The culmination of a multi-year research project, Urban Intermedia: City, Archive, Narrative presented a series of films which used collage to construct narratives from archival media. Photography, documents, cartography, journalism, drawings, video, and other formats are brought into dialog, crafting an “intermedia” language to express multi-dimensional narratives of the development of Berlin, Boston, Istanbul, and Mumbai.

The explication of these narratives becomes contingent on the forms of media through which they have been expressed historically, revealing not only a wealth of archival material but creating new channels of communication through which overlapping and conflicting ideas, explanations, and timelines may be expressed simultaneously.

Media served as common ground for designers and researchers to collaboratively explicate each narrative. To facilitate this collaboration, the idea of a “narrative surface” framed the production of the animations. All media was brought to this surface and into registration with other pieces of media through collage techniques such as of overlay, blending, juxtaposition. Through this technique, specific historical arguments may be crafted while indicating, at any moment or hinging on any piece of media, a plethora of alternative histories that might be told.

Scott led design and animation work for Berlin team, edited and coordinated production for Istanbul and Mumbai animations, collaborated on audio-visual design, coordinated installation at all sites

This exhibition was completed as part of the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative, a multi-year research project undertaken at the Harvard Graduate School of Design with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Exhibited at:

Aedes Architecture Forum, Berlin, Germany
27 January – 21 February 2018

SALT Galata, Istanbul, Turkey
7 March – 1 April 2018

Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, Mumbai, India
15 April – 9 May 2018

Druker Design Gallery, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA
27 August – 14 October 2018 

Exhibition Curators
Eve Blau
Robert Gerard Pietrusko

Research Directors
Eve Blau (Berlin)
Stephen Gray, Alex Krieger (Boston)
Gül Neşe Doğusan Alexander, Sibel Bozdogan (Istanbul)
Rahul Mehrotra (Mumbai)

Art Direction
Robert Gerard Pietrusko

Exhibition Coordinator / Project Manager
Gül Neşe Doğusan Alexander

Installation Design Howeler + Yoon Architecture
Eric Höweler, principal
David Hamm
Caleb Hawkins

complete list of the project team