Tripod: Performance, Media, Cybernetics

Abstract

In March 1976, Steward Brand interviewed Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson at Bateson's home near Santa Cruz, California. Brand, best known as one of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, is a nodal figure in the countercultural and cybercultural milieus of personal and networked computing that gave rise through the internet to new imaginaries and practices of mediated communication that have since proliferated in everyday life across much of the globe (Castells 1996(Castells , 2001Turner 2008). Brand had been "wowed … out of [his] shoes" (Bateson and Mead 1976, 33) by Bateson's Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) and opened the interview asking about the Macy conferences on cybernetics. He recorded the conversation and published the transcript in The CoEvolution Quarterly (Bateson and Mead 1976). Cybernetics was the topic that made the conversation of two septuagenarian anthropologists relevant to Brand's readers.In 1977, Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication published a three-page excerpt (from the much longer transcript that Brand had published) as "Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson on the Use of the Camera in Anthropology" (Mead and Bateson 1977). In this excerpt, Mead (then age seventy-five) and Bateson (then seventy-two) discuss their use of still and motion photography in Bali, where they worked as newlyweds from 1936 to 1939. This dialogue quickly became a classic in visual anthropology (then formalizing as a subdiscipline), appealing for the endearing way the formerly married anthropologists argue. Its power as a mythic text, however, lies in the binary of science versus art, a polarity that recurs with fractal regularity in the history of the field and that Mead and Bateson came to personify to later generations of visual anthropologists. While Mead doggedly advocates for the scientific potential of the camera, the use of tripods, and long takes, Bateson cantankerously refuses such limitations, insisting that the camera should be "off the tripod" and "the photographic record should be an art form" (Bateson and Mead 1976, 19).In 2015, my colleague Christian Hammons and I turned to the published transcripts of this Mead-Bateson conversation as the basis for a performance documentary. Our thought was to build out from this text to explore the documentary possibilities of performance and the performative