Exhibition “Das bist du!” (That’s you!)

This exhibition presented camera ethnographic work from the initial phase of the research project “Early Childhood and Smartphone” within the Collaborative Research Centre “Media of Cooperation” at the University of Siegen. With this exhibition, we experimented with different installation formats, including single, two- and three-channel video installations on monitors and projected, synchronized and asynchronous, as well as an interactive sorting tool on hand-held tablets. The video installations shown in this exhibition offered a wider (not just academic) audience the opportunity to observe for themselves how digital media practices in early childhood are implicated in young children’s development of a sense of self, relationships to others, to their material and social lifeworlds.

Review of the exhibition

“The entire exhibition is a sophisticated interplay of cleverly arranged images. In one corner of the exhibition space, for example, a monitor is placed opposite an inviting arrangement of armchairs. When we take a seat, we find ourselves facing three children who have also made themselves comfortable on a sofa, and we are drawn into a scene in a living room observed through a camera ethnographic lens. Elsewhere, the triptych- and diptych-like montage of videos invites us to repeatedly let our gaze wander and shift, to see both one and the other, together and apart. Finally, the ‘game’ presented on hand-held tablets requires active manipulation to create sequences of the short video pieces (miniatures).Sitting down, ‘letting our eyes wander’ the screens, and ‘handling’, the ‘mani-pulation’ of the touch screens, is the central methodological idea of the Blicklabor (laboratory of gazes) in the flesh: to establish and sustain a participatory, active, researching relationship to the visuality of the social.”

Klaus Amann, educational consultant, Dörsdorf (Germany)