Collaborative Engagements with the DIY Electronic Music Scene of São Paulo

This paper aims at describing the various experimental collaborations that stay at the basis of the website www.sensorhythms.com. The website results from three-year postdoctoral research about the DIY electronic music scene of São Paulo and focuses on the embodiment of experiences in local music participation. Experimental collaboration is creatively engaging with digital, audiovisual, and multimodal methods­– the website takes film as a pivoting element in the construction of the web content while engaging with other media and experimenting with multiple ways of anthropological writing. The film series features collaborations with artists, performers, scenographers, producers, filmmakers, photographers, or anthropologists, and in co-authored filmmaking and multimodal dialogues. The paper engages with these mixed forms of collaboration while discussing authorship in the context of experimental collaborative methodology. By thinking about fieldwork as a laboratory for collaborative experimentations, I intend to discuss ethnographic authority in film as a concept that is diluted by commonly owned creativity, invention and shared knowledge-making. In this sense, I question the anthropologists' status quo, as the sole producer of anthropological knowledge. Engaged in the process of collaborative experimentation the anthropologist works together with interlocutors to co-create and co-own, artistic and documented products that are co-curated across commonly shared platforms. In the context of new and complex media-ecologies, anthropologists and interlocutors are therefore invited to work together and critically reflect on this process of sharing and co-creating anthropological knowledge.