Work-in-Progress PhD Symposium

//February 27th

//2:00-5:00 PM

//GEM Lab, FB 630.15

//1250 rue Guy

The inaugural Work-in-Progress PhD Symposium brings together graduate students in film and media to share ongoing doctoral research. Across two panels, presenters explore how moving-image practices are reshaped by circulation, technological change, and archival reconfiguration – from streaming platforms and multiview interfaces, to orphan films, design pedagogy, and low-tech media histories. The moderated panels highlight new and developing projects, and aim to foster discussions around research methodologies, future directions, and fieldwork.

Presenters:

Marie Martraire, “From Scarcity to Multiplicity: How Versions Transform Video Art in the Age of streaming”

Abstract: Versions are a longstanding feature of media production and circulation across many cultural forms. Focusing on versions of digital video artworks in the age of streaming, this paper examines how works proliferate and coexist across festivals, museums, art centers, biennials, and online platforms. These versions often emerge through the negotiation of technical formats, exhibition infrastructures, and art-market conditions, and vary in spatial arrangement, geographical context, resolution, duration, and modes of address. Rather than being organized around a single authoritative work or master version, they accumulate in parallel, allowing video artworks to emerge as evolving constellations rather than stable objects. This perspective reframes versioning not as a derivative practice, but as an aesthetic deployment of circulation.

Marie Martraire is a PhD student in Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia University and Curator & Collection Director at the contemporary art nonprofit KADIST. Her research examines the intersection of contemporary art and video cultures in the age of streaming, with a particular attention to digital aesthetics. Formerly Director of KADIST San Francisco, researcher-in-residence at MMCA Seoul, and program manager at the Asian Contemporary Arts Consortium, among other positions, she has co/curated exhibitions and film programs internationally. Her writing has been published in Journal for Curatorial Studies, Journal for Chinese Contemporary Art, LEAP, SFAQ, and more. Martraire is also a Research Assistant at the Global Emergent Media (GEM) Lab at Concordia University and serves on the board of the San Francisco Film Cinematheque.

Insook Park, “Multiview’s Multiple Dimensions” (via Zoom)

Abstract: This project examines the multiview—a media configuration that enables the simultaneous display of multiple audiovisual streams within a single screen—as a symptomatic aesthetic through which sociocultural imaginaries of progress and improvement are articulated and materialized. By tracing its development from early television innovations through Picture-in-Picture, Smart TVs, and contemporary streaming platforms, her research will demonstrate how the multiview has been consistently framed as a promise of advancement and futurity.

Insook Park is a PhD student in Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia University, Montréal. Her research focuses on media technology, digital aesthetics, and contemporary spectatorship.

Amir Hossein Siadat, Exploring the Representation of the Private Sphere in First-Person Documentaries by Iranian Women Filmmakers (2011–2024)”

Abstract: This paper examines how Iranian women filmmakers use first-person documentary to make private life visible under conditions of political restriction and censorship. Focusing on works produced between 2011 and 2024, it shows how intimate, self-reflexive filmmaking reconnects private and public spheres and turns personal storytelling into a form of cultural and political critique.

Amir Hossein Siadat is a film researcher, teacher, and critic, currently pursuing a PhD in Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia University. A member of the Association of Iranian Film Critics, he has contributed film articles for over 15 years to Iranian magazines including Film, Chāhār, Filmkhāneh, and Cinema va Adabiāt. He served as Director of the Cinematheque at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art for more than five years and has curated several international film weeks in Iran. Last year, he co-authored a book with Sahar Khoshnam examining Mohammad Reza Aslani’s Shatranj-e Bad (The Chess of the Wind, 1976). Some of his writings in English are available on his personal website: www.amirsiadat.com.

Han Yang, “Digital Archival Earthquake and the Reparative Critical Practice of Orphan Films”

Abstract: Focusing on the "archival earthquake" in the post-digital era, this research employs "reparative critical practice" to recover the lost memories of "orphan films". Moving beyond reductive restoration, it utilizes a collaborative, open-ended narrative strategy to achieve a new cognition of orphan films and films as archives.

Han Yang is a PhD candidate from the Department of Film Studies at the Beijing Film Academy, and is currently a visiting doctoral student at Concordia University. His research interests include film and the archive, film preservation and restoration, film curation, and film history.

Sudipto Basu, The Lure of Low-Tech: Appropriate Technology and Design Pedagogy in the National Institute of Design, India (1960s-70s)”

Abstract: The paper studies the emergence of an appropriate technology discourse in global design through a focus on design pedagogy at India’s National Institute of Design (NID) in the 1960s-70s. Founded in 1961, NID imparted a holistic, Bauhaus-inspired design education by embracing mid-twentieth-century modernism while being attentive to India’s artisanal traditions and living environments. NID’s holistic philosophy of designing objects and environments was, however, increasingly challenged from the 1970s by institutions and critics who demanded an explicit developmentalist mandate attuned to the basic needs of India’s poor, subaltern majority (Khandelwal 2021). To sustain itself against these critiques, which threatened its funding, NID’s designers had to increasingly re-orient their pedagogy and practice towards human-centric responsible design for rural, subaltern users, while still holding on to its founding philosophy. This shift crucially paralleled the global appropriate technology movement which championed low-tech, frugal design; emblematically Victor Papanek’s Design for the Real World (Clarke 2021). In this paper, Sudipta Basu draws on H. Kumar Vyas’s foundational Design and Environment course offered as basic training to every NID student (whose materials include a 8-part instructional film and a textual primer) and some mid-70s projects at NID to understand how low-tech design emerged through a dynamic perception of environments and sociological surveys within rural settings. Though NID’s holistic design pedagogy was justly celebrated for its overcoming of inherited artisan/artist divides (from the colonial era), Basu probes how troubling hierarchies of uneven development along gender, caste-class, and rural/urban lines were underwritten into the ideology and process of appropriate tech design (Chatterjee 2023). How did the politics of expertise adapt in this moment, with the designer assuming the role of pattern-seeker and hands-on problem-solver in rural subaltern lifeworlds (Nolan 2021)? This paper thereby traces how old and new ideologies of rural development interacted with technological thinking, design pedagogy and practice at a key node of global design history (NID) during the Cold War.

Sudipto Basu is a PhD candidate in Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia University. He studies the mutual entanglements of global histories of media, technology and design with development experiments in rural India during the Cold War, between the 1950s-80s, through overlapping networks of funding, epistemes, infrastructures, and field-sites between the West and India. He has won a Fonds de Recherche du Québec doctoral grant; and works with the Global Emergent Media Lab and Governing Through Design research group.