Monthly Archives: April 2017

Guest Lecture: Amanda Weidman, Cultural Anthropologist.

Monday, April 17 at 2:30 PM – 4 PM

Location: SCI 104

Amanda Weidman is a cultural anthropologist whose work in Tamil-speaking South India has centered on gender, technological mediation, music, sound, and performance. She is the author of a book on the social history of Karnatic (South Indian) classical music, Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern: The Postcolonial Politics of Music in South India (Duke Univ. Press, 2006). Her current research project is on playback singing in the South Indian Tamil-language film industry. She is also a Karnatic violinist.

Playback singing in Indian popular cinema is more than simply a technical process of substituting one voice for another; rather, it is a culturally and historically specific phenomenon that has generated novel forms of vocal sound and performance practice, celebrity and publicity, and affective attachment to voices. I situate these forms within the cultural and political context of South India from the post-Independence period to the post-Liberalization present. I examine the discourses and practices that were generated when playback singing first emerged and became standard practice in the 1940s-50s, the aesthetics that became normalized in the 1960s as certain voices began to dominate, and the ways the status and vocal sound of playback singers have changed since the liberalizing reforms of the 1990s.

Free and open to the Swarthmore community.

Ali Momeni ’97: Animating Resistance

April 19, 2017 @ 5PM: Artist’s Lecture (SCI 101)
Building on Momeni’s Manual for Urban Projection, the lecture will elaborate Momeni’s methodologies including a projection system that enables rapid animation based on still images and drawings as well as a gestural interface for virtual puppeteering of projected animations in real-time.

April 21, 2017 @ 8PM: Outdoor Performance (Lawn at Pearson Hall. Rain location will be LPAC Lobby.)
Momeni and the workshop participants will collaboratively create and perform a live cinema/projection performance that consists of animations depicting and annotating the contents of this database in playful and performative ways. These animations will depict the characters, setting and methods of specific actions from the Global Nonviolent Action Database like an animated graphic novel.

The live cinema performance will consist of several “drawing stations” where performers can draw on transparency with markers on a back-lit surface. A digital camera pointed at the surface then captures the images and brings it into custom video-projection software developed by the artists to create and layer video loops. As new drawings are captured and animated, a visual narrative around each action accumulates.

AliPoster

Animating Resistance: Live Cinema Explorations of the Global Nonviolent Action Database

Animating Resistance: Live Cinema Explorations of the Global Nonviolent Action Database

Prof. Ali Momeni, Carnegie Mellon University

19 April: 5:00 p.m. Artist’s Lecture in Science Center Room 101
20 April: 12:30-6:30 pm and 8:00-10:00 pm Workshop in Kohlberg 326 Language Center
21 April: 8:00 pm Outdoor Performance (Pearson Hall Lawn. Rain Location: LPAC Lobby)

More details.

The theme for this workshop and performance will be Swarthmore College’s Peace and Conflict Studies’ inimitable and inspiring Global Nonviolent Action Database. Momeni and the workshop participants will collaborative create and perform a live cinema/projection performance that consists of animations depicting and annotating the contents of this database in playful and performative ways. Momeni will be assisted by artist and MFA Candidate Davey Steinman for this performance.

Ali Momeni’s performance project at Swarthmore College will combine cinema, outdoor projection, improvisation, animation, “depicting the characters, setting and methods of specific actions from the Global Nonviolent Action Database like an animated graphic novel.”

Momeni was born in Isfahan, Iran and emigrated to the United States at the age of twelve. He studied physics and music at Swarthmore College and completed his doctoral degree in music composition, improvisation and performance with computers from the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies at UC Berkeley. He spent three years in Paris where he collaborated with performers and researchers from La Kitchen, IRCAM, Sony CSL and CIRM.

Photo credit: iMAL.org under Creative Commons license 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/ http://bit.ly/2oRJgje

Between 2007 and 2011, Momeni was an assistant professor in the Department of Art at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where he directed the Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Art, and founded the urban projection collective called the MAW. Momeni is currently an associate professor in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University and directs CMU ArtFab, teaches in CMU’s IDEATE, Music Technology and Masters in Tangible Interaction Design degrees.

Momeni’s current research interests include performative applications of robotics, playful urban interventions, interactive projection performance, machine learning for artists and designers, interactive tools for storytelling and experiential learning, mobile and hybrid musical instruments, and the intersection of sound, music and health.

Davey T Steinman is an artist and explorer working at the crossroads of performance and technology. Davey is currently pursuing an M.F.A. in Video and Media Design in the School of Drama at Carnegie Mellon University.

This event is free and open to the public.

Sponsors: The Cooper Serendipity Fund, Kohlberg Language Center, Dept. of Theater, and Dept. of Music and Dance

Border Walls and the Politics of Becoming Non-Human

“Border Walls and the Politics of Becoming Non-Human”

Miriam Ticktin, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Co-Director of the Zolberg Institute for Migration and Mobility at the New School.

Friday, April 21st
2:30 – 4:00 pm
Science Center Room 199
Swarthmore College (directions)

Abstract: “In this talk I am concerned by the ways in which border walls and zones come not simply to *defend* (i.e. certain territories), but to *define* — that is, to shape or alter categories of natural and human kinds. I will suggest that borders walls, and all the surrounding and auxiliary technologies they harness, work by shifting how we understand different kinds of beings, ultimately rendering certain kinds killable.”

Sponsored by the Departments of Sociology and anthropology, Political Science, The Environmental Studies and Peace and Conflict Studies Programs, The Global Affairs Program at the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, and the Center for Humanities at Temple University

Doctors of the Revolution: Medicine and Violence in Egypt’s Tahrir Square

Doctors of the Revolution: Medicine and Violence in Egypt’s Tahrir Square

Dr. Soha Bayoumi (Harvard University)
Dr. Sherine Hamdy (Brown University)

Friday, April 14, 2017
4:30pm
Science Center 199
Swarthmore College

Organized by Peace and Conflict Studies and Co-Sponsored by Arabic, Biology, Health and Societies Program, Islamic Studies, Political Science, Pre-Med Office, Sociology and Anthropology, Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility.

Nancy Lindborg: Lessons from the Ebola Crisis

This event has now been rescheduled. Details below.

From our friends in the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility and the Economics Department

Lessons from the Ebola Crisis

A Lecture by Nancy Lindborg
President of the United States Institute of Peace

Discussant: Professor Steve O’Connell
Gil and Frank Mustin Professor of Economics

TUESDAY, MARCH 14, 2017
7:30 P.M.
SCHEUER ROOM

Nancy Lindborg headed the Ebola High-Level Task Force at USAID, where she was director of the Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance (DCHA) Bureau. She currently serves as President of the United States Institute of Peace, an independent
institution founded by Congress to provide practical solutions for preventing and resolving violent conflict around the world.

Sponsored by the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility’s Global Affairs Program with support from the Economics Department.

Reflections on covering war and crime

“From the streets of Kabul to the streets of New York: Reflections on covering war and crime”

A conversation with New York Times reporter, Joseph Goldstein

Friday, April 7th @ 4:30 PM
Science Center 105
Swarthmore College

Joseph Goldstein’s first newspaper job was at the 6,000-circulation Daily Citizen in Searcy, Ark, where he wrote, among other things, a feature story about how meth-fueled treasure hunters in rural Arkansas were creating an underground economy for arrowheads and other Native American artifacts. He soon moved to New York City, where he worked at The New York Sun, until its demise, and later at The New York Post. He joined The New York Times in 2011 and writes mainly about the criminal justice system in New York. He has reported on the N.Y.P.D.’s over-reliance on stop-and-frisk tactics and about a secretive police unit that combs the city’s jails for Muslim prisoners in the hopes of pressuring them into becoming informants. He has covered Ferguson, the emergence of the alt-right, and Afghanistan, where he was based for a year.

This event is part of “Reflections From The Field”, a new speaker series at Swarthmore, which brings people working on the front lines of conflict and social change to campus to reflect upon *what* they do, *why* they do it and *how* they came to do it.

Sponsored by the Department of Political Science, Global Affairs Program at the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, Media Studies, Career Services, and Peace and Conflict Studies.