Critical Media Practice is pleased to announce the admission of five new students this year:
Ron Grady is a doctoral student in education whose work explores the social worlds of children through participatory and ethnographic methods that involve close observation grounded in and informed by meaningful relationships. His media practice integrates still and moving images, and, increasingly, collage. Through these, he interrogates the typical tenor of the adult gaze toward children and attempts to re-imagine and re-configure extant images of and to emphasize the rich humanity and playful creativity within the social space of childhood. Currently, he’s wrestling with the question: Who is visible and how are they made visible?
Seiyoung Jang is a composer, improviser, and maker who aims to celebrate manifestations of organic forms in resistance of thoughtless sterility, with a focus on intersubjectivity and embodiment. She has studied with Laetitia Sonami, James Fei, Ted Coffey, Maggi Payne, Chris Brown, and Pauline Oliveros, among others. Seiyoung obtained her MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College and a BA in Psychology and Music from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Seiyoung is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Practice & Critical Inquiry under the guidance of Vijay Iyer.
Emilia Mello is a Brazilian-American filmmaker, artist, and scholar. Her first feature documentary, See Deus, Sem Demônio (No Kings), premiered at CPH:DOX in 2020 and played at the True/False Film Festival 2021 and MoMA Doc Fortnight 2022 among others. She has a BS from Columbia University in Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology and an MFA in Studio Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Emilia is pursuing a PhD in Film and Visual Studies.Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies
Svetlana Romanova (Sakha/Even) is an artist and filmmaker born in Yakutsk, the capital city of the Sakha Republic, Russia, located south of the Arctic Circle. Her practice centers on the importance of Indigenous visual language, particularly in the Arctic regions and gravitates towards critical self historization. Svetlana is pursuing a PhD in Film and Visual Studies.
Aidan Zentner is a PHD student in applied physics at the Harvard School of Engineering. He studies the computational capabilities of biomolecular systems and the structural properties of novel materials.
On February 7, several students shared their works in progress at the annual CMP Critique, this year with guest artist and Solomon Fellow Wu Tsang. Chris Benham, Leon Kamp, Lana Romanova, and Noah Toyonaga presented pieces in video and sculpture for feedback, .
We are excited to announce an upcoming conference titled Collaborations Afield: Work Across Ecologies and Disciplines at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University that will be held on March 27-29. Proposals are due Jan. 28.
Over the past decade, ecological habitats have been increasingly understood as more complex and elusive to study from the lens of a single author or discipline. As new ways of thinking-by-doing collectively become imperative, collaborative practices both inside and outside of academia have emerged in dynamic and vibrant ways. Artists, anthropologists, archaeologists, architects, ecologists, engineers, herbalists, geographers and local communities have begun assembling and employing diverse methods and theories for researching the field site, advocating for a more expansive exchange between new sets of agents.
Collaborations Afield explores the fertile ground of research on the fringe, where collective work takes root across disciplinary boundaries, between human and non-human, biological, microbial, and artificial actors. Work afield signifies both the observational practices of place-based knowledge production and the state of environmental humanities as an area of study itself. To go afield is to venture beyond the range of one’s own expertise by physically working in, and thinking with, the field site. By investigating research questions through close observation, attuned listening, and data gathering, collaborations afield commune around a shared context approached through diverse methodologies.
Across artist residencies, design studios, and science labs, the field has become both a site of inquiry and an object of study. Attending more closely to the bacteria, the reeds, the wind, the soil as matter with which to play and think critically, artists-in-residence at nature conservation sites reframe the environment as a medium in itself. The study of elemental media takes this a step further, re-organizing our perception of dust, air, water amongst other matter as phenomena that speak to deep time and anthropogenic change. To literally tread in the weeds of a wetland ecosystem, as Gediminas and Nomeda Urbonas’s Swamp School illustrates, is to move across molecular and planetary scales at once. To study the industrial ruins of the post-Soviet space as Lori Khatchadourian’s project Afterlife of Socialist Modernity does, or to observe architectural heritage in ruin up close as Caitlin Desilvey’s fieldwork for Curated Decay reflects, is to witness how matter is consumed and transformed, allowing new forms of life amongst people and plants to emerge. To collaborate with artificial intelligence in the field site is to deploy new ways of sensing, monitoring, and analyzing environmental data to understand and predict ecosystems in flux. The “patch” for Anna Tsing, the “animistic apparatus” for May Adadol Ingawanij, and “earthbound knowledge” for the Anthropocene Curriculum are all modes of apprehending a globally dispersed, and yet deeply attentive, impulse to study a rapidly changing environment and its human and nonhuman interdependencies.
In these somewhat formalized—yet still unruly and shifting—spaces of gathering, how is fieldwork assembled, archived, and studied? What alternative forms of scholarship in the environmental humanities is made possible when diverse disciplines commune around a shared site? How do emergent practices in observation and documentation of field sites shape theory, and in turn, how does environmental humanities discourse generate new methodologies for fieldwork?
Collaborations Afield invites proposals from graduate students who work within collectives composed of humans and non-humans; work across geographies and scales; and/or embrace disciplinary contamination to think about the environmental humanities in new and expansive ways. The conference invites proposals that engage across, and extend beyond, the following fields: media studies, visual culture, sound studies, history of art and architecture, history of science, anthropology, critical heritage studies, comparative literature, landscape architecture, nature conservation, filmmaking, archaeology, social practice art, plant science, ecology, entomology, mycology, atmospheric science, geology.
Submissions will be accepted at collaborationsafield@gmail.com until January 28, 2025 and should include a 300-word abstract with a proposal title, three to five bibliographic references, and a 150-word bio in a single PDF. Accepted proposals will be notified by mid-February and full paper drafts will be due by mid-March. Presentations should be 20 minutes in length. Registration here is open to anyone interested in attending the conference.
This conference is co-organized by Noha Mokhtar, Pauline Shongov, and Maya Shopova.
The fall deadline to apply for the Critical Media Practice secondary field is Friday, Nov. 1.
The Graduate School in Arts and Sciences offers a secondary field in Critical Media Practice (CMP) for Harvard PhD students who wish to integrate media creation into their academic work. CMP reflects changing patterns of knowledge dissemination, especially innovative research conducted or presented using media practices in which written language may only play a part. Students interested in creating original interpretive projects in still or moving images, sound, installation, internet applications, or other media in conjunction with their written scholarship may apply to pursue the CMP secondary field, which will connect them with courses, workshops, and advising on production of media in different formats.
Off-site is a research collective that investigates what critical heritage practices are made possible — and how attitudes towards waste, ecology, and environment shift — when we re-imagine the role of care in collection, exhibition, and archive strategies. Co-founded in 2020 by CMP student Pauline Shongov along with Maya Shopova and Borislav Angelov, Off-site takes the Balkans as a case study to contour new modes of curatorial thought, artistic practice, and material urgency in the wake of the fall of the Eastern Bloc. Caught in the space between the East and the West amongst the ruins of Soviet, Ottoman, Byzantine empires, stories of material movements, histories of land and built environments, and knowledge of plant and animal life emerge in new ways. By exploring the dissonant heritage of the past, Off-site investigates the post-imperial ways of life that animate the present.
Ecologies of Prehod, on view at Swimming Pool in Sofia, Bulgaria, August 1–September 24, 2024, is one of many Off-site initiatives to engage with sites of ruination in Bulgaria through sculpture, installation, sound, and moving-image work. For the past four years, invited artists have participated in long-term collaborations with specific sites through mailed prompts collected by locals in Bulgaria, distributed by the project team, and entrusted in the artists’ care for the duration of their research. Prompts include care agreements that accompany specimens of rubble and flora collected from landscapes and building stock left in ruin since the start of the transition from a planned to a market economy, a period known as Prehod. Ranging from an Ottoman-era hammam brick to plant samples from an abandoned Soviet-era observatory, prompts are composed of mobile fragments that serve as aural, visual, and material witnesses to Prehod.
At Swimming Pool, Sofia, five artists adopt a thinking-with-matter approach to conceive of a critical framework for working with unofficial heritage sites and archives through the notion of Prehod. Sam Ghantous digitally retranslates textures from his prompt—a steel fragment from an abandoned textile factory in Sliven, Bulgaria—that resurface anew on the gallery walls as wallpaper and curtain, recalling quotidian textile patterns and faux materialities influenced by Soviet- and Prehod-era domestic interiors. CMP faculty Katarina Burin uncovers a family archive of holiday postcards taken in the former Eastern Bloc to create a series of anti-monument sculptures that speak to a fragmented personal story of immigration, assimilation and return. CMP student Elitza Koeva documents the social imaginaries of Bulgaria’s transitional period by exploring how monumental and ideological sites are subverted through citizen acts of reinscription. Manar Moursi takes her prompt—a fragment from an abandoned Ottoman hammam in Sliven—and uses it as a pumice stone in two endangered hammams in Cairo, Egypt. As a response to the neglect of cultural heritage sites, she returns to the Sliven bathhouse to perform a water summoning ritual over the ruins. Nicolás Kisic Aguirre builds an experimental broadcast that reflects on diasporic experience by sharing thoughts and hopes with material derived from personal stories rendered in artistic and acoustic explorations.
In re-imagining what it means to care from a distance for tangible and intangible heritage, the exhibition rethinks Prehod from a proper noun to a process of transitioning from one material state, historical period, and geographic place to another. Ecologies of Prehod offers a research methodology to understand environments in transition, both past and present. The liquid and soil terrains of the littoral edge, vegetal life, mineral matter, and animal migration entangle with the lived experience and oral history of the people who cohabitate with the land. Thinking with the vital matter of heritage ecosystems offers new approaches to building alternative forms of knowledge production in critical heritage studies, environmental humanities, and critical media practice.
Ecologies of Prehod is curated by Off-site at Swimming Pool, Sofia—a space for art and research focused on intersectional and collaborative practices, education, art politics and institution-making. This exhibition is made possible with the support of the National Culture Fund of Bulgaria, Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative, Harvard Critical Media Practice, and the Film and Visual Studies program at Harvard University..
Top: Off-site, Prompt collection, 2021 (photo: Pauline Shongov and Maya Shopova) Bottom: View of Off-site, Ecologies of Prehod, Swimming Pool, 2024 (photo: Yana Lozeva)
Film still from a work in progress by CMP student, Lilia Kilburn
Eight students presented work at this year’s CMP Critique on on April 12 with faculty, other CMP students, and guest critic Walid Raad. We exchanged lively feedback on work from Soumya Ghosh, Parker Hatley, Lilia Kilburn, Ana Laura Malmaceda, Noha Mokhtar, Beatrice Steinert, Julia Sharpe, and Kristen Zipperer.
Walid Raad, who received this year’s Solomon Fellowship at Harvard, is an artist whose works include photography, video, mixed media installations, and performances. His works include the creation of The Atlas Group, a fifteen-year project between 1989 and 2004 about the contemporary history of Lebanon, as well as the ongoing projects Scratching on Things I Could Disavow and Sweet Talk: Commissions (Beirut). His books include Walkthrough, The Truth Will Be Known When The Last Witness Is Dead, My Neck Is Thinner Than A Hair, and Let’s Be Honest The Weather Helped.
Raad’s solo exhibitions have been featured at institutions including the Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg), Museo Nacional Thyssen Bornemisza (Madrid), Louvre (Paris), The Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), Moderna Museet (Stockholm, Sweden), ICA (Boston, USA), Museo Jumex (Mexico City, Mexico), Kunsthalle Zurich (Zurich, Switzerland), The Whitechapel Art Gallery (London, UK), Festival d’Automne (Paris, France), Kunsten Festival des Arts (Brussels, Belgium), The Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin, Germany).
CMP students Beatrice Steinert (Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and History of Science), Noah Toyonaga (Physics), and Soumya Ghosh (Physics) co-organized Unfiguring, a Mahindra Humanities Center Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference co-sponsored by CMP in March 2024, which brought together practitioners from the arts and sciences for three days of intensive discussion and play. The title and subject of the conference foregrounded the scientific “figure” – the name for any photograph, drawing, diagram, or plot of data in an academic paper – as a mode of thought and site for intervention.
Unfiguring was organized around a series of presentations and artworks on topics ranging from ant acoustics to fluid dynamics to visualizations of infinity. Following the presentations – which ranged from academic and artist talks to video works, photographs, and beyond – a curated panel of professional artists and scientists provided critical insight and seeded conversations which spilled into breaks.
These discussions revolved around tactics of production, aesthetics of interpretation, and forms of community – all of which articulated and simultaneously challenged the distinctions of discipline in science and art.
Squirrels on Earth and Stars Above is the first published collection of the essays and lectures of the late Maniacal Naturalist Peter Warshall (1943-2013). A generalist ecologist with a special enthusiasm for natural history, ornithology, and hydrology, Warshall influenced a generation of countercultural field biologists, poets, and activists. He was the land-use editor for the Whole Earth Catalog and CoEvolution Quarterly, an ecosystem designer for Biosphere 2, and a lecturer on ecopoetics at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Assembled from his personal archive, the book showcases Peter’s innovative thinking on science, poetics, ecological citizenship, and the relationship between our species and the living planet.
Format: 6.5“ x 8“ x 1“ Pages: 294 Print-Run: 500 copies Softcover Edited by Parker Hatley in collaboration with Gregor Huber, Noha Mokhtar, Harris Bauer, and Diana Hadley. Published by Edition Hors-Sujet, March 2024, in collaboration with CMP Projects, Harvard University
The Mahindra Humanities Center Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference, Unfiguring: Experiments in the practice of science and art, is currently accepting proposals through February 1st.Unfiguring is organized by CMP students Beatrice Steinert, Noah Toyonaga, Soumya Ghosh, with Daniel Faccini. The conference will be held from March 21-23, 2024.
In contemporary science, the scientific paper is a dominating force. Composed of a succession of “figures” scaled to the page, the paper is a scientific genre that imposes a linear, impersonal, and two-dimensional logic to how scientists conceptualize and communicate their research. Artists, on the other hand, have a vast range of tools at their disposal to observe, document, and craft stories about the natural world.
Building on the entwined histories of science and art, Unfiguring will be an experimental space for those curious about the expansive realm of possibilities where the boundaries between the arts and sciences blur. What would it look like for scientific research to take its form as a performance, sculpture, film, immersive projection experience, or literary manuscript? How can scientific communities recognize and attribute credit for such works? Through exchange of ideas, practices, and experiences, this conference will allow scientists to envision how they could approach their work more expansively and all participants to gain a broader sense of possible futures for science. We will approach this step towards a deeper integration of the sciences and arts playfully and with humility.
We welcome submission of work from any STEM field as well as from all disciplines that engage the sciences in form or content. Proposed projects can be at any stage of the research process: ideating, making, gathering, analyzing, and interpreting observations, among others. We encourage experimentation in media and format. Selected work will be grouped into multidisciplinary research reviews led by a panel of invited artists and scientists. For more information and to submit a proposal, visit www.unfiguring.org
We are happy to report that we can once again support students’ media practice with CMP Capstone Fellowships. CMP students are eligible to apply for up to $5,000 in funding, with priority given for capstone projects at later stages of development and most in need of funding. Students can generally receive funding for their capstone project only once during their time in CMP.
Applications are available here and are due on October 16, 2023. The committee will meet to review applications in late October, with decisions announced in November.
This fellowship support is generously funded by the Division of Arts & Humanities.
