Dancefloor networks: Multimodal ethnography and artistic research in Istanbul nightlife

Abstract

This thesis examines Istanbul's dancefloor network through a multimodal ethnographic and artistic research, focusing on how sound, sensory experience, artistic output and informal communicative practices like gossip shape belonging, knowledge, and survival under conditions of precarity. Rather than approaching the dancefloor as a physical limited site of musical performance venues or places where the performances occur, the study conceptualizes it as a scattered and affective network that includes people, spaces, practices, and relations that happen across venues, neighborhoods, and social contexts. The research investigates how participants navigate precarity, labor conditions, exclusion, belonging and care within this network, and how these dynamics are mediated through sound, movement, proximity, and everyday interaction. The theoretical framework brings together approaches from multimodal ethnography, sonic and sensory ethnography, artistic research, and theories of precarity and gossip. In particular, the thesis aims to understand why participants remain affectively attached to dancefloor networks that promise safety, autonomy, and belonging, yet simultaneously reproduce new forms of vulnerability and exclusion. The dancefloor emerges as a scene of temporary escape rather than resolution; a space where people seek relief from precarity and create mutual "better worlds" while encountering precarity reorganizations in the scene. Methodologically, the research is grounded in long-term insider participation within Istanbul's nightlife scene and employs multimodal ethnography with artistic outputs as tools as research design. Data was generated through participant observation, informal and semi-structured interviews, fieldnotes, field recordings, and practice-based artistic production. Sonic ethnography positioned listening, recording, and editing as analytic acts, while sensory ethnography expanded attention beyond single-sense hierarchies toward embodied and emplaced experience. Artistic research functioned as a mode of knowledge production rather than representation, enabling contextualizing through making. Three practice-based works Gradual Nonsense, Farewell, and Whisper operate as methodological tools within the thesis. Each work functions as a mode of inquiry through which the research thinks through sound, image, and space, enabling access to affective, sensory, and relational dimensions of the dancefloor network that remain difficult to articulate through text-based ethnography alone. Gradual Nonsense aims to understand networks scatteredness and sonic instability as an analytic method for registering the affective uncertainty, exhaustion, and meaninglessness that shape everyday participation in the network under precarious conditions. Through the processes of recording, editing, and compositional manipulation, sound here became a way of analyzing atmosphere rather than just documenting events. Farewell functions as an audiovisual method for exploring migration and absence, another approach to dancefloor network's precarity by using repeated viewing and editing to approach mobility, loss, and "being left behind" are experienced as everyday conditions in dancefloor network. Whisper, a multichannel sound installation, operates as a multichannel composition and epistemic method that examines how gossip and whispering circulate within the dancefloor network as informal communicative ways of knowledge, care, and critique. By using spatialized voices and requiring listeners to move, lean in, and examine proximity, the installation reproduces the embodied conditions under which gossip operates in the field. In this work, whispering is not treated as a lack of voice but as a tactile and strategic way of audibility through which participants manage risk, share warnings, and collectively interpret power relations in the absence of reliable institutional support. Taken together, these works demonstrate how artistic practice functions as an analytic process that generates knowledge through making, listening, showing, and spatial engagement, positioning practice-based experimentation as integral to the multimodal ethnographic methodology of the thesis. By integrating multimodal ethnography and artistic research, this thesis contributes to sound studies, anthropology, and artistic research by demonstrating how dancefloor networks function as precarious spaces in relation to belonging. The study proposes that understanding nightlife scenes requires attending not only to music and performance, but to the affective, sonic, and relational practices through which people attach and live on within uncertainty.