I have curated a chronological timeline of personal and academic projects exploring my interests in filmmaking and anthropology, including how each is unconsciously cyborg:
Sto-Rox Chemistry Demonstrations (2018)
Stars (2014)
Film by Mackenzie Stewart
Starring Fatima Torky
Executive Producer: King Career Center, Anchorage AK
SELECTED FOR KCC Two Oceans Film Festival and Summer Solstice Fest in Anchorage, AK 2015
Winner of Best Edit at Two Oceans Film Festival
Stars (2014) was an experimental short based on a poem I wrote on the ride to school one morning, typing it into my iPhone as tears welled in my eyes—two girls, teenagers a year younger than me, were struck and killed by a drunk driver in broad daylight on Abbott Road in South Anchorage. They were on their way home from the mall after back-to-school shopping–they reminded me of myself.
I had my best friend’s little sister play the girl, and I was very inspired by 2013 Tumblr aesthetics. Tumblr was a popular microblogging website and app in the early 2010s. It revolutionized my imagination as a teenager because I could search for dreamy photos of things I loved like nature, fashion, art and reblog them to my personal blog called wishingforwhimsy. This aesthetic was integral to the way I imagine Alaska in my memory: technicolor pastels in the air, like it’s always sunset alpenglow.
Why cyborg anthropology?
I instinctively integrated my interests in online aesthetics, such as the “Tumblr Girl Aesthetic,” into the costuming, color correction and performance of Fatima. When the poem came to my mind on the way to school, I instinctively reached for the yellow notes app on my phone. The first DSLR I ever used, CanonEye, is a mixture of first-person point of view and wide shots of Fatima. The wide shots are an imagining of myself in these situations, as if I were in a movie myself, as if I was moved transcendently by the story of girls that could have been me. The use of animated text created in After Effects and the digital recording of the score I created on GarageBand are other examples of digital tools aiding self expression.
Arm Sequence (2016)
Edit by Mackenzie Stewart
Starring the Pittsburgh SteelWheelers
Research Group: Liam Duncan & Danica Pratta (School of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences) and Delena Obermaier, Kaely Elsasser & Mackenzie Stewart (Film & Media Studies Program)
Recorded by Mackenzie Stewart, Delena Obemaier & Danica Pratta’s GoPro
Executive Producer: University of Pittsburgh The Year of Humanities GRANT 2016
Created for Bodies In Motion, a Year of the Humanities STEAM research collaboration between the Film & Media Studies Program and the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, Arm Sequence (2016) explored the movement of the Pittsburgh SteelWheelers, a wheelchair rugby team, challenging ableist conceptions and offering alternative points of view of human movement.
Research groups evenly included Film and HRS students, and our team was stronger when we drew upon each others’ strengths: the HRS students were well-versed in Rehabilitation Sciences protocols and the Film students had the technical expertise to film and edit our research content.
Why cyborg anthropology?
Bodies In Motion explored the idea that humans first adopt new visual recording technologies as a means to simply explore the newfound ability to capture movement, from early photography technology to the first cinema toys like the zoetrope to the first motion picture cameras. In Arm Sequence, the camera’s neutral point of view fixes on the strength of the player’s arms paired with quick counter-cinema-inspired jump cuts to emphasize agility and feelings of awe toward all forms of human movement.
Yellow (2017)
Film by Mackenzie Stewart
Recorded by Mackenzie Stewart, Xavier Lang & Ann Shetler
Executive Producer: University of Pittsburgh Film & Media Studies Program and University of London, Birkbeck’s The Derek Jarman Lab
SELECTED FOR University of Pittsburgh Film Symposium 2018, Pitt Film Fest 2018, Young Voices Essay Film Fest 2018 and the British Film Institute’s Future Film Festival 2019
Winner of Best Picture at Pitt Film Fest 2018
Yellow (2017) was my final essay film for the Pittsburgh-London Film Programme I attended Spring 2017. The program taught essay filmmaking, a form of experimental, self-referential documentary, and encouraged students to explore their new environment with a camera. During my trip, I was experiencing feelings of displacement and was drawn to turning my life experiences into a dynamic personal film statement.
Why cyborg anthropology?
Through the framework outlined in class, Yellow became a work of cyborg anthropology when I began to use technology to move through memory, cultural reflection and personal experience. Yellow is my diary, an intimate unfolding of my true thoughts and feelings through words, camera and montage editing. In the past, I struggled with writing narrative film scripts for class, but felt immediately understood learning the filming process of visual fragmentation that constitutes an essay film.
Sto-Rox Chemistry Demonstrations (2018)
Films by Sto-Rox Students
Executive Producer: Danelle AvellinO & Mackenzie Stewart
Sto-Rox Chemistry Demonstrations (2018) was an annual project sponsored by Sto-Rox High School Chemistry Teacher, Danelle Avellino, from 2016-2018. We collaborated and designed a STEAM project after reflecting on a lack of student interest in chemistry bookwork—a sentiment I also felt as a teenager when asked to do dry word problems on a Thursday afternoon between lunch and going home for the day.
Ms. Avellino directed students on the chemistry portion of the project, and I guided the students in filming with either their smartphone or my personal camera. They were required to design their video using film theory by designating production roles, creating storyboards and editing for continuity. They were instructed on Premiere Pro in a group setting and individually edited their projects within their groups, incorporating their own visual style into the text explanations and credits (most of them figured this piece out on their own).
Why cyborg anthropology?
By humanistic data tracking standards (observation and perhaps zealous/proud bias), the use of technology in a collaborative setting certainly influenced the level of participation, and subsequently, the students’ understanding of chemistry concepts.
The following films ranged in explanations from the thoroughly scientific explanation in Lava Lamp Experiment to the emotive, human-centered observations in Diet Coke & Mentos Experiment where students instruct the scientists who would be re-creating their process to “run for your life!” in their experimental instructions.
Colors: Pitt Pantry (2019)
Films by ken Stewart
Executive Producer: University of Pittsburgh Film & Media Studies Program
In collaboration with Pitt Pantry
Screened at the Pitt Pantry Hunger Banquet (2019)
Colors: Pitt Pantry (2019), my final capstone for the Film & Media Studies degree, was influenced by my struggles as a food insecure low-income student diagnosed with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. I frequently found that a lack of nutrients and concerns over securing food directly impacted my mood and ability to plan for the future.
The concept links the primary colors, Yellow & Blue, with individual characters. When the characters interact, they become the secondary color, Green. Each primary color character was directly inspired by myself and other people in my life who had experienced food insecurity, either in the past or present.
Yellow (2019) has a sunny disposition and was introduced to the food pantry from a young age. She has a strong sense of self-worth despite her set-backs and was inspired by a library colleague who took me to the food pantry on a lunch break when I revealed I was struggling to pay for food.
Blue (2019) was based on myself, and upon reflection, I am concerned about the way she is portraying both myself and other real people struggling with food insecurity. In the future, I would like to expand my research outside of personal experience when creating altruistic media that represents a wide group of people.
Green (2019) depicts Blue & Yellow gaining trust, becoming friends and their adventure to the food pantry. To me, the most important part of this film series is the way the two colors mix to create another color, another experience, an example of what happens when different wavelengths converge.
Why cyborg anthropology?
I hoped to create a slightly ethnographic, self-referential social advertisement series that used personal, first-hand experience and emotionality through images, music and edits to illustrate to a cultural outsider – most of the students I encountered at the University of Pittsburgh who were not food insecure – what it really feels like to have limited resources, how it colors every aspect of your life. Colors: Pitt Pantry was a foundational pivot in my quest to use what I had learned of essay filmmaking and first-person perspective in film from the London program for a social good, spurring my interests in pursuing altruistic, intentional media creation.
Kaleidoscopes for Eyes (202x)
Experiment by Ken Stewart
Presented on Instagram as @kaleidoscopesforeyes
Kaleidoscopes for Eyes (202x) began as a response to the pandemic, hence fracturing the decade of 2020 into a blur of “202x.” From 2020-2021, I developed an alter ego in my head named K.len, which originated while sweeping floors at Crêpes Parisiennes on S. Craig St in 2019, but later came to be shorthand for Kaleidoscopic Lens. K.len is a cyborg, combining the mechanical workings of executive functioning {robot} and the abstract intuition of the limbic system {human}.
Kaleidoscopes for Eyes is intended to be a manifesto on approaching video and digital media design, but is currently an experiment of video and photo lightplay on my personal Instagram account and ever-evolving updates to my website portfolio.
Why cyborg anthropology?
The project tracks my firsthand understanding of virality, engagement and information sharing on social media. The current goal is to use the gallery portion of Instagram to create intentional videography from a first-person point of view, while balancing the use of the stories feature to share and curate external user-generated content, literally sharing the stories of others through their own making.
The project is on-going and will continued to be refined over the decade 202x.