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.
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.
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:
Critical Media Practice is excited to welcome five new students to the secondary field: Elitza Koeva from the Graduate School of Design; Max Bowens, Pauline 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.
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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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.
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.
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…)
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))
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.
