On Monday, February 10th, at 5:30, we will have the great pleasure to host filmmaker and anthropologist Prof David Jaclin. The event will feature David Jaclin's latest short feature film L'Usure du Monde (The Wear and Tear of the World). The screening will be followed by a presentation by Prof Jaclin on the wear and tear of the living and of things, including the wear and tear of images, now produced in astronomical proportions.

Synopsis: L'Usure du monde (The Wear and Tear of the World) recapitulates and extends some fifteen years of ethnographic fieldwork carried out between Canada, South Africa, Hong Kong and the Solomon Islands, where David Jaclin studied, among other things, the international traffic in so-called exotic animals, the world's third-largest black market, behind drugs and arms. Wishing to go beyond a description of “climate change”, David Jaclin's research addresses, with the help of filmed images, the phenomenon of “iridescence”, the luminous appearances and disappearances that occur when two bodies, whether human, living or even machine-made, meet. (From Fragments of Images, forthcoming)

David Jaclin's Bio: I hold a doctorate in Anthropology from the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris and a doctorate in Communication Studies from University of Montreal. A fellowship from the Fyssen Foundation enabled me to carry out postdoctoral work at MIT (HASTS). I am currently an associate professor at UOttawa’s School of Sociological and Anthropological Studies, where I head the HumAnimaLab.

At the intersection of Anthropology and Communication Studies, my research draws on informational and communicational processes at play in human-nature relationships, with a particular focus on their emergent socio-cultural implications and evolutionary dimensions. Building on multi-sited, multi-species and multi-media ethnographies, my work investigates some of our contemporary modes of interaction with rapidly changing environments.

Such modes are here approached in a media ecology perspective, where a living organism, like any medium, is not simply apprehended as a passive vehicle for a message but rather envisioned as a transductive milieu.

I am currently developing, as an extension of my previous work on the trafficking of 'exotic' animals, a research on/in water. From atmospheric rivers in California to groundwater microbiological mutations in an abandoned mine in Quebec, through cloud seeding in Taiwan and the dismantling of a European hydroelectric network, I concentrate on the circulation of this (vital) element and its anthropocenic reconfigurations.

Location: Critical Media Lab, Peterson Hall, Room 108.