BLOG

“Earth Chance” a performance by Kythe Heller and Meghan McNealy

What kinds of spiritual, political and environmental worlds can art-making and literary practice reveal and create? What kinds of knowledges and actions do these forms distinctly make possible? And how can we develop those knowledges and actions collectively in our art-making, writing, scholarship, and social practices?  How are the “revealed knowledges” of art-making distinctly able to address and transform the hidden and not-so-hidden crises that suffuse our social life-worlds? How can form be used or thought through in ways that move beneath (or, like a spirit, above) the radar of familiar frameworks of sense-making, and how can this be connected to social and political remaking, individually and collectively?

These are some of the questions which I was interested in pursuing when I founded VISION LAB in late fall 2017, and which we have been pursuing collectively over the last year and a half, through public workshops, residencies, presentations, collaborations of art and literary work, and experiential retreats, held last year in Vision Lab’s residence at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School, this year through performative engagements with the Radcliffe Gallery Series, and next year in upcoming partnerships with other Harvard and MIT Institutes and the larger Boston arts community. We are currently growing and open to new members and collaborative ideas and venues for 2019/20; anyone in CMP is welcome to participate. Please feel free to contact Kythe Heller with ideas and questions.

WHAT IS VISION LAB? VISION LAB is an experimental lab in the future of the human spirit, based at Harvard Divinity School and hosting events, performances, and collaborations combining radically imaginative cross-disciplinary conversations and experiential practices spanning the areas of contemporary spirituality, social and environmental justice, and literary and artistic practice. (more…)

On March 7-8, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study hosted an accelerator workshop organized by CMP Faculty Co-Director Peter Galison, CMP Administrative Director Julie Mallozzi, and Sensate Journal editor Julia Yezbick (also a CMP alumna).

The workshop brought together programmers/coders, anthropologists, artists working with Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, media studies scholars, science and technology studies scholars, and neuroscientists to critically engage with each other around the themes described in the workshop’s executive summary:

From ethnography and other field methodologies to emergent media, immersive practices hold grand promises. Advances in immersive technologies such as Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality raise new questions about what it means to witness an event or to have an experience, prompting us to ask: what is the relationship of our sensorial experiences to reality? What politics of narrative and representation do we need to consider when consuming the commoditized package of narrative, media, and branding that virtual or augmented realities present? What are the ethical, political, social, and aesthetic implications of virtual immersive experiences?

The gathering gave us the chance to begin developing critical cross-disciplinary discourse and generating working strategies for the use of immersive media projects in the interstitial spaces between art and academia. We documented our process and conversations in order to create some ancillary content and a developed a curatorial direction for a special collection in Sensate Journal around the theme of immersion/immersive media to be published in the coming year.  Stay tuned!

CMP student, Lina Verchery, was recently interviewed by Tricycle Magazine about her work in film, Buddhist Studies and ethnography. Her short film, “In Ordinary Life” (produced in the Sensory Ethnography Lab), will be featured in Tricycle’s upcoming Buddhist Shorts Film Festival in New York City.

Roots Harmonic performance in Djerassi, California: Closing improvisation of emergent sounds, with Sebastián Pérez, Dasha Lavrennikov, Kevin Kelsey, Anya Yermakova

Inserting my body into historical research has been the main concern of my CMP work. The traces left behind by dead human bodies that is the archive; the negative space of those archives for all the traces that weren’t left. Both together – still do not sum up to the embodied understanding of those somas, their way of being in the world.

Lurking, echoing a distant past, hiding in the corners of evolving structures, surviving through the fabric of progress – some epistemes of these bodies persisted. However faint the echo, with which mode of attention must I listen to hear the resonance of this embedded history?

At a recent art-science residency in Djerassi, California, I experimented with methods that could bring me closer to this multi-modal way of listening. I was joined by astrophysicist and musician Sebastián Pérez and by dancer and philosopher Dasha Lavrennikov. Our collective hybrid ways of being were central to the collaboration.

We situated our experiment among the exposed roots of redwood tree stumps. We dressed (literally) in 100-year-old musings on functional analysis, and played with emergent rhythms (visual and sonic) of found objects. All this, to bring me closer to the thought experiments – the hypotheticals that might have passed through these distant bodies. To empathize with the somatic experience of the early 20th century scholars of the Russian Empire experimenting with, embracing – contradictions, polyrhythmy, and flux.

The video below is a micro summary of this endeavor, and another experiment towards defining this method of artscience for historiography. Perhaps the most important finding from this artistic research in Djerassi was that art-science is most useful not actually as a connection between art and science. It is most useful when understood as an artistic invitation for flow between “human sciences” and “hard sciences.” In my particular case it is a body-centered performance, between critical history and mathematical logic.

Roots Harmonic from Anya Yermakova on Vimeo.

A delegation of faculty and students representing Harvard’s graduate-level work in the arts recently traveled to Paris for an intensive exchange with colleagues at the arts/research PhD program within Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL), a new consortium of nine top-level French academic institutions with ten associate members. Our trip was a follow-up to the October 2017 Art as Research: A Transatlantic Dialogue in which Harvard and SACRe students and program directors presented at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts.

PSL’s SACRe Doctoral Program (Sciences, Arts, Creation, Research) shares similar goals and scope with Critical Media Practice, Harvard’s secondary field for PhD students. Both programs aim to integrate art-making with scholarly research at the graduate level and require students to produce both a written dissertation and an artistic project.

Our hosts planned a fascinating and packed program that involved events at all five of SACRe’s partner schools, which are spread throughout Paris. Each institution’s administrative leaders welcomed us and led a tour of their beautiful and historic facilities. Several schools also arranged for us to observe classes, exhibitions, rare musical instruments, robotics demonstrations, and hidden art pieces.

For us the heart of the visit was the Harvard and SACRe student presentations. Fourteen students each had about 30 minutes to introduce and show their work followed by questions and responses from faculty and other students.

The students in both programs span a continuum from artists whose work will find its place in the art world to scholars who use artistic practices to conduct or present their research. The most exciting projects truly unite artmaking and research. These were some of the highlights:

• Harvard RLL/TDM student Amanda Gann explores the theatricality of grief practices and the intersections between archive and performance in a theatre project based on texts by a British woman who began hearing voices after her brother failed to return from WWI.
• SACRe student Hadrien Jean combines musicology and cognitive science in his investigation of auditory selective attention, working in collaboration with a composer to create a musical piece using certain constraints.
• SACRe student Emile De Visscher is a designer, engineer, and editor investigating the current utopia of local and distributed manufacturing through tools he describes as “technophanic.” His project comprises a 300-page paper and objects in a performance.
• Harvard Anthropology/CMP student Noha Mokhtar researches the relationship between kinship and architecture in Cairo using photography variously for ethnographic “note-taking,” source material for art pieces, and as artwork in itself.
• SACRe student Elizaveta Konovalova created a seven-part installation as a visualization and plastic interpretation of research about the wasteland of a former Soviet city in Germany.
• Harvard Music student Rajna Swaminathan is a mrudangam player whose research and practice question the politics of virtuosity and the queer/ diasporic extrapolations of musical traditions – for example, can time can be “queered” in music?
• Harvard VES/CMP student Jessica Bardsley is an artist who works at the intersection of nonfiction and experimental filmmaking in a mode she calls “autofiction.” Her scholarly research investigates water in post-1960s contemporary art.

The exchange was a fantastic opportunity to interact with a consortium of world-class institutions who have launched a program with goals very similar to those of Harvard’s CMP field. Their faculty and students seem steeped in the same kinds of inquiry as ours and were impressed by our students’ stellar examples of true arts-based research.

Roma, Museo del Maxxi 19 10 2018
LOW FORM
Imaginaries and Visions in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
©Musacchio & Ianniello

I recently had the opportunity to present my robotic sound installation ‘Do You Like Cyber?’ –  part of my ongoing research in Critical Media Practice – at Rome’s MAXXI – National Museum of the 21st Century Arts for the exhibition ‘Low Form. Imaginaries and Visions in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,’ curated by Bartolomeo Pietromarchi.

‘Do You Like Cyber?’ is composed of three parametric speakers attached to swiveling robotic arms. Playing with the idea of deceitful messages, the speakers broadcast a series of short audio messages that were used by bots on the dating website Ashley Madison, which I retrieved after the site was hacked. These bots were programmed to engage the website’s users in online chats, getting them to subscribe to the website’s services. Despite the fact that the bots were designed to only contact males, they didn’t always function as they should have. This work focuses on a series of insubordinate bots that, in a post-anthropocentric fashion, displayed anarchic and unpredictable behaviors, such as chatting with each other for no apparent reason or contacting female users even if they weren’t programmed to do so.

With ‘Do you like Cyber?’ I wanted to put the autonomy and interaction between artificial entities at the center, while leaving humans only partially aware of their presence. For this reason, I decided to use unpredictable robotic arms and parametric speakers, which radiate sound in single focused directions rather than in all directions like traditional speakers. Additionally, their sound bounces off hard surfaces such as walls, creating virtual sound sources and making it difficult to detect its origin.

As an artist and researcher, I am particularly interested in exhibition formats that encourage theoretical reflection, and I also contributed to the exhibition catalogue, edited by CURA, with a short speculative text entitled “What is it like for a computer bot to be a computer bot?”.

A big thanks goes to GALLLERIAPIÙ for its backing, to FabLab Bologna Makeinbo for its technical supervision, to Kevin Ramsay for the sound editing, to Annalee Newitz for her fundamental insights on Ashley Madison’s data, and, obviously, to Harvard University – Critical Media Practice for its continuous support.

Featured artists in the show: Zach Blas & Jemima Wyman, Carola Bonfili, Ian Cheng, Cécile B. Evans, Pakui Hardware, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Nathaniel Mellors & Erkka Nissinen, Trevor Paglen, Agnieszka Polska, Jon Rafman, Lorenzo Senni, Avery K Singer, Cheyney Thompson, Luca Trevisani, Anna Uddenberg and Emilio Vavarella.

“What you make should be something that hasn’t been made before,” advised artist Xu Bing at a lively lunch with CMP students and FSC fellows last Thursday.  Xu was visiting Harvard to show his film “Dragonfly Eyes” at the Harvard Film Archive and deliver a Kim and Judy Davis Dean’s Lecture in the Arts at Radcliffe Institute.

Xu described his desire to push people’s ways of thinking into a corner – to take things to a logical extreme so that they must question their assumptions. This approach definitely shows in “Dragonfly Eyes” and many of his other fascinating projects, including his wordless “Book from the Ground” which tells an entire story with only emoijis, icons, and punctuation.  Xu said he was interested in the idea of this “new type of pictograph that is emerging globally – something everyone can read.”

Students sought advice on how to approach their own media projects, thoughts about working with found materials, and Xu’s feelings as one who collects things to be the object of contemporary art world collectors. Xu responded with inspiring words and great humor.  Thank you to Radcliffe, Xu Bing, and translator Menglan Chen for making this happen!

We just finished a very inspiring master class with Lebanese filmmaker and artist Ali Cherri – part of his visit to Harvard that includes last night’s Artist Talk and tonight’s Harvard Film Archive screening.

A gathering of Critical Media Practice Students, Film Study Center Fellows, and undergraduates who are engaged in artistic practice got to hear in detail how Ali conceptualizes and technically realizes his work.  Ali explained how his trilogy of “The Disquiet,” “The Digger” and work-in-progress “The Dam” began with an interest in how moments of catastrophe in his home region – from natural disasters to war – can become extended forever in time as the agony seems to never end.  How does one represent the experience of violence when it’s not always “spectacular”?

Ali sometimes starts from a place of documentary, gathering images observationally and building relationships with people in their daily lives, and then slowly moves into fiction as he choreographs scripted using involving people in their space as actors to create the meaning he seeks.  His imagery can ultimately cross over into the supernatural, as in the striking last shot of “The Disquiet.”

Participants seemed particularly interested in Ali’s process of creating installations, including those related to single-channel works and free-standing pieces like the striking “My Pain is Real” that explores ideas about the digital mediation of violence through manipulation of his own face.

Thanks to Ali Cherri, HFA, and CCVA for this inspiring visit!

Last night marked the first-ever gathering of CMP students from across the university in our welcome event for the new semester.  It was great to hear from graduate students in Anthropology, Literature, Design, Public Health, and other fields describe their research and media projects.

We look forward to more opportunities to build community through regular critique group meetings, workshops, and other gatherings.

This summer three Film and Visual Studies graduate students from the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies and the Critical Media Practice secondary field presented installations at the Graduate School of Design’s Kirkland Gallery in a series titled “Neither/Nor, Any/All”. These exhibits explored “the limits and possibilities of research as practice, exposing and probing the nature of art-making as a multi-modal activity.”

Lindsey Lodie and Megan Alvarado-Saggese’s “Unspecified Objects, Marfa TX: The Built Wall” explores the contradictions of site-specific practice at America’s borderlands, in particular the case study of Donald Judd, who in the mid-1970s used Marfa, Texas as a backdrop for his art installations while “largely ignoring the cultural, demographic and geo-political dimensions of the region”.

Brandon Evans presented “By Listening, Pain and Sin Are Eradicated,” which included a performance in audio works, curated materials, and textual translations of gurbani (Sikh sacred text) exploring “the dimensions of language, performance, and listening as shared spheres of practice in the Sikh religious tradition and in Western contemporary art”.

Jessica Bardsley’s installation “Unearthed” mapped “an internal geography, exploring relationships between surface and interiority, matter and affect. Taking inspiration from topography, geology, and theories of emotion, this exhibition assembles artifacts from a quiet, eerie galaxy, a desaturated land, light-years from within.”