An Anthropology of/with Virtual Reality: Digital Ethnographic Experiments with Active Materiality
This lecture, titled »Good Enoughing at Middle Tech: An Ethnography of Corporate Software Culture«, will be presented by Prof. Paula Bialski (University of St. Gallen) on Thursday, January 30th, from 14:00 to 16:00 in MB4/165. Organized as part of the regular RUSTlab lecture series, the event is a collaboration between the WS (Wissenschaftliches Serviceprojekt) of our CRC 1567 and RUSTlab. Insights into corporate software culture and development practices will be explored.
As part of the RUSTlab lecture series, Maxime Le Calvé presents his monograph An Anthropology of/with Virtual Reality, an exploration of VR not as a medium for escape or content delivery, but as a site for collaborative performance and ethnographic invention. The book unfolds from within the making of immersive installations in artistic and scientific contexts—not studying VR from the outside, but working with it to stage forms of knowing, sensing, and relating. Rather than framing VR as a platform for (un)real immersive and empathy-producing storytelling (Messeri 2024), Maxime Le Calvé treats the technology as a stage for what Andrew Pickering calls an ontological theater: a space where researchers, practitioners, and technologies co-enact partial and situated realities. Case studies include a 360° performance between the artist Jonathan Meese and his mother, a virtual reanimation of an East German slide archive as a responsive image cloud, and the speculative design of neurosurgical sensing tools. These stagings foreground mid-embodiment (Dumit and Myers): the embodied condition through which scientific knowledge emerges in action. Across these collaborations, Maxime Le Calvé introduces the concept of sense-acts (Le Calvé and Fedorova, forthcoming): co-experienced epistemic gestures that arise in the interplay between bodies, interfaces, and speculative relations. Working with VR invites us to stay with the performative tensions of perception, and to cultivate a virtuous mode of not-doing in ethnographic collaborations: one that holds space for what resists articulation, yet insists on being sensed.
Maxime Le Calvé is a multimodal anthropologist who engages with immersive technologies, design research and the arts. He is currently a Research Associate at the ExC “Matters of Activity,” and is the Co-Founder of the Speculative Realities Lab at the University-Hospital of the Charité in Berlin. He trained in general ethnology in Paris Nanterre and received his doctorate in social anthropology from EHESS Paris and the Institute for Theatre Studies at FU Berlin. Maxime is currently conducting an ethnographic study on performative practices in neurosurgery. He uses drawing, digital prototyping and experimental publishing as field methods. He recently curated several exhibitions, i.e., Field/Works (2020 & 2024), Stretching Materialities (2021), and Drift. Sink. Emerge. Repeat. (2025).He is the author of Golden Pudel-Ethnographie (2024), a monograph on an alternative creative venue in Hamburg. He also co-edited the volume Exercices d’ambiances (2018) on approaches to atmospheres in social sciences. His writings include essays on contemporary art, music, the streets of Berlin, the fun of dissecting brains, and ethnographic training. His current multimodal work can be found on the radical open-access platform AnthroReverb and on his blog, maximelecalve.com.
The lecture is also part of the RUSTlab Lectures at the RUSTLab of the Ruhr University Bochum.
Picture credits: Maxime Le Calvé
