Sunday, October 12, 2025
4:00 PM
CAM Lab, Harvard University
Admission: FREE with RSVP
CAMlab Harvard University
Lower Level, 485 Broadway,
Cambridge, MA 02138
Program Info
Handle with Care
Program 08:
Co-programmed by
Wenhua Shi & Kalpana Subramanian
Sunday, October 12, 2025
2:00 PM
CAM Lab, Harvard University
Admission: FREE with RSVP
CAMlab Harvard University
Lower Level, 485 Broadway,
Cambridge, MA 02138
This program, Handle with Care, explores the fragile intersections between human perception, ecological systems, material decay, and modes of communication. Through techniques ranging from phytography and cyanotypes to Super 8 and digital deconstruction, these works reveal deeply personal and environmental entanglements across time, place, and medium.
A Patriot of These Woods - Karel Doing
9:40, 16mm, B&W and Color, 2025
Plastic Aortas - Malic Amalya
9:40, 16mm color, 2024
Positive Transparencies - Marianne Thodas
6:49, Digital, 35mm Color, 2024
Midsummer - Masha Vlasova
2:37, 16mm color, 2024
Full Out - Sarah Ballard
14:25, 16mm color, 2025
Cellulose Documents: Forget Me Not - Katina Bitsicas, Scott McMahon
4:53, color, 2025
Dizzy Cavalry (Cavalerie étourdie) - Patrick Doyon
1:00, Black & White, Digital, 2025
Phonetic Philmmaking - Rennie Taylor
20:00, Super 8mm Color, 2025
Total: 68:04
A Patriot of These Woods - Karel Doing
9:40, 16mm, B&W and Color, 2025
A Patriot of These Woods is a film that is inspired by the novel The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino. Calvino's book tells the adventures of a boy who climbs up a tree to spend the rest of his life inhabiting an arboreal kingdom. The filmmaker casts himself in the role of the protagonist by applying his 'phytography' technique. He dives into the vegetal world, undertaking his own journey into the trees around him using his body as a metaphorical soldier who defends the trees and plants that grow around him. An otherwise concealed world opens up, revealing the symbiotic relationship between humans and plants. A hybrid creature emerges, partially plant, partially human, their bodies merged, their thought processes entangled. These woods respect no borders.
Karel Doing is an independent artist, filmmaker, and researcher whose practice investigates the relationship between culture and nature by means of analogue and organic process, experiment, and co-creation. His work has been shown worldwide at festivals, in cinemas, on stage, and in galleries. He was a founder member of Studio één, a pioneering DiY film laboratory. He has invented "phytography," a technique that combines plants and photochemical emulsion. He regularly gives workshops and talks to share his ideas and skills.
Plastic Aortas - Malic Amalya
9:40, 16mm color, 2024
Completed with the support of Light Cone's Atelier 105 post-production residency; Paris, France. Plastic Aortas is a portrait of the black plastic encasing the Fells Reservoir in the unceded land of the Massachusett, Pawtucket, and Naumkeag indigenous peoples. The lining was placed there by conservationists in order to mitigate the invasive Common Reed, which is killing native plants. However, the lining also interferes with wildlife and contaminates the water.
Malic Amalya (b. 1980. Burlington, VT) is an experimental filmmaker living and working in Boston. Malic is an Assistant Professor of Experimental Media and Film Production at Emerson College. His films have screened widely and are distributed by Canyon Cinema in San Francisco and Collectif Jeune Cinema in Paris.
Positive Transparencies - Marianne Thodas
6:49, Digital, 35mm Color, 2024
Positive Transparencies captures the tensions arising from the destruction and reconstruction of 17 individual 35mm analog slides. Using Hornby Island as its focal point, the film explores the methods of observing, transforming, and transmuting the natural world through technology. Employing analog deconstruction, the project repurposes the island's landscapes, creating dynamic motion sequences that emulate a process of artistic disintegration.
Marianne Thodas (b. 1997) is a lesbian filmmaker and sound artist born in Okotoks, AB, now based in Vancouver, BC. Her work explores themes of memory, belonging, mortality, lineage, and place-based attachment. Deeply interested in expanded modes of film and sound production, Thodas' pieces exemplify bricolage, evoking personal reflections through thematic and technological experimentation. Her work is currently distributed by the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre.
Midsummer - Masha Vlasova
2:37, 16mm color, 2024
Midsummer is a cyanotype, sun-printed film. The film was conceived during Juhannus, the celebration of the longest day of the year in Finland, when the sun doesn't set for 24 hours. The light of the sun is both material and collaborator in creating this film-poem.
Masha Vlasova is a filmmaker whose work explores seasonal themes, summer, and the relationship between time and nature.
Full Out - Sarah Ballard
14:25, 16mm color, 2025
Full Out is the inaugural work in a suite of films investigating the intricate threads between historical accounts of mass hysteria, the body's capacity for knowing, and the ways collective resonance can both fracture and heal. This film seeks to explore how the body's uncontrollable impulses can act as both a site of vulnerability and an instrument of resistance.
Sarah Ballard is a filmmaker and educator currently based in Milwaukee, WI. Her work has screened at venues and festivals such as CROSSROADS, Antimatter [Media Art], Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Light Matter Experimental Film and Media Arts Festival, San Diego Underground Film Festival, Engauge Experimental Film Festival, Onion City Experimental Film Festival, and Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, among others. She holds an MFA in Cinematic Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and a BFA in Film Production from the University of Central Florida. Sarah is a recipient of the 2023 Princess Grace Award in Film and is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres at UW-Milwaukee.
Cellulose Documents: Forget Me Not - Katina Bitsicas, Scott McMahon
4:53, color, 2025
In Cellulose Documents: Forget Me Not, a new purpose is given to a found archive from the 1930's of discarded studio portrait nitrate film negatives. The crumbling and decaying negatives were preserved through digital scans and reinterpreted by the artists by combining them with microscopic imagery of botanic material. This parallels the use of cellulose in nitrate film with the makeup of organic plant cell walls. Nitrate film was used by photographers and filmmakers from the 1880s to the 1950s, but was replaced by acetate safety film after it was found to be highly flammable and unstable. By preserving these found and unidentified portraits, we illuminate the obsolete material of nitrate film through the examination of cellulose at a molecular level.
Katina Bitsicas is a Greek-American new media artist who utilizes video, installation, projection mapping, AR, photography, and performance in her artworks to explore grief, loss, trauma and memory. She has exhibited worldwide, including The Armory Show, Candela Books + Gallery, Plexus Projects, Wheaton Biennial curated by Legacy Russell, CADAF: Digital Art Month Paris, PEEP Projects, Eye's Walk Festival, 57th Dimitria Festival in Thessaloniki, Art in Odd Places Orlando, Indie Memphis Film Festival and St. Louis International Film Festival. Notable residencies include Open Air Media Festival, University of Arkansas-Fort Smith Windgate AiR, UCSF Library, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Prairie Ronde, and Hinge Arts at the Kirkbride. Katina received her BA from Kalamazoo College, Post-Bacc from SACI Florence, Italy, and MFA from the University of South Florida. She is an Associate Professor and Coordinator of Digital Storytelling and Associate Director of the School of Visual Studies at the University of Missouri.
Dizzy Cavalry (Cavalerie étourdie) - Patrick Doyon
1:00, Black & White, Digital, 2025
An 8mm reel of a Hollywood western flickers to life once more. As the first call of the bugle rings out, the cavalry charges—swift and chaotic—while the film strains to keep pace. It ripples, trembles and tangles, caught in the chaos of gunfire and the thunder of galloping hooves.
Patrick Doyon is a director based in Montreal, Canada. Its first professional film Sunday (2011) garnered honours on the international festival circuit as well as being nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short. He studied graphic design and he is sharing his time between illustration and animation. Many of his works have been awarded in various competitions: Art Directors Club, Society of Illustrators, Communication Arts, Applied Arts and Arte Laguna Prize have all highlighted the quality of his artwork. In 2015, he received the prestigious Governor General's Literary Award for his illustrated book "Le Voleur de sandwichs". Alongside his artistic practice, he teaches animation at UQAM School of Design.
Phonetic Philmmaking - Rennie Taylor
20:00, Super 8mm Color, 2025
For as long as I can remember, it has been difficult and uncomfortable to express myself when speaking aloud or when writing. I would often silence myself to avoid the feeling that I was making a mistake, a word out of place or mispronounced, to avoid the embarrassment of repeating and having to clarify my thoughts. I have always lived with the disruption of language intertwined with my experience of living with a learning disability. "Phonetic Philmmaking", a 20 minute experimental Super 8 film, satirizes normative language conventions and transforms them into a new visual vernacular linking metaphorical and literal meanings within the verbs, nouns and pictures. This film explains my world – if only I can find the right word.
Rennie Taylor is a multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto. His practice focuses on the everyday with an emphasis on nostalgic signs and symbols found in popular culture. Engaging in the practices of photography, filmmaking, animation, collage and illustration he explores themes of consumerism, the handmade and obsolescence. He investigates decay within technology which corresponds to his material manipulation of celluloid, ephemera and found objects. His short experimental Super 8 films and videos have been screened across Canada and Internationally in Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Serbia, and the United States. These films have appeared at festivals such as Antimatter [Media Art], Dresdner Schmalfilmtage, Engauge Experimental Film Festival and Light Field. He is currently pursuing his MA in Cinema & Media Studies at York University, received his BFA with Distinction in Photography at Toronto Metropolitan University and an Ontario College Diploma in Fine Arts at Centennial College. Rennie previously served as a board member at the8fest Small Gauge Film Festival and a founder of the artist collective [UN]PROMPTU.
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