Artificial Intelligence and Phenomenological Ethnography

Abstract

While phenomenological ethnography is primarily concerned with the structure of an individual subject’s experience of the sociocultural world, the contents of that experience itself remain a vital concern and problem for phenomenological ethnography given the several problems any ethnographer faces in trying to access what their subjects experience. This chapter describes an experimental methodology in which the ethnographer uses an artificially intelligent, improvising, musical social interactant to address this problem by staging encounters between performers active in free improvisation and these nonhuman virtual systems. Results of this method illustrate its efficacy as a novel means of understanding human social interaction as a distinct form of culture as experience.