Mixed Messages 2013

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School of MEDIA STUDIES

MIXED MESSAGES

17TH ANNUAL GRADUATE STUDENT SHOWCASE

December 4–18, 2013 A presentation over two weeks of outstanding graduate student works selected by a panel of distinguished jurors, Mixed Messages celebrates the Media Studies Program’s focus on theory, design and practice across media.

IMC Lab + Gallery 56 West 22nd Street, 6th Floor New York, NY 10010 Monday–Friday, 11:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m.

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MIXED MESSAGES 2013 PROGRAM FEATURED WORKS

Sepand Ansari Wikistalker (Web)

Daniel Creahan CSplit (1a) (Sound, 6:04)

Nathaniel Czarnecki REbirth

WELCOME Welcome to Mixed Messages, our annual Media Studies graduate student showcase. This is the time of year we share some of the most exciting work from the past year in film, video, sound and multimedia. Our core commitment to the importance of the bond between theory and practice across all media platforms continues to provide us with a rich context for imagination, innovation and social commentary.

This year’s collection of experimental, documentary and narrative projects exemplifies the creative best of our students and faculty.

Celebrate along with us, and enjoy.

Anne Balsamo, Dean, School of Media Studies, The New School

(Video, 1:52)

Ateqah Khaki The Call to Prayer (Web)

Lindsay Pugh Yours Pughly (Film/Video, 15:56)

Sofia Theofilaktidis 37.9667 N, 23.7167 E (Video, 3:30)

Laura Trager Côte à Côte (Video, 21:46)

Honorable Mentions Lauren Elizabeth Kelly Interrupted: Smith Family Meeting (Video, 8:06)

David Iglesia If Only for One Night (Video, 10:54)

Gregg LaMotta If There is a Scheme (Video, 4:39)

Tomas Uribe Strobe Remix (Video, 1:40)

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Sepand Ansari Wikistalker (Web)

Wikistalker illustrates the relations between different things by visualizing the semantic relevance between the inter-connected structure of their Wikipedia articles. Each graphic bar (or ray) in the visualization represents an outgoing link from the Wikipedia article with its length corresponding to the semantic relevance of two connected articles.

Hyperlinks, once being an addition to the textual content, are as significant as the content itself in many cases. In Wikistalker this idea is pushed to its limits by removing the content and only showing the structure of hyperlinks. The work also revisits the idea behind Web Stalker, visualizing the structure and connections between different elements of cyberspace, instead of showing the content. It creates an alternative reading and navigation experience of Wikipedia articles by leaving the pathways and spatial arrangements the same, but creating a new navigational perspective of the virtual space of Wikipedia corpus.

Wikistalker is also a tool for the cartography of things from the collective perspective of Wikipedia contributors mined by machine learning algorithms.

The semantic relevance measure is calculated by data mining the Wikipedia corpus using Wikipedia Miner algorithm. Visualization is implemented in HTML5 using D3.js and Jquery.

Links may be filtered by their relatedness using the sliding bar; sorted alphabetically or by relevance and the meta structure of the visited articles may be compared by using history tab.

Sepand Ansari is a Media Studies student

and also a programmer who is interested in hypermedia, among other things.

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Nathaniel Czarnecki REbirth (Video, 1:52)

Daniel Creahan CSplit (1a) (Sound, 6:04) The act of sounding, the production of sound recordings, is bound up in its own mediation.

Both in the studio and outside it, it’s easy to overlook the waveform as a composite sketch, a series of meticulously patched together samples made at miniature intervals. What we hear is as much a product of the computer putting the pieces back together in a coherent pattern as it is the body acting on the air, the air acting on the microphone.

The sounds of CSplit (1a) are in fact composed from a single recording of a punch to my gut, a solid, fleshy thud that ultimately divides the space up between silence and sound, vibrational energy in a vivid, violent form. Digitally processed by greatly extending segments of the original recording, the original sound separates into a series of abstracted samples worlds away from the original recording.

REbirth is a single-channel audio/visual projection created by using found footage from YouTube. The manipulated video of an animal being slaughtered evokes contradictory emotions through its representation of life and death, beginning and end. The overlaid soundscape of the sea is intended to calm the audience's experience. We look at the birth as the beginning and death as the end although they both should be treated as one. Although they are part of nature, most of us refuse to accept them as one.

Nathaniel Czarnecki is Polish born graduate student and filmmaker, currently based in New York City. He received his first masters degree in law in 2009, before committing to film and media. The work he creates engages issues regarding the universal experiences such as human emotions, life and death. He is influenced by such filmmakers as Krzysztof Kieślowski, Terrence Mallick, Andrei Tarkovsky.

Daniel Creahan is a student, writer and multimedia artist living in Brooklyn, NY. His work focuses on materiality and its manipulation in digital environments, as well as patterns of use and consumption across cultural disciplines.

He performs as one half of the band Mind Dynamics, and makes a mediocre omelette.

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Ateqah Khaki is a graduate student at The

Ateqah Khaki The Call to Prayer (Web) The Call to Prayer is an interactive, online multimedia project that attempts to depict one Brooklyn neighborhood through audio and video recordings. At a time when Islamic practice is regularly deemed “suspicious,” and American Muslim communities have been subject to widespread, secret surveillance by the NYPD, the project is an attempt to depict the sometimes banal and mundane “everyday” and illustrate one of the ways in which Islamic practice peacefully and poetically intersects with other aspects of New York City life.

Users are invited to explore audio and video recordings of the adhan (the Islamic call to prayer) and daily life unfolding in the Boerum Hill neighborhood, and “DJ” their own experience by playing one or more audio and video recordings simultaneously. This experience attempts to simulate the experience of walking down the street when the adhan is occurring; just as one walking down the street in real life has the ability to decide when turn right, or left, or proceed straight ahead, the individual navigating the site has agency regarding which clips to play when, and for how long. Accordingly, no two viewing/listening experiences are the same, and the user is in the position of curating their own unique experience engaging the project.

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School of Media Studies. She is interested in transmedia, digital storytelling and progressive social change. As a Muslim American, she is particularly interested in using media to explore American Muslim identity, to depict Islamic devotional practices, and to counter and combat Islamophobia in America. Previously, Ateqah was a senior communications strategist at the national office of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) where she worked on issues related to national security; speech, privacy & technology; and human rights. Prior to joining the ACLU, she worked as a publicist for Riptide Communications—a public relations committed to progressive social change— where she worked on campaigns ranging from corporate accountability and environmental justice to peace and justice work and poverty awareness. She is the founder of the Tumblr blog MyBestFriendIsMuslim.com and has been profiled on the White House blog as part of “Women Working to Do Good,” a collaboration between the White House and HelloGiggles. She holds an undergraduate degree in sociology from Whitman College and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Lindsay Pugh Yours Pughly (Film/Video, 15:56)

This documentary film project deals with the power of the mediated image and its ability to alter or trigger personal memory. The film also explores the importance of social media and its ability to create a new way of remembering people and events. In a world where “CTRL+F” exists, is the truth of the past more readily available or are we deluded to think so? Does social media bring us closer or even further away from the past?

Does it simplify memories or complicate them? By interviewing my father about his mediated memories and examining my own social media usage, I attempt to gain a better understanding of the elusiveness of memory and the presentness of the past.

Lindsay Pugh is a Brooklyn-based graphic designer

and independent filmmaker. She is also a frequent contributor to Stage and Screen Insider, a Londonbased magazine focused on theater, television, and film. For the past three years, she has been interested in exploring spaces, places, and thoughts that are frequently visited but rarely given the detailed attention that they deserve. She received her BA from Allegheny College in 2011 and her MA from the School of Media Studies at The New School in 2013.

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Sofia Theofilaktidis 37.9667 N, 23.7167 E

Laura Trager Côte à Côte

(Video, 3:30)

(Video, 21:46)

37.9667 N, 23.7167 E is an encounter between the current Greek socio-political-economical forces that are in a constant fragile state of becoming. The collision and shock shutdown of state broadcaster ERT, national austerity measures as well as the infiltration of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party have defied the Greek citizens’ birth given right: freedom.

Sofia Theofilaktidis is a Greek-American filmmaker raised and based in New York City.

Currently she is pursuing her MA in Media Studies at the New School. A fixation on the human nature has been one of the inspirations that led Sofia to filmmaking. Feeling, thinking and acting are all inherent characteristics of human nature, yet we cogitate, react and behave so differently.

The causation and expression of these traits and a questioning of whether subjects are conscious or unconscious of them has been the catalyst for Sofia’s film and video work.

The point of departure for Côte à Côte (French for “Next to each other”), is the hypothesis that, with starting to work in video in the early 1970s, Jean-Luc Godard moved away from a post-Marxist, Foucauldian critique of the politics and aesthetics of film and their relation to meaning-making, which he pursued in the 1960s, to an aesthetic, videographic exploration of a new kind of knowledge production which relates images, sounds and bodies in new, non-representational ways. (An examination of how Godard's film and video work changed after he re-introduced analog film-making into his toolbox, looking for traces of his later work in video in his works in film of the 1950s and 60s was also conducted).

The goal of creating Côte à Côte was to a) prove this hypothesis through an in-depth analysis of Godard's video work with the terms of non-representational theory and b) to find the appropriate means of expression to do so that would allow the non-representational elements of Godard’s work experienceable without merely imitating them.

Côte à Côte therefore consists of two nearly identical video loops, displayed next to each other. The loops consist of footage from several of Godard’s film and video projects, chosen for its degree of formal experimentation with the medium. Original footage is 'remixed' by applying techniques specific to his video works to excerpts of his film works, exploring alternate ways of creating meaning as medium-specific potentialities. The two loops differ from each other in sequence, length and number of the excerpts as well as their degree of manipulation. My own and Godard's artistic intervention in the creation of meaning through different motion picture formats is thus explicated through their juxtaposition.

Laura Trager

With a background in media and cultural theory, Laura's artistic and academic interest is film philosophy. She is especially concerned with questions regarding the affective perception of film in relation to its aesthetic constitution. Since entering the Media Studies master's program at The New School in Fall 2011, she has explored this field of inquiry in 16mm film, and also in digital video, analog still photography and sound.

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JURORS Zachary Kaplan

Zachary Kaplan is Rhizome's Community Manager and Program Administer and is responsible for continuously re-imagining and re-considering what participation and engagement means for the organization, online and off.

Previously, he worked at the Renaissance Society, Chicago, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. For MOCA, he co-produced the Happenings in conjunction with Allan Kaprow— Art as Life, and the launch of the Engagement Party residency series. As an independent curator, he has organized exhibitions for Golden Age in Chicago, and for Fellows of Contemporary Art and Control Room in Los Angeles. He sits on the creative board of Summer Forum for Inquiry + Exchange, and is an editor at its journal, Dilettante. He received his undergraduate degree from Occidental College and his graduate degree from the Roski School of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California, both in Los Angeles.

Producer, Dawnja Burris Final Jury and Exhibition Coordinator, Ernesto Klar First Round Jury Coordinator, Diane Mitchell First Round Faculty Judges, Jim Briggs, Melissa Friedling, Brian McCormick Assistant Producer, Amelia Maffin Exhibition Coordination Team, Piril Gunduz, Laura Trager, Angelica Vergel Administrative, Promotion and Catering Oversight, Roberto Montes Special thanks to all the students who submitted projects for consideration and the faculty members who guided their work.

INFORMATION media@newschool.edu

Jennifer McCoy

Jennifer McCoy is a media artist who makes video installation, sculpture, and technology based work in collaboration with Kevin McCoy. Their work explores changing conditions of social roles, categories, and genres. To this end the work has occupied many terrains: exhaustive categorization, recreation and reenactment, automation, miniaturization, and most recently remote viewing and speculative modeling. Their work has been exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, P.S.1, Postmasters Gallery, The Museum of Modern Art, and The New Museum as well as internationally. Grants include a 2002 Creative Capital Grant for Emerging Fields, a 2005 Wired Rave Award, and a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship.

In 2013 they will participate in a summer residency at the Headlands Art Center. They are represented

by Postmasters Gallery.

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