Urban Intermedia: City, Archive, Narrative

“Urban Intermedia: City, Archive, Narrative,” the culmination of a four-year investigation funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, argues that the complexity of contemporary urban societies and environments makes communication and collaboration across professional boundaries and academic disciplines essential. Four research projects, focused respectively on Berlin, Boston, Istanbul, and Mumbai, use a range of technologies to bring physical and digital media—archival documents, digital data sets, photography, cartography, architectural drawings, graphics, text, animation, film, and video—into dialogue and registration with each other. The media hybridize, exchange properties and techniques, and generate new “intermedia” languages—and, with them, new ways of acquiring and producing knowledge about cities. Projected onto screens, the visual narratives they construct tell their stories though the materials of the research themselves without written or verbal narration, leaving them open to multiple readings and the interactive construction of meaning with viewers of the exhibition.

In spring 2018 the exhibition was presented in Berlin, Istanbul, and Mumbai. The Boston installation of “Urban Intermedia” expands and reflects upon the process of research by highlighting archival materials from Boston-based collections related to race, space, and power in the city’s development. A 33-foot-long meeting table will serve as an active site of research and exchange over the course of the exhibition—a place for hosting small lectures, class sessions, and discussions around the display of archival media.

“Urban Intermedia” is curated by Eve Blau and Robert Gerard Pietrusko with installation design by Höweler + Yoon Architecture.

When
27 August to 14 October 2018
Where
Druker Design Gallery
Harvard GSD
Cambridge
Organizer
Harvard GSD
Link
Urban Intermedia

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