Gear | MUSEUM FATIGUE

Mobile Visual Ethnography Kit

February 18, 2015 by Museum Fatigue

Last year I posted a bit about the simple, mobile equipment that I have put together for the students in my visual anthropology class to use on their visual documentary projects. This year I have made a few updates that are worth a quick share. I’m still committed to using Zoom H1s for audio capture—there really isn’t a better recorder for the price—and I’m a big fan of the tripod/case accessory package that is available for the Zoom H1 on […]

Categories: Anthropology, Fieldwork, Gear, How To, Visual Anthropology • Tags: Canon VIXIA HF R500, FurryHead Windscreens, mobile equipment, visual ethnography, Zoom H1

(Simple) Mobile Visual Ethnography Equipment

March 13, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

I’m often telling folks that the goal of my visual anthropology class is not to make filmmakers, but to use basic equipment to have my students make films together with others… For the past few years, students in my class have been working with local volunteers from our university neighborhood—The Hamline Midway—to make simple films together. During the first half of the semester they get to know one another, and the students get to learn the equipment, by making a […]

Categories: Anthropology, Fieldwork, Gear, How To, Visual Anthropology • Tags: FlipCam, FurryHead Windscreens, iPhone, visual ethnography, Zoom H1

An OFF Pocket™ for Sensitive Fieldwork?

December 16, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

I like the idea of privacy. When you carry a mobile phone, regularly check in to Twitter, often update your Facebook, or use Google products, however, privacy really can’t be much more than that—an idea, a dream, a conceptual ideal. So, earlier this year when I read about Adam Harvey’s Kickstarter project, the OFF Pocket™, I immediately loved the idea—a black pocket that you drop your phone into to disconnect it, shield it from the network, quiet its connectivity. It was […]

Categories: Fieldwork, Gear, Privacy, Review • Tags: Adam Harvey, anthropologist, bag of holding, China, eavesdropping, iPhone, Kickstarter, mobile phone, OFF Pocket™, reporter

“Public Walking iPads” as Portable Distinction

November 2, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

The other day while in the check-in line at the Beijing airport a middle aged man in smart business casual dress, with a modest rollaboard suitcase just also happened to be plugged into his iPad watching a Hollywood blockbuster. The bustle of the airport, the crowded checkin line, the juggling of luggage in one hand and the precarious balancing of an expensive, unprotected 4th generation 3G iPad in the other, made me cringe. A single unexpected bump or slip and […]

Categories: China, Consumption, Gear, iPad, Objects of Power • Tags: capital, conspicuous consumption, distinction, iPad, iPads, Pierre Bourdieu, Social Class

Protection in the Nuclear Age

September 7, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

“In this uneasy age in which we live, strife abounds in many troubled parts of the world. The weapons of modern warfare have become increasingly powerful and numerous…In the face of this threat, a strong civil defense is needed not only throughout government, but on the part of the individual and the family.” In the final throes of preparing for this semester, while digging though some readings for a class, I came across a small booklet that I collected a […]

Categories: Books, End of Times, Gear, Memory, Mystery Objects, Retro • Tags: Civil Defense, civil preparedness, Department of Defense, fallout shelter, Fallout Shelter Design, Nuclear Age, Nuclear Attack, Survival

The Playtime of Surveillance

March 23, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

“Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society—not that machines are determining, but because they express those social forms capable of generating them and using them.” —Gilles Deleuze “All play means something.” — Johan Huizinga When I was growing up, a boy in the upper midwestern United States in the final decades of the Cold War, I loved spies, secrets and the gear that when along with them. I locked what childhood secrets I had in a small […]

Categories: Gear, Play, Random Reflections, Surveillance, Toys • Tags: AR Drone, brookstone store, drones, johan huizinga, Jumping Sumo, Parrot Drones, Rolling Spider, Rover Spy Tank