This seminar provides an interdisciplinary forum for faculty, students, researchers, and artists working with film and related moving image media. Our mission is to explore the intersections of theory and practice in film and media, and to create a dialogue between creative practitioners and scholars.

The working group meets monthly, in seminar-sessions curated by participants, typically workshopping projects-in-progress.  We also sponsor larger events, performances, and screenings, ideally generated from our seminar workshops. Our objective is to foster ties amongst the faculty and students working on film across, and beyond, the campuses at CUNY.

All seminars and events are open to the public. A list of Screenings & Events is listed here.

Click here to join our mailing list.

You may also register via our Center for the Humanities Seminar site:

http://centerforthehumanities.org/seminars/film-studies-working-group-moving-images-theory-and-practice

 

Upcoming SPRING 2014 Seminar/Workshop MEETINGS :

(click here for the schedule of Public Events)

4/25: Projections and Public Space. 2:30pm (note revised time), Room C205

 

 

• This seminar will explore both historical and recent developments in urban, projected moving-image media, from monumental public installations to micro-cinemas. Dell’Aria and Herzog will both share research-in-progress.
• Readings for the session are available here.

3/28: Nonfiction Media and Collective Expression. 2pm, Room C419

• Seminar and screening organized by Ed Miller (CSI & The Graduate Center) and George Murer (The Graduate Center). Readings for the session are available here.
• This session will feature a screening of Murer’s recent film The Earths to Our Sun: Popular Cosmopolitanism in Local Music Culture in Kurdistan, Afghanistan, and Kuwait:

Themes of globalization, mediation, and local identity are prominent in analyses of contemporary music and culture as manifested in specific movements, subcultures and genres. In this film I present side by side three musical milieus (in Kurdistan, Afghanistan, and Kuwait) in which expressive culture is necessarily grounded in both a strong sense of local identity and in a framework of historical and contemporary trans-regional and intercultural interactivity. Taking into account evolving political circumstances, the emergence of social media as a tool, and the relationship between technology and aesthetic innovation, I highlight the following locally situated processes: the use of distortion and other globally circulating forms of electronic sound manipulation and production to adapt an iconic zurna and kemancheh repertoire that is integral to traditional Kurdish wedding dance to the elektrobağlama in Southeastern Turkey; youth driven samrahs (evening musical gatherings) in Kuwait in which a interest in historical cultural interactions with coastal Yemen and India are rekindled; and a duo of Hazara musicians in Afghanistan who tailor their traditional repertoire to acknowledge transborder experiences as refugees in Iran, increasingly acute interactions between Hazaras and Pashtuns in central Afghanistan, and a foreign military presence. In each case, a balance must be struck between the individuality of performers, the duties of embodying the cultural essence of particular communities, and worlds of emergent possibility and cross-pollination across geographic and ethno-linguistic divides

 

 

 

 

 

PAST SESSIONS:

Fall 2013

9/19: Introduction and formation of working groups.  6:30pm, Room 8301

 

10/17:  On Improvisation & Works in Process.  6:30pm, Room 8301

• Tara Mateik will kick-start our seminar by workshopping his current project, Friends of Dorothy (see full description and readings here.

 

11/7: Creative Practices & Inventive Methods.  6:30pm, Room 8301

• Patricia Clough, Benjamin Haber, Karen Gregory, and Josh Scannelli will discuss their performance-research project related to big data and visualization, work that evolved from their own Center for the Humanities Seminar The Life of Things.  This work-in-progress will be performed at a public event Spring 2014.

 

Spring 2014

2/27: Media & Environments. 6:30pm, Room C205

Robert Rauschenberg, Open Score, part of 9 evenings, 1966

 

•  Seminar organized by Joy Fuqua (Media Studies, Queens College) and Drew Bucilla (Art History, The Graduate Center).   This seminar session will explore a wide range of approaches to media environments, from media artifacts and sites of disaster to expanded cinema and multiscreen projection environments. Fuqua and Bucilla will both share research-in-progress.
• Readings for this session are posted here.