WELCOME Welcome to the Mixed Messages 2021 Graduate Student showcase. 2020/21 has been an unprecedented academic year for all our students and faculty. Nevertheless, they were determined to continue their work, and to present some of the best creative interactive, experimental, multi-platform, and public engagement projects. This work is testimony to our students' ingenuity and resourcefulness, and to our faculty's continuous commitment to teaching and mentoring, even in an online only environment. Even in trying times, we strive to continue our mission to be at the forefront of new media trends, as well as critical thinking and analysis, showcasing a rich context of imagination, innovation, and social commentary. I hope you will celebrate these media artists and their work along with us, and enjoy. Vladan Nikolic Dean, School of Media Studies The New School
PROGRAM Julieanna (Jules) Aliwarga Beary's Delightful Afternoon
Maris Hutchinson Machine Noise
Jose Benitez Doodle Chats: Art During COVID (collaboration with Hayley Mackenzie Bain)
Purple
Mutual Aid: A Visual Essay (Collaboration with Centro Corona) Rachel Debolski The Ladies Room Harry Dwinell Keeping Face Livia Foldes Coded Portraits Anna Gedal Towards A Transparent Methodology: Mapping My MA Thesis Research Jonathan (JonJon) Hosseini Dudebot Database
Win Khaing
Coding & Accessibility in Myanmar Marcos Echeverria Ortiz Where We Were Safe: An oral history about Salsa in New York City Mariana Sanson Of Fairies and Monsters Aldana Vaccaro Dreamlog (Pandemic Edition) Media x Women Media x Women Website How She Made It ™ Podcast work/play blog Media x Women Social Media
Julieanna (Jules) Aliwarga
Jules Aliwarga is a songwriter and story maker who delights in writing whimsical narratives about fierce, fantastic females and anthropomorphic animals. Currently, Aliwarga is pursuing a MA in Media Studies online from Jakarta, Indonesia, while working on new tunes. You can find Aliwarga at her site, Cappuccino with Jules. She also runs an online platform called Imaginator, where young female creatives can submit their fiction stories. Aliwarga enjoys "Meerkat Manor" and fantastical shows and books like "Charmed," "The Magicians," "A River of Royal Blood" by Amanda Joy, and Leigh Bardugo's "Shadow and Bone" and "Six of Crows" series.
Beary's Delightful Afternoon
Spring has arrived, and Beary is having a little picnic filled with delicious treats. He also goes around the garden looking for new friends. Will the other bears happily join him or does he need to find other animals to have a chocolatey good time with? Find out what happens in this digital storybook that promotes diversity in friendship.
Jose Benitez
Jose Daniel Benitez (he, him, they, them) is a multimedia artist, activist, holds a graphic communications bachelor of art from Baruch College-CUNY, and is currently pursuing a master in media studies from The New School University. His work spans from participatory art, video installations, photography, and silkscreen printing, that explores the intersectionality of identity and struggles in movement spaces. He is well known for being a core member of Mobile Print Power (MPP), a political silk screen printing collective, and for being a member-leader at Centro Corona. Majority of his works are created through a participatory or collaborative process based on the political principle of believing in the power of collaborative and collective work in movement spaces.
Doodle Chats: Art During COVID (collaboration with Hayley Mackenzie Bain) As part of my summer course, Remaking NYC Post COVID-19 assignment, I did a podcast discussing art during and post COVID-19. In the podcast, I am joined by my friend and colleague Hayley Mackenzie Bain, who is a curator, printmaker, draftsman, and student at The Art Institute of Chicago based between Queens, NY, and Chicago, IL. She has been a member of Mobile Print Power, a multi-generational printmaking collective since 2016, and involved with the community center Centro Corona. Doodle Chats is a podcast in which we talk about current issues and the art world from our lens of emerging artists while at the same time doodling and sketching.
Mutual Aid a Visual Essay (Collaboration with Centro Corona) As part of my summer course, Remaking NYC Post COVID-19 assignment, I decided to take photographs of my local community center's mutual aid network's food distribution team. Centro Corona, being said community center is based in Corona Queens, found itself at the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic during the early days. Through these series of photographs, I hope to capture the grassroots efforts New Yorkers, primarily working-class immigrant folks, undertook to take care of themselves and their community with little to no governmental support at the start of the pandemic. I later incorporated these photographs into graphics to promote an online fundraiser for the mutual aid network.
Rachel Debolski
Rachel Debolski is a visual artist and filmmaker from Detroit, Michigan. She received her BFA in Entertainment Arts with an emphasis in Digital Filmmaking from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit and is currently pursuing her MA in Media Studies from The New School. Rachel's work consists of film, performance art, and installation art that emphasizes female subjectivity and uses narrative devices to explore identity, desire, and the construction of the female self. Outside of her artistic practice, Rachel also works in an educational setting teaching filmmaking to youth.
The Ladies Room
The Ladies Room is a concept for an Expanded Cinema Project. Displayed in a Multi-channel video installation, The Ladies Room consists of a series of scripted comedy/dramas that follow the stories of several women and their encounters with one another in women’s public restrooms. Exploring the concept of a female gaze, the characters and their stories depict the more accurate portrayals and complexities of women and their experiences that often fail to be represented in entertainment media.
Cited sources: Cohen, Maxi. Ladies Rooms Around the World: Nokia Theater. 2009. Collins, Petra. The Teenage Gaze Series. 2010-2015. Kurland, Justine. Bathroom. 1997.
Harry Dwinell
Harry Dwinell is in his second year at The New School pursuing an MA in Media Studies. He graduated from the University of Colorado in 2017 with an undergraduate in psychology. With that, a fair amount of his work tends to focus on people's emotions and mindset. Please follow him on Instagram @harrydwinellphotography and @harrydwinelldrone
Keeping Face
"Keeping Face" is a photo essay project that seeks to shed light on people's potential mental states during quarantine and this time of the pandemic using mirrors as a gateway into the mind. Too often, even under these circumstances, when people ask how we are doing, we feel the need to say "well" or "good" when the opposite may be more accurate. This project shows that it is okay not to be doing okay. It is okay to be struggling no matter who you are, a mother, teacher, couple, young, old. That these circumstances we find ourselves in cause any number of stressors for everyone: not being able to sleep from anxiety, more and more people turning to alcohol or relapsing, the struggles of children learning from home, of being away from or unable to see a loved one, etc. I chose not to include any text in this work to allow viewers to derive their own meaning and relate to the photographs however they may. Through seeing themselves in these photos, this project seeks to express to viewers that they are not alone, we are all going through this, and it is okay to admit that and talk about it.
Livia Foldes
Livia Foldes is working in the latent space between art, design, technology, and activism. After a decade of practicing, speaking about, and teaching graphic, interaction, editorial design, and art direction, she is currently earning an MFA in Design & Technology at Parsons. Her current work focuses on biometric technologies and issues around consent, gender, race, and labor.
Coded Portraits
Coded Portraits is a framework for understanding and subverting the aesthetics and politics of automated recognition. Beginning with the question, "what do I look like to a machine?" I run a selfie through different forms of machine vision to generate a series of self-portraits. Then, I recreate them by hand, altering, appropriating and reclaiming these invasive and incomplete depictions. The resulting portraits are a dialogue between my original selfie, how it was “seen” by a machine, and my response to the gaps and tensions that are exposed. Ultimately, the re-coded portraits conceal as well as reveal: the altered images are no longer recognizable as human to facial recognition algorithms.
Anna Gedal
Anna Gedal is an experienced strategist, writer, researcher and storyteller. She's graduating with an MA in Media Studies this May and holds a BA in History from Barnard College. For the past decade, she's designed and written media experiences and films for cultural institutions across the country. Her MA thesis research is focused on the origins of immersive technologies early 20th-century world's fairs and amusement parks as imperial fantasies and how to apply these historical lessons to make contemporary cultural storytelling with emerging tech more equitable.
Towards A Transparent Methodology: Mapping My MA Thesis Research
This project is a mapping exercise of my MA thesis research. Through it, I reflect on what I'm learning, interrogate how these epistemes are organized, who has access to them, and where I'm finding/unearthing them. On another level, I'm experimenting with how to visualize my research process (developing an alternative ontology), how my research dialogues with the work, scholarship, art, and ideas of others, and how to represent which perspectives are rendered invisible. This exercise is a critical space for me to show myself in this nearly disembodied process, which academic objectivity requires, and to be honest about the challenges I face/d, where I got stuck, where I am now, and where I'm going next. It also functions as a meta analysis, allowing me to draw new connections between works that I would otherwise not have seen and to actively place myself in dialogue with ideas foundational to my own argument. At its heart, this exercise is an act of "epistemic disobedience," a term I borrow from scholar Walter D. Mignolo. I am explicitly revealing my lack of linearity and the failed "logic" of my rigorous, academic research. Yes, my process is guided by my scholarly training and professional research skills, but it also relies on hunches, instincts, moods, luck, and associative thinking. This exercise is not intended to undermine the value of my research; it is to emphasize the limitations of epistemological rigidity. I encourage you to consider how much is lost when we reject knowledge that falls outside the academy's and the archive's narrow constraints. I frame this exercise and my thesis project by returning to scholar Sasha Costanza-Chock's simple yet poignant question: Who is this benefitting?
Jonathan (JonJon) Hosseini
JonJon Hosseini is 29 years old & has been spending the past (almost) 3 years living in Brooklyn. Originally from the middle of nowhere in Southern NJ, he has spent his time at the New School in the Graduate program for Media Studies learning Motion Graphic Design, Advanced Video Editing, Animation, and Screenwriting. Adopting the art name “noJnoJ”, he created noJnoJ Productions and uses his newly refined skills to create visual art for music artists when the opportunity arises. During his final semester he has also worked as a teaching assistant for two courses, Design Principles and Projects in Motion Design.
Dudebot Database
For my final project in The Design Process I chose to try to further develop a story bible that I was developing while at The New School. Seeing other people having their story bibles not only in pdf formatting but also in different forms of websites/blogs began to give me ideas of creating an “Interactive Story Bible Prototype”. The world I'm creating starts off on the far off distant planet of Flotz where Jane is a newly trained pilot working for the P.I.N. (Private Investigative Network) inside of the fortified Inner City. The year is 2035, now 20 years since the planet Earth has been destroyed. An Earth-Human refugee, Mak has been hiding beyond the city’s giant walls far out in a desolate town with his child-like robot companion. Far off in the distant mountains lies a kingdom in jeopardy. After the recent assassination of her father, the King, Caedis is the Vampire heiress to its throne.
Maris Hutchinson
Maris Hutchinson is a Media Studies Masters student, interested in how mechanics of environmental destruction and truths are shaped.
Machine Noise
A Rube Goldberg with recyclable items.
Purple
An investigation into how to repurpose an analog machine.
Win Khaing
Win Khaing is a visual artist, graphic designer, content creator, media consultant, and activist from Myanmar. He has his bachelor's degree in Liberal arts. He started his first job as a graphic designer at a Fashion Magazine. Now he is pursuing his master's degree in Media studies, and he will graduate in spring 2021.
Coding & Accessibility in Myanmar A workaround solution to enable Unicode access for the people of Myanmar. Burmese is a tonal, monosyllabic language. It is composed of 33 consonants, 12 basic vowels, and eight independent vowels. The biggest challenge that most of the Myanmar people face is the essential accessibility of communication through their devices by not having a uniform encoding system. A simple search on google, looking for a location, an article to read, a blog to post, to express expression on social media, and even an essential comment can be difficult if someone doesn’t have the same operating system as you. The use of Zawgyi complicates all kinds of searches in operating systems, including vital ones such as hospital patient proper names. Simple automated tasks being performed in every country such as names on a national ID, have to be done by hand in Myanmar. Since Myanmar is the only country that hasn’t entirely used the Unicode system, it can quickly become a barrier for many international coders and consumers having a tough time working in Myanmar. Not having a uniform coding means lacking basic communication needs and fundamental privilege that most countries have with internet access. The Zawgyi font was released in 2006 and is still mainly used in many computers and smartphones. However, for a country where more than 90% of the population are using the ZawGyi daily, it can be challenging to change it to Unicode in a short amount of time. Myanmar millennials learned to use the ZawGyi keyboard and their ways of typing to write from whatever shape comes first. If you buy a phone from a store, almost all the stores will have a service for free Zawgyi installation service. The biggest obstacle to Unicode is that most people use phones that have already the inconvenient Zawgyi font installed, which is counterintuitive to a time and era where it is necessary to be able to read web pages. These do not work with the Zawgyi font. Yet, people are used to working around it, not fully realizing that this can be simply corrected by converting to a Unicode system.
Marcos Echeverria Ortiz
Marcos Echeverria Ortiz is an award-winning multimedia journalist, photographer, and documentalist. For the last eight years, he has invested efforts to develop transmedia projects and cover stories related to culture, music, social movements, and human rights. Originally from Ecuador, through Radio COCOA and Noisey VICE, he has written, filmed, and photographed the underground and independent music and cultural scene of Latin America. Marcos graduated with honors from the Media Studies MA program at The New School. He has recently covered social justice movements and worked with New York Communities for Change, United for Respect, and Make The Road New York. Through documentary and hybrid forms of media, he chronicles the Latinx experience in New York City through stories that connect with music, memory, and history.
Where We Were Safe: An oral history about Salsa in New York City
"Where We Were Safe" is an ongoing interactive oral history archive that focuses on collecting memories about the lost and destroyed Salsa music places in New York City, such as ballrooms, clubs, record stores, and outdoor venues. By combining digital mapping and cultural memory, this project aims to reconstruct historical space by recovering these sites' heritage through a lens of social, racial, and cultural dynamics that fed the Latin experience in the 1970s. Although this project located almost a hundred places, the first stage of this archive concentrates on eight such locations: Casa Amadeo Record Store and Orchard Beach in The Bronx, Club Corso and Chez Jose in Manhattan, Bethesda Fountain and rumbas in Central Park, The New Rican Village in The Lower East Side, The Village Gate in Greenwich Village, and Hotel St. George in Brooklyn. Amid the COVID-19 crisis, more than 18 participants directly involved in the Salsa scene since the 1970s, such as musicians, dancers, academics, journalists, photographers, videographers, DJs, club bouncers, and fans, were interviewed through long-distance phone-calls, video chats, and some in-person video recordings.
Mariana Sanson
Mariana Sanson is a multidisciplinary Media Studies graduate student and a producer of big scale projects in media arts with a social approach and a human rights perspective. Sanson has experience coordinating teams focused on the culture industry and civil society. She is a firm believer of documentaries and that the creation of media as a tool for social change and their impact to create collectivity
Of Fairies and Monsters
The project "Of Fairies and Monsters" is a time-based project that aims to explore women's subjectivity, surrealism, the use of technology to create imaginary media, imagination, the idealization of the democratization of the means of production, image manipulation, and media archeology through a combination of photography, video, and photography installation.
Aldana Vaccaro
Aldana Vaccaro was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and currently lives in New York City. She has been working in unscripted television and documentary film production for almost 20 years, during which she founded Dos Pandas -a production company operating in both Argentina and the US. Through it, she has created over 600 hours of award-winning television content for top performing networks and studios across Latin America (AMC, Viacom, Discovery, Mediapro, Vice). She was Assistant Director on “Fotografías” (Photographs), a documentary feature by Andrés Di Tella, and collaborated with him in the production of film festivals such as BAFICI and the Princeton Documentary Festival. She is currently Line Producer for Black Market S2, a docu-series hosted by Michael K. Williams for VICE. She is also director Lisa Immordino Vreeland’s producer for various fashion, arts and culture documentary projects shot in the US, Europe and Asia. She has a BA in Journalism from the Universidad de Palermo, a Filmmaking Certificate from NYU and in 2020, she graduated from The New School’s MA in Media Studies, with a focus on documentary filmmaking. She has written, directed, produced and edited five short films. She is currently working on two interactive and collaborative documentary projects, one capturing and interpreting people’s dreams during the pandemic, and another one exploring public restroom graffiti. She is also developing what she hopes will be her first feature documentary film as a director, based on Victoria Ocampo, one of Latin America’s most influential women of the 20th Century.
Dreamlog (Pandemic Edition)
Everyone seems to be having weird, vivid dreams since we went on lockdown in March 2020 and started living through the different stages of this pandemic. Experts say it may have to do with a number of reasons: we tend to remember dreams better when we sleep more, when our routines are altered, or when we are under a lot of stress. Dreams may help us process traumatic events or prepare for what may come, as immersive VR scenarios in which we can test different strategies or confront realities more difficult than our own, so we are then pleased with the world we wake up to. Whatever the cause of this flood of dreams is, this project aims to capture and interpret them visually and aurally. It explores recurring themes and emotions that emerge from our individual and collective unconscious in this unique international context. The dream records are presented on an interactive map that can be freely explored. In order to achieve this, participants are asked to recount a recent dream and submit it as an audio recording. The recording is used as a voiceover in combination with stock footage, music and sound FX to create short films. In this instance, the database feeds from the database. Does it feed our subconscious in turn? Do we dream in a cinematic language? Are we inevitably becoming cyborg beings? Dream log is an exploration of the impact of AI, search engines, generic stock commodities and databases and how they shape contemporary life. Moreover, it constitutes a study of the problems of translation, interpretation, semantics, representation, classification and creation of associative meanings and its implications and consequences in the power structures of society, both conscious and unconscious, and at individual and collective levels.
MEDIA x WOMEN
Media x Women is an independent organization committed to fostering diversity, inclusivity, and equality in the media industry through nurturing a community of like-minded media professionals, to serve as a network and resource for women on the rise. We aim to empower and uplift our community through amplifying the positive impact of media made by women, provide inspiration and career advancement opportunities through shared knowledge and mentoring, and awaken media organizations to the impressive potential of female talent. Media X Women is powered by a diverse international team including university students, industry professionals, and mentors. The team has worked in coordination to develop and launch a series of creative initiatives to promote the mission of Media x Women that include:
Media x Women Website
How She Made It™Podcast work/play blog Media x Women – Social Media
Media x Women Website
Team leader – Sarthak Garg is a well-rounded creative, but with a few sharp edges. Brooklyn-based Art Director & Designer with international experience working on digital, social, and print campaigns across entertainment, beauty, and CPG categories. Currently, an employed Designer at Zealot Inc. in New York, an award-winning creative marketing agency. Collaborators – Urvashi Ajmera, Sarthak Garg, Leah Gomes, Chantel King, Alicia Pan
The Media x Women website is an interactive platform for user engagement. The website has been revamped to establish visual brand identity in line with Media x Women’s multi-platform marketing strategy and expansion plans.
How She Made It™ Podcast Team leader – Co Leaders – Nicolas Lopez Santamaria, Sonia Case, Chantel King Nicolas Lopez Santamaria is an award-winning content creator, developer, and producer with five+ years of experience in film, photography, branded content, and podcasts. An entrepreneur at heart, with a proven track record as a ‘bridge-person,’ cultivating cross-departmental interdependencies in both start-up media initiatives and leading global brands, alike. Sonia Case is a lover of good stories, adult humor and the absurd. Born in Mexico City to a very Mexican mother and an extremely midwestern father. Raised on copious amounts of cheese, love for the Cleveland Indians as well as a strict Vitamin-T diet (tacos, tortillas, tlacoyos and tamales). Passionate about creating content that celebrates our crazy human experience on a global stage. Chantel King is the production manager at The New School’s College of Performing Arts. Her specialties include promoting Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion practice in every workspace; TV and Film production, theater, and live events; and organizing, scheduling, managing, and motivating teams of any size. Collaborators – Urvashi Ajmera, Mariella Barcelo, Carly J. Bauer, Akshi Bavishi, Safiya Bailey, Sonia Case, Kennis Keying Chen, Kayla Dotero, Sarthak Garg, Leah Gomes, Chantel King, Alok Rathod, Schachar Regev, Nicolas Lopez Santamaria, Carlos Alberto Durán Zárate
How She Made It™ is a podcast celebrating career journeys and informing young professionals about industry opportunities. It relays stories of industry leaders from across the globe. The podcast publishing plan has been developed based on extensive industry research including concept testing, analytics, audience development, creation of marketing assets, guest recruitment, and publishing system. The first season, launched in Fall 2020, features journalists, social media strategists, multimedia professionals, media attorneys, and innovators from Disney Plus, NBC Entertainment, Huffington Post, Daily Mail, and more. It is available on Apple, Google, Spotify, and Media x Women website.
work/play
Team leader Urvashi Ajmera is a Strategist with over 5 years of experience creating strategies and marketing content for brands across various portfolios. She has worked on global brands including Unilever's Tresemmé, Pond's, Magnum, Dove, St.Ives, Lakmé, P&G's Always, Google, and Facebook. Currently, Urvashi is working as a Strategist with 1000heads in New York. Collaborators – Mary Pat Abruzzo, Simran Narwani
work/play is a blog for Media x Women, an organization for women in the media industry. It helps women across the globe connect and share resources in the form of advice, skills, and opportunities. The blog is dedicated to creating original content that can be valuable for women entering the media industry or already in the industry. It is a platform for women to connect with other women alike, get mentorship advice, career-related help, and advance resources. work/play aims to create meaningful and valuable original content that amplifies women's positive impact in the media industry.
Media x Women – Social Media Team Leader – Co Leads – Urvashi Ajmera & Leah Gomes Urvashi Ajmera is a Strategist with over 5 years of experience creating strategies and marketing content for brands across various portfolios. She has worked on global brands including Unilever's Tresemmé, Pond's, Magnum, Dove, St.Ives, Lakmé, P&G's Always, Google, and Facebook. Currently, Urvashi is working as a Strategist with 1000heads in New York. Leah Gomes is a brand, content, and social media strategist with past experience in event planner and casting. Leah spent 2 years in Mumbai, India, interning and working at various media agencies to grow her knowledge and experience in the world of Media and Entertainment. Currently leading the Social Media Content Strategy Team at Media X Women. A strong team player, she believes every individual contribution makes a team more powerful and it shows in the outcome. Collaborators – Mary Pat Abruzzo, Urvashi Ajmera, Safiya Bailey, Sarthak Garg, Leah Gomes, Isabella Brascetta Guerra, Nejla Katica, Alicia Pan, Simran Narwani
Media x Women is one of the fastest growing global networks of young media professionals with over 1,000 members from across 52 countries. The social media outreach plan has been carefully designed to engage with audiences through a variety of social media including LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Producer Brian McCormick Program Manager Alexandra Shinert Associate Producer Jose Benitez Manager of Technical Operations Manuel Ermecheo Director of Administration Janelle McKenzie Executive Secretary Laurrice Morgan-Eady
Special thanks to all of the students who submitted projects and the faculty members who guided their work. www.newschool.edu/mediastudies
Immerse yourself in an academic experience that uniquely integrates media theory, production, and management. Create your own interdisciplinary curriculum by combining courses that meet your interests and goals. Join a vibrant and creative community at one of the most international and diverse media programs in the country.