2022–23 Grantees
An Apology to Kelp
An apology to kelp is a collaboration between Becs Epstein (MFA candidate, Performance Studies, SAIC) and Max Bogan (PhD student, Committee on Evolutionary Biology, UChicago). It is an interdisciplinary attempt to acknowledge and make amends for the harm that we, as humans, have caused to marine organisms. By attempting to grow the bull kelp Nereocystis luetkeana on various ceramic sculptures as growth substrates, and documenting the process in a book containing photos, illustrations, and written reflections, Becs and Max hope to blend the artistic message of apology with scientific purpose. The project’s ultimate goal is to investigate human and non-human relationships in the context of anthropogenic climate change. Human activity has negatively impacted non-human organisms in a multitude of ways, and An apology to kelp seeks to confront that harm directly from a scientific, artistic, and human perspective.
Faculty advisors: Sara Black (Associate Professor, Sculpture, SAIC); Sean Hoban (Lecturer, Morton Arboretum, Committee on Evolutionary Biology, UChicago)
Expressive Transformations
In Expressive Transformations, Gordon Fung (MFA candidate, Film, Video, New Media, and Animation, SAIC) and Max Nikol (Ph.D. student in Anthropology, University of Chicago) investigate the expressive qualities of different English speech styles through multimedia art practice. By channeling, replicating, altering, and distorting field recordings through a variety of analog and digital audiovisual media, we draw attention to (1) the multisensory poetics of English styles of speaking (such as English as a native language in the Anglosphere, as a lingua franca in immigrant communities, or as imitated in AI-generated text-to-speech voices); and (2) what happens to the felt qualities of those styles when source recordings are altered. The project seeks to generate aesthetic experiences of Englishes as they change, move, and are translated (or “lost in translation”) as the result of global processes. To convey the idea of “lost in translation,” we alter, degrade, and distort the collected footage and field recordings to generate experimental materials, alongside the originals. Through the (mis)translation process, we capture how meanings vary and alter upon iterations, and how original sources lose their fidelity upon replications. Expressive Transformations will culminate in a recorded/livestreamed audiovisual performance and multi-channel audiovisual installation. By highlighting the contrast between original and distorted materials, we expand viewers' sensation, perception, and experience.
Faculty advisors: Frédéric Moffet (Associate Professor, Film, Video, New Media, and Animation, SAIC); Constantine V. Nakassis (Associate Professor, Anthropology, UChicago)
Salmon Fishing in Chicago
Salmon Fishing in Chicago is a collaborative documentary film project about the urban fishing ecologies of Lake Michigan. Joshua Silver (PhD student, Sociology), Kendra Lee Sanders (PhD student, Cinema and Media Studies), and Avery LaFlamme (PhD student, Cinema and Media Studies) will consider the distinct and overlapping knowledges that define human and non-human aspects of Lake Michigan, including the active communities of fishermen on Chicago’s South Side, the staff of technicians at state-funded fish hatcheries, and the uncertain life cycles of the Coho and Chinook salmon that connect them. The project adopts observational documentary and sensory ethnographic techniques to traverse the different temporal and spatial scales at which ecological crisis is felt in the greater Chicago region, from shifts in the food web to generational changes in the fishing cultures sustained by the lake’s biological life. The project aims to contribute to ongoing conversations about sustainability, conservation, and environmental change by shifting away from an emphasis on personal narratives to foreground the processes, infrastructures, and non-human actors that shape and are shaped by human activity.
Faculty advisors: Neil Brenner (Professor, Urban Sociology, Sociology, UChicago); Thomas Lamarre (Professor, Cinema and Media Studies, UChicago); Daniel Morgan (Professor, Cinema and Media Studies, UChicago)
Space + Art: Cosmic Seismic Chime
Space + Art, a collaboration between Andrea Bryant (PhD candidate, Physics, UChicago) and Nimrod Astarhan (MFA candidate, Art and Technology Studies, SAIC) seeks to engage in a multiplicity of academic and artistic public presentation formats including but not limited to artworks, research paper publications and a symposium. Cosmic Seismic Chime, the first work produced through the collaboration, seeks to articulate seismic activity of Saturn's moon Titan in the form of an online interactive chime. The chime's sounds are determined by a set of physics simulations and equations that take into consideration different material formations of Titan's ice-shell and ocean compositions, which would affect its seismoacoustic properties in the case these were audible. A speculative opera of singing moons, Cosmic Seismic Chime imagines differences in material properties as attenuations of sound akin to seismic attenuation caused by the same, while revealing patterns of matter movement well beyond the reaches of our bodies and the purview of our senses. By creating an aesthetic experience of an inaudible, often inaccessible energy, the work opens up to the different energies that can be experienced here on earth, and ways in which these abstract energetic spectrums can come into being as works of art that extend reality beyond our senses.
Faculty Advisors: Steve Meyer (Professor Emeritus, Astronomy and Astrophysics and Physics, UChicago); Eduardo Kac (Professor, Art and Technology Studies, SAIC)
Timekeeper
A story of timekeeping is a question of who it is that keeps time—us, or all that is not us. Calling upon thematic interests in philosophical and physical concepts of time and consciousness, George Iskander (PhD student, Physics department, UChicago) and Autumn Ahn (MFA candidate, Performance Studies, SAIC) propose the innate humanism living through the question of time as a broad human concern about security and the desires for predictability. Time traveling through this experimental collaboration by way of early star charts, such as the Yeolcha Bunyajido, a planisphere from Korea’s Joseon Dynasty completed in 1395, we turn to film, the man-made invention to reproduce time and image, and photographic processes to explore the conceptual dimensions of timekeeping. Taking into account the embedded scientific apparatuses of this point of view, what did it mean to humanity, to culture, to etch a map of the night sky into a slab of black marble? How did the invention of astronomy define the course of human consciousness Manipulating the technical devices of capturing images using an analogue and handmade approach, our final illuminations of the night sky, from time etched on to a contemporary globe using bijective mapping, explore the wonder born in awe of the natural world and the sense of connection to the material concerns of invention.
Faculty advisors: Joseph Grigely (Professor, Visual and Critical Studies, SAIC); Salman Habib (Senior Scientist, Argonne National Lab and Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, UChicago)
Water Cribs: The Science of Care
Water Cribs: The Science of Care is a video-based ethnographic artwork exploring the role of Chicago’s unique set of water intake facilities, or water cribs, in the everyday functioning of the city. These nine intake cribs (two still functioning) are located in Lake Michigan, several miles from the shore, and funnel water through tunnels under the lake to be processed for consumption. Reed McConnell (PhD student, Anthropology, UChicago) and Lily Scherlis (PhD student, English and Theater and Performance Studies, UChicago) use multiple methodologies (a scientific understanding of water and ecology, cultural theories of labor, interview methods, artistic craft) to explore the logistics, politics, and aesthetics of urban infrastructure, focusing in particular on the history of the water management workers who historically lived on the cribs for two-week shifts.
Faculty Advisors: Jennifer Scappettone (Associate Professor, English, UChicago); Joseph Masco (Professor, Anthropology and Social Sciences, UChicago)