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…)
The ‘Italian Council’ is the main program promoted by the Italian Minister of Cultural Heritage and Activities, established in 2017 with the aim of funding the creation of high-budget art projects and increasing the collections of Italian public museums.
Italian artist Emilio Vavarella, currently a PhD candidate in AFVS and CMP at Harvard, is among the winners of the 2019 edition of the Italian Council with a project entitled “rs548049170_1_69869_TT”. The project will benefit from a 178,000.00 euros production budget and revolves around the idea of translating the artist’s genome into a large textile, using commercial genotyping techniques available in Mountain View, California, and a 19th century Jacquard loom (one of the first ‘computing machines’), still active in Southern Italy.
Vavarella’s project aims to conjugate tradition and modernity by intertwining the genetic and cultural histories of the artist and his mother, (who is a tailor), and topics such as the digitalization of biological life, technical reproducibility, and the intersection between artisanal textile manufacturing and contemporary techno-scientific possibilities.
An integral part of the project will be a series of collateral events and initiatives aimed at expanding the project’s theoretical implications and produced with the support of cultural partners in Italy, the United States and China, including: Ramdom, a cultural association in Puglia and leading partner of Vavarella’s project; Arthub Asia, a Shanghai-based platform devoted to contemporary art creation and diffusion; the Film Study Center at Harvard University; and MAMbo, the Museum of Modern Art in Bologna.
Learn more about Vavarella’s work here: http://emiliovavarella.com/
Introduction to Critical Media Practice class had a show of its final projects in Vanserg Hall last night, with projects including multichannel video pieces about managed forests in Ontario (GSD), more coming soon.
Check out the CMP Capstone Exhibition in the Harvard Gazette.
It takes countless hours to pull together a traditional doctoral thesis, a cogent case laid out on the page based on reasoned argument primed with examples. But the printed word, Harvard scholars know, is only one way to demonstrate what you’ve learned about the world. Continued…
On April 25, the Critical Media Practice secondary field opened its inaugural Capstone Exhibition entitled “Into Place.” The exhibition, comprised of a cinema program and a group gallery show, presented a range of works from sound projects and short videos to multi-channel installations and performances. This show was the first time graduate students from across the University have collectively exhibited their CMP work, which tackles scholarly inquiry through visual, aural, tactile, performative, and interactive means.
CMP students who participated in the show represented a variety of disciplines including Anthropology, Comparative Literature, Music, and Visual and Environmental Studies. Several alumni of the CMP program were invited to present past projects alongside current students; it was exciting to see the work side-by-side while also creating a dialogue between CMP students and the alumni, who now hold teaching and professional positions and could share advice and experience for the graduating students. We look forward to inviting alumni back to present their work in future exhibitions.
In addition to the experience of creating the capstone projects, CMP Administrative Director Julie Mallozzi highlighted the value of mounting an exhibition from scratch: “It’s a great opportunity for the students to learn how to install the work, to see how the audience interacts with their projects, and to create professional documentation. It is all part of the learning experience.” With a packed opening night, the exhibition also served as a wonderful way to spread the word about the CMP program.
The gallery show of “Into Place” was held in the ArtLab Annex in the Sackler BuildingCMP student Lindsey Lodhie (Visual and Environmental Studies ’20) participated in the gallery show with her installation “Artificial Tears,” which explores the aesthetic interface where research protocols, performance reenactment, and genre film intersect in laboratory studies of emotion. Taking the ostensible substance of affect—tears—as a concrete site of symbolic and material investigation, “Artificial Tears” seeks to unravel what Bruno Latour has described as the “scenography of empiricism.”
Joseph Pomp (Comparative Literature ’20) created a sculptural installation which outlined the city of Manhattan in a personal atlas of the movies. He drew inspiration from works by Juan Downey and Thom Andersen that use video to question prevailing (mis-)conceptions of geography. “Manhattan Video” restitutes film clips to their shooting locations and, in so doing, detects how the specificities of place bear their imprint across wildly divergent works.
T. Brandon Evans (Visual and Environmental Studies ’20) presented a perforative installation titled “Tāli/Khāli (Empty Beat.” Brandon aka Bunty Singh uses a concept of rhythm (tāla) from Hindustani classical music and Sikh music traditions as an operation on the dynamics of live performance and vernacular media in the Punjabi and diasporic Sikh community. The conspicuous absence of the performer is articulated in the operation of media transmission. Absence emphasizes the notion that creative processes are not, as in Sikh religious thought and in process philosophy, the products of human agency, but rather inflorescences of the Divine.
Benny Shaffer (Anthropology ’20) presented his 9-channel installation “Elsewhere” in the Lightbox Gallery at the Harvard Art Museums. “Elsewhere,” depicts the floating life of a Uyghur tightrope walker as he performs on the margins of China’s entertainment industry. The precarity of his work points to a broader context in which Uyghurs, a largely Muslim ethnic minority, are continually subjected to discriminatory policies under the Chinese government. This video installation reflects on the relationship between spectacle, surveillance, and mediation in contemporary China.
Argyro Nicolaou (Comparative Literature ’18) presented both a performative lecture in the cinema program and a complimentary installation in the gallery show titled “History Lesson.” In “History Lesson” Nicolaou proposes an alternative history curriculum for Cyprus based entirely on film productions shot on the island before its division in 1974.
With the success of “Into Place” we look forward to organizing future events, exhibitions, and opportunities for students in Critical Media Practice to share their works with the Harvard community and beyond.
“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.
