Alumni Profile: Iona Pelovska (ComCult PhD '15)

Current Work

As artist/filmmaker I was already on a career path in the film animation industry when I decided to pursue a PhD in Communication and Culture. My decision was, therefore, not dictated by an interest in increasing my employability, but by a desire to pursue a particular project of mine that was contingent on a rigorous questioning of cinema. If one is considering a graduate program in order to gain access to the job market, there are shorter and more instrumental paths that lead there. The value of graduate school is far greater than securing a job. Graduate work cultivates a more thoughtful attitude towards the world. It trains the mind to consider variables that touch on all aspects of society, especially at times of exploding information technology networks. The ComCult graduate program provides an interdisciplinary training that is increasingly adequate in a world of growing complexities, and often highly transferable in the job market.

Since I have finished the program, I have been back to the animation industry, working on my independent art projects, writing theory and contributing to journals. ComCult has been indispensable in helping me integrate my practice as an artist and philosopher. I can’t stress enough the value of my ComCult time for allowing me to go deeper into my work.

Reflections on ComCult

When I came into the program, my research question was rather content oriented. I was questioning, from a viewer’s position, how the body was affected by cinema. When I went into the program, this question deepened to include the whole movement of industrial technology—what it meant, how it affected human cognition, and whether its imperative was not alien to human agency, and antithetical to art. My dissertation ended up exploring poetic and rational language, and the ways the related cognitive modalities operated in art and techno-scientific discourse.

For me, ComCult was indispensable because it afforded me the time and resources to hone my questioning of my artistic medium and practice, and hit the core of what I wanted to work on in the future. When choosing a graduate program, it’s also important to know one’s predilections and motivations so that one connects with the right supervisor. ComCult has a great pool of people. It gives access to professors across departments at both universities. My suggestion to people considering graduate studies is to look in a frank uncompromising way what kind of relationship they need to build with their supervisor in order to feel comfortable and confident.

Recommended Reading

It is extremely hard to choose a single book but perhaps it’s safe to say that everyone should read What Computers Still Can’t Do (external link, opens in new window)  by Hubert Dreyfus. It makes a case of how artificial intelligence (AI) can, and more importantly cannot, replace human intelligence. I think it’s an important book as AI is already in our lives and advancing rather quickly. There is an ongoing debate about the transferability of the human mind to the computer. This book demonstrates the irrelevance of many of the arguments that have traditionally been used in that debate, and brings important nuances to our understanding of human and machine knowledge. If I had to recommend one single contemporary philosopher, it would be Dreyfus.