Events

Biologists craft stories about the living world through intricate and often intimate practices of making, thinking, and communicating through images. The field of developmental biology in particular has retained, perhaps more than any other life science, its roots as a visual science in an increasingly data-infused era. Figure 1. In the Beginning meditates on the status of images of developing organisms as sites of observation, delineation, framing, exploration, and storytelling across art and science. It experiments with what happens when images are brought out of dematerialized scientific knowledge systems through media now primarily considered the purview of art. 

Beatrice Steinert, will be defending her dissertation, Multicellular Media: Visual Practice in Developmental Biology, 1860-present to her ad hoc Committee on Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and History of Science as well as her CMP Capstone Figure 1. In the Beginning on Wednesday, May 14, 2025 at 2 p.m. in Science Center B-10 and over Zoom. 

The defense will be followed by a viewing of her Capstone installation in the Science Center Central Arcade  as well as reception outside of SC B-10. 

2:00 PM (SC B-10 and Zoom): Presentation of dissertation and CMP Capstone

3:00 PM (Science Center Central Arcade and outside SC B-10): CMP Capstone viewing and reception

Email Program Coordinator Cozette Russell to request Zoom link.

At the heart of Phantom Tree is a 150-year-old red oak tree that was felled in 2019 to make way for a multi-million-dollar renovation and extension of Andover Hall (now Swartz Hall) at Harvard Divinity School. The tree stood at the center of Divinity School, towering to a height of 75 feet, and covered half of the yard with its canopy. The work is rooted in archival research, as well as a series of conversations and interviews, often in the form of intimate confessions with activists who put efforts into attempting to save the tree. The story is one among many that highlight Harvard’s involvement in property development, urban gentrification, and land acquisition.

Phantom Tree acts as a point of departure, tracing the tree’s afterlife through diverse sensory experiences, aiming to decenter the privileged ontological position of the human and foreground the tree as a perfect embodiment of mutual entanglement and interdependence with the rest of the biotic and abiotic world.

The exhibition is part of the program of the Thinking With Plants and Fungi Conference (May 15-17), exploring how plants and fungi help us rethink the nature of mind and matter and humans’ relationship to the more-than-human world. 

The work is supported by the Thinking with Plants and Fungi Initiative, Critical Media Practice program, Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative, ArtLab, Constellation Project, Shelemay Sound Lab, and the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies.

Artist Biography:

Elitza’s art practice explores temporality and the impermanence of tangible and intangible nature as well as emerging interferences and resonances among sound, space, biotic and abiotic entities in urban contexts. Her work aims to understand how artistic visual, sonic, and spatial practices engender engagement, critical awareness, and participatory responses to digitally mediated environments, reconciling the self and the social at the level of city construction and subjectivity.

Elitza is a postdoctoral fellow with the Thinking With Plants and Fungi Initiative at the Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School. She holds a master’s degree in media studies from the University of Tokyo and a doctoral degree from Harvard Graduate School of Design with a secondary field in Critical Media Practice (CMP). Her research examines the relationship among sound, place, and “cross-species sociality” (Haraway) to conceptualize space, intersubjectivity, and the sensorium within the framework of the human-animal-machine cybernetic triangle.

Phantom Tree
92 Seattle st, Allston, MA 02134

Opening Reception May 16, 6—8pm
Gallery open May 17 &18, 12—6pm, May 19, 12-3pm