A Page of Worlds — A Poster Archive
Anderson Memorial Bridge — A Project about Time
EALC Teaching Tips — A Website-in-Building about Teaching
Compass — A Game Theory-based App
The Rhythm of Byt — A Short Video about COVID-19

<<< Anderson Memorial Bridge — A Project about Time

Since mid-summer 2018, I lived across the Charles River and crossed the John W. Weeks Footbridge almost every day to reach Harvard’s main campus. At some point — I can’t recall exactly when — I began to pause at the footbridge’s center line, photographing the bridge beside it, which I later learned was the Anderson Memorial Bridge.

Until the pandemic, when I moved away, I took more than two hundred images from this fixed vantage point, each preserving a fragment of light, weather, and season. Together they form a quiet chronicle of a place both constant and ever-changing.

You can refresh the page to see a different set of photos.

<<< The Rhythm of Byt — A Short Video about COVID-19

"We must institute a library in which we must collect everything we possess relating to the customs of everyday life." —Leon Trotsky, Problems of Everyday Life

2020 brought many people's deepest fears into reality.

Unemployment, bankruptcies, mental collapse, illness, death, and—for many ordinary people still living—the endless dullness of domestic everyday life.

The Russian term for this habitual, tedious everyday life is byt, a word usually translated into English as "everyday life" or "mode of life," but once declared by Roman Jakobson "culturally untranslatable" into Western languages.

Writer Anya von Bremzen interprets byt as "the metaphysical weight of the daily grind, the existentially depleting cares of material living."

Scholar Christina Kiaer explains byt as "the everyday life in its most mundane and material aspects, as opposed to higher forms of spiritual or philosophical existence."

According to Svetlana Boym, at least since the nineteenth century byt has been seen by many as a "fundamental feature of [Russian] culture," signifying "everyday routine and stagnation," as opposed to bytie, which refers to spiritual being—the "real" life found elsewhere.

In Pro Eto, Vladimir Mayakovsky chooses to render byt in the banal imageries of tea, teatime, and samovar the Russian tea pot. A typical scene of byt is described as "sipping tea / at the fire, side-by-side" (Poems 149), and the the airtight compulsive force of byt is likened to a samovar, "catching the light / shone all over / longing to enfold me / in its samovar arms" (146).

Mayakovsky's vivid imagery of tea captures the core characteristics of byt: banal, habitual, and impregnable as a fortified "fortress" (Jakobson's metaphor).

Byt is, in any case, the unchanging Russian day-to-day living.

It was also since the nineteenth century, an anti-byt discourse started to germinate among Russian intellectuals. "Westernizers and Slavophiles, Romantics and modernists, esthetic and political utopians, and Bolsheviks and monarchists," according to Boym, people from various intellectual and political stripes collectively engaged in a "battle" against the old Russian byt. The two revolutions in the 1910s only added steam to this war. As Yuliya Alekseyeva writes, intellectuals tired of the habitual, hackneyed Russian byt had just one single purpose: to "revitalize a human consciousness deadened" by the old Russian byt (42). Again, Mayakovsky stood out as the most unflinching soldier in this war. In Pro Eto, for instance, he condemns the old Russian byt as "daily trash" and mocks those who prefer "tea instead of love." In Drag Forth the Future!, Mayakovsky again calls out to all his peer "pioneers" to "take aim" and "go at" "communism" by "shaking out" the old byt "at home / at the table, / in family, / in our relationships." In his 1929 play Bedbug, the protagonist Prisypkin claims proudly that he stands "against all this petty bourgeois byt [мещансого быта]," and that he is "a man with higher needs." Even in his 1930 suicide note, "Past One O'Clock…," Mayakovsky did not forget to proclaim that "love's boat has smashed against the daily grind [byt]." Harry Gilonis calls byt Mayakovsky's "life-long detestation," and Alekseyeva thinks this detestation was shared by "many thinkers of the time," including Alexander Rodchenko, Vladimir Tatlin, and more (Kiaer).

"We create new objects for daily life (byt)." Vladimir Tatlin told his friend Anna Begicheva in 1925. One year earlier, he had just published his new design of a winter coat—his "new objects for daily life"--in Krasnaia panorama under the title "Novyi byt." Tatlin and his Constructivist comrades believed that banishing the old byt to welcome a new one demands the creation of new objects. To create these "simple" and "primitive" objects that are "necessary" for "everyday life at its most basic need" is their solution proposed to transform the old byt.

Certainly, Tatlin was not the first person who who found the old byt intolerable and called for a change. As early as in 1913, Aleksandr Shevchenko in his seminal manifesto of the Neo-primitivism movement, Neoprimitivism: Its Theory, Its Potentials, Its Achievement, had already proposed to salvage man from the old byt through redefining beauty and art. "We, like some kind of ideally manufactured mechanical man, have grown used to living—getting up, going to bed, eating and working according to the clock—and the sense of rhythm and mechanical harmony." To change this old byt, Shevchenko remarks, we must resort to the "creative will" and "creative hand" of artists' rather than mechanically copy the nature and conform to the existing habit. Shevchenko's special attention to the "rhythm" of life and his trust in the artist's "creative will" and "creative hand" were later picked up by Vertov Dziga. Several years after Shevchenko's manifesto, Dziga put forward his own approach to modifying the old byt: kinochestvo—"the art of organizing the necessary movements of objects in space as a rhythmical artistic whole, in harmony with the properties of the material and internal rhythm of each object." Kinochestvo aims, Dziga writes in 1925, at a "[re-]organization of the observations of the human eye," "a revolution in seeing, and therefore in man's reception of the world in general," and "a free, . . . active, conception of even the most mundane things."

Russian avant‑garde artists' contemplations on byt, on different ways of changing it, and particularly Dziga Vertov's call for "a precise study of movement" and for reorganizing the movements of everyday objects "as a rhythmical whole" according to their "internal rhythm," inspired me to create my own project The Rhythm of Byt.

The short film consists of three parts. While they share the themes of time, domesticity, and everyday life, each part is edited according to a different type of rhythm.

Footage of the first part is assembled according to the melodic rhythm of J.S. Bach's Prelude and Fugue in C Major, BWV 846. As the opening prelude of The Well-Tempered Clavier, this work is considered the most aesthetically balanced piece in music history. Beautiful as it is, the piece is composed in the most mechanical way: the same chromatic pattern keeps repeating throughout the whole piece. Considering the double meaning of the English word "harmony," this piece indeed exemplifies what Aleksandr Shevchenko calls a "mechanical harmony." Well-tempered, well-balanced, and mechanically repeating itself, for me Bach's BWV 846 symbolizes perfectly the old Russian bourgeois byt. But since piano performance does not always realize the music piece's intended stable tempo, I spent some time fine-tuning the duration of each short in order for the cut to match the tempo of the performance (something Eisenstein called "metric montage"). The film image lives, that is, under the unalterable structuring power of the melodic rhythm, the melodic byt.

As though to generate the derivative of a mathematical function, in the second part of the film, I strip Bach's BWV 864 of its melodic façade and arrange the shots according to the music piece's pure tempo (120 BPM). After the brief introductory sequence, the melody disappears. Only the Jazz drumbeats remain afterwards. This differs from the beginning of the first part where conversely it is the metronomic beats that disappear while the melody stays. Foregoing the melodic balance in the second part, albeit seemingly reductive, liberates and invigorates the editing. In contrast to the stable duration of each short in the first part—a balance imposed by the melody—gradually in the second part, film shots pop up in eight, six, four, and even fewer frames. Sequences in triplet shots also get the chance to appear. As Vertov Dziga expects, a different type of rhythm brings out new possibilities of seeing.

Coming to the third part, neither a melody nor a tempo exists anymore. No crutch is provided to help the audience's eyes; they should now rely on themselves to—as Dziga puts it—"active[ly]" discern in "even the most mundane things" the "internal rhythm" of everyday life. To my delight and to my surprise, Bud B—in my footage files the bud that grows very slowly is called Bud B—which stays stubbornly dormant throughout my whole time of shooting finally decided to open itself a few days ago. I then feel I have caught something edifying. If the old byt is repetitive and is hence always predictable, one can never foretell the rhythm the new. I thus use Bud B as the ending of the film, hoping to urge the audience to imagine the new rhythm of life yet to be born and defined.

<<< EALC Teaching Tips — A Website-in-Building about Teaching

While serving as a Pedagogy Fellow at the Derek Bok Center for Teaching & Learning (2024–2025), I realized it would be valuable to gather teaching tips from faculty in my department and turn them into a booklet. The project is ongoing, and below is the working website I built for it.

Visit the EALC Teaching Tips website.

<<< Compass — A Game Theory-based App

Compass is an app that applies game theory to help partners (any kind) communicate with each other. GitHub Repo: https://github.com/noah-c/Compass.

<<< A Page of Worlds — A Poster Archive

Since becoming the Assistant Director of CCK-IUC in 2020, I’ve initiated or helped organize numerous events that explore the possibilities of Chinese humanities to broaden its horizons. The posters below are ones I designed -- each a world that connects me with friends, colleagues, and the wisdom they generously shared.