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.
“Chaque Mercredi Caracas,” the first publication of CMP Projects, was awarded one of the Most Beautiful Swiss Books 2020. CMP students Noha Mokhtar and Xavier Nueno, in collaboration with visiting editor and designer Gregor Huber, worked on this publication in the context of the new course CMP Projects: Publication and Production, offered since Fall 2020 by Joana Pimenta.
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.
Sensate: A Journal for Experiments in Critical Media Practice (co-founded by CMP-ers Julia Yezbick and Lindsey Lodhie) has just launched a special collection called On Immersion exploring questions around a “sense of being there” and forms of mediated interaction in fields from cultural anthropology to immersive technology. The collection includes an editorial essay as well as articles by Peter Lunenfeld, Young Joo Lee, and Stephanie Deumer – some of which grew out of conversations at a CMP workshop on Immersion: Social and Technological Pasts and Futures held at the Radcliffe Institute in March 2019.
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.”
Gruenrekorder also released Visiting Lecturer Ernst Karel‘s CD Swiss Mountain Transport Systems as part of their Field Recording Series.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
