ABSTRACT
Critically responding to the contemporary capture and redistribution of experience through digital technologies, we focus on a series of creative ethnographic experiments with sensory technologies conducted by members of the Manifold Lab in collaboration with young people in Manchester, UK. We draw on theories of the haptic eye and a/signification from Deleuze and Guattari, to problematise conventional descriptions of sensation, in search of the intensive, the imperceptible, and the eco-sensory. Our focus in this chapter is on sensor technologies as potential agents of surrealist ethnographic experimentation. We engage with digital devices as ecological agents, tracking intensive flows, layering affect, invaginating power, ramifying insight, and entangling concepts through playful inversion, pursuing a kind of surreal participation that avoids de-scription and conventional causal exegesis. We argue that critical and creative engagements with digital technology helps to counter simplistic models of ethnographic representation.
