Tuning Solaris

A peer-reviewed piece on the emerging theory of sensory ethnography and post-humanist cinema

2016, Visual Ethnography Journal

“Solaris. Its light burns right through my eyes. A companion text to the film that does not mean anything but itself.”

• Full title: Tuning Solaris: From the Darkness of a Shopping Mall Towards Post-Humanist Cinema
• Author: Pavel Borecký 

• Journal: Visual Ethnography Journal (5/2), 107-137 pages, 2016
• Access: paywall
• Language: English
• Key words: Visual Anthropology, sensory ethnography, atmosphere, empathy, more-than-human, non-representative theory

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Abstract

Building upon the audiovisual project on a Tallinn shopping mall, the article outlines the conceptual resources vital to the ethical-aesthetic agenda of sensory ethnography, and links them with the ambitions of an emerging post-humanist cinema. 

By doing so it tells the story of a personal struggle for the embodiment of a non-representative and object-oriented stance and challenges the main premises of human-centered observational filmmaking style.

Finally, the article argues that by provoking the experience of disorientation and more-than-human closeness, sensory ethnography can contribute to the birth of a post-human awareness and an ontological reconstitution of our being-in-the-world in the Anthropocene era.

Table of Contents

• Entering the Mall
• Solaris as a Post-modernist Abject
• The Shapes of Humanistic Cinema
• Through the Lands where Things can Speak
• Sensory Ethnography in times of the Anthropocene
• Conclusion