Harmony and Dissonance: the 17th Annual Interdisciplinary Colloquium
Tuesday, April 8, 2025
The beauty of harmony and collaboration is their ability to harness dissonance in the service of peace and agreement. This idea rings especially true in a present reality marked as much by conflict as by community. Both human-made and natural disasters can foster moments of togetherness and altruism. This same dynamic plays out in learning environments, where friction can serve as a catalyst to inspire change: we often learn through productive conflict, discomfort, and respectful engagement with opposing viewpoints.
This colloquium invites participants to contemplate the myriad ways that harmony and dissonance shape our world, our lives, and our communities, large and small.
*The program is currently being finalized
Art Submissions
Epiphany Knedler
Art & Design Department, Lecturer
the specifics might be vague is visual exploration of the role images play in how and what we remember. The images are created using analog photographs from family photo albums overlaid with an abstraction and pixelization of the image, creating tension between the memory we hold and the one we craft. Each time we access a memory, we rewrite the moment. The very act of remembering alters the facts. This process, called reconsolidation, makes the image a bit more blurry and malleable, a retelling of the last time we shared the memory. Anything can alter our version of events, particularly in our increasingly artificial world.
Each retrieval of a memory is a portrait of our current self, combining with the changing ways we perceive our world. Ideas of truth and documentation have long entangled the history of photography. The photographer both conceals and reveals stories of our lives, curating the images of our lives. Images often spark memories and stories, overwriting any truth we may seek. With the increasing ease in the use of artificial intelligence and digital manipulation, images no longer spark your real memory but help you create your desired memory. Using analog photographs from my family archive, I re-record them as digital files, replicating the reconsolidation process. I pixelate each image by hand, blurring some areas while others remain visible, shaping the image into a new narrative. Memory is flexible and always changing; the only constant are the stories we tell ourselves.
