Shizugawa Released on Gruenrekorder

CMP Alumnus Andrew Littlejohn‘s sound piece Shizugawa was released digitally today in both 5.1 and stereo by the label Gruenrekorder. The piece was composed during Littlejohn’s PhD work in Anthropology and presented in the 2019 CMP Exhibition. According to the liner notes:

“On March 11, 2011, a tsunami devastated the northeast coastline of Japan following an undersea megathrust earthquake with a magnitude of 9.1. The wave destroyed many inhabited coastal areas. This included Shizugawa, the central district of a small town in Miyagi Prefecture called Minamisanriku.

“I recorded in Shizugawa between 2013 and 2015 while conducting research on how survivors experienced its reconstruction. I was motivated partly by dissatisfaction with the excess of distant ruin photography that appeared after the tsunami. Instead of gazing on destruction from afar, I wanted to try and understand the experience of being “in the midst of a changing landscape,” as one resident described it. For those in this midst, I found that two Shizugawas overlapped: one of memory and one emerging. The first was lost in the flood; the notes below provide some clues regarding what people no longer heard as a result. In the second, another resident wrote that the sounds of wind and water had replaced those of daily life. But many other voices could also be heard: frogs, birds, diggers, cicadas. Together, they filled the evacuated space, providing people with food for thought even as they rubbed unevenly with memories of what had been.”

Gruenrekorder also released Visiting Lecturer Ernst Karel‘s CD Swiss Mountain Transport Systems as part of their Field Recording Series.

Joana Pimenta named CMP Director of Graduate Studies and Interim Director of the Film Study Center

We are delighted to announce that, as of July 1, Joana Pimenta will be the Director of Graduate Studies for Critical Media Practice and Interim Director of the Film Study Center.

Joana is an accomplished filmmaker and writer, whose films have screened at festivals around the world, including Locarno Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Rotterdam, and CPH:Dox. She has worked as a cinematographer, director, and video installation artist on projects in the United States, Portugal, and Brazil. Joana has been a member of our community for many years, having received her PhD in Film and Visual Studies and Critical Media Practice from the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies (now Art, Film, and Visual Studies). She has previously taught at Harvard and Rutgers Universities, and has been both a Visiting Lecturer on Visual and Environmental Studies as well as a Fellow at the Film Study Center and Sensory Ethnography Lab.

Harvard-PSL Workshop // Joseph Minster, PSL

The third Harvard/PSL workshop, held at Harvard on 26 and 27 February 2020 was part of an exchange between Harvard University and the SACRe laboratory of PSL University (Paris), and aimed at questioning the process of practice-based research in the context of research-creation.

We do not intend to report here the detailed interventions of the four Harvard doctoral students (Amanda Gann, Seiyoun Jang, Julia Sharp, Javier Nueno) and the three PSL doctoral students (Léandre Bernard-Brunel, Joseph Minster, Geoffrey Rouge-Cassarat): each of us was invited to present his or her work, and for several of us, the work presented was at a relatively early stage.

However, we can draw some lessons from the discussions we had about the questions raised by research-creation – questions that the workshop was not, of course, intended to answer, but rather to identify, in order to guide our reflection in the years to come.

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Harvard-PSL Workshop // Julia Sharpe

In late February, I had the chance to discuss my artist practice as part of the PSL-Harvard workshop “Inquiry through Practice.” For me, what remains from the two-day workshop is the exchange of ideas and newfound friendship not only with the visiting cohort from PSL––Joseph Minster, Leandre Bernard-Brunel, and Geoffrey Rouge-Carrassat ––but also with fellow graduate students at Harvard––Amanda Gann and Seiyoung Jang (not to mention the ongoing collaboration between everyone who formally and informally participated: researchers, faculty, administrators, and students).

Everyone’s presentation took a different form: Seiyoung performed electronic sound, highlighting its relation to the body; Amanda took us through an emotional history of death in the theatre, acting out the role of death herself; Geoffrey led us through his practice as a director, blurring the line between game and play; Leandre screened his documentary, an ethnographic search for ghosts; Joseph showed his films as variations on the reality of the Alps; I showed my personal image and writing archive. Xavier Nueno presented his paper “On Independent Investigations in the Age of the University-Corporation” as a way to tie our practices together, and other audience members, including Critical Media Practice students, participated in lively discussions on how to define and frame “research” “practice” “archive” “experience” “institution.”

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Two New Students

We are pleased to welcome two new students to the CMP secondary field: Anna Hopper from Government and Omar Salomão from Romance Languages and Literatures. We look forward to following their research and supporting their capstone work.

FSC/CMP SPRING PROGRAMMING CANCELED

In accordance with Harvard University’s protocols regarding the coronavirus, the Film Study Center is canceling our spring programming. We will update you with rescheduled events and our fall programming as soon as we are able. You can follow the University’s latest policies and procedures on the Coronavirus website.

Artistic Practice in the Research University: a Radcliffe Workshop

On February 28, Critical Media Practice convened a workshop on Artistic Practice in the Research University, hosted by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.  The workshop brought together faculty and graduate students from six research universities with innovative programs uniting artistic practice and scholarly inquiry: CMP and MetaLAB at Harvard; the Centre for Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice at University of the Arts, London; Film & Digital Media, University of California, Santa Cruz; the SACRe program, Université Paris Sciences et Lettres; Critical Media Practices, University of Colorado, Boulder; and the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Faculty and graduate students from each school informally presented about their programs’ structure, approach, student body, and projects. Together we explored the strengths and challenges we face in this field and what we have to learn from one another, including:

  • How does students’ artistic work shape their scholarly research and vice versa – or does the artmaking benefit from separation from the scholarship?
  • What are strong examples of practice-based research methods that inform theoretical investigations?
  • How does artistic practice garner legitimacy in fields dominated by text?
  • How do we reconcile the very different criteria for measuring the success of art vs. scholarship?
  • What are the opportunities for us to collaborate as institutions?

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Five New Students

Critical Media Practice is excited to welcome five new students to the secondary field: Elitza Koeva from the Graduate School of Design; Max BowensPauline Shongov, and Julia Sharpe from Art, Film, and Visual Studies; and Deirdre Moore from History of Science.

To receive the secondary field designation on their diplomas, these students will successfully complete four CMP courses; create, publicly critique, and exhibit a capstone project; and fulfill documentation requirements. CMP supports its students with equipment, funding (when available), advising, and exhibition opportunities.

The next deadline for application to CMP is April 1, 2020.  Admission to the field is competitive and based on demonstrated ability in media practice; understanding of the artistic process; and appropriateness of the proposed media work for the student’s research interests.

Julia Smachylo’s Capstone Project: Silvic Stewards

Over this past semester I’ve been working toward finalizing my capstone project as part of the Critical Media Practice specialism. The project is being developed in parallel with my doctoral research which investigates forest management and processes of urbanization, with the overall goal of providing an insertion point through which to critically analyze the potential of planning and design within these spatial contexts. The capstone has enabled a deep dive into a discrete slice of these dynamics, and explores incentivized landscapes of forest stewardship in the region of southern Ontario. The work navigates the various ways of defining and valuing these forests, and asks the question ‘what is a managed forest?’  Methodologically, the project investigates how artistic research contributes to an understanding of these landscapes, as well as how, and through which modalities of engagement participants are involved in their stewardship. By integrating video as part of my research methodology, I ask: what does this particular approach -one that blends fieldwork with video installation- offer?

A work in progress, this piece has been reformatted several times over the last year. It was first conceptualized as a three-channel video installation, which then transformed into a two-channel piece that paired camera movement and montage to explore different ways of connecting spaces separated geographically, but united through policy and stewardship.  In this first iteration, I was interested in what was revealed when this footage was coupled to create new digital landscapes combining different scales, locations, and movements. The pairing brought attention to ecological similarities while juxtaposing footage to highlight differences in location, scale, activities and time.
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Mellon Fellowship Awards

Critical Media Practice is pleased to announce the awarding of CMP-Mellon Fellowships to 22 CMP students, primarily to support capstone work.  A total of $40,000 in fellowships was awarded.

These fellowships are supported by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which has supported CMP for nearly 10 years.