SUMMER 2021 CLASSES
COURSE# CLASS DAY + TIME INSTRUCTOR
IMA 78066 Socially Engaged Art and New 15 sessions - 3 credits Betty Yu Media Practices for Social Justice Mondays + Wednesdays, 4-7pm June Production 7th - July 26th hybrid
IMA 78318 Public Humanities for Digital 5 sessions - 1 credit James Levy Media Artists: Engaging "Place" Thursdays, July 8 - July 29th 5-7pm + and History in New York Saturday July 31st from 11am-3pm Production online
IMA 78346 Immediate Site: Requiem Tuesdays June 15, 29, & July 13 Kara Lynch Production synchronous from 4-7pm & Tuesdays June 22 & July 6 will be one-on-one meetings online
FALL 2021 CLASSES
1-CREDIT CLASSES:
COURSE # CLASS DAY + TIME INSTRUCTOR
IMA 78301 Intensive Tools and Techniques Sat + Sun September 11th + 12th JT Takagi Sound Recording 10:30am - 6pm in person
IMA 78303 Intensive Tools and Techniques Sat + Sun September 18th + 19th Sean Hanley Camera Fundamentals 10:30am - 6pm in person
IMA 78302 Intensive Tools and Techniques Sat + Sun September 25th + 26th Sean Hanley Lighting 10:30am - 6pm in person
IMA 78313 Premiere Editing and Post Fri, Sat, Sun, October 1st, 2nd, 3rd Iris Devins Production Workflow 10:30am - 3pm online 3-CREDIT CLASSES:
MONDAYS: COURSE # CLASS DAY + TIME INSTRUCTOR
IMA 78087 Digital Resistance M, 3:10-6pm Kara Lynch Production or Analytical online
IMA 78204 Documenting Histories, Asian, M, 6:10-10pm Reiko Tahara Asian American online Analytical
TUESDAYS: COURSE # CLASS DAY + TIME INSTRUCTOR
IMA 77100 Community Media and Advocacy & T, 10:10-1pm Kelly Anderson The Urban Environment hybrid Production
IMA 74400 Microcultural Incidents T, 2:10-5pm Michael Gitlin Production in person
IMA 76700 Intro to Physical Computing T, 2:10-5pm Jesse Harding Production in person
IMA 72400 Developing and Producing T, 6:10-9pm Véronique Bernard Analytical / Production online
WEDNESDAYS: COURSE # CLASS DAY + TIME INSTRUCTOR
IMA 78052 Story Strategies W, 10:10-1pm Andrew Lund Production online
IMA 78048 Culture Jamming W, 3:10-6pm Clarinda Mac Low Production hybrid
IMA 75400 Advanced Studio: Emerging Media W, 6:10-9pm Rachel Stevens Production online
IMA 75000 Emerging Media 1 W, 6:10-9:40pm Zach Nader Production TBD THURSDAYS: COURSE # CLASS DAY + TIME INSTRUCTOR
IMA 78076 Multi-Channel Video Installation Th, 10:10-1pm Andrew Demirjian Production in person
IMA 70200 History of New Media Art Theory Th, 2:10-5pm Amanda McDonald and Exhibition Practices online Crowley Analytical
IMA 70000 Visual Culture Seminar Th, 6:10-9pm Marty Lucas Analytical online
IMA 76400 3D Animation + Modeling Th, 6:10-9pm TBD Production in person
OTHER: COURSE # CLASS DAY + TIME INSTRUCTOR
IMA 78100 Collaborative Media Residency Andrew Lund
IMA 78800 MFA Thesis Project class Class Times TBD Advisors 3 credits (old thesis model)
IMA 79600 MFA Thesis Preproduction Class Times TBD Advisors 3 credits (new model)
IMA 79800 MFA Thesis Production Class Times TBD Advisors 3 credits (new model) CLASS DESCRIPTIONS
SUMMER - IMA 78066 Socially Engaged Art and New Media Practices for Social Justice 15 sessions Mondays + Wednesdays June 7 - July 26 from 4pm - 7pm 3 credits Betty Yu
This class will highlight best practices and tools for engaging with new media practices to support social justice, community development and political change. We will explore the fine art of resistance, creative action, cultural praxis, and new media strategies in historic and contemporary social movements. Now more than ever, we are witnessing an increased civically-engaged public and grassroots community movements that are embracing arts, culture and media as vital tools to advance their issues. Combining theory and practice, this course will interrogate cultural practices that reimagine and, perhaps even help transform structural relations, while offering just alternatives. Some of the social issues and intersecting concerns we will explore include racial justice, climate catastrophe, gentrification, labor, LGBTQIA and immigrant rights. Collectively, students will explore the possibilities and limitations of socially-engaged artistic practices through case studies, lectures, workshops, and reflections upon their own creative interventions. Through involvement in community-engaged projects that integrate new media, video, audio, photography or other mediums - students will be immersed in the practices of collaborating, critical-thinking and making work that challenges social inequalities and plot toward creative alternatives. This course will place emphasis upon the collective process and community-building as foundational to social justice and social practice work, students will work in groups to develop a final project. The class will culminate into a public exhibition and community celebration of socially engaged projects produced through the course. Class expectations will include a research based assignment on a socially engaged artist, minimal readings, and a team-oriented final project where students will explore community-based cultural and media production for social change. Students will be working with two orgs during this class: Wing on Wo in Chinatown, and FABnyc in the lower east side.
SUMMER - IMA 78318 Public Humanities for Digital Media Artists: Engaging "Place" and History in New York 5 sessions Thursdays, July 8 - July 29 from 5-7pm and Saturday, July 31st from 11am-3pm 1 credit James Levy
Public Humanities – an outgrowth of the increasingly popular “public history” discipline – applies the methods, practices and expertise of humanities scholarship to public settings. Whether in museum exhibitions, public websites, site-specific installations or locales of public memory such as historic buildings, grounds or cultural venues, public humanities seeks to engage the public in dialogue about important social and political issues that affect people in their daily lives. This 1-credit course seeks to introduce IMA students to the basic methods and philosophy of public humanities. Students will learn about the history of the emerging field, they will learn how to identify and assess key elements of effectiveness in public humanities sites and installations, and they will produce short artistic public humanities media pieces based on local NYC sites. There will be a short essay-length reading each week and a final group or individual media project due at the end of the course to be presented and discussed during the final extended Saturday session. Students will venture into at least one New York neighborhood during the run of the class but may do so in a way that aligns with their own work and other outside commitments. While students will be encouraged to work in small teams, no one will be required to and all class activities will be Covid-safe according to the needs and comfort level of each student.
SUMMER - IMA 78346 Immediate Site: Requiem Tuesdays June 15, 29, & July 13 synchronous from 4-7pm & Tuesdays June 22 & July 6 one-on-one meetings. 1 credit Kara Lynch
The thematic focus of the seminar will critically engage issues of place-making, public and private space, memory, aftermath, the archive, and public demonstration. This course will focus on developing methods and tools to approach installation making as a practice in conversation with diverse media: video, digital, audio, photo, film, performance, and the plastic arts. As artists, we will actively address calls to decolonize this place, recover lost and stolen histories, and the need for public sites of memorial, mourning, politics, and celebration. Students will consider what remains - how the past persists in the present, how the future is shadowed, and the ways in which no framework is stable. This is a rigorous theory/practice workshop class designed specifically for students to produce work that engages questions of site, space, time, experience and the senses within an historical context. Participants will be introduced to Deep Listening methods, diverse installation art practices, and various readings around decolonization, wake work, and approaches to the archive and remembrance. We will challenge traditional modes of production and presentation collectively. Each participant in this course will generate ‘research’ as they respond to weekly prompts to stimulate their daily practice within their respective locations. This research will culminate in interventions and projects to share for feedback with peers in the course. Students will focus on their critical skills and be required to complete concise written responses to readings/viewings and each others’ projects. Readings wander through poetry, critical theory, memoir, manifesto, historical fiction, and cultural studies predominantly written by BIPOC artists, theorists, activists, and scholars. This course will encourage students to take risks, broaden their perspective of artistic production, and generate self-initiated works in a community of peer artists.
Course format :: Three biweekly, synchronous meetings for discussion and feedback, and two breakout meetings with one on one consultations with the professor on the off weeks. FALL - IMA 78303 Intensive Tools and Techniques - Camera Fundamentals Sat + Sun September 18th + 19th 10:30am - 6pm 1 credit Sean Hanley
This workshop will provide a complete breakdown of best practices for using the Canon C100 cinema camera for in the field situations. Topics will include practical tips and tricks for both tripod and handheld use, choosing lenses, using an external monitor, and other techniques for determining proper exposure, focus, and white balance. In addition, the workshop will cover specific aspects of the camera functionality, like navigating the menus, choosing Picture Profiles, and ensuring settings for the highest quality image. Students will go out into the field and put these techniques into practice with a goal of recreating common real world challenges. While viewing contemporary documentary and experimental references, Students will also learn the basic aesthetics of composition, perspective and angle, with an eye to developing an individual artistic point of view as expressed through the lens.
FALL - IMA 78301 Intensive Tools and Techniques - Sound Recording Sat + Sun September 11th + 12th 10:30am - 6pm 1 credit JT Takagi
In this class students will learn and apply sound production theories and techniques. They will become familiar with the language of audio professionals and the equipment they use, as well as current industry practices used by sound recordists, sound mixers, and boom operators. Fundamental best practices are emphasized and documentary styles versus dramatic setups will be covered. In addition to learning the technical skills students will also become familiar with sound’s role in media production, and better understand how both audio production and post-production sound design contribute to the film/video production process.
FALL - IMA 78302 Intensive Tools and Techniques - Lighting Sat + Sun September 25th + 26th 10:30am - 6pm 1 credit Sean Hanley
This workshop will provide students hands-on experience planning and executing different lighting scenarios for documentary and/or narrative filmmaking, including various interview 'looks', group settings, and verité scenes. Students will have the opportunity to work with available lighting instruments, reflectors, and modifiers with an aim for recreating challenging real world scenarios. The workshop will demonstrate lighting techniques for both indoor and outdoor environments. Discussion topics will include measuring lighting, exposure tools, understanding dynamic range, contrast ratios, color temperature control, as well as lighting for a variety of skin tones.
FALL - IMA 78313 Premiere Editing and Post Production Workflow Fri, Sat, Sun, October 1st, 2nd, 3rd 10:30am - 3pm 1 credit Iris Devins
Adobe Premiere and Developing a Post-Production Workflow introduces Premiere to new editors as well as experienced editors coming over from other editing programs. The workshop will provide an overview of Premiere’s layout and tools, and students will develop a strategy for media organization within Premiere. The instructor will use examples from her own work to demonstrate strategies for developing a post-production workflow within Premiere from the camera to the final exported video. Additionally, the workshop will discuss strategies for more advanced post-production workflows, such as preparing Premiere projects for graphic design, visual effects, and color correction
FALL - IMA 74400 Microcultural Incidents Tuesdays, 2:10-5pm Production 3 credits Michael Gitlin
There are two production assignments for this class. The first piece should be a short project made specifically for the course (not something carried over from a previous semester). The formal and conceptual boundaries of this short project are open-ended but it should in some way engage with experimental approaches to ethnographic practice. Possible approaches might include a piece documenting the microculture of your living space, with an eye for the totemic; a piece which explores various methods of observing and documenting a particular zone of activity, for example returning to the site of observation several times over several days; or a piece which documents a public ritual or ecstatic activity. This list of approaches is by no means exhaustive. The second project can either be something begun during this semester or a continuation of work already begun. If the latter, it’s important that substantial progress be made during the course of the semester. A course pack with readings drawn from a variety of sources will be handed out in class, as well as being available on the course Blackboard. Each student will be expected to moderate the discussion of at least one course reading during the semester. The desire for cultural definition; the forces at play in the constitution of self’; the relationship between self and other; the pleasures and problematics of “intercultural” encounters; the secret history of subcultures: these are a few of the thematic concerns found within a broad strain of experimental film and video and which can be seen as evidence of what might be called an ethnographic impulse. This course is a combined screening and production class in which we will seek to define, uncover and explore the variety of ways in which that impulse is manifested. Topics to be examined include: the “salvage paradigm” and the desire for the lost; methods of observation and myths of objectivity; varieties of reflexivity; ritual and the utopia of ecstatic community; and postcolonial humanism and the totalizing eye. Our readings and screenings will take us across boundaries between experimental media, on the one hand, and more traditional works of “visual anthropology” on the other, and across genre boundaries within these two broadly defined disciplines. We will be looking for areas of formal similarity and difference and for convergences or dissimilarities of intention and methodology. For example, how does the methodology of visual anthropology, with its scientific gloss in which shooting film or tape becomes “collecting visual sampling data” and interview subjects become “informants,” affect its claims of objectivity and veracity? Readings and screenings will be conducted with a critical eye in which both the intersection and the collision of ideas will be foregrounded, and contradictions between and within texts will be highlighted. Screenings should be understood not as arising out of a canon of “great works” but as exemplary instances of particular themes or tendencies. “In this world of fragile mirrors, standing beside men and women for whom any clumsy action may provoke or inhibit trance, the observer’s presence can never be neutral.” –Jean Rouch, from On the Vicissitudes of the Self “I do not intend to speak about, just speak nearby.” – Trinh T. Minh-ha, from Reassemblage
FALL - IMA 78087 Digital Resistance Mondays, 3:10-6pm Production or Analytical 3 credits Kara Lynch
This seminar on media analysis and production will consider how constructions of power are embodied in technologies and conversely, how technologies shape our notions of authority and how we actively mobilize against it. In recent years, access to information and images has shifted dramatically. Handheld technologies, social media networks, live web-streaming, video games, and podcasts eclipse mass-media broadcast channels distributing entertainment, news, and information. Drawing upon Media Arts, Critical Ethnic Studies, and Cultural Studies, we will examine models of Digital Resistance in order to understand: the relationship of race to representation; precursors to contemporary innovations; Corporate Media and Government gate-keeping of information; modes of production; the relationship between media, information and action. Through readings, responses, visual projects, and research, students will learn to critically read and make digital media and contend with it as a mass language. Throughout this semester, as their Digital Resistance, students will address the following questions: “What are examples of anti-racist and de-colonial media?” and “How do we make actively anti-racist and de-colonial media?” Participants in this course will develop independent research projects/papers and create a collective digital platform in order to contribute their research, writing, and media making to public discourse.
FALL - IMA 78204 Documenting histories, Asia, Asian-America Mondays, 6:10pm-10pm Analytical 3 credits Reiko Tahara
In this course, we will investigate the idea of Asia, its modern histories, as well as the diasporic experiences of Asian and Asian Americans through films. The main focus is on “documentary”, hybrid, and experimental, but some fiction works may be included. The course aims to provide the basic understanding of what has happened in Asia (South, West, Southeast, Central, East Asia and Pacific Islands) since the Western colonial expansion and through the major wars and political upheavals, and how those historical events have impacted people in Asia and Asian diaspora in America today. We will explore the power of film as history (re)writing apparatus by studying both the works by known Asian filmmakers (e.g. Mira Nair, Shinsuke Ogawa, Lav Diaz) as well as lesser-known but significant work from the Asian diaspora. A special attention will be given to the pioneering work of the Asian American filmmakers as well as grassroots distributors such as Third World Newsreel and their efforts in cross-racial and cross-continental solidarity, and we will ponder together how we can keep those recorded memories and histories alive. Assignments will include weekly readings and watching, discussion leaders and presentations in lieu of the midterm (most probably once a semester each), and the final (either an academic essay or video essay). Readings most likely will include: Trinh T- Minh-ha, Homi Bhabha, Sucheng Chan, Azfar Hussain, Shumei Okawa, Jessica Hagedorn, Mitsue Yamada, Ella Shohat, among others.
FALL - IMA 77100 Media, Community Advocacy & the Urban Environment Tuesdays, 10:10am-1pm Production 3 credits Kelly Anderson
This class will provide students with an opportunity to do collaborative work in community-based settings in partnership with local stakeholders. In Fall 2021 we will be working as the NYC team of the Whose Land? project. Whose Land? Is a web-based archive that will be created by James Levy. It will eventually be a web-based archive that features projects, including videos and a podcast, exploring the histories of farming, land and migration between New York and Wisconsin. Stories will be told through the lens of equity and racial justice with a focus on land, land use and dispossession. The IMA piece of the Whose Land? project in Fall 2021 will involve selecting specific locations in NYC and partnering with community-based organizations who are doing work related to those sites. These may be places where the future of a parcel of land is contested due to development plans, places that have histories and cultural attachments that warrant preservation, or places where community actors are trying to build a just future through non-speculative uses of land. Possible partners include a Community Land Trust Queens (on the site of the Amazon H2Q fight), Weeksville Heritage Center in Crown Heights, Brooklyn and UPROSE in Sunset Park which is working on a green reindustrialization plan for the South Brooklyn waterfront. We are still researching options and are open to students finding their own organizations to partner with.* In the class, we will screen media projects that document urban struggles around housing, development, gentrification, and green reindustrialization, and explore how media can amplify community voices, raise awareness and create pressure for change. We will consider case studies where filmmakers have collaborated with communities, and discuss the complex ethical and power relationships involved when making media “for,” “about” or “with” others. Students should have some technical background in video and/or audio production, or editing. Since the work will be done in teams, there will be an opportunity to learn from peers. Some technical training can be provided based on class needs, but students should have basic skills. There may be opportunities for students interested in mapping, or web design and development. The class is open to many models of collaboration and to student input on the design of the course. The most important requirements are a desire to get out and engage with communities, a seriousness about the ethics and real world complications of doing that work, and enthusiasm about the potential for media to help advance racial and economic justice. Some projects that have emerged from this class in past semesters include Rezoning Harlem, The Domino Effect, Subprimed, and It Took 50 Years: Frances Goldin and the Struggle for Cooper Square. For more information contact Prof. Kelly Anderson at [email protected] * There will also be a Whose Land? team of students upstate at Cornell University and the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Potential community partners for the upstate work are the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, several Haudenosaunee nations, and the Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust. Twice a semester in the Fall, a virtual event will allow the groups upstate and in NYC to connect across the rural/urban divide and share what we are learning.
FALL - IMA 76700 Introduction to Physical Computing Tuesdays, 2:10-5pm Production 3 credits Jesse Harding
Physical computing is a set of tools and practices that enable artists, designers, and hobbyists to create electro-mechanical works that sense and affect the physical world. Working in media beyond the screen and the standard desktop, laptop, or mobile computer, physical computing practitioners use electronic components and physical materials to build devices that bridge the gap between the digital and physical worlds. This course introduces students to microcontroller programming, electronics, and physical interaction design. The bulk of the course will focus on using the Arduino microcontroller to create experiences that extend beyond the computer screen. We will also examine the use of electronics and interactivity in art and design. Weekly hands-on labs, assignments, and readings will help students gain technical proficiency with these tools and develop a critical and creative eye for interactive technology.
FALL - IMA 72400 Developing and Producing Tuesdays, 6:10-9pm Production or Analytical 3 credits Véronique Bernard
This course is designed for the non-fiction producer of documentaries, series, shorts, interactive and other forms of factual content for the screen in all genres and across multiple platforms including theatrical, television, digital, web, mobile and installation. The course deconstructs the development process in detail from concept to green light, and reviews the production process from pre-production to distribution. The primary emphasis is on content development including research, casting, proposal and treatment writing, pitching and presentation materials. The course also explores producing fundamentals such as budgeting, fundraising, scheduling, field producing, post-production and deliverables. Each student is required to fully develop one original project, which is presented to a group of industry professionals at the end of the semester, along with a comprehensive written proposal. Students are exposed to different genres, formats and approaches in non-fiction production, and are encouraged to develop a passion project with a unique voice, original characters, exclusive insight, a distinctive angle and/or innovative form. They should leave with a project ready to go into pre-production. FALL - IMA 78052 Story Strategies Wednesdays, 10:10am-1pm Production 3 credits Andrew Lund
Story Strategies teaches fiction filmmaking and screenwriting concepts for students interested in integrating narrative techniques into their media making practice. An intensive writing workshop in which students explore essential techniques for the effective creation of organic cohesive stories for the screen, students employ conventional and alternative dramatic structures and characterizations, amplify audience engagement, implement and subvert genre conventions, and refine expressive script language. The course covers ideation and story development methods and analyzes writing practice approaches that support varied modes of creative expression. During workshop sessions students will develop critique approaches and systems to synthesize feedback. They learn to analyze the writing of others and offer constructive feedback to improve work that is not their own while enhancing their own writing and revision process. Dramatic elements analyzed include: central question, plot goal, life need, obstacles, conflict, complication, tension, rising action, character arc, parallel action, POV, and exposition. Storytelling techniques covered include: surprise and suspense, plant and payoff, motifs and patterns, information disparity and dramatic irony, turning points and reversals, slow disclosure and revelation, subjective and objective drama, temporal compression and expansion, objects and locations as narrative devices, and narrative progression in the cut.
Students will learn to: ● Embrace cinematic storytelling by constructing narratives with images rather than illustrating with them. ● Dramatize internal states (thoughts and feelings) by generating external representations through action, behavior, setting, framing, composition, and other concrete details. ● Use sound as a core storytelling component to define space, reveal character, establish mood, and generate rhythm and tone. ● Deploy narrative conventions to amplify audience engagement and activate audience participation in the storytelling process. ● Apply narrative strategies to reenactments, non-linear stories, experimental films, social action narratives, and documentary projects. ● Intentionally articulate your connection to your story, your rationale for telling it, your way of structuring it, and your intended audience for it. ● Develop your authorial voice through a commitment to writing craft, word choice, action and image order, using language as a lens, and revision. ● Incorporate filmmaking craft in writing by applying acting, directing, and editing techniques throughout the writing process. ● Learn screenwriting form and format conventions to create scripts that serve as foundations for collaboration across film departments. ● Analyze short fiction films to excavate meaning, core narrative concepts, structural approaches, story conventions, and short form tropes.
Projects include: ● Children’s picture book ● Day in the life visual narrative ● Personal story pitch ● Fictional adaptation of a non-fiction story ● Short script exercises that explore voice over narration, non-chronological structures, neutral dialogue and subtext, character discovery and decision, reversal stories, and odd couple frameworks. ● Final project: a short fiction film script, the first act of a feature script, or a documentary treatment
Remote mode: As a writing intensive critique focused class, Story Strategies is an ideal course to run remotely. Critique discussions work well on Zoom, and this will constitute the bulk of what we do together. We will also take advantage of Zoom breakout rooms for periodic exercises that highlight various aspects of the scriptwriting process as well as to facilitate smaller group discussions.
FALL - IMA 78048 Culture Jamming of the 2020s Wednesdays, 3:10pm-6pm Production 3 Credits Clarinda Mac Low
Culture jamming is a moving target. We will take time to develop a critical overview of what “culture jamming” (defined as subversive and utopian alternatives to mainstream cultural production) means in the 2020s, when online interventions have taken on vital importance, and pandemic has shifted our understanding of how digital telepresence functions in art and activism. This course will offer students a chance to engage with a variety of activist and social art practices related to artistic activism, and culture jamming. These activities take place in public space, at cultural institutions, and online, and include actions like artists’ takeover of plywood barriers on businesses during the uprisings of 2020, Decolonize this Place’s protests at the Whitney Museum in 2019, the Yes Men’s interventions into media and corporate spaces, and much of the instigation during the Occupy movement. We will work with both theory and practice, bring in contemporary practitioners as guests, and look at historical predecessors, from both Euro-American traditions (e.g. the historical European avant-garde, Situationism, tactical media, relational aesthetics), and other traditions (e.g. protest music by Fela Kuti and in calypso, satirical Black carnival traditions from the American South and the Caribbean). We will study a variety of art practices we can use to create our own activist projects, including performative interventions, fake campaigns, art laboratories, and more. Students will work to develop their own new forms, working on projects individually and in groups, as well as creating reflections on reading/viewing existing scholarship. We will take this opportunity to find new ways to be together as a class--in person, remotely, and combining the two--in a way that reflects our culture jamming and utopian intentions. FALL - IMA 75400 Advanced Studio : Emerging Media Wednesdays, 6:10am-9pm Production 3 credits Rachel Stevens
Advanced Studio offers an environment in which students can develop a project of their own choosing, while receiving intensive faculty mentoring and periodic group critiques. The primary goal of the course is to achieve a significant amount of work on a project of their own in a supportive critical context. Along the way, we’ll also work on developing critiquing skills. The type of work can be anything from documentary film to performance to social practice art.
FALL - IMA 75000 Emerging Media 1 Wednesdays, 6:10pm-9:40pm Production 3 credits Zach Nader
This production course introduces students to the fundamentals of Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Efects, and is suitable for both those familiar with these softwares and students with little to no previous experience. Through the lenses of visibility, photographic reproduction of our world, and contemporary art, we discuss ways in which artists use media to understand and generate our world. We look at ways to create artworks and supporting documents, exploring strategies to work with color, layout, framing, typography, and the principles of design to create persuasive visual communication. The course provides historical context through readings and analysis of aesthetic techniques and movements from the history of art and design; including photomontage, glitch, animation, motion graphics, text/image relationships and more. Additionally, we actively consider the ways contemporary artists have used the techniques and concepts we discuss to center storytelling in rich and dynamic ways.
FALL - IMA 78076 Multi-Channel Video Installation Thursdays, 10:10am-1pm Production 3 Credits Andrew Demirjian
In this hands-on production course, we will create new multi-channel video installation artworks that are in conversation with the rich and diverse histories of this practice. We will engage with the technical, theoretical and aesthetic concepts that inform the production, post-production and exhibition of producing these immersive works. Using both hardware and software methods for synchronizing sources, we will experiment with different vertical and horizontal configurations of multiple monitors and projectors to display student work. Projection mapping and sculptural techniques that investigate methods for breaking the rectangular frame will also be explored. In addition to multiple channels of video, we will also work with multiple channels of audio to create immersive environments. Students will gain hands-on experience working with a quadrophonic sound system and subwoofer along with other speaker configurations. Through a series of short readings, we will survey diverse perspectives, contexts and topics in this mode of production. We will also screen, critically analyze and discuss a wide array of practices from artists working in this medium including Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Doug Aitken, John Akomfrah, Candace Breitz, Willie Doherty, Omer Fast, Madelon Hooykaas, Hyphen Labs, Beryl Korot, Mary Lucier, Angela Melitopoulos, Ulrike Ottinger, Iñigo Manglano Ovalle, Tony Oursler, Nam Jun Paik, Sondra Perry, Pipilotti Rist, Elsa Stansfield, Hito Steyerl, Martine Syms and many others. The course will be taught as a hybrid, with some classes via Zoom for discussing texts and learning post-production techniques and others in-person to set up monitors, projectors and speakers to test our work. Documenting the pieces created in class will be part of our working method, ensuring students are able to easily show the outcomes of their work for crits, grant proposals and future exhibitions.
FALL - IMA 70200 History of New Media Art Theory and Exhibition Practices Thursdays, 2:10pm-5pm Analytical 3 credits Amanda McDonald Crowley
The term New Media Art is used to describe a range of practices and processes that relate to art combined with contemporary digital media, technological tools, and scientific research methodologies. The class will address these practices, especially as they relate to the ubiquity of contemporary networked internet culture, interactive display of work, and audience engagement strategies for new forms of expression. This course will introduce key themes, processes, networked social movements, as well as diverse & intersectional cultural trends. It will ask students to analyze and discuss central debates in emerging media studies by looking at the key components of algorithmic and digital culture (interactivity, cybernetics, networks, databases, surveillance, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, internet culture, computer code as language … ). It will also place these concepts within historical and cultural contexts in order to unpack and explain how these developments continue to construct the world around us. A particular emphasis will be placed on diversity as it relates to digital culture by exploring environmental, social, cultural and avant-garde histories of media and art, drawing on global traditions and on diverse communities and knowledge systems. Topics will be tailored to research interests of participating students, but will include seminars on topics such as: surveillance society; cyberfeminism, glitchfeminism, and object oriented feminism; afrofuturism; vernacular video and techno-vernacular creativity; indigenous knowledge systems. To borrow from James Bridle’s New Dark Age: Technology at the End of The Future, we’ll cover Computation, Climate, Complexity, Cognition, Complicity, and Conspiracy. Digital culture is, after all, ubiquitous to contemporary new media theory. We will interrogate and critique examples of new forms of expression in art, media culture, as well as computational sciences. In particular we will explore ways that artists consider presenting work using interactive media techniques and technologies that provide audiences with particularly interactive experiences in the reception of interactive media works including interactive projection, augmented reality, virtual reality. We will additionally explore curatorial strategies for presenting complex, computational work and consider timeframes and strategies for engaging audiences in non-traditional formats, and participatory frameworks.
Objectives: Students will come away from this course with a broad understanding of major themes and discussions in the field of emerging media studies. Students will gain knowledge of seminal “new media art” and artists and develop an appreciation for the way that technological developments, culture, science, and society influence one another. Students will also gain an understanding of alternate, participatory exhibition strategies for presenting Interactive Media Arts. This is an analytical course, and students will be provided with opportunities to develop critical thinking, close reading, research, and note taking as well as critical writing skills.
Assignment/Course Structure: We will analyze relevant historic and recent works drawing on a range of practices in art, media, performance, and design, parallel with assigned readings. Students will be expected to lead discussion about readings twice in the semester (and are encouraged to research and share works relevant to their reading) and submit a written response to the readings, write a midterm art/culture review of an online or physical exhibition or presentation of work. Students will write a final critical research paper and present a short synopsis of this paper in class.
FALL - IMA 70000 Visual Culture Seminar Thursdays, 6:10-9pm Analytical 3 credits Martin Lucas
The seminar is a research-oriented critical exploration of visual culture – how images work, and what they do – across media, time periods and critical approaches. Students will be asked to create a research paper on a topic of their own choosing while sharing presentations of readings drawn from a variety of disciplinary frames including art history, media studies, critical theory, and cultural studies, designed to give students a broad overview of useful tools for thinking about the visual world. At the core of the seminar is the idea of self-directed research. Each student will create a Visual Culture project of their own choosing; typically in the form of a research paper some 15 to 30 pages in length including a bibliography and a paper in draft and final versions. These topics will be discussed and approaches shared. Each participant will also make a presentation to the group based on one or more of the readings. The seminar will ask students what the engagement with thought and action means to them. What are good questions? Useful answers? What are the implications of the forms of storytelling you choose to use or eschew? Who you are as a media maker? What do teaching and learning constitute in an “Information Age?” There will be approximately 2 articles per week by authors including W.T.J. Mitchell, bell hooks, Teddy Cruz, Marita Sturken, Isaac Julien, Brian Massumi and more. The Fall 2021 seminar will be online, and the lectures will be a mix of live and asynchronous. FALL - IMA 76400 3D Animation and Modeling Thursdays, 6:10pm-9pm Production 3 credits TBD
In this course, students will learn the complete animation pipeline that will enable them to create 3d content for video, graphic novels, filmmaking, and net based art from start to finish. Students will learn storyboarding, 3D modeling and texturing, rigging, animation techniques, rendering, compositing, and post-processing. This course is a broad introduction to the tools and techniques of 3D animation and will give students the knowledge they need to continue their creative work. Learning Outcomes By the successful completion of this course, students will be able to: 1. Conceptualize and storyboard 2. Successfully navigate Maya 3. 3D Model 4. Create custom texture maps 5. Rig and animate custom 3D assets 6. Successfully create full renders
BIOS (in alphabetical order by last name) :
Kelly Anderson’s most recent film is UNSTUCK: an OCD kids movie. Her other work includes My Brooklyn, a documentary about gentrification and the redevelopment of Downtown Brooklyn. My Brooklyn premiered at the 2012 Brooklyn Film Festival, where it won an Audience Award, and it was broadcast on the PBS World series America ReFramed. Her other work includes Never Enough, a documentary about clutter, collecting and Americans’ relationships with their stuff, which won an award for artistic excellence at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival. She also produced and directed Every Mother’s Son (with Tami Gold), a documentary about mothers whose children were killed by police officers and who have become national spokespeople on police reform. Every Mother’s Son won the Audience Award at the Tribeca Film Festival, aired on the PBS series POV, and was nominated for a national Emmy for Directing. In 2000, Kelly completed SHIFT, a one-hour drama for ITVS about the volatile relationship between a North Carolina waitress and a telemarketing prison inmate, which premiered at the Rotterdam International Film Festival and aired on PBS stations across the United States. Kelly’s other documentaries include OUT AT WORK (with Tami Gold), which screened at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival, was broadcast on HBO and won a GLAAD Award for Best Documentary. She is the author (with Martin Lucas) of Documentary Voice & Vision: a creative approach to non-fiction media production (Focal Press, 2016). Kelly received the UFVA’s 2017 George Stoney Award for Excellence in Documentary, and from 2015 to 2017, she was the Co-Chair of New Day Films, a 44-year-old distribution cooperative of social issue media makers. Kelly is a Professor of Media Studies at Hunter College (CUNY) in New York City, where she also teaches in the IMA (Integrated Media Arts) MFA program. www.andersongoldfilms.com Véronique Bernard is an independent non-fiction film and television producer, director and executive whose experience includes WNET Culture & Arts Documentaries, Sundance Channel Original Programming, New York Times Television, National Geographic Television, ABC News Productions and SBS Television in Australia where she was Head of Production. Recent credits include doc series E2: The Economies of Being Environmentally Conscious (PBS/Sundance, Grantham Prize for Excellence in Environmental Journalism Award of Merit 2009,) feature doc French co-production The Man Who Invented Himself: Duane Michals (Special Mention Prize International Festival of Film on Art FIFA 2013,) science series Redesign My Brain (ABC Australia, Science Channel, Discovery International 2012, 2014,) PBS series Art in the Twenty-First Century (2016,) feature doc Enter The Faun (America Reframed 2017,) The People vs. Agent Orange (ITVS/Independent Lens, ARTE 2020-21,) Chasing Childhood (DOC NYC 2020) and doc short Game Changer (Tribeca Film Festival/BET 2021.) She has taught at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and the School of Visual Arts Master’s Program in Social Documentary. She is President and Executive Producer of Iliad Entertainment and on the Board of the Documentary Producers Alliance.
Andrew Demirjian’s artistic practice and research is guided by considering the role of the question as a means to expand the possibilities of art forms, the why’s and what if’s that lead to new ways of seeing. This practice of radical inquiry – continuously examining the structures that shape consciousness and perception - is enacted by creating projects that subvert structures that support the status quo and limit thought. Through building linguistic, sonic and visual environments that disrupt habituated ways of reading, hearing and seeing, he makes the commonplace strange to encourage critical reflection. The works are often presented in non-traditional spaces and take the form of multi-channel audiovisual installations, generative artworks, video poems, augmented reality apps and live performances. Andrew’s work has been exhibited at The Museum of the Moving Image, The New Museum – First Look: New Art Online, Fridman Gallery, Transformer Gallery, Eyebeam, Rush Arts, the White Box gallery, the Center for Book Arts, The Newark Museum and many other galleries, festivals and museums. The MacDowell Colony, Nokia Bell Labs, Puffin Foundation, Artslink, Harvestworks, Rhizozme, Diapason, The Experimental Television Center, The Bemis Center, LMCC Swing Space, the MIT Open Documentary Lab and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts are among some of the organizations that have supported his work. Andrew teaches theory and production courses in emerging media in the Film and Media Department and the Integrated Media Arts MFA program at Hunter College. www.andrewdemirjian.com
Iris Devins is a writer, director, and producer. The Sundance Institute selected her to participate in the Screenwriters Intensive, and she was a 2017 Sundance Knight Fellow. The Leeway Foundation awarded her with a 2018 Transformation Award. She recently finished a festival run with her narrative short, After the Date. The film portrays a romance between a trans woman and a straight man. After the Date premiered at Frameline in 2017, and later screened at festivals such as Hollyshorts, Athens International Film + Video Festival, Mammoth Film Festival, and Portland Film Festival. She received funding from the Leeway Foundation Art and Change Grant for her upcoming short, Trashy Booty. The film is a dark comedy about two dumpster diving trans women who find a hitchhiking robot in the outskirts of Philadelphia. She is currently developing her first narrative feature, Angie Star. The film is supported by a grant from the Sundance Institute with additional support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. www.irismakesfilms.com Michael Gitlin makes work about the intricate conceptual and ideological systems that we use to organize our ways of knowing the world. His work has been screened at numerous venues, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the New York Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, the Full Frame Documentary Festival, the London Film Festival and the Whitney Biennial Exhibition. His 16mm film, The Birdpeople, is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Gitlin was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006. His work has also been supported by the Jerome Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Gitlin received an M.F.A. from Bard College. www.michaelgitlin.com
Sean Hanley is a director and cinematographer working in documentary and artist moving image. His short films navigate the construction of Nature through studies of landscape, place-making, and the experience of the non-human. His work has screened at venues and festivals including the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Edinburgh International Film Festival, the New Orleans Film Festival, FLEXfest, Antimatter, the Aurora Picture Show, UnionDocs, the Imagine Science Film Festival, and the Paris Festival for Different and Experimental Cinema. As a cinematographer, he has lensed three feature-length projects for filmmaker Lynne Sachs starting with Your Day is My Night(2013, MoMA Documentary Fortnight), Tip of My Tongue (2015, Closing Night of MoMA Documentary Fortnight), and the The Washing Society (2018, BAMCinemaFest). His cinematography has also screened at the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Brandywine River Museum, Anthology Film Archives, and online for SFMOMA, the New Museum, and Art21. He is a proud member of the Meerkat Media Collective, a group of media makers practicing collaboration and consensus. He holds a BFA in Film Production from Emerson College and an MFA in Integrated Media Arts from CUNY Hunter College.
Jesse Harding is an educator, fabricator, and artist who uses physical computing to address materiality and phenomena of perception and mediation. Harding’s work is built around systems of feedback and superimposition with the aim of detourning processes & materials which are often not actively considered. In addition to his artistic practice, Jesse also works to create tools for the creation of media using unconventional techniques such as lenticular printing, laser cut phonograph records, and 16mm films which can be printed on a standard printer. In addition to teaching at Hunter College, Harding also leads courses at The New School in the Design + Technology Program, The Borough of Manhattan Community College in the Media Arts & Technology Program, and at NYU’s ITP Camp. www.cosmicharding.com
James Anders Levy is a scholar of American race and ethnicity and expert in the field of public humanities. He now serves as Associate Professor and Public Historian at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. As a public historian, Dr. Levy founded and directed two large-scale community-based history projects that employ oral history and community-based research. At Hofstra University, Dr. Levy founded the Diverse Suburbs Oral History Project, a project now administered by Hofstra’s National Center for Suburban Studies. The Diverse Suburbs project showcased its findings in a major national exhibition at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Fall 2015 called Black Suburbia: From Levittown to Ferguson that Levy curated. The show was seen by nearly 8,000 visitors and garnered exceptional reviews (the Journal of American History described the exhibit as “brilliant, jarring and continuously challenging”). Levy is also founder and director of the Wisconsin Farms Oral History Project, a project exploring the connections between race, land and farming in Wisconsin which has been featured on Wisconsin Public Radio and selected as an official partner of the Wisconsin Humanities Council’s “Working Lives of Wisconsin” project. In 2018-2019, the project sponsored the Lands We Share traveling exhibition and community conversation tour (see: landsweshare.org) which was honored nationally with a 2020 Award for Excellence from the American Association for State and Local History and the Elizabeth B. Mason Award from the Oral History Association. It also received the 2020 Best Public Program award in Wisconsin from the Wisconsin Historical Society. Before earning his doctorate, Dr. Levy co-founded and directed the San Francisco-based educational non-profit organization, Streetside Stories, an organization that celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2019 and is now an affiliated program of San Francisco's Performing Arts Workshop https://www.performingartsworkshop.org
Martin Lucas is a media artist and educator. Since his first film, Tighten Your Belts, Bite the Bullet (New York Film Festival, 1980) he has examined social injustice as it is embedded in cultural and technological systems of communications, economics and war. His work has shown at locales including the Buena Vista Arts Center, San Francisco, the Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, New York, and the Centrum Beeldende Kunst, Rotterdam. Martin organizes events and speaks regularly in the US and abroad on topics including media education, emerging media and social change and documentary film. He is the creator of the Codes and Modes Symposium at Hunter, which brings artists and scholars from around the world to examine the culture of documentary media. A founding member of the Paper Tiger Television Collective, he has worked in media development, education and production with groups from Siberia to Southern Africa. Martin has a BFA from the Tisch School of the Arts, NYU, and an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. His latest film, Hiroshima Bound (2015) meditates on America’s collective memory (or amnesia) concerning the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He is the author, with Kelly Anderson of Documentary Voice & Vision: A Creative Approach to Non-fiction Media Making (2016); recent articles include “Documentary: Trauma and an Ethics of Knowing” (2017) and “The New Political Subject: Affect and the Media of Self-Organizing Politics” (2019). www.martinlucas.net
Andrew Lund is a narrative filmmaker and entertainment lawyer, he recently produced and co-edited the feature film Brief Reunion, which was distributed internationally on television, VOD, and digital outlets following theatrical exhibition in New York and LA, and a successful festival run, including the award for best narrative film from the University Film and Video Association (UFVA) and the audience award for best film at the Gotham International Film Festival. My Last Day Without You, on which Andrew served as a producer, was also recently released theatrically after winning top producing honors at the Brooklyn International Film Festival. Andrew is the Executive Producer of nine feature films that tackle social and political issues, including The Hungry Ghosts, written and directed by Michael Imperioli; Vanaja, named by Roger Ebert as one of the top five foreign films of 2007, and Arranged, an international hit that Variety called “a pure pleasure to watch.” Andrew is currently producing and writing the screenplay for Mocking Justice, a narrative feature based on Vermont’s 1970’s culture wars. Andrew also remains committed to the short film as a fundamental form of cinematic expression. Andrew has written and directed five award-winning shorts, the last two of which were honored as top narrative films at the UFVA annual conference. In addition to worldwide festival screenings and television broadcasts, his shorts are included in film textbooks, DVD compilations, and distributed theatrically and non-theatrically. In 2016, Andrew produced and edited the shorts Quintown (audience award New England Film Festival) and Fire (prize winner at the New Hampshire International Film Festival). Double or Nothing, Andrew’s latest short as writer/director has garnered multiple grants and is slated for production in late 2016. Since 2014, Andrew has been a judge in the narrative short film category at the Rhode Island International Film Festival (an Academy Award and BAFTA qualifying festival). He also created and curates the Short Film Repository, which houses educational extras that support the study and production of shorts. Andrew’s writing on film includes an essay, “What’s a Short Film, Really?” in “Swimming Upstream: A Lifesaving Guide to Short Film Distribution” by Sharon Badal, and two upcoming books for Peter Lang Publishers that examine the short film as its own art form and explore the relationship between a film’s running time and its form and content. Since 2011, Andrew has been Director of the IMA MFA Program. In this role, he has focused on how narrative strategies and storytelling techniques can contribute to a wide range of media projects. A Faculty Associate at the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute, Andrew served on the College’s Committee on Interdisciplinary Programs, the Presidential steering committee for the formation of an Arts Administration Program, and the advisory board for the Mellon Foundation funded Arts Across the Curriculum initiative. Andrew also founded CinemaTalks, an independent film screening and discussion series. Since 2007, Andrew has been a frequent panelist at the Rhode Island Film Forum and the ScriptBiz symposium, which he produced in 2016. Andrew serves on the Advisory Board of the Rhode Island International Film Festival and the Vision Committee for the Gamm Theatre in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. An Associate Professor in Hunter’s Film & Media Department, Andrew has an honorary advisory appointment to the Film Studies Department at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and has taught in the Graduate Film Division of Columbia University, where he received J.D., M.F.A. and B.A. degrees.
Kara Lynch is a time-based artist living in exilio en el Bronx, born in the auspicious year of 1968. She is curious about duration, being in the body, and sonic experience and is ambivalent towards hyper-visual culture. Through low-fi, collective practice and social intervention lynch explores aesthetic/political relationships between time + space. Her work is vigilantly raced, classed, and gendered – Black-indigenous-immigrant, queer, and feminist Major projects include: ‘Black Russians’ – a feature documentary video (2001); ‘The Outing’ – a video travelogue (1998-2002); and ‘Mouhawala Oula’ – a gender-bending trio performance for oriental dance, live video, and saxophone (2010). Her current project ‘Invisible’, an episodic, multi-site video/audio installation (2003-present), excavates the terror and resilient beauty of the Black experience. kara is a member of Interdiciplinario La Lìnea, a feminist artist collective based at the US/Mexico borderlandia. kara co-conceived and edited, WE Travel the Spaceways: Black Imagination, Fragments, Diffractions(2019),an anthology of art, writing, scholarship, and conversations navigating African Diaspora Futures. She has published in XCP Streetnotes, Ulbandus Review, BFM, contributed audio to Cabinet Magazine, video to PocketMyths, and drawings/writings to the Encyclopedia Project v.II & III. In 2012/13 kara was a research fellow in the African and African Diaspora Studies Department, University of Texas, Austin and the Academy for Advanced African Studies in Bayreuth Germany. kara completed her MFA in Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego and she earns a living as an Associate Professor of Video and Critical Studies at Hampshire College.
Amanda McDonald Crowley is a cultural worker, curator, and educator. Amanda works at the intersection of art, science, and technology; and supports public art platforms that bring together professionals and amateurs from varied disciplines to generate dialogue and create space for audience engagement and social change. Amanda is currently working towards an exhibition at the Center for Book Arts, NYC for winter 2022; with Mary Mattingly on Swale, a public food forest, currently on Governors Island, NYC; LigoranoReese on School of Good Citizenship, a participatory platform addressing voting rights in the US; has advisory roles on artist-led projects including Vibha Galhotra’s S.O.U.L Foundation, Delhi; Juanli Carrión’s OSS Project, NYC; Di Mainstone’s Human Harp, UK; and in 2019 curated Amy Khoshbin’s TinyScissors pop-up tattoo parlor for Detroit Art Week. Amanda was consultant artistic director at the Bemis Center in Omaha NE in 2013/2014; has held leadership positions with Eyebeam art + technology center, NYC; Australian Network for Art and Technology; ISEA2004 (International Symposium of Electronic Art), Helsinki, Finland; Adelaide Festival 2002, Australia; and has done curatorial residencies at HIAP (Finland), Santa Fe Art Institute (USA), Bogliasco Foundation (Italy), Sarai New Media Initiative (India), and Banff Center for the Arts (Canada) among others. www.publicartaction.net
Clarinda Mac Low has been a professional performing, visual, and socially engaged artist for more than 30 years. Her childhood was spent in the avant-garde arts scene of the 1960s and 1970s, and her first performing experiences were with her father, poet Jackson Mac Low, and with Meredith Monk. She graduated from Wesleyan University with a double major in Dance and Molecular Biology and Biochemistry. For over 20 years she created dance and performance productions in New York City and elsewhere before branching out into installation, interdisciplinary visual arts, and video art. She received an MFA in 2014 from the Digital and Interdisciplinary Arts Practice (DIAP) program at CCNY-CUNY. Her work straddles digital arts, live performance, dance, and sound art, with a concentration on social practice and site-responsive work in unusual spaces. She creates interactive and participatory situations that investigate social constructs and corporeal experience, with a recent concentration on climate change. She is interested in nurturing creative activism of all kinds, striving to support liberatory, anti-racist, and pro-queer work, and seeing art as part of a wider set of tools for changing and developing culture and society. Part of this work is in starting new experimental institutions, including Culture Push, which nurtures new visions for art and social change through the Fellowship for Utopian Practice, Works on Water, an organization dedicated to artists working with water and waterways in response to climate crisis and changing anthropogenic landscapes, and (D)IRT, a research and action group affiliated with Decolonize This Place, and begun in response to the crisis at the Whitney Museum.. Mac Low's most recent artistic projects include Sunk Shore, speculative fiction tours of specific locations that are based in a deep dive into climate change; Incredible Witness, a series of games and interactive environments built to give people visceral insight into the internal lives of others; Free the Orphans, an investigation of the spiritual and intellectual implications of intellectual property in a digital age; The Year of Dance, a research-based artwork that investigated how bonds form in art-making to create unconventional family and kinship structures; and Cyborg Nation, which uses one-to-one unscripted conversation as an interactive meditation on the interface between bodies and technology. www.clarindamaclow.com
Zach Nader is an artist excavating new possibilities in content and aesthetics for existing photographic imagery through the use and misuse of contemporary image editing software. His reworkings of existing imagery focus on the screen as a site of transformation and possibility. Zach’s work has shown widely, including at Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Haus der elektronischen Künste, Basel, Switzerland; Time Square Arts’ Midnight Moment, New York; Sorbus, Helsinki, Finland; Eyebeam, New York; and Interstate Projects, Brooklyn, NY. He is represented by Microscope Gallery in Brooklyn, New York. www.zachnader.com
Rachel Stevens is an artist and researcher. Her interests include social ecologies and critical geography, media art, art and technology, experimental documentary, visual culture and archives. As half of the collaboration Oyster City she created an Augmented Reality walking tour and game about oysters in NYC located on Governors Island and was commissioned to create a public project for Paths to Pier 42 on the East River Waterfront in Lower Manhattan. The latter, which culminated in the publication of the Fish Stories Community Cookbook, drew together recipes, stories, drawings and ecological information contributed by people living and working in the Lower East Side in order to address the site as integral to the surrounding estuary. Her interest in space and place led to her participation in the Creative Ecologies and Decolonial Futures residency in Chiapas, Mexico, an NEH Summer Research Institute on Space, Place and the Humanities at Northeastern University and a year-long residency with iLAND (Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature and Dance). Stevens is currently working on an experimental documentary project—one aspect of which will be a feature-length film, about infrastructural, ecological and territorial entanglement at the St. Lawrence River at the border of Canada, the US and the Akwesasne Mohawk Territory. Also a writer and curator, Stevens’ writing on art and visual culture has been published in Afterimage, Flash Art, MFJ, World Records and other publications and she is on the editorial board of Millennium Film Journal, a journal devoted to artist moving image work. She participates in the curatorial collective Two Chairs, which stages artist projects in dynamic relationship with unconventional sites including Queer Paranormal (an exhibition concerning Shirley Jackson and the “Haunting of Hill House”) at Bennington College, and has been an associate curator with Creative Time. Stevens has presented at conferences and festivals internationally including: ISEA, i-Docs, Penn Program in Environmental Humanities, Pluralities, SCMS and Visible Evidence. Her work has received support from the Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, The Puffin Foundation, Socrates Sculpture Park, Signal Culture, Signal Fire and Works on Water / Underwater New York. In addition to teaching in the Hunter College IMA MFA program, Stevens has also taught media art and photography practice and theory at Brown University, Rhode Island School of Design, Queens College and others. She has an MFA from the University of California, San Diego, and a BFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design. rachelstevens.net
Reiko Tahara is an independent documentary filmmaker, educator, and translator. Her experimental documentary works have been exhibited widely across the states including at SXSW, Hawaii Int’l FF, Margaret Mead, NY Asian American FF, Walker Art Center, Pacific Film Archive, also internationally in Brazil, Sri Lanka, Japan, Canada, Singapore, etc. She has been a recipient of grants from NEA, NYSCA, Jerome Foundation, and Center for Asian American Media, among others, and a few fellowships including the emerging artists overseas program from the Japanese government. She is Co-founder and Programmer of the Uno Port Art Films (est. 2010), a summer outdoor film festival in Okayama, Japan (annual 2010-2016, biennial thereafter). UPAF, with its theme of “Life, Art, Films,” aims to connect unexpected dots by introducing cutting edge independent films mainly from or about underrepresented world communities to underserved rural populations in Japan. She has degrees from Waseda University (in Tokyo) and the New School, studied journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on a full year scholarship, and mentored under a legendary documentary professor-author Deirdre Boyle. After teaching at New School, Temple University (PA), and City College for 3 years, she has been teaching at IMA as well as NYU since 2010, and at DCTV since 2018. The courses taught include: documentary history; documentary production; world cinema; Japanese cinema; fundraising for independent media; new currents in documentary; Asian culture (anthropology/cinema hybrid course); and third cinema. http://thirdcinema.net/
JT Takagi has produced and directed a dozen films, four of which have aired on PBS, and has received numerous awards and fellowships. She is also a documentary sound recordist, with credits on PBS and HBO programs and more, including feature documentary films like Through a Lens Darkly, Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, and the Oscar-nominated Strong Island. She has received both Emmy and CAS nominations for her sound work.
Betty Yu is a multimedia artist, filmmaker, educator and activist born and raised in NYC to Chinese immigrant parents. Ms. Yu‘s documentary “Resilience” about her garment worker mother fighting sweatshop conditions screened at national and international film festivals including the Margaret Media Film and Video Festival. Yu‘s multi-media installation, “The Garment Worker” was featured at Tribeca Film Institute’s Interactive. She worked with housing activists and artists to co-create “People’s Monument to Anti-Displacement Organizing” that was featured in the Agitprop! show at Brooklyn Museum. Betty was a 2012 Public Artist-in-Resident and received the 2016 SOAPBOX Artist Award from Laundromat Project. In 2017, Ms. Yu was awarded several artist residencies from institutions such as the International Studio & Curatorial Program, Skidmore College’s Documentary Studies Collaborative and SPACE at Ryder Farm. In 2015, Betty co-founded Chinatown Art Brigade, a cultural collective using art to advance anti-gentrification organizing. Betty won the 2017 Aronson Journalism for Social Justice Award for her film “Three Tours” about U.S. veterans returning home from war in Iraq and their journey to overcome their PTSD. Ms. Yu is a 2017-18 fellow of the Intercultural Leadership Institute. Betty recently had her first solo exhibition, “(DIs)Placed in Sunset Park” at Open Source Gallery in September 2018 in New York City. This work was also exhibited as part of BRIC’s 2019 Biennale. Betty is currently a commissioned public artist working with the Highline to create street signs that highlight the labor stories of the neighborhood that will be unveiled in the Spring of 2019 as a park’s opening it’s final section. Ms. Yu‘s work has been exhibited, screened and featured at the International Center of Photography, Directors Guild of America, Brooklyn Museum, The Eastman Kodak Museum, Visual Communications Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film & Video Festival and No Longer Empty’s pop up gallery. Betty is an adjunct assistant professor teaching new media, film theory, art and video production at various colleges in New York City, including The New School, Pratt Institute, John Jay College, Marymount Manhattan College and Hunter College. In addition Betty Yu sits on the boards of Third World Newsreel and Working Films, two progressive documentary film organizations. She also sits on the advisory board of More Art, an arts organization promoting public art in the community. Ms. Yu holds a BFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and a MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College. In addition, Betty has close to 20 years of community, media justice and labor organizing experience. Ms. Yu‘s organizing recognitions include being the recipient of the Union Square Award for grassroots activism and a semi-finalist of the National Brick “Do Something” Award for community leadership in Chinatown. Betty was a 2015 Cultural Agent with the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture (USDAC) a people powered network. She organized “City of Justice: New Year, New Futures” an anti-displacement interactive social justice, arts & activism event that featured 10 art, new media, culture and performance stations at Brooklyn Museum’s First Saturday with thousands in attendance. http://www.bettyyu.net/