Appropriating Imagination in Virtual Anthropology of Art

This paper returns to the work of Alfred Gell and his ground-breaking essays on theanthropology of art, and vice versa, the “art of anthropology”, which came to challengeHegel’s autonomy of art and its “spirit” (Geist), by creating an idiosyncratic art theorythat focused on the inter-subjective play between intentions of social agents andindexes in terms of reciprocity and exchange (Gell 1998, 96-153). It argues that therapid evolution of virtual and interactive technologies taking place in the art world andthe market transformed the process of distribution by indexing into formalizedaesthetics (i.e. “style”). In other words, indexing has become a matter of aesthetics. Inanthropological terms, these rapid developments raise a set of new technical andmoral questions in appropriating imagination in the emerging staged plays betweenHost (i.e. “ethnographer”), User (i.e. “informant”) and the ethnographic field as aprivatized mise-en-scene. In investigating this triangle, this paper compares fourdifferent types of “interventions”, in which imagination has been appropriated in fourcollaborative interdisciplinary projects, in order to argue for a re-evaluation of Gell’stheory within the context of the rapid developments of virtual technology. In discussingthe intentions and nexuses of the four collaborative plays, the paper shows how thetechnological virtual revolution radically affected collaborative interventions, carryingradical implications for anthropology of art.