The Ethnographer

Today in our tutorial, we had to read the infamous short story "The Ethnographer" by Jorges Luis Borges. We got together with partners and took turns reading. The partner who wasn't reading took a video or still images of the person reading. It definitely started as an awkward experience, but it turned out to be very artistic. We had to look at the person as more of an object, rather than a person. I took a video of my partner. I started off head on and level to her face. Then I stepped backwards and then sideways, behind her and in front of her. I experimented with focusing and lighting. I zoomed up close to her face and close to the paper. I also stood in a far away corner. By the time I was in a far away corner, all I could do was view her reading the short story. I couldn't actually hear her anymore. Unfortunately, I don't have the video of her - only the one that she took of me.

My favourite part of the tutorial was the ringtone exercise. We were put into a large circle as a class and asked to play our ringtones. Sometimes they were taking turns, sometimes all at once. It made such an amazing sound. Although some ringtones (including mine) are very annoying, they seemed to work and became less irritating when played all together.

Our final activity of the tutorial was to stand in a line of five students in front of the class. We played an "ice breaker" type of game where the first person would say their name and the rest of the group, one by one, would have to repeat their name. We couldn't move on to the next person's name until the whole group pronounced their name correctly. This wasn't too tough... Until we got to the names of a foreign culture to our own. My name is pretty easy to pronounce correctly though!