Sensory Ethnography Lab

Formed in 2006
Based in Massachusetts, USA

The Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) is an experimental laboratory at Harvard University that explores combinations of aesthetics and ethnography. As an exploratory research project combining analog and digital media, it has thus far produced and exhibited films, video art, audio, photography, and installations that interweave the history and narratives of people living in every corner of the world, collected through on-site fieldwork. The Lab’s film Leviathan, depicting a North American bottom-trawling fishing vessel at work with grim yet stunningly beautiful images and sounds, was shown in Japan in August 2014, and in summer 2015 Hunt the World, a selected program of some of SEL’s finest films thus far, was shown in four Japanese cities. The anthropologist and film director Lucien Castaing-Taylor serves as director of the Sensory Ethnography Lab.