Category: blog

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.”

Three Landscapes
by Cynthia Browne

Thursday April 12th, 4:00 pm. Linden 109 (Linden Street Studios at 6–8 Linden Street)
Viewing begins at 3:00 pm on Thursday 4/12 and by request.

Caught between a past no longer viable and a future not certain, Germany’s Ruhr (aka Ruhrpott, das Revier) is a landscape full of spatial and temporal disjunctures.  For those unfamiliar, the Ruhr was arguably the former industrial heartland of Germany —mostly mining and steel production—reaching its peak production in the mid-20th century before experiencing a slow, steady, but also uneven decline in second tier industry over the past fifty years. Three Landscapes is a video triptych and media installation that offers a perceptual experience of the Ruhr’s “specious present,” in which a passage of time, the recent past and the near future, are brought together and made palpable within the duration of the exhibition space.

Friday, March 9 at 2:00 p.m.
Sever 416

Anya Yermakova will showcase several creative projects in sound, movement and experimental laboratories, that have been instrumental in developing a mediated lens on critical issues of scholarship in the history and philosophy of science-making.

A presentation will be followed by a discussion. All are invited to contribute to the conversation about Art as Research. Workshopping someone’s concrete idea or process is particularly welcome.

RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.com

Re-discovering foundational spaces that interlink methods and modalities, we play in re-combining them via dynamic, at times non-existent logics. Foregoing bridge-building across disciplines and ways-of-knowing, we instead focus on the kinds of selves that inhabit them, including ourselves – as sites for research. We treat Foundational Principles as conditions for possibility — of playfulness, of “progress,” of corporeality.

Yermakova’s creative work supports the translation and amplification of the the precarious voices of the subversive mathematicians in pre-revolutionary Russian Empire. “Refusing to refuse” professionalization, they are at once “serious” and dispersed, “intuitive” in both a mathematically-praiseworthy and suspiciously-mystical ways. While #neo-Platonist, #universalist, #spiritual are all accurate associations for their mathematical practices, differentiating their universalism is a task that requires an ontology based on rethinking their fundamentals in their kind of modernity, which has left little trace.

Curious to intuit their self-identification as Methodologists and Symbolists, and to treat seriously the possibility for broadening mathematical subjectivity, the research begins with a project of integrating foundational laws of astrophysics with embodied knowledge. Dimensioning relevance of the space inbetween, emerging new foundational principles are taken into co-composing and improvising with sounds and structures. Diagrammatic notation, historically-embedded assumptions of genre, fluidity of language, and relaxing the categories of “science” — surface and bend, necessarily, in service of “tuning” and “tuning in.” Mathematical practice gains potential to be embedded in a framework of collective responsibility.

Experimenting with creative practice on ourselves that upholds the fundamental indeterminacy of this collective, exposes missing pieces of a mathematical sanctuary enwrapped in multi-dimensional precarity, removed from our intuition by a gap in spacetime.

Anya Yermakova is a PhD candidate in History of Science at Harvard, with a Secondary in Critical Media Practice.

For short bio see anyayermakova.com

Tue, January 16, 2018
2:00 PM – 4:00 PM
Sever Hall, Mezzanine room

Dasha Lavrennikov will introduce her methodology in and on Art as Research, and in particular laboratories of dance and collective practices. She will present her own situated movement research as well as the work of Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, representatives of the neo-concrete movement in Brazil with embedded history of Russian constructivism, who employed multisensory and interdisciplinary practices in their work.
A presentation will be followed by a discussion. All are welcome. Dasha’s Bio below.

In this work we are responding to the contemporary reality in which we live, with the desire to shift beyond anthropo-logical self-centric models, that are propagated throughout the conventional education system, mass media, and through a globalization and universalization of the notions of culture. Under the conditions of cognitive capitalism, we must broaden our awareness of how our bodies and minds are being mobilized and for what purposes. In this research we reclaim, explore and mobilize the living sensing body as a field of presences in motion, in continuum with its environment. Through laboratories of dance and collectives practices we engage in a philosophy in action, shifting beyond dualistic and dichotomic paradigms both in relation to the body as well as in relation to thought, language, knowledge and culture.

In these laboratories, we investigate dance as a tool for activating collective practices, incorporated into the multidimensional definition of subjectivities, activating the field of co-productions of subjectivities and corporealities in their singularities. The laboratories of dance are part of a larger phenomenon of a global call for a growing engagement of experimental artistic languages in social, collaborative and collective practices in the contemporary art world. These tendencies are in resonance with the amplification of the notions of co-authorship and no more spectators, towards the agency of a new protagonist-participant as well as provoking epistemic changes in the formats of creation, no longer based on products but on collective processes.

This research is responding to a need that comes from contemporary society to displace the centrality of the artistic field towards new ways of activating and being part of other modes of being together, and other possibilities of social interlocutions. This research is aligned with the emergence of new ethical aesthetic paradigms active in a hybrid zone between symptoms and intuitions directly from the social relations, reconfiguring an elliptic method, between practice and theory, between the experience and a conceptual constructivist reflection, which also guides the embodied and performative writing. The elliptical configuration is made from within the process of interlacing action, writing and reflection, using experimental dance and performance tools, we begin to elaborate and reconfigure methods of generosity and care as pillars that support and guide the collective artistic practice.
Dasha Lavrennikov Bio

Born in Russia, is a dancer, performer, teacher, choreographer, and artist-researcher. She has been teaching, performing and lecturing between Europe, Latin America and North America, with her BA in dance from the US, an International Masters in Performing arts (Denmark, France), and PhD in Communications and Culture (RJ, Brazil). She has lectured at MMOMA (Moscow Museum of Modern Art) in 2016 and Garage 2017. She completed her Doctorate at Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 2017.

From 2013-2017 she has been living in Rio de Janeiro, working as an artist in residency at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Niteroi (MAC), collaborating with the innovative curatorial and educational project, and directing multiple Performance Laboratories in collaboration with universities and arts programs. As well as collaborating with the works of contemporary artists such as: Susana Quiroga, Leo Tepedino, Lula Wanderley, Isaac Julien, Livia Barrosa de Moura, in the context of the museum and gallery space.

From 2008-2013 she was working in a diversity of choreographic and interdisciplinary projects and taught classes and workshops in Europe, working with companies such as David Dorfman Dance (USA), Live Art Installations(Denmark), Art- Attac (France) and Flesh (Spain) and with artists such as Khosro Adibi, Benoit Lechambre, Richard Colton, David Dorfman, Eddie Taketa, Lisa Riece, Jeremy Nelson, Nickolas Lechter, Jean Jaques Sanchez, Pipaluk Supernova, Parnab Mukherjee, Inma Marin, amongst others, as well as presenting and touring her own choreographic and performance work. In 2012 she received the DanceWEB Jardin D’ Europe scholarship, from the International Impulstanz Dance Festival in Vienna, Austria. She continues her own movement and artistic research, exploring a variety of artistic languages and performing arts practices collaborating with visual arts, new medias, film and photography.