TLDR: skip to the video at the bottom, everything is explained there as well!
Pink’s chapter emplaces ethnography through the importance of place and space, and through an interdisciplinary, complex, and individual understanding of sensorial experience. She encourages finding creative ways to share experiences beyond the written word or isolated sensory expressions. Pink also discusses how the very communication of sensory ethnography is a place in and of itself, open to ever-changing interpretations by the audiences it encounters. She states that “we cannot directly access or share [other people’s] personal individual, biographical, shared or ‘collective’ memories, experiences or imaginations…however, we can, by attuning our bodies, rhythms, tastes, ways of seeing and more to theirs, begin to become involved in making places that are similar to theirs, and thus feel that we are similarly emplaced” (Pink 2021, 26).
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In our sensory exchange, we first discussed how we each experience knowledge, memory and imagination, and we learned that while Kim's sense of knowledge bleeds into imagination, Ella’s bleeds into memory. |
Next, we randomly selected prompt questions to generate a sensory memory to share with each other. We surrounded ourselves with various art and musical supplies, set a 20-minute timer, and individually responded to the prompts in a multisensory way. We briefly described our creations to each other before resetting the timer to creatively respond to each other’s sensory memory creations, in an act of what Pink refers to as ‘creative correspondence’.
In our reflection afterwards, we noticed that Ella felt much more imaginative and creative when responding to Kim's artwork, and that Kim was able to recall a memory in response to Ella’s memory. It seemed that in engaging in this method of creative correspondence, we were able to understand each other better and thus understand each other’s creative works more deeply.
In our reflection afterwards, we noticed that Ella felt much more imaginative and creative when responding to Kim's artwork, and that Kim was able to recall a memory in response to Ella’s memory. It seemed that in engaging in this method of creative correspondence, we were able to understand each other better and thus understand each other’s creative works more deeply.
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We each noted that the other person was able to reflect back things we had only unconsciously known before in our responses. In responding creatively to each other, we both engaged with a mode we were less comfortable with on a regular basis: for Ella, this was imagination, for Kim, this was memory.
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We decided to write a song that combined our experiences, called back to our artwork, and captured the creative place we had built and were experiencing that evening. The song features words from the poem Ella wrote in response to Kim's first artwork, and its title comes from Kim's overall understanding of Ella’s first artwork. We discovered that we have opposite songwriting practices, and we worked together to accommodate each other.
Sarah Pink concludes her chapter discussing how the very communication of sensory ethnography is a place in and of itself that is open to ever changing interpretations by the audiences it encounters. We hope that in experiencing this video, the audience gets a glimpse into our process and that they consider asking themselves and their friends questions like, “how do you experience memory?” or “what is something you do regularly to nurture positive feelings within yourself?”