CEE #70

https://mailchi.mp/upenn/cee-70-third-thursday-camra-ssmf-and-more-17570880

Last week, CAMRA hosted their annual Screening Scholarship Media Festival with the theme of portals, an experiment with crossing boundaries, shifting perceptions, and navigating between worlds. For the organizers, portals were “intersections where multiple realities, experiences, and dimensions converge,” and the projects that were highlighted over the two days of the festival blended material and metaphysical approaches to world/art-making across historical, spiritual, and technological terrains.

As always, SSMF helped to plant seeds among the participants, largely graduate students working multi-modally, helping them to find in each other a community that values creative practice as intellectual work. This is why it is so interesting to me that Merriam Webster’s definition also lists “portal” as referring to a communicating part or area of an organism, and specifically, the point at which something, such as a pathogen or a germ, enters the body. But if this pathogen or germ is not merely a microorganism that causes disease, but also a substance that can develop into something new, we become mediums of the creativity of new life and new beginnings.

The sun has finally broken through the chill of the never-ending winter – let us experience this as the portal to blooming, pollination, and eventually, summer!

Deborah A. Thomas

Director, CEE