The next deadline to apply for the Critical Media Practice secondary field is Monday, Nov. 8.
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. Critical Media Practice is overseen by the Film Study Center.
More information and the application can be found here. Please contact the CMP program coordinator with any questions.
Emilio Vavarella solo show “rs548049170_1_69869_TT (The Other Shapes of Me): Sourcecode” marks the conclusive act in a trilogy of exhibitions based on Vavarella’s project “rs548049170_1_69869_TT” (The Other Shapes of Me) and curated by the cultural organization Ramdom. The idea of the source code permeates the body of works exhibited in the gallery, and forms the basis of the conceptual and technical infrastructure of the exhibition. A source code is simultaneously an origin and an elaboration, a source of life and the effect of life’s digital processing. The show is the result of Vavarella’s research into the origin and current applications of binary technology: from weaving to programming, algorithms, software, and automation processes, up to the complete computerization of the human being.
The exhibition opened at GALLLERIAPIÙ in Bologna last May and will close on September 8th. It follows the exhibitions “Ideas, Hypotheses, Assumptions and Objects” (July-September 2020, Gagliano del Capo), and “Errors, Limits and Malfunctions” (January-February 2021, Shanghai). Whereas the previous two exhibitions in this series were focused respectively on Vavarella’s research process and on his work methodology, the current show will unveil Vavarella’s new project in its entirety. The fulcrum of the show is the installation “rs548049170_1_69869_TT” (The Other Shapes of Me). The title refers to the first line of text resulting from the genotyping of Vavarella’s DNA. This piece is based on the translation of his genetic code into a large fabric, through the labour of his mother, using one of the first modern computational machines from the late nineteenth century: the Jacquard loom. The result is a monumental work composed of a grayscale fabric, a loom, and a video. The use of the nineteenth-century loom led to the production of a grayscale textile sixty centimeters wide and eighty-two meters long, thus pushing the technical possibilities of this early computational machine to their furthest limits. This work has become part of the permanent collection of MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna.
The show also includes a new series of works entitled “Sections (The Other Shapes of Me):” medium- and large-scale tapestries, eight of which are on view, that explore the weaving possibilities of contemporary digital looms. Every single piece corresponds to a section of Vavarella’s DNA. Pushing the technical possibilities of these more modern machines, Vavarella has produced polychrome tapestries whose vertical dimension corresponds to his own height.
The exhibition is closed by the series “Samples (The Other Shapes of Me):” nine small- and medium-sized tapestries that correspond to a DNA sample of the artist, woven through heterogeneous digital processes.
Finally, the show is accompanied by the artist book “rs548049170_1_69869_TT” published by MOUSSE and edited by Emilio Vavarella, Claudio Zecchi, and Paolo Mele. This publication highlights and extends the aim of Vavarella’s project through the contributions of other fourteen thinkers and practitioners from the fields of art, philosophy, bioengineering, media theory, and the history of science and technology: Lorenzo Balbi, George M. Church, Francesco Giaquinto, Ellen Harlizius-Klück, Sabine Himmelsbach, Paolo Mele, Stephen Monteiro, Carla Petrocelli, Davide Quadrio, Eugene Thacker, Ed Regis, Devin Wangert, Ursula Wolz and Claudio Zecchi.
The Film Study Center and Critical Media Practice program are delighted to announce our 2021 Flaherty Film Seminar Fellows, who will attend the seminar in July.
Uncertainty, fragmentation, opacity. We live in a time when the transparency of convictions and definitions and the desire for total understanding of differences that historically guided the Western world of images no longer holds. In cinema, the boundaries between center and margin have been loosened and dissolved. Today, the critical issue may no longer be to relocate the center but our perceptions of the margins. More than ever, the traditional geographical boundaries of cinemas have proven unsatisfactory, as cultural and historical connections are continually reworked. Moving images require both filmmakers and viewers to negotiate what is not understood: there is no such thing as a blind spot; there never was. The spots are opaque, and they compel us to shape new tools for describing what we see, feel, and think.
The 66th edition of the Flaherty Film Seminar will inspire us to look defiantly at the opaque places of cinema. As suggested by the writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant, the works presented will “clamor for the rights to opacity for everyone” in their irreducible singularities. Opacity is an unfolding force that creates openings and endless possibilities of cinematic existence, especially for subjects that have been excluded or are less valued on conventional screens. The Seminar will be an opportunity to experience the moving image in its power, beauty, and, most of all, ordinariness. As an invitation for displacement or provocation, it points to an open future, to cultural, formal, aesthetic freedoms, where questioning is prioritized over finding answers.
CMP welcomes four new students to the secondary field: Ria Gyawali from Anthropology, Ana Laura Malmaceda from Romance Languages and Literatures, Junnan Mu from African and African American Studies, and Nnenna Onuoha from Anthropology.
We look forward to following their research and artistic practice and supporting their capstone work.
The book presents a sequence of black-and-white images taken from the travel sections of the newspapers Le Monde and The New York Times from the 1960s onwards. By focusing on visual representations of “the Other” in travel reportages and advertisements, the collection of images explores the relationship between colonialism and the evolution of mass tourism in the second half of the 20th century: a world that is within reach and ready for consumption. As an insert to the book, “Our Letters Crossed” responds to the images from today’s perspective. In a collection of letters written by friends in different parts of the world, each one addresses its sender’s experience of an unprecedented year. 2020 is an island that didn’t exist.
We are delighted that the book won this important award! Every year, the Swiss Federal Office of Culture organises the “Most Beautiful Swiss Books” competition to honour outstanding achievements in the field of book design and production, with particular attention being paid to works that express contemporary trends. The 19 Most Beautiful Swiss Books of the 2020 edition were named by the FOC on the recommendation of an international jury. The award-winning books will be shown in an exhibition at the Helmhaus Museum in Zurich from 24 to 27 June 2021 and will then be on display at other locations in Switzerland and abroad.
In the meantime, CMP Projects is already working on its second publication, together with Parker Hatley.
The book is published by Edition Hors-Sujet and is now available in different bookstores in the US and Europe, as well as on the website. You can also find it at Printed Matter in NYC.
Collection co-editors Julia Yezbick, Rachel Yezbick, and CMP student Emilio Vavarella frame their questions in the introductory essay: “What purchase do we give to first-hand experience over other forms of mediated interaction? Where does the immersive begin and end? How do various forms of media immerse us differently, and to what effect? And what is gained and what is lost in immersive media experiences as compared to other forms or modalities of mediated experiences?”
Each piece in the collection makes use of the possibilities of the web medium in different ways. Lunenfeld’s “Collodial Supension: Immersion and the Pedagogies of Making” is entirely constructed within Google spreadsheets but breaks the traditional functional limits of that format; Lee’s “In between the states of Immersion and De-immersion” use a new “spacialized” tool to enable the reader to move through and rearrange her work as they might in a gallery or room.
It’s exciting to see this collection – which is still open for submissions – emerge in a format that is so visually, functionally, and intellectually rich.
The next deadline to apply for the Critical Media Practice secondary field is Thursday, April 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. Critical Media Practice is overseen by the Film Study Center.
More information and the application can be found here. Please contact the CMP program coordinator with any questions.
Critical Media Practice recently awarded ten CMP students funding for the 2020-21 Collaborative CMP Projects, a fellowship supported by the Mellon Foundation. Below is a glimpse into these upcoming works in progress. We will highlight each project with posts by the students over the coming semester.
Things I Didn’t Know I Loved by Shireen Hamza and Buse Aktas “Things I didn’t know I loved” is a mail-based collaborative project that investigates embodiment, care, mischief, and serendipity as they manifest in research practice. The participants will exchange mail art over one year, with rules of engagement that shift, rupture, and playfully conflict, all under the quaint temporalities of physical mail.
manipulation by Salmaan Mirza and Shireen Hamza “manipulation” is digital archive fever. it embraces hallucination — the seeing and unseeing historians do in their daily work on digitized texts. A collaboration between two cmp students and 2-5 archivists across the world, this project will produce a pamphlet as theoretical intervention, and two standalone film/video works.
A Quotidian Place by Xavier Nueno and Noha Mokhtar “A Quotidian Place” is a book of photographs which comprises two parts. The first shows how social space and everyday life have been studied by architects through the medium of photography since the 1950s. The second offers our own response to the architect’s gaze, through the use of fiction.
The Later USA Almanac by Julia Sharpe and Parker Hatley
This proposal brings together two distinct book projects that will serve as the inaugural publications for the almanac, a publishing initiative that solicits the creation of local, hyper-specific works from twenty to thirty artists, each from a different geographic region of the US. Assembled over the course of our pending
presidential term, the goal of the project is to produce an almanac that highlights the diversity of approaches to our present political/environmental climate.
Off-Site by Pauline Shongov and Elitza Koeva
A series of online and pop-up exhibitions culminate into a physical installation set in Sofia, Bulgaria in 2022. The project charts a journey in understanding the possibility for contemporary Balkan art in the global context when approached curatorially by Bulgarian diaspora, who re-examine conceptions of identity, belonging, history and place.
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.”
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.
