Exploring Microphone Possibilities

Film/Video Technician Stefan Grabowski recently led a workshop for Film Study Center fellows and Critical Media Practice students on how to select appropriate microphones for different media production situations.  It was inspiring to see demonstrations of the wide variety of professional mics available to FSC fellows and CMP students, including small and large-diaphragm condenser mics, dynamic mics, contact mics, hydrophones, magnetic pickups, and parabolic mics.  Some of the specialty mics inspire experimental approaches to audio recording and sound design.

See Stefan’s workshop handout for details on the transducer varieties, pickup patterns, stereo configurations and arrays, and accessories as well as an introduction to considerations for technique and practice.

Watching Experimental Films in Our Settler Colonial Context

by Shireen Hamza

I wasn’t really sure what the Flaherty seminar was, beyond a large group of people gathering to watch and discuss films, three times a day for seven days. I knew about the principle of non-predisposition, that I would be walking into each day’s three programs without knowing what I would be watching beforehand. But before arriving and speaking with some of the participants who had attended previous seminars, I did not know of the many significant changes that the organizers of Flaherty have made over the last few years. Though the seminar has a long history of being a place for international film, the organizers have of-late been choosing programmers who could uniquely center communities of artists whose work is marginalized in, and not widely accessible in, the US.

In 2018, the programmers were African American artists Kevin Jerome Everson & Greg de Cuir Jr., and next year’s programmer will be Professor Janaína Oliveira, a Brazilian scholar and programmer focused on Black filmmakers across Latin America. And organizers have responded to the call by Sky Hopinka and others to change the logo, which used to be an objectionable representation of an Inuit character from the eponymous Robert Flaherty’s famous film, Nanook of the North.

I had been so drawn to the description of this year’s seminar — Action! — and interested in what kind of films might be programmed by Shai Heredia, an organizer of India’s first experimental film festival, that I had not reflected on the broader shifts that this specific seminar was a part of at The Flaherty. Entering this art space, which centered artists from across Asia, I was also pleased to see that there were many attendees (and fellows, specifically) from Asia, and of various Asian diasporas, as well as artists and curators of other historically marginalized identities within the US. (more…)

TALI KHALI (EMPTY BEAT) | T. Brandon Evans

Tali/Khali (Empty Beat) 2019, smartphones, 3 video/audio loops (each approx. 10 min.), harmonium, cloth, shoe rack, microphone PA system, doorbell, found objects

In “Tali/Khali (Empty Beat),” Brandon aka Bunty Singh uses a concept from Hindustani classical music and Sikh music traditions to interrogate the dynamics of live performance and vernacular media practice in the Punjabi and diasporic Sikh community. Khāli means “empty,” and is contrasted with tāli, meaning “clap/beat.” While the latter indicate beats to be emphasized in a rhythmic cycle, the former indicate a lack of a clap, making the beat unemphasized and thus empty. Here, media infrastructures take on the nature of the emphatic, with electricity responsible for the empty ground of possibility, for the transmission of a beat. The conspicuous absence of the performer corresponds to the empty beat: the emphatic presence of the performer surfaces only in the midpoints and endpoints of media transmission processes. The identity of the absent performer also brings up questions of center and periphery in the context of a newly globalizing religious tradition. However the removal of a performer suggests both the moral imperative to diminish ones ego (haumai) within Sikh religious thought, while also critically assessing the agency of mediated transmission in religious performance adjuncted by electronic media. Likewise, removal of the performer’s live presence emphasizes the notion that creative processes are not, as in Sikh religious thought and in process philosophy, the products of individual human agency—they are, rather, inflorescences of the Divine.

The garden. A butterfly alights a flower, flutters and flies away. Bhai Vir Singh speaks to two visitors walking in his garden:

“Dear Disciple of the Guru, having seeing this, what did you see?”

Visitor 1: I saw a butterfly come, sit on a flower, then fly away.

Visitor 2: I saw one beauty kissing another. What did you see, Bhai Sahib?

Bhai Vir Singh: “Godself is delighted with God’s very own Sweet Nectar, God Themself is the Enjoyer of All.”

(As told by Dr. Jaswant Singh Neki in his memoir Asal Vidya (Sakrit Trust, Ludhiana, Punjab, India))

NOTES FROM THE FRINGE | Aryo Danusiri

Notes from The Fringe 2019, HD Video loop

In “Notes from The Fringe” the left projection is set in a butcher’s home in the riverside slum area of Ciliwung, Jakarta, during the 2014 monsoon season – just a few months before a massive forced eviction started as part of a World Bank-funded flood mitigation project. The right projection was recorded immediately after one of the sporadic forced evictions. The graffiti reads: “We might have lost, but one day we will…” with the last word buried in the ruins.

ARTIFICIAL TEARS | Lindsey Lodhie

“Artificial Tears” is an artistic research project that explores the aesthetic interface where research protocols, performance reenactment, and genre film intersect in laboratory studies of emotion. Taking the ostensible substance of affect—tears—as a concrete site of symbolic and material investigation, this project seeks to unravel what Bruno Latour has described as the “scenography of empiricism.”

HISTORY LESSON | Argyro Nicolaou

History Lesson, 2018/19, stacks of exercise books, video, and accompanying lecture performance

The highly constructed nature of historiography is willfully ignored as educational and political institutions continue to consider historical narratives more valuable than artistic representations. “History Lesson” proposes an alternative history curriculum for Cyprus based entirely on film productions shot on the island before its division in 1974. The installation was made possible thanks to the support of the Min da de Gunzburg Center for European Studies.

Argyro Nicolaou presents History Lesson, a lecture performance in the Carpenter Center for Visual Art

The installation portion of History Lesson installed in the Sackler ArtLab Annex

ELSEWHERE | Benny Shaffer

“Elsewhere” depicts the floating life of a Uyghur tightrope walker as he performs on the margins of China’s entertainment industry. The precarity of his work points to a broader context in which Uyghurs, a largely Muslim ethnic minority, are continually subjected to discriminatory policies under the Chinese government. This video installation reflects on the relationship between spectacle, surveillance, and mediation in contemporary China.

Elsewhere, installed in the Lightbox Gallery, Harvard Art Museums

MANHATTAN VIDEO | Joseph Pomp

A personal atlas to Manhattan in the movies, or streetwalking on a TV map. Drawing inspiration from works by Juan Downey and Thom Andersen that use video to question prevailing (mis-)conceptions of geography, this project restitutes film clips to their shooting locations and, in so doing, detects how the specificities of place bear their imprint across wildly divergent works.



Emilio Vavarella awarded prestigious Italian Council award

The ‘Italian Council’ is the main program promoted by the Italian Minister of Cultural Heritage and Activities, established in 2017 with the aim of funding the creation of high-budget art projects and increasing the collections of Italian public museums.

Italian artist Emilio Vavarella, currently a PhD candidate in AFVS and CMP at Harvard, is among the winners of the 2019 edition of the Italian Council with a project entitled “rs548049170_1_69869_TT”. The project will benefit from a 178,000.00 euros production budget and revolves around the idea of translating the artist’s genome into a large textile, using commercial genotyping techniques available in Mountain View, California, and a 19th century Jacquard loom (one of the first ‘computing machines’), still active in Southern Italy.

Vavarella’s project aims to conjugate tradition and modernity by intertwining the genetic and cultural histories of the artist and his mother, (who is a tailor), and topics such as the digitalization of biological life, technical reproducibility, and the intersection between artisanal textile manufacturing and contemporary techno-scientific possibilities.

An integral part of the project will be a series of collateral events and initiatives aimed at expanding the project’s theoretical implications and produced with the support of cultural partners in Italy, the United States and China, including: Ramdom, a cultural association in Puglia and leading partner of Vavarella’s project; Arthub Asia, a Shanghai-based platform devoted to contemporary art creation and diffusion; the Film Study Center at Harvard University; and MAMbo, the Museum of Modern Art in Bologna.

Learn more about Vavarella’s work here: http://emiliovavarella.com/

Introduction to Critical Media Practice final show

Introduction to Critical Media Practice class had a show of its final projects in Vanserg Hall last night, with projects including multichannel video pieces about managed forests in Ontario (GSD), more coming soon.