Speculative Analogy
Using 360 film and VR glasses for co-imagining religious experience
by Roger Canals (University of Barcelona), Alkim Erol (University of Barcelona), Juan Francisco Cuyás (University of Barcelona)
The aim of this essay is to briefly provide methodological and theoretical reflections about the process of creating and disseminating a multimodal collaborative experiment based on the ceremony in honor of San Juan (Saint John) performed by some members of the Venezuelan community of Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain).[1] The main result of this project lasting from 2022 to 2024, is a 360-film titled How Do Saints See? (Canals, Erol, and Cuyás 2022), the editing process of which was partially shared with some of its protagonists (see image 1). The film can be seen in interactive mode here:
Once the film was finished, we invited four women devotees of San Juan to watch it using VR glasses. Afterwards, we proposed them to critically comment on our work and to discuss the potentialities and limitations of VR as visual research device. Their comments can be watched here:
Origins of the research
Roger Canals began to study this ritual in 2010 (Canals 2016). On several occasions, Venezuelan followers of San Juan in Barcelona expressed to him the idea that, during the ritual, the images of San Juan, identified with the spirit himself, were able to “see us”. We took this statement as an initial provocation to explore the kind of subjectivity and agency that “spirits” might have during ceremonies. Therefore, as filmmakers and anthropologists, we decided to translate this statement into a visual research approach. We opted to film the ritual with a 360-camera, positioning the camera at the level of the images of San Juan of following their movements. We chose a 360-camera because, to our view, it suggested a “non-human” and “unconventional” way of seeing.
It is important to make it clear that the principle of “filming from the point of view of the saint” was for us a pure hypothetical and speculative point of departure. We didn’t mean to employ the 360-camera to literally reproduce the allegedly “real vision of the saint”. We consider that these multimodal technologies are not less “biased” or “human” than others (Takaragawa et al. 2019). We did not assume either that the watching of the film in VR could be assimilated to the direct ritual experience lived by the devotees (Messeri 2024). However, we considered that 360-camera and VR could be employed as a “fieldwork device” (Estalella & Criado 2018) aimed at triggering a discussion with devotees about the agency of spiritual non-human entities during religious ceremonies and about the potentialities and limitations of technologies of vision to carry out anthropological research about the non-visible, especially in the religious domain.
Experiencing a ritual with 360 glasses. Photo: Visual Trust Project. 2024.
This research is theoretically based on the concept of “speculative analogy”[2]. This term refers to an experimental methodological approach aimed at triggering collaborative imagination through inventive hypothetical comparisons. Our initial questions were: “could 360-camera evoke the way a saint sees the ritual?”; “Does VR have the capacity to make you feel as if you were in the middle of the ritual?”. Before analyzing the responses given by the practitioners to these questions, we would like to provide some information about the ceremony in honor to San Juan and about the development of our film.
The celebration of San Juan
The celebration of San Juan (in Catalan, Sant Joan) in Barcelona is held on the night of 23rd June. This festivity is widespread in the Mediterranean region and in Latin America although there are significant differences in the way it is enacted in the two regions. In Barcelona, for example, the Sant Joan festivities revolve around two main elements: fire and water (in the Catholic tradition, the water is linked to the baptism of Jesus Christ by John the Apostle). In Latin America—and in Venezuela in particular—the San Juan festivities are mostly practiced by the African American population. There are two basic aspects of the Afro-American San Juan: the performance of music (and especially drums) and worshipping of Catholic religious images. Iconographically, San Juan is represented in two ways: first, as a young boy (San Juanito) and, second, as an adult. During the San Juan festivities, these images are carried on the shoulders of the cargador (literally, “the one who carries”) to the rhythm of drums and songs performed by the participants. The cargador claims to “dance the saint” (that is, its image) under the influence of the divinity. The image of San Juan is totally absent in the Mediterranean celebration.
Performative filming through a 360 camera
The operator of the 360 camera was Alkim Erol. During the filming, she placed the camera on top of a stick that she was holding at eye-level of the statue of San Juan while it was being carried on the shoulders of the dancer or cargador. She mimetically reproduced her or his movements. In her notebook, Alkim explains how she felt during filming this experience. Her words recall the concept of “ciné-transe” (Rouch 1973; Buob 2017; Henley 2009), which was coined by Jean Rouch (1917-2004) and inspired by the works of experimental filmmaker Maya Deren (1917-1961):
I was trying to follow the image with the camera in my hand to get the “perspective of the image of San Juan”. I synchronized with the music. I felt integrated. It may sound funny but, mentally, I got into “the saint’s perspective”. I made a kind of narrative in my mind, feeling that "I am one of the saints" (Alkim Erol, June 2023).
It is crucial to mention here that filming and editing with a 360 camera requires different skills from those of traditional filmmaking. For instance, while filming, Alkim had to constantly place herself in the midst of the action to capture the whole scene, and to remain there for a certain time to obtain uninterrupted sequences. She had to do this while monitoring the 360-view of the camera, whose recording was being displayed on her cell phone. As she described it, the difficulty was to keep a balance between the physical and sensorial immersion in the ritual and the mental distance required to imagine how would the camera hypothetically convey “San Juan’s gaze”.
Collaborative editing. Photo: Visual Trust project. 2024.
Editing as a shared agency
After filming the ritual, the editing stage became central in developing our experiment consisting of speculatively evoke a “non-human way of seeing”. To achieve this goal, we took technology as a methodological tool. This approach exemplifies Favero’s (2018) concept of "shared agency". According to Favero, this term refers to the idea that not only the investigator and the participants but also the technology itself actively participate in the research process. He argues that digital images and technologies have become relational entities influencing our perception and social interactions, including the way we do research. In this sense, immersive image-creation technologies, far from being passive tools, may act as co-creators.
We used Premiere Pro tools that, initially, were not designed for 360 editing. We realized (often by mistake) that these tools made images of the ritual “stretch” and “fold onto themselves”. These distortion effects as well as glitches and unconventional camera movements offered perspectives that are impossible for the naked human eye.
Accordingly, we decided that the montage should not follow the chronological order of the ritual stages, as in classical ethnographic filmmaking. Instead, while respecting the beginning and end of the ritual, we edited scenes relating to key ritual actions –such as dances, drum rhythms and chants– and juxtaposed them. We did this to convey, by speculative analogy, the idea expressed by believers that saints have an “atemporal vision”, that is, not subject to linear temporality.
Conclusion of the experiment
The comments of devotees made after having watched our 360-film in VR allowed us to learn new issues regarding the ritual and the technologies of vision. From an ethnographic perspective, we detected two main frictions related to the modes of intervention of spirits during ritual. The first one has to do with the act of seeing: believers state that the saint merges with its image during the ceremony thus assuming a specific visual positionality and directionality. Yet at the same time they upheld that the saint could see from all places and angles. The second friction points to spirit-possession. We had been told before starting to shoot that the spirit of San Juan “descended” (baja) from above. This is why we started and ended the film with an image of the sky. However, after seeing our film, they claimed that the earth was under-represented. According to them, "spirits live up there, but enter the body of the believer from below, through the legs". In the words of one believer, the ritual acts as an axis mundi connecting the earth to the firmament.
In terms of technology, the believers agreed that the 360-camera could not reproduce the saints' point of view. As they said: "no one can know how a saint sees". They recognized "our view" behind the 360-camera. However, they agreed on the potential of this technique to film rituals in a different way and to reflect on religious ceremonies. As for VR, they were ambivalent: while they enjoyed watching the ritual through immersive glasses and acknowledged that at some point they felt "like we were there", they also critically admitted that a ritual is a much richer sensory and spiritual experience, involving senses such as smell and touch, which no visual recording will ever be able to fully capture.
Bibliography
Anderson, Ryan B., Emma Louise Backe, Taylor Nelms, Elizabeth Reddy, and Jeremy Trombley. 2018. "Introduction: Speculative Anthropologies." Theorizing the Contemporary, Fieldsights. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/series/speculative-anthropologies
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Canals, Roger. 2016. “Sant Joan. Un ritual global?”. In La nit de Sant Joan a Barcelona, Barcelona: Angle Editorial / Ajuntament de Barcelona, 153-179.
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[1] This article is part of the ERC project “Visual Trust: Reliability, Accountability, and Forgery in Scientific, Religious, and Social Images” (PI: Roger Canals, 2021-2026), which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC), under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No 101002897). It has been also funded by the research group CINAF of the University of Barcelona. Grant: 2021SGR001136. The research in this paper was also co-funded by the project Estudi comparatiu de les religions afroatlàntiques a Catalunya ( DGAR22/22/000002) of the by the Direcció General d' Afers Religiosos of the Generalitat de Catalunya (SPAIN).
[2] We have coined the term “speculative analogy”. However, there is a significant bibliography on “speculation” and “analogy”. See, for instance: Hofstadter, D. and Sander, E. 2013. Surfaces and essences: Analogy as the fuel and fire of thinking. New York: Basic Books. Anderson, Ryan B., Emma Louise Backe, Taylor Nelms, Elizabeth Reddy, and Jeremy Trombley. 2018. "Introduction: Speculative Anthropologies." Theorizing the Contemporary, Fieldsights, December 18. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/series/speculative-anthropologies
Using 360 film and VR glasses for co-imagining religious experience. Photo: Visual Trust Project. 2024.