Content (Ernst Karel and Veronika Kusumaryati, 2020) (Patreon)

There is no obvious way to present an audio field recording. The audience for this type of documentation is mostly restricted to anthropology specialists conducting archival research, even though audio recordings can often achieve an intimacy that ethnographic film cannot. The tape recorder, as a piece of equipment, is just not as imposing as the movie camera, not as intrusive or weapon-like. Given the limitations of exhibiting this material, Expedition Content takes a radical approach, which ironically is also the most obvious. It makes them into a "film," although it is almost entirely without images.

Ernst Karel is a veteran member of Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab, one whose artistic and technical specialty is audio. He has been a sound recordist for a number of SEL productions, as well as experimental, ethnography-adjacent work by the likes of Ben rivers and Anocha Suwichakornpong. He has also produced a number of site-specific sound installations based on documentary audio. With Expedition Content, he and SEL fellow Veronika Kusumaryati have returned to a pivotal moment in the history of ethnography, and of their own academic institution.

Apart from onscreen subtitles, and brief footage of people lighting fires in a bat cave, Expedition Content proceeds in complete darkness. The archival audio comes from a 1961 trip to study and observe the Hubula, an Indigenous tribe living in the part of Papua New Guinea that was under Dutch colonial control at the time. (Later, the area was ceded to Indonesia and subjected to ongoing military rule.) Harvard professor and revolutionary ethnographic filmmaker Robert Gardner led the group, and the tape recordings were made by one of Gardner's students, Michael Rockefeller. The choice of material is hardly coincidental. Karel and Kusumaryati ask us to consider the web of power relations at work within this particular expedition, and ethnography more generally.

As we listen to the audio and read the captions, we notice certain things: Rockefeller's attempt at categorizing the sounds on the tape; the ironic humor with which the Hubula observe their Western observers; and the rather shocking material Rockefeller records of Gardner, Peter Matthiessen, Karl Heider, and other members of the team, getting drunk and musing about which of the Hubula women they might try to screw. (There's also a rambling discussion about jazz that finds the men describing their appreciation in fairly racist ways.) The implications are clear. The attitudes of the ethnographers, revealed amongst themselves "after hours" and off the clock, cannot help but influence the work they've gone there to do.

Part of what makes Expedition Content so compelling is that the material presents a knot of contradictions that Karel and Kusumaryati mostly leave tangled up. Gardner was a revered experimental ethnographer whose films, including the one he shot during this voyage, Dead Birds (1963), took anthropology away from its scientific air of objectivity, and nearer to the avant-garde. (In addition to his work at Harvard, Gardner also hosted the TV show "Screening Room," where he interviewed the likes of Hollis Frampton, Bruce Baillie, and Peter Hutton.) Meanwhile, it is the most privileged member of the team, Rockefeller, who surreptitiously records his companions' vulgar behavior. Does Expedition Content alter our view of Gardner's achievements? And Rockefeller, who went missing during a subsequent expedition to Southern New Guinea, belied any impression we might have of the dilettante billionaire. Expedition Content demands that we consider the unseen behavior of public men, and appropriately enough, it asks us to do it in the dark.