Audio-visual-sensory Essays in Post-Digital Times: Communicating Anthropological Knowledge Across the Multimodal, Multisensory, Participatory and More-than-human

An introduction to the special issue, this article sets the stage for the essays that compose it. It addresses the transformations that have been taking place in the recent decades in the terrain of image-making, visual culture, visual technologies and indeed of visual anthropology. Addressing the continuity between past and present practices this text acknowledges that we are in an era of post-digital visuality, where the distinction between what is digital and what is not is of second order importance. The article suggests that audio-visual-sensory research is a fluid terrain where different media, senses, modes of collaborations and of narration concur in creating something which is at once a communication of scientific research and a form of production of new ethnographic evidence. It also claims that what we do with visual media today contains indeed elements of novelty yet also many elements of continuity with the ambitions, intentions and desires of previous generations of anthropologists. In a way, the Old is the New New.