Ernst Karel and Veronika Kusumaryati

Ernst KAREL works with sound, including electroacoustic music, experimental nonfiction sound works for multichannel installation and performance, image-sound collaboration, and post-production sound for nonfiction film. Lately, he works around the practice of actuality/location recording and composing with those recordings, with recent projects also taking up archival audio. At the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University, he collaborated on sound for a number of films and developed and taught a practice-based course in ‘sonic ethnography.’ Veronika KUSUMARYATI is a political and media anthropologist working in West Papua, a self-identifying term referring to Papua and West Papua provinces of Indonesia. Her scholarship engages with the theories and historiography of colonialism, decolonization, and postcoloniality. She holds a doctoral degree from the department of anthropology at Harvard with a secondary field in Film and Visual Studies. She is an assistant professor of political anthropology, race and identities, digital media, Southeast Asia, and Melanesia at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

A relistening and reinterpretation of colonial recordings of New Guinea made in 1961 by Michael Rockefeller, heir to the Standard Oil family.

Shot from movie Expedition Content by Ernst Karel and Veronika Kusumaryati