Urban Intermedia* is a multifaceted research project, begun during phase one of the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative, and part of an ongoing exploration of new collaborative practices that bring together scholarship, design, and media around the study of cities. In the Urban Intermedia project scholars and designers work together to develop new visual and digital methods and cross-disciplinary approaches to the study of urban environments, societies, and cultures.
During the first phase of the HMUI, the Urban Intermedia research was organized into four city-based projects in Berlin, Boston, Istanbul, and Mumbai, that served as “portals” into the key themes of the research. The capstone project of that phase was an exhibition, which was presented in Berlin, Istanbul, Mumbai, and Cambridge during 2018.
Exploring the disciplinary “blind spots” of urban research, Urban Intermedia uses 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 dialog and registration with one another. Through these methods, the distinct languages of different media interact at the deepest structural levels. They hybridize, exchange properties and techniques, and, in the process, generate new “intermedia” languages, and with them new ways of examining complex and dynamic urban phenomena through multiple critical lenses.
In phase two of the HMUI, the Urban Intermedia project is carried forward in Recovery Through Remediation: Landscape and Economic Transformation of the GDR’s ‘Energy District’ *** Advancing research begun in the Berlin Portal, that project examines the transformation of the opencast lignite mining region of Lower Lusatia in eastern Germany into a lake district, and center for renewable energy production.
Urban Intermedia Exhibition Credits:
Exhibition Curators
Installation Design
Exhibition Coordinator
Art Director
Production
Scott March Smith