Medium is …


Thursday, Nov. 6th 9PM
CAM Lab Harvard University
Lower Level, 485 Broadway,
Cambridge, MA

Curated by Shira Segal.

At the Lab - Josh Weissbach
| Portugal, USA |2025 | 3:05 min. | B/W | Sound

In the distance, a woman's fingers are utilized as a musical instrument as a scene unfolds around her and the adjacent musician.

Josh Weissbach is an experimental filmmaker. His films have been shown worldwide in such venues as Ann Arbor Film Festival, Light Field, European Media Art Festival, 25 FPS Festival, Courtisane Festival, First Look at Museum of the Moving Image, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Festival dei Popoli, and Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris. He has won jury prizes at Montreal Underground, Videoex, ICDOCS, Onion City, Ithaca Experimental, Infinito Super 8, Denver Underground, and Art of Brooklyn Film Festival. A selection of Josh's films is in distribution at Light Cone in Paris, France.

Interwoven Intervals - Laura Kraning
| 2026 | 6 min. | Color | Sound

Pattern drafts are the graphical score for weaving - grids of light and dark representing the interlacement of warp and weft. In this material hybrid of film and textile, the repetition of grids, lines, and squares assert a structural form that is fragile and vulnerable to erasure.

Laura Kraning’s moving image work deconstructs the spatial and material textures of landscape, engages with machinic interventions in image making, and meshes the handmade processes of film and textile. Her films have screened at prestigious festivals and venues worldwide including NYFF, London, Oberhausen, Rotterdam, and MoMA, among others.

But Days Pass Like This - Ariana Gerstein
| 2026 | 5:20 min. | Color, B/W | Sound

Embracing the manual, the discarded, two eyed viewing (just one at a time) , this film is animated using a 1952 Stereo Realist 35mm camera and the Ego stereo video camera (re-fillmed for 2 eyes, one at a time), hand processed, with a song (The Happy Sunny Side of Life c. 1936), a counter melody against despair. Duet happenings. 2 eyes, time/space. There/ not there.

Ariana Gerstein uses non-traditional methods to digress, reconsider, recycle, complicate and slow down to think through cinema about relationships and material presence. Her techniques include desktop scanners in place of cameras and other single-frame, animation, and off-use approaches. Her films have been screened at many venues including IDFA, European Media Arts Festival, Media City, 25FPS, New York Film Festival, MOMA, and received awards and support by way of the Gus Van Sant Award for Best Experimental Film from Ann Arbor Film Festival, Golden Gate Award from San Francisco International Film Festival, a Truer Than Fiction/Independent Spirit Award with partner Monteith McCollum (with Ariana as editor), Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship, New York Council on the Arts, New York Foundation of the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, and Illinois Arts Council. Her experimental documentary work has been nationally broadcast on the P.B.S. series P.O.V. and is a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow. She teaches at Binghamton University in the Department of Cinema and serves as graduate director of the MFA program.

Fragments from the unfound postcards - Lanannh Chu
| Vietnam | 2026 | 9:46 min. | Color | Sound

An experimental near-fiction short about animal collection and colonization, fabricated from the accounts of European ornithologists and zoologists who made expeditions to Vietnam and Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia) during the French colonization.

Lananh Chu makes audio-visual works and writes poetry. Lananh stands in solidarity with the people of Palestine, Sudan, and Congo, who are resisting genocide and fighting for freedom from the river to the sea.

Colors from the Garden - Emmanuelle Negre
| France | 2025 | 12:30 min. | Color | Sound

Based on research in plant chemistry and experimentation with plant-based developers, this project invites us to rethink the way colors can be produced on film. Throughout the changing seasons, we follow the plants as they are submitted to manipulations in the hands of the film's protagonists. Yet it is thanks to the plants' substance that the film reveals itself, in its various forms and hues.
Colors from the Garden begins by exploring the codes of documentary filmmaking, from the collective planting to the harvest. Then, visual and auditory links between the gestures of the dyeing workshop and those of the film laboratory create a kind of herbarium-color chart.
This film was made at Ensad Limoges as part of the Chromoculture creative research project, in collaboration with the Cinematheque of Nouvelle-Aquitaine.

Emmanuelle Nègre is an artist who graduated from the Villa Arson in Nice (France). She has been in charge of video instruction at the Beaux-Arts de Paris since 2023.