URBAN INTERMEDIA: City, Archive, Narrative

Please join us for a conversation among the curators, Eve Blau and Robert Pietrusko, and invited media theorists, Laura Kurgan, Lev Manovich, and Jeffrey Schnapp about new methods of urban research that bring together design, scholarship, and critical media practice.
Focusing on Urban Intermedia: City, Archive, Narrative – the exhibition, research project, and methodological experiment currently on display in the Druker Design Gallery – the panel will explore a range of questions related to the use of archival materials and time-based media that were developed in the project: How are the materials and methods of urban research— and by extension the stories we tell with them—being transformed by new media formats and technologies? In this context, what constitutes an archive, and how might physical archival materials be incorporated into digital forms of urban scholarship? Is it possible to tell stories and construct arguments that speak across disciplinary boundaries through a shared media language? And, how would such a “shared media language” challenge the dominant conceptual frameworks of urban research?
The panel discussion will be immediately followed by a reception in the Druker Design Gallery for the exhibition Urban Intermedia: City, Archive, Narrative.

HARVARD-MELLON URBAN INITIATIVE is a multiyear cross-Harvard research and teaching project supported by funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It brings together scholars and designers to develop new visual and digital methods and cross-disciplinary approaches to the study of urban environments, societies, and cultures. Four city-based research projects in Berlin, Boston, Istanbul, and Mumbai, along with related courses and programming, form the core of the project. Urban Intermedia: City, Archive, Narrative, the capstone project of the Initiative, presents the findings of the research and the media-rich methods of exploring the disciplinary ‘blind spots’ of urban research developed in the project.
For more information, please visit the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative.
Co-Principal Investigators:
Eve Blau, Adjunct Professor of the History and Theory of Urban Form, GSD
Julie Buckler, Samuel Hazzard Cross Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, FAS