Harvard in the Time of New Media

Distorted images line the walls of the Carpenter Center’s Sert Gallery, where five projectors each display a disassembled and digitally manipulated film loop. Each malformed video produces a different effect: an old Western movie is blurred in a way that leaves pixilated smudges of color on the screen every time an object moves, while a more abstract image shows hundreds of arrows rotating and flashing in place around a centered square. Several other clips recall online videos that have only partially loaded.

The creators of this exhibit, Rebecca Baron and Doug Goodwin, named their project “Lossless,” referring to the compression or duplication of electronic data with no reduction of quality. “Lossless” is both a display of art in the age of new media and a commentary on the digital media it employs.

A seemingly all-encompassing term, new media describes the use of electronics, computers, and communications systems to create unique content as well as the dissemination of that content for consumption. Facebook, YouTube, and Wikipedia all fall under the scope of new media, as do video games and interactive art exhibits like “Lossless.” In fact, “Lossless” utilizes several new media elements. Besides its methods of image distortion, the project’s online element includes a Wiki—or user-modifiable Web page—that holds pictures and information about the exhibit and related projects.

Because of the wide scope of new media and the lack of a substantial design program, Harvard has been unable to successfully consolidate new media topics into a field of academic interest. Still, despite the absence of a concrete means of studying it, students have found ways to incorporate new media into both their academic and extra-curricular pursuits.

THE NATURE OF AFFILIATION

“[The Internet] has changed the way people gain access to information and entertainment, and the actual content and form of information and entertainment,” says Jason A. Kaufman ’93. Kaufman, a Research Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, recently taught a sociology course called “Media and the American Mind,” which studied American society through advertising, telecommunications, regulation, entertainment, and other forms of media. Kaufman says that as an Internet-based digital culture formed over the past couple decades, the schism between high art and low art has been breached. “Where we used to have formal, widely agreed upon boundaries between what we considered high culture—Shakespeare, fine art—and low culture—Broadway musicals or graffiti art—we’ve seen a gradual blurring and redefinition of these boundaries,” Kaufman says. “Doing mashups can be as high-status as playing Beethoven’s String Quartets, and in many cases even more so.”

“Media and the American Mind” was one of Harvard’s only courses directly addressing new media topics, but it is no longer offered since Kaufman left the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. At the Berkman Center—Harvard’s main organization for Internet-related studies—Kaufman has been using data from social networks and user-stated cultural preferences on Facebook to study “the nature of affiliation,” which he feels is a central aspect in new media and cultural changes spurred by the Internet.

“It’s now more and more possible to join a niche community that’s built around common taste in some esoteric form of cultural consumption,” Kaufman says. As the volume and variety of multimedia content available on any computer across the globe increases every day, artists within these enclaves gain the ability to distribute their work to anyone with a keyboard. “Rock bands are just as likely to emerge through self-promotion via MySpace or YouTube as they are through major record companies,” Kaufman says. “In the not-so-distant future it will be just as easy to get new movies online as opposed to at a cinema or at a rental store.”

EVERYBODY ELSE IS DOING IT

The Warble is an online magazine that takes advantage of this heightened accessibility from the isolation of Currier House. Creators Emma C. Banay ’11, Louisa C. Denison ’11, Douglas C. Duquette ’09, and Clement D. Wright ’09 distributed the first issue of The Warble on Nov. 1 as an alternate way for student artists in Currier to share their work. “Art can be this link in the house community and allow you to get to know the other people who are walking around in the dining hall or sitting in front of the TV,” Wright says.

When a user accesses The Warble website, only the publication’s title and a white screen are visible, but as the user moves his or her mouse over the blank space, different works of art become visible, disappearing and reappearing as the cursor travels across the computer screen. “The goal of it was simplicity,” Wright says of The Warble’s interactive aspect, “because it sort of allows you to focus on one thing at a time, which is kind of cool, and also you don’t really know what you’re getting as it comes at you.” The first, and currently only, edition of The Warble features a webcomic, two poems, two short films, two short stories, and a picture drawn using Microsoft Paint.

The Warble was originally conceived of as a printed arts publication rather than a digital project, but the group it decided to try and accommodate the many different forms of media they found people wanted to share. Wright believes The Warble has found a good balance between modernity and traditional artistic style. “To some extent, so much is thrown at you at once on the Internet, and in a way that’s awesome and allows you to see so much different stuff, but it can be overwhelming at times,” he says. “It’s kind of cool to have both the broad spectrum of what the Internet can offer you and also a simple, elegant way to view it.”

The Harvard Voice, another student-run campus publication, has incorporated new media into its practices as well. “The idea behind [The Voice] is that it’s a multimedia publication in the true sense of the world multimedia,” says Derek M. Flanzraich ’10, who until recently held the title of Director of Multimedia at The Voice. Through reader comments on The Voice’s website and related blogs, the publication seeks to create a consistent dialogue between its print and digital forms, Flanzraich says. The Voice also recently began a partnership with Harvard-Radcliffe Television to provide a significant amount of online video content.

Older student publications have also been looking to new media as a way of expanding the type of content they include. The Harvard Advocate, the oldest continuously published college literary magazine in the country, recently began putting together a DVD insert to be distributed with their next quarterly issue. “We want to facilitate the publication of media that students are working hard on and producing in really great and creative ways but that never otherwise had a chance to circulate on a larger scale across campus or even within the Harvard community,” says Thalassa G. Raasch ’09-’10, who is leading the project.

The DVD will contain works taken from student and recent alumni projects in the mediums of film, animation, sound art, musical composition, and interactive computer-generated art. The Advocate is modeling its DVD on the Wholphin DVD Magazine, a quarterly distribution of short films published by McSweeney’s. Yet even with this template in mind, Raasch says the DVD’s content is still very much up in the air.

“To be completely honest,” Raasch says, “I’m not entirely sure what I want, but I just want to make sure that everything has an opportunity to be published that is produced at Harvard, especially since this medium would allow us to publish things in a way that they wouldn’t normally be presented within The Advocate magazine.”

SO WHY CAN’T WE?

Despite this demonstrated interest in the subject matter, Harvard students can face organizational challenges to pursuing new media academically. J. D. Connor ’92, the concentration advisor for the VES Department, explains that often when students are interested in multimedia design, “they’ve gone to MIT, which has a really robust media studies program,” whereas “Harvard tends not to have a lot of that.” Though the VES concentration’s film/video track allows students to study a variety of new media concepts such as animation and 3D rendering, Connor says that Harvard lacks “a larger engineering side” or “a bigger profile put on consumer products.” For example, Connor explains, though Harvard has engineering and computer science programs, the school does not have the same caliber robotics or video game programs that a school like MIT does.

Asked whether Harvard has shown commitment to the study of new media, Kaufman is unsure. “I didn’t receive tenure,” he says, “but it’s hard to say if that’s a reflection on the value the university places on new media... Certainly, the university is committed to technology and communications. It’s a different question how committed they’ve become to the study of these issues because even at a place as large and interdisciplinary as Harvard, disciplines drive a college and it’s not clear how disciplines, especially the liberal arts, will respond to this challenge.”

Still, the lack of an academic department devoted to new media has not stopped some students from pursuing multimedia studies. Last year, Charlie I. Miller ’08 devised a VES senior thesis that retold the Faust legend as what he calls “a multimedia production that fully integrated video and live performance.” The project, entitled “Username: Faust,” heavily utilized YouTube and other Internet components to convey a virtual reality world that replaced the spiritual realm of the original Faust myth. Miller praises his adviser, VES Professor Alfred Guzetti, for being open to the use of new media. “[Professor Guzetti] was really interested in learning it and sort of exploring it alongside me,” Miller says.

Miller points out that he was “unaware of the digital media field” until he was putting together “Username: Faust.” Without pursuing new media with his thesis, Miller says, he would have been unable to study new media in the same depth or capacity due to a lack of classes in this area. As the Resident Multimedia Specialist at the Denver Theatre Company in Denver, Colo., Miller continues to work within the medium and suggests that the best way for students to pursue new media is through personal projects or to look outside of Harvard, potentially cross-registering at MIT.

‘LOSSLESS’ AND FOUND

While interest in new media has begun to creep into the lives of Harvard students through independent study or via student publications, some faculty members at the college are less enthusiastic about digital art and see limited potential for it in academic study. “Web art, by definition, is ephemeral,” says VES professor John R. Stilgoe. “It is hard to save, even when you try to save it. I fear it’s like a Rothko painting. His paint deteriorated, and I fear that a lot of web art will deteriorate when the formats change.”

Besides his concern for the impermanence of new media, Stilgoe cites “the sadness of web art,” which is the result of  the computer screen’s limitations. “You have to shift from one subject to another in the same format,” he says.
But this concern continues to be addressed by those who work with new media. “Lossless” utilizes more than one format, allowing for an immersive viewing experience in the gallery and, through the Wiki, a more informational element that can be explored and edited from any computer. Likewise, student groups like The Advocate have used new media to allow for expansion into new formats so that different types of content can be shared with the Harvard community. The nebulous nature of new media may make it difficult to address in structured academic study, but the far-reaching potential of digital media continues to bring forth new forms of artistic composition, distribution, and discovery.
—Staff writer Jeff W. Feldman can be reached at jfeldman@fas.harvard.edu.