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This morning anthropologist David Dupuis and I had a fascinating meeting with Richard Barber, Cultural Development Officer at South Tyneside Council and Mike Hamilton Strategic ICT Manager at The Word, National Centre for the written word in South Shields.
We are beginning to work on an audio-visual installation that will be exhibited at The Word in April 2018, and the meeting today was specifically to get access to the room where the installation will take place and get an idea of the facilities that can be used. This is no ordinary room, in the Story World space it is possible to create a 360 degree surround sound and visual experience.
Today we saw it being used to full effect with a group of school children. The students were really impressed, as were we!
The visuals can be projected on all walls in the rooms, helping to create the atmosphere of actually being in the environment depicted in the scene. For example, space imagery can be used to transport you into space! With 5 projectors, there are various possibilities in terms of screening photographs or static images alongside moving image, using all or a selection of the walls, repeating images around the space, having different images appear at different times on different walls and so forth.
The room has proven to be very popular with school groups who have been doing creative writing exercises in there. The pupils write as they sit in the projected landscape listening to sounds from that specific scene. Teachers have commented how much the quality of the student's writing has improved since using the Story World facilities.
I am excited and really pleased to be using the space in a less conventional way, and am ever so grateful to the staff at the Word who are ever so helpful and enthusiastic.
Social anthropologist, David Dupuis contacted me about my research having read my blog post via Hearing the Voice.
David is a Visiting Fellow at the Department of Anthropology of the University of Durham, funded by the Fyssen Foundation. In collaboration with the Hearing the Voice team, he is working on the experience of auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH), occurring in shamanic contexts, especially during the ayahuasca rituals and retreat times in the jungle.
David's doctoral dissertation focused on ritual innovations, modes of transmission of religious knowledge and the topic of therapeutic effectiveness in Takiwasi. During his PhD, David spent eighteen months in Takiwasi, a therapeutic community located in the Upper Peruvian Amazon. This therapeutical team includes medical doctors, psychologists and traditional healers using some mestizo shamanism practices. Medicinal plants – including the hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca – are used in rituals along with psychotherapy and speech groups. The rituals mix elements of Amazonian shamanism, Catholicism and the New Age.
David aims to advance his work in order to elaborate a cross cultural and comparative model of the arousal, socialization and control of AVH in various social contexts. His goal is to shed light on how cultural repertoires affect the nature and intensity of AVH, illustrating how culture affects our mental experiences. He is consequently planning to conduct further ethnographic fieldworks in order to collect new data with a view to better understand what he calls the socialization of AVH.
It was fascinating to hear about his experiences and the effect that the plants can have on people and their auditory verbal hallucinations. I am curious to find out more about the rituals, and the effects that the ayahuasca can have. The implications for the use of this plant are considerable.
David and I discussed how our research interests relate and began talking about potential collaborative ideas. I am looking forward to working with David and seeing how our ideas develop.
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