November 13th and 14th, 2015
Hunter College, 68th and Lexington
North Building, 4th Floor
Directions to symposium here.

Sponsored by the Integrated Media Arts MFA
and the Department of Film and Media Studies
Hunter College of the City University of New York

Keynote Presentations will be given by Ernst Karel and Deborah Stratman.

Full schedule here. Symposium participants here. Schedule-at-a-glance here.

Taking its name from Dziga Vertov’s call for a dialectical relationship between sound and image, a film object that is not soundtrack plus image track but a new composition, a third work, formed by the interaction of sound and image, this symposium will examine the audible as a locus of affect and site of meaning in contemporary non-fiction media practice.

There has been an increasing amount of writing and thinking in recent years, emanating from a diverse set of disciplines that has come to be called Sound Studies, about sound as psychoacoustic phenomena, as psychogeographic record, as social practice and as sonorous art object. Still, the relationship between sound and image in time-based media practice, the particularized semantic valences produced by their interactions, remains underexplored and undertheorized, and what critical writing there is on the subject centers primarily on questions of diegesis and narrativity in fiction film practice.

From the frame to shot to the cut, from the thought to the form, in theory and in practice, all too often film and digital video continues to be conceptualized, written and spoken about as a primarily visual medium. What is required is a conscious effort and concerted struggle to rethink the primacy of the image, and to open up the space of sound.

The somatic experience of sound uniquely connects the space of the social to an individual interiority. To hear a film is to be both in one’s own head and to occupy a position in a shared sonic field, and to bring a critical ear to the act of making is to construct a place for that positionality to occur, to consciously engage the acoustic community of film listeners.

The Third Work brings together filmmakers, artists, scholars, graduate students and others to examine the conceptual terrain, the technical variables, and the semantic possibilities of sound in non-fiction media.

The symposium is free and open to the public but we ask that you RSVP by registering here.

Symposium organized by Michael Gitlin
Associate Professor, Integrated Media Arts MFA Program
Dept. of Film and Media Studies, Hunter College

with assistance from Kaija Siirala
Graduate Student, Integrated Media Arts MFA Program
and Adjunct Faculty, Dept. of Film and Media Studies, Hunter College

For more information write: thethirdwork@gmail.com

Symposium support provided by:

Arts Across the Curriculum, Hunter College
Professor Rebecca Connor, Director

The Office of the President, Hunter College
Jennifer Raab, President

The Office of the Dean of Arts and Sciences, Hunter College
Dean Andrew Polsky

Additional support and thanks to:
Dr. James Roman
David Pavlovsky
Andrew Lund
Peter Jackson
Jason Fox
Jacqueline Goss