I Thought I Saw You Watching: Emerson’s GBFA 2024 Artist’s Showcase

Emerson College is proud to present a series of installations, crafted by the school’s Global BFA cohort of 2024. Installed in our Huret & Spector gallery space, the show spans one week, and features the following artists with their work:

A recorded conversation between electricity pylons, translated for human understanding

by Kelsey Cohn
Three-channel colour projection, HD video, sound, 60 min loop.
A recorded conversation between electricity pylons transcodes a conversation between two solitary pylon towers, left standing together in a distant, post-human future. Through their casual musings on life, nature, time, and cosmology, the audience is invited to reflect on existence from a structuralist vantage point.

Across three projections, the pylons tower over an empty landscape. Here, they seem more like monuments than infrastructure, their ability to communicate reframing them as angelic messengers rather than utility structures. As the pylons pass the time reflecting on ecological curiosities and ancient discoveries, their characterization and banter invites an empathetic humor.

At once spiritual, scientific, historical, and whimsical, the work invites a universal reflection on our origins and place in the ecological sphere. From their divine point of view above the landscape and history, the pylons alone notice the wires that link our lives deeply to the world around us. 

The Normandy Tree Tape

by Roz Pederson
Single channel display on CRT monitor, 11min
Combining documentary and fiction, The Normandy Tree Tape exists in the oft forgotten space between story and history, real and unreal. It challenges our preconceived notions of true and false and allows for a shift in perspective that is rarely considered. Indeed the tension between viewpoints provides the driving force of the piece. It bridges science and mythology, knowable and unknowable. 

While clearing land in an old growth forest in Normandy, workers discovered a VHS tape stuck in the roots of a fell tree. When this tape was played back, they discovered a unique alteration to it. The tape originally was a home recording of a TV documentary, but through methods currently being studied by scientists, some of the data on the tape was replaced with narration from the forest. After extensive restoration, Roz Pederson and her team are excited to present the first public exhibition of The Normandy Tree Tape.

This is the myth The Normandy Tree Tape creates, a story somewhere between folklore, scientific discovery, and tourist trap. The installation serves to convince you of this myth. This piece was born from the idea that it is human nature to assume all people to have a set of experiences more or less similar to ours. Through communication, we learn ways in which this is and isn’t the case, and approximate the innate human experience. There may be, however, sensations so human they become difficult or impossible to identify because the opposite has never been known. 

The work imagines what exists beyond the limits of modern communication, what the sensory experience of the inhuman may be and stands against the truth and for the complete subjectivity of all things.

Inside the Screen

by Lisa Siera
Live video, sculpture, light, sound, 1:40
Inside the Screen is a spatial interpretation of the world inside the phone screen. It compares the social design created in the digital world to the physical system of the panopticon jail. After years of experience in front of and behind the camera, the artist examined the intertwined dynamics between cameras, eyes, bodies, and screens. A panopticon originally devised by Jeremy Bentham is a circular prison with cells arranged around a central well, from which prisoners could at all times be observed. 

One-Way Street

by Sid Tian Shi
Single channel color projection with videos and sound
This project is an interactive video installation where the audiences take a walk and play around the urban landscapes of Paris. During this journey, every anecdote, signs and spectacle of the streets are listed up and collected as an appendix to it. 

It consists of one main screen showing the landscapes, and a supplement screen showing the commentary images and texts. Within the screening area, the audience can interact with the pace of this journey by stepping into sections in the space, which will be detected by the monitor camera installed to the ceiling.

The journey starts with a call between two friends living in Paris. A calls B, saying that he is gonna take a walk from his home to B’s. After that call, the audience is on a street with A, traveling through the route from Italy 13 to Pére Lachaise. We have no way of knowing about A’s past or his present life. It’s just that we are viewing the city through his scope. He is curious, loves to observe, and always looking around, instead of finishing this journey which leads us to the city fragments and comments we then see.

The panopticon allows a watchman to observe occupants without the occupants knowing whether or not they are being watched. The installation’s structure is inspired by the guard tower(the central well) and draws attention to how we are illusioned to hold power over our digital selves through our phones, essentially becoming the prisoners while thinking we are the watchmen.

Artist Reception, Monday August 12th, 5-7:30pm. 

Location: The Huret and Spector Gallery is located on the 6th Floor of the Tufte Building. Please enter through the doors at 10 Boylston Place Alleyway. Please note: visitor registration and ID required for visitors without Emerson Badge.