Emerson Contemporary

The M.F.A Thesis Shows: Christopher Lee & Asma Khoshmehr
2024-12-02 00:00 - 2024-12-05 23:59 (America/New_York) | Huret And Spector Gallery, Tufte Building
Emerson’s Master’s in Fine Arts candidates, Christopher Lee and Asma Khoshmehr share deeply personal stories of their family’s past, interpreted through new media.

This exhibition will have a reception on December 5th from 6-8pm.

Memory Lost by Christopher Lee

Memory Lost is a multimedia installation that probes the fragile nature of human memory through the lens of AI generated media. Drawing inspiration from the artist’s personal experience witnessing his grandfather’s battle with Alzheimer’s Disease, this work explores the parallels between artificial intelligence and human cognition. The installation revisits formative moments from the artist’s life from childhood through adulthood, using AI to reconstruct and reinterpret these memories.

By highlighting the biases and limitations of both AI and human recollection, the piece invites viewers to contemplate the ephemeral quality of our lived experiences. Memory Lost serves as a poignant meditation on mortality, loss, and the imperfect mechanisms through which we preserve and recall our past, challenging us to consider the essence of what makes us human.

Throughout his artistic journey, Chris has been driven by an innate curiosity to acquire new knowledge, leading him to constantly push the boundaries of his creative toolkit. Early in life he explored drawing and painting before developing a deep affinity for music. By high school Chris had built up a home studio filled with guitars, synthesizers, and other gadgets. As an adult, Chris briefly explored a business career before realizing his true calling lay in creative work.

He enrolled in Emerson College’s Film & Media Art program to work with other artists and to find a personal and professional outlet for his creativity. Since then, Chris has contributed to dozens of student and independent projects, specializing in location sound recording, sound design, and mixing. His personal work leverages diverse digital technologies, reflecting his evolution from a young artist to a versatile multimedia professional adept at integrating multiple artistic disciplines.

Act.No.06: 1001 Nights in Zanzibar by Asma Khoshmehr

Act.No.06: 1001 Nights in Zanzibar is a multimedia installation that uncovers the silenced stories of forced child marriages and political persecution following the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964. The work explores a 1971 presidential decree that allowed officials to forcibly marry underage girls, including many women in the artist’s family. These policies led to deportation, imprisonment, confiscation of family properties, and decades of silence about the trauma endured. Asma, the first in her generation to uncover this hidden history, conducted years of research, discovering the secret stories of many women in her family impacted by these events. She traveled across Tanzania, Kenya, Oman, UAE, and Iran to gather testimonies, family documents, and archival records, piecing together her family’s survival through forced marriages, captivity, and eventual escape.Inspired by One Thousand and One Nights and Scheherazade’s storytelling to transform a vengeful king into a compassionate leader, Asma’s project reflects her hope to mirror Scheherazade’s journey. It combines archival materials, 3D laser scans, virtual reality experiences, and video art, exploring how storytelling can confront power and inspire transformation. By sharing these stories, this project reflects on how Scheherazade used storytelling to change a vengeful king, drawing attention to the tyrants of today who continue to use women’s bodies as tools of revenge in war and revolution.Asma Khoshmehr is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker whose work combines immersive storytelling, documentary filmmaking, and new media. With a BFA in Performing Arts and currently pursuing an MFA with a focus on new media, her practice draws deeply from her East African and Middle Eastern heritage, exploring themes of generational trauma, forced displacement, and political sexual violence.

Asma’s work has earned recognition through prestigious awards and residencies, including the MacDowell Fellowship, the MASS MoCA, Andrew Freedman Home (AFH), and the ON::VIEW Artist Residency. She has also received the Carole Fielding Grant from the University Film and Video Association (UFVA) and the Virgin Unite Grant. Her international journey includes a scholarship to study Beijing Opera at the Shanghai Theater Academy and mythology at Sanskriti Kendra in India.

Curiosity, Play, Innovation: International Computer Music Conference Installations at Emerson
2025-06-11 00:00 - 2025-06-14 23:59 | Emerson Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02111, United States
Emerson Contemporary has joined hands with the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), one of the world’s largest and most prestigious gatherings of sound artists, electroacoustic composers, and music technologists from across the globe.

This year, the installation track of ICMC 2025 received 56 submissions from artists and researchers across 12 countries, showcasing the expanding boundaries of sound art and interactive media. These installations will be on display at Emerson Contemporary’s Media Art Gallery from June 11th – 14th.

Rings…Through Rings by Tak Cheung Hai

In alignment with this year’s theme of “Curiosity, Play, Innovation,” we accepted 19 installations that transform Emerson College’s Media Art Gallery and Bright Family Screening Room into laboratories of sonic exploration. The selected works span a rich spectrum of approaches—from immersive audiovisual environments and interactive sound sculptures to spatial audio experiences and video installations—each pushing the envelope of how we experience and interact with sound in physical space.

Particularly noteworthy is the diversity of artistic practices represented, with creators employing everything from AI-driven systems and sensor-based interactions to acoustic phenomena and architectural resonances. Many works exemplify the democratization of technology that David Wessel championed, utilizing accessible tools and gallery-provided equipment to ensure that innovative artistic expression isn’t limited by resource constraints. These installations invite participants to move beyond traditional concert hall experiences and engage with sound as a sculptural, architectural, and deeply interactive medium, and feature work by Michael Trommer, Jane Tingley, Zhitao Lin, William Turner Duffin, Tak Cheung Hui, Matthew Ostrowski, Matthew Azevedo, Shomit Barua, Betsey Biggs.

Read more about the ICMC schedule of installations and screenings right here, or about the installations at the Emerson Contemporary Gallery below.

Foresta-Inclusive: (ex)tending towards by Jane Tingley

Contained by Michael Trommer

Contained presents a sonic auscultation of our Anthropocentric milieu, integratingfield recordings, 360o camera footage and 3D scans of urban corporate towers,logistical networks, industrial areas and other non-places [1] as well as urbanencampments and derelict locales that are resonant with both the heard andunheard acoustic emanations of the technotope we have become dependent uponfor our survival. In doing so, it approaches sound as a material that can beapprehended as both corporeal and abstracted: in addition to the airborne, audiblesound of the subject spaces, Contained integrates the electrical, vibrational andmnemonic emissions that permeate our everyday habitats, highlighting their rolesas unheeded yet nonetheless deeply affective components of a quotidian andcontingent soundscape.

Contained – Project Still

Michael Trommer is a Toronto-based sound and video artist; his practice has beenfocused primarily on psychogeographical and acoustemological explorations ofanthropocentric space via the use of spatial and tactile sound, field recordings,VR, immersive installation and expanded cinema.

Entrainment by Shomit Barua

Entrainment is part of a series of phenomenological experiments that explore thetheme of spatial and temporal disorientation. Inspired by the passing landscapeviewed from subways and trains, this audio-video installation employs severalmotion-based perceptual distortions: 1) the Doppler effect, 2) Moiré interferencepatterns, 3) skewed parallax (binocular disparity), and 4) the Wagon wheel effect.Entrainment refers to the synchronization of organisms to an external perceivedrhythm.

Entrainment at SMOCA – Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (2024-2025)

Shomit Barua is a Japanese-born, Desi-American intermedia artist specializing inecoacoustics, responsive environments, and emergent narratives. His work is rootedin poetry and architecture, and reflects the shared tenets of contained space,economy of materials, and movement that is both physical and emotional.Combining everyday technologies with esoteric programming languages, he blursthe line between installation and performance, weaving together object, sound andimage. Digital and analog techniques are fused to investigate his core subject:corporeal presence in a physical space.

Foresta-Inclusive: (ex)tending towards by Jane Tingley

(ex)tending towards is driven by sensor data collected using the Foresta-Inclusiveinfrastructure at the rare Charitable Reserve in Blaire, ON. CA. This infrastructureincludes three networked ecosensors that are installed unobtrusively onto the trunk of atree and sense phenomenon such as: temperature, humidity, VOCs, particulate matter,wind, C02 and rain. The in-gallery installation is composed of three main components: 1)a visualization that images 24hrs of collected data, where the outer ring showscontemporary values and each subsequent smaller ring images the values from theprevious hour, 2) a point cloud of the tree being sensed, and 3) the soundscape thatsonifies the collected data.

Jane Tingley is an artist, curator, director of the SLOlab (Systems | Life | Ontologies) andAssociate Professor at York University. Her studio work combines traditional studiopractice with new media tools – and spans responsive/interactive installation,performative robotics, and telematically connected distributed sculptures/installations.

the ground beneath our feet, the air inside our lungs by Matthew Azevedo

the ground beneath our feet, the air inside our lungs explores the deep, inviolableconnections between seemingly independent individuals. Visitors are invited to sitin cocoon-like hammock chairs where they will experience an infrasonicgenerative composition presented via tactile transducers built into the chair’sframe. The composition’s development is primarily directed by the visitor’s heartand respiratory rate, which are monitored via a millimeter-wave radar sensor.While in this seemingly isolated state, the visitor’s experience is continuouslyshaped by the sensor data from nearby hammocks and activity throughout thespace monitored by a seismic accelerometer mounted to the floor.

Detail view of one of the “haptic hammock’s” two Dayton Audio TT25-8 tactile transducers.

M. Azevedo (b. 1977) is an artist, educator, and researcher based in Providence,RI whose work is focused on the outer edges of human perception, in particularthe liminal space between touch and hearing occupied by infrasound. They aremost widely known for their recorded works and international performances asRetribution Body, composing site-specific works for architectural spaces driveninto resonance by massive custom subwoofers.

Liminal by Zhitao Lin

Liminal is an AI-driven audiovisual installation by Zhitao Lin that transforms tra-ditional Chinese aesthetics into a generative, interactive experience. Inspired by the mythical Peach Blossom Spring, the piece uses real-time gesture tracking to control the sound of Guqin, Xiao, and percussion, along with dynamic digital ink landscapes rendered as 3D particle systems. Only one audience member is tracked at a time, allowing for a focused and intimate interaction. Each motion becomes a brushstroke in both sound and image, creating a deeply personal and ephemeral version of this imagined utopia.

A Generated visual output from Liminal, illustrating gesture-driven 3D particle ink landscape.Image by Zhitao Lin.

Zhitao Lin is a forward-thinking composer whose work bridges traditional Chineseaesthetics, spectral music, and cutting-edge technology. Currently a Doctor ofMusical Arts (DMA) candidate in Composition at the Peabody Institute of the JohnsHopkins University, he also holds a Master’s degree in Composition from Peabodyand a Bachelor’s degree in Music from the University of California, Berkeley. Hisresearch focuses on the intersection of artificial intelligence and musiccomposition, exploring new possibilities in sound art through deep technologicalintegration.

MELT: the memory of ice by Betsey Biggs

MELT: the memory of ice (topographic remix) is a spatial remix of my music-film MELT: thememory of ice, an invitation to sit bedside in communion with our earth’s body melting andspilling through climate change. Created during a summer spent in Greenland with my mother and 5-year-old, the installation creates a spectacular, otherworldly, immersive river of icebergs, increasingly interrupted by flashes of memories of the north. A musical drone rich with glimmers of sound — calving ice, reindeer bells, sled dogs — surrounds a choir reciting an unfathomable list of winter’s loss — flurries, orca, snow angels. The transformation and relocation of the film’s sounds and images opens up a new, imaginative space for the audience to sit with and wander through, a kind of inner topography of the north. The ice melts on.

Still, MELT: the memory of ice (topographic remix), 2024

Betsey Biggs (Writer/Director/Composer) is a composer and media artist whose workconnects the dots between sound, image, place and technology. Her work has been described by the New Yorker as “psychologically complex, exposing how we orient ourselves with our ears.” For more than twenty-five years, she has composed music, created live multimedia performances, and created participatory art installations.

Rings…Through Rings by Tak Cheung Hui and Xiaoqiao Li

Rings. . . Through Rings transforms historical military cartography of Hong Kong into an immersive sound installation, where laser-etched vinyl discs—each encoding geographical data—are physically manipulated by participants. These custom turntable-based artifacts translate map engravings into sonic textures, generating evolving soundscapes thatreflect the landscape’s temporal shifts. Through real-time audiovisual processing, users explore the dynamic interplay between natural topographies, human intervention, and technological mediation, experiencing history through physical engagement and spatial listening.

Laser-etched vinyl disc on a turntable, showcasing processed cartographic engravings of Hong Kong’s Northern Metropolis.

HUI Tak-Cheung, a Hong Kong-born composer, creates works spanning chamber and orchestral music, electronic pieces, sound installations, and interdisciplinary projects. His multidisciplinary approach integrates immersive audio, spatial sound, and advanced music technologies to reconstruct soundscapes and tell stories across eras and cultures.

Xiaoqiao Li is an artist, academic, and researcher whose work examines the intersection of analogue imprints and digital imprints, particularly in analysing digital print matrices. Li’s practice-based approach sheds light on the complexities of printmaking in the digital era by investigating how digital imaging information is captured, retained, lost, and transmitted. Li holds a BA in Visual Arts from Macao Polytechnic University, an MA in Visual Arts: Printmaking from Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London, and a PhD from the Academy of Visual Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University, supported by the Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme. His PhD thesis was selected by the Leonardo Graduate Abstracts (LGA) Peer Review Committee as a top-rated LABS Abstract for advanced research in Art and Science, published by Leonardo (MIT Press Journals). Li’s work has been exhibited internationally, earning accolades such as the Clifford Chance Purchase Prize (UK) and the Chinese Young Artists’ Work Award at the Beijing International Art Biennale. Beyond his studio practice, Li actively contributes to academia through presentations at conferences and articles published in the IMPACT Printmaking Journal and Leonardo (MIT Press), fostering dialogue among artists and scholars in both traditional printmaking and digital art. As he continues to learn and grow, Li hopes that his continuous efforts will contribute to evolving discussions in the field.

Summerland by Matthew Ostrowski

Summerland explores the intersection of the technical and the mystical at thedawn of the electrical age. Morse code sounders are driven by texts from fromtwo critical figures in early long-distance communication: Samuel Morse himself,the telegraph’s inventor, and Spiritualist medium Kate Fox, who communicatedwith the dead through a ‘spiritual telegraph.’ Excerpts from Morse’s writings aretranslated into the code that bears his name, and 21st-century analysis/synthesistechniques are used in a futile attempt to resynthesize recorded transcripts ofFox’s sessions with the beyond using 19th-century means.

Summerland at the Albany Institute, 2020 (detail). Photo by Andrew Neumann.

A New York City native, Matthew Ostrowski is a composer, performer, and installation artist. Using digital tools and formalist techniques to engage with quotidian materials: sonic, physical, and cultural; Ostrowski explores the liminal space between the virtual and phenomenological worlds. Engaged with tropes of interruption and flux, his works function as environments in a constant state of change, exploring the process of consciousness in its constant state of collision with the world.

Entrainment (2023 - ongoing), by Shomit Barua
2025-06-11 00:00 - 2025-06-14 23:59 | Emerson Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02111, United States
Emerson Contemporary has joined hands with the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), one of the world’s largest and most prestigious gatherings of sound artists, electroacoustic composers, and music technologists from across the globe. As a part of the installation track of ICMC 2025, presenting Shomit Barua’s Entrainment – on display at Emerson Contemporary’s Media Art Gallery from June 11th – 14th.

Multi-channel video + multi-channel audio, original footage aboard rail-based public transportation inBrooklyn, Budapest, Lisbon, Montreal, and Barcelona; 16min audio + 60min video cycle

Entrainment is part of a series of phenomenological experiments that explore the theme of spatial and temporal disorientation. Inspired by the passing landscape viewed from subways and trains, this audio-video installation employs several motion-based perceptual distortions: 1) the Doppler effect, 2) Moiré interference patterns, 3) skewed parallax (binocular disparity), and 4) the Wagon wheel effect. Entrainment refers to the synchronization of organisms to an external perceived rhythm.

This installation recreates the hypnotic and transcendental states that often emerge from the repetitious visual, auditory, and haptic polyrhythms experienced aboard a moving train. Original portrait-mode footage is “temporally collaged” and spatially arranged to reconstruct views from rail-based public transportation in Barcelona, Budapest, Lisbon, Montreal and New York.

Entrainment at SMOCA – Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (2024-2025)

Entrainment, originally entitled Entrainment718, was inspired by a hundred-foot stretch of the Brooklyn F train that connects the subterranean to the above-ground. On this transitional stretch, the visual interplay of regularly-spaced pylons against haphazardly strung high-intensity work lights causes a skewing of parallax— looking out the window, depth perception becomes distorted, as though suddenly careening through a starfield. Entrainment is an exploration of that sense of disorientation, and the hypnotic and transcendental states that often emerge from the repetitious visual, auditory, and haptic polyrhythms experienced aboard a moving train. This project continues to grow, include footage from rail-based public transportation from around the world.

Audio consists of a multi-channel sound system arranged linearly. The original musical composition (16mins) consists of several textural layers that are distributed spatially, running up and down the multi-channel array in gated sequences. The effect is that of a passing train, while also evoking the rhythmic quality of being on board the train. Each channel is synced with the video panel directly behind it and when that audio channel is active, a variety of visual effects is applied to the corresponding panel.

In this way, one can visually track the sonic placement of sound in space (source-bonding [1] à la Denis Smalley’s Spectromorphology). Additionally, a haptic channel plays infrasonic polyrhythmic patterns. The auditory (score length vs spatial distribution), visual (footage vs effects programming) and haptic layers are all cycles of different lengths.

As they loop, the layers stack in new combinations. This gestalt of sensory information that drift in and out of synchronization is an example of the nested or overlapping rhythms described in Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis [2], in which the body becomes a metronome that not only observes but feels—embodies—temporal perception.

Most notably, the panoramic is actually a single-channel portrait-mode video (60mins) shot on a camera-phone, repeated 14 times and mirrored vertically. Each column is an instance of the original footage offset by 23 frames; in essence, they are pulling from the “memory” of the video, and placed side by side, they become stitched together to form what appears to be a panoramic view. The perceived elongation of the image is achieved through a repeated temporal and spatial displacement.

Media Links:– https://shomitbarua.com/entrainment718 – https://shomitbarua.com/– IG@shomijah

Artist Statement

Shomit Barua is a Japanese-born, Desi-American intermedia artist specializing inecoacoustics, responsive environments, and emergent narratives. His work is rootedin poetry and architecture, and reflects the shared tenets of contained space,economy of materials, and movement that is both physical and emotional.Combining everyday technologies with esoteric programming languages, he blursthe line between installation and performance, weaving together object, sound andimage. Digital and analog techniques are fused to investigate his core subject:corporeal presence in a physical space.

Having collaborated with sculptors, dancers, musicians, architects, and visualartists, he believes that exploration of a motif is amplified – made “robust” and“thick” – through dialogue between disciplines. He holds an MFA in Poetry fromBennington College and teaches writing at Arizona State University whilecompleting his doctoral research at ASU’s School of Arts, Media, and Engineering.

Entrainment – on display at Emerson Contemporary’s Media Art Gallery from June 11th – 14th.

MELT: the memory of ice (topographic remix), by Betsey Biggs
2025-06-11 00:00 - 2025-06-14 23:59 | Emerson Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02111, United States
Emerson Contemporary has joined hands with the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), one of the world’s largest and most prestigious gatherings of sound artists, electroacoustic composers, and music technologists from across the globe. As a part of the installation track of ICMC 2025, presenting Betsey Bigg’s MELT: the memory of ice – on display at Emerson Contemporary’s Media Art Gallery from June 11th – 14th.

Still, MELT: the memory of ice (topographic remix), 2024

Betsey made MELT after wandering around the world’s most active glacier, in Ilullisat, Greenland, with her mother and 5-year-old daughter and the film’s cinematographer, Troy Fairbanks. All synthesizers are made out of processed field recordings from this trip. The slow film stills and music are increasingly interrupted by audiovisual glitches, representing tipping points of our warming climate; the timing of these glitches was determined by a Max patch converting sea ice extent data to probability.

The vocal music was created collaboratively with the members of Moving Star vocal ensemble from an open score Betsey composed. The music was recorded by Jeff Cook at 2nd Story Sound, mixed by Michael Hammond of Big Ship Audio, and the spatial Dolby Atmos mix was created with Sean Winters. The film itself premiered at the IMAX Theatre at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

On MELT: the memory of ice, Betsey writes, “As an installation, I wanted to truly use the gallery space to do something more than just press play on a movie, to explore the imaginative possibilities of transforming and relocating the sounds and visuals, to create a new kind of space for the audience to wander through. The visual transformations, especially, allow me to understand the images in a different, more imaginary way: a kind of inner topography. So I’ve titled this installation work MELT: the memory of ice (topographic remix).“

Artist Statement

Betsey Biggs (Writer/Director/Composer) is a composer and media artist whose workconnects the dots between sound, image, place and technology. Her work has been described by the New Yorker as “psychologically complex, exposing how we orient ourselves with our ears.” For more than twenty-five years, she has composed music, created live multimedia performances, and created participatory art installations. She earned a Ph.D. in music composition at Princeton University, and has taught music, multimedia, public art, photography, and video at Brown University, RISD, and the University of Colorado Boulder, where she currently serves as Assistant Professor of Critical Media Practices.

Troy Fairbanks (Director of Photography) has a well-rounded filmmaking career as adirector, videographer, cinematographer, and drone operator. His Denver production companies, Makēda Creative and Rise Aerials, specialize in action sports, documentaries, and drone cinematography. He has created more than 800 video projects in 31 countries, with a special focus on flying FPV drones for commercial purposes. When he’s not behind the camera, you can find Troy and his wife traveling the world in their converted school bus, enjoying the outdoors and board sports, and chasing one adventure or another.

Moving Star is a vocal ensemble creating original music infused with improvisation. They are an artistic community partner of the Carnegie Hall Education Wing. The performers of Moving Star have collaborated with Meredith Monk, Julia Wolfe, Ann Hamilton, and SufjanStevens, and have performed at Zankel Hall, Whitney Museum, La MaMa, Symphony Space,and elsewhere.

MELT: the memory of ice – on display at Emerson Contemporary’s Media Art Gallery from June 11th – 14th.

Liminal by Zhitao Lin
2025-06-11 00:00 - 2025-06-14 23:59 | Emerson Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02111, United States
Emerson Contemporary has joined hands with the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), one of the world’s largest and most prestigious gatherings of sound artists, electroacoustic composers, and music technologists from across the globe. As a part of the installation track of ICMC 2025, presenting Liminal – on display at Emerson Contemporary’s Media Art Gallery from June 11th – 14th.

Still image from the documentary video Shell Art – Mother of Pearl, published by Meet Qingdao onYouTube (2023). Used here for cultural reference.

Liminal is an AI-driven audiovisual installation by Zhitao Lin that transforms tra-ditional Chinese aesthetics into a generative, interactive experience. Inspired by the mythical Peach Blossom Spring, the piece uses real-time gesture tracking to control the sound of Guqin, Xiao, and percussion, along with dynamic digital ink landscapes rendered as 3D particle systems. Only one audience member is tracked at a time, allowing for a focused and intimate interaction. Each motion becomes a brushstroke in both sound and image, creating a deeply personal and ephemeral version of this imagined utopia.At the heart of Liminal is a custom gesture-mapping system driven by computer vision. A high-frame-rate camera captures the participant’s hand and body movements in real time. The left hand triggers and modulates sounds derived from traditional Chinese percussion and xiao (bamboo flute), while the right hand controls timbral and articulatory variations of guqin-like textures, such as harmonics and arpeggios. These movements simultaneously influence a custom 3D particle system, generating visuals reminiscent of dynamic ink wash paintings. The result is an evolving visual environment that fuses digital abstraction with references to natural landscapes and lacquered ornamentation.

A Generated visual output from Liminal, illustrating gesture-driven 3D particle ink landscape.Image by Zhitao Lin.

Sound in Liminal is shaped through a real-time gestural mapping system. Using a high-frame-rate camera, the installation tracks the participant’s hand and body movements to control and modulate sonic elements derived from guqin, xiao, and percussive textures. Each gesture dynamically alters parameters such as pitch articulation, layering, and spatialization—allowing the participant to sculpt a con- tinuously evolving soundscape through motion alone.

Designed for one-on-one interaction, the installation maintains focus and clarity by tracking a single participant at a time. This enables highly responsive audio-visual interplay and encourages an intimate, reflective mode of engagement.

Each interaction becomes a unique and ephemeral composition, situated at the intersection of body, machine, and cultural resonance. Liminal invites participants into a space where gestures function as both input and authorship, transforming embodied presence into real-time audiovisual expression. It offers a sensory environment where memory, movement, and technology coalesce—evoking a digitally mediated encounter with introspection and transformation.

Artist Statement

Zhitao Lin is a forward-thinking composer whose work bridges traditional Chinese aesthetics, spectral music, and cutting-edge technology. Currently a Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) candidate in Composition at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, he also holds a Master’s degree in Composition from Peabody and a Bachelor’s degree in Music from the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on the intersection of artificial intelligence and music composition, exploring new possibilities in sound art through deep technological integration.Lin’s work spans chamber music, orchestral compositions, opera, electronic music, and multimedia sound installations, earning recognition for its fusion of cultural depth and technological innovation. By blending Chinese musical traditions with spectral techniques and AI-driven creativity, he crafts a sonic world that is both avant-garde and deeply evocative. Influenced by Zen philosophy, his compositions often evoke a surreal, mystical quality, transforming abstract musical narratives into immersive experiences. His practice continues to explore new human-machine collaborations that expand the boundaries of musical expression.

Liminal – on display at Emerson Contemporary’s Media Art Gallery from June 11th – 14th.

Foresta-Inclusive: (ex)tending towards, by Jane Tingley
2025-06-11 00:00 - 2025-06-14 23:59 | Emerson Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02111, United States
Emerson Contemporary has joined hands with the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), one of the world’s largest and most prestigious gatherings of sound artists, electroacoustic composers, and music technologists from across the globe. As a part of the installation track of ICMC 2025, presenting Foresta-Inclusive: (ex)tending towards, by Jane Tingley – on display at Emerson Contemporary’s Media Art Gallery from June 11th – 14th.

(ex)tending towards is driven by sensor data collected using the Foresta-Inclusive infrastructure at the rare Charitable Reserve in Blaire, ON. CA. This infrastructure includes three networked ecosensors that are installed unobtrusively onto the trunk of a tree and sense phenomenon such as: temperature, humidity, VOCs, particulate matter, wind, C02 and rain. The in-gallery installation is composed of three main components: 1) a visualization that images 24hrs of collected data, where the outer ring shows contemporary values and each subsequent smaller ring images the values from the previous hour, 2) a point cloud of the tree being sensed, and 3) the soundscape that sonifies the collected data. This work uses a simple gestural interaction to allow the participant to move into the 3D space of the visualization to explore the deep time of the tree’s life. The slower one moves the easier it becomes to inspect each ring of the tree’s experience.

Foresta inclusive: (ex)tending towards installed at the Ottawa School of Art Gallery Orléans. 2024.

In response to the temporal difference between tree and human individuals, this work explores ways to slow down human engagement, and to make visible the daily experience of a tree. The aim of the work is to find ways to demonstrate the absolute liveliness of the natural world as it unfolds all around us – yet more often than not beyond our limited sensory perception. The first visualization materializes data as a particle flow field that gently undulates and is affected in real time by changing data. Inspired by tree rings as evidence of yearly experience, the visualization is structured in the same manner and visualizes the last 24hrs of the tree’s life, where the outer ring shows contemporary values and each subsequent smaller ring the values from the previous hour. To interact with this visualization, there is a one-meter-tall cork cylinder that is also a scent sculpture, which releases the scent of geosmin (the scent of a forest after it rains) every time it rains in the forest.

To interact, the participant uses a simple gestural interaction to move spatially into the visualization. The slower one moves, enables the participant to inspect each ring. The interface is embedded in soil, which also contain a set of sculptural sensor pods. Next to the visualization is a point cloud visualization of the tree at the rare Charitable Reserve. The point cloud was captured by a LIDAR scan of the forest at rare using a very large drone and rendered using Touch Designer. This point cloud is also affected in real time by live data. Like the visuals, the sonic elements materialize the forest data in a generative sound experience that balances between mimicry and poetic memory of forest experience.

Fig. 2. Visualization

In its entirety this installation creates an embodied exploratory space where the deep time of a tree’s life is remembered, and the human body is slowed down in the engagement.

Artist Statement

Jane Tingley is an artist, curator, director of the SLOlab (Systems | Life | Ontologies) andAssociate Professor at York University. Her studio work combines traditional studiopractice with new media tools – and spans responsive/interactive installation,performative robotics, and telematically connected distributed sculptures/installations.Her works are interdisciplinary in nature and explore the creation of spaces andexperiences that push the boundaries between science and magic, interactivity andplayfulness.

Hrysovalanti Fereniki Maheras, also known as Hryso, is a computational art practitionerspecializing in generative audiovisual art simulations and electronic kinetic art. Shecollaborated on the sound design of this project. Currently a Ph.D. candidate inComputational Arts at York University, she also serves as a studio instructor foraudiovisual arts. Hryso’s artistic exploration involves seamlessly traversing betweenvirtual and physical technological realms, aiming to create art that investigates theemergence of a virtual analog environment within a shared, intricate physical habitat.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTSFaadhi Fauzi: Three.js Web developmentKavi – Ilze Briede: 3D modelling and Touch DesignerMarius Kintel: Firmware and MQTT VCR development

(ex)tending towards – on display at Emerson Contemporary’s Media Art Gallery from June 11th – 14th.

In Conversation: Artists Margaux Crump and Ash Eliza Williams **on ZOOM**
2025-11-06 12:00 - 13:00
Thursday, November 6 *On ZOOM* 12:00 – 1:00 PM

In Conversation: Learn how artists Margaux Crump and Ash Eliza Williams collaborate with non-human beings to create artwork. Meeting LINK .

Ash and Margaux consider the natural world an active contributor of aesthetic meaning. They will each describe their current art-making ideas and processes and discuss ideas raised by the exhibitions in which they are showing.

This is a joint program between Emerson Contemporary and Sala 1, Rome, Italy. Ash Eliza Williams is a visual artist showing in Learning with Trees, an exhibition at Sala 1 curated by Martina Tanga. Margaux Crump is a visual artist showing in a sentient land; artistic alliances with forests, beetles, salt, and air, curated by Shana Dumont Garr and opening at Emerson Contemporary, Media Art Gallery in January 2026.

Margaux Crump, photo by Feast Day / @FeastDayStudio

Margaux Crump is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher exploring the entanglements between magic, ecology, and the spiritual Imagination. Born in Houston, TX, she spent her childhood playing in gardens where she was steeped in ancestral fairy lore. These experiences wove quietly through the background of her work, until she returned to Houston after earning her MFA in studio art from Washington University in St. Louis. With a renewed interest in the folklore and myths she grew up with, she immersed herself in the study of esotericism and ecology. She is currently investigating the phenomena of the unseen, from the microscopic to the mythic worlds that surround us. Taking form primarily through sculpture, photography, painting, and ritual, her work traces threads of the mythic, magical, and imaginal across disciplines and histories in search of how they inhabit and trouble the present.

Ash Eliza Williams

Ash Eliza Williams grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains in SW Virginia. Ash is a painter and multidisciplinary artist making work about interspecies communication, non-human language, and more vibrant methods of connection. Recent exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, the Anderson Museum, and the Chautauqua Institute. Ash often works with scientists, including as an artist-in-residence at Shoals Marine Laboratory, Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, the Museum of Comparative Zoology, and Mountain Lake Biological Station as a Lucille Walton Fellow. Ash is currently a 2025 – 2026 Roswell Foundation Artist-in-Residence.

In Conversation: Artists Jack Gruman and Logan Puleikis of VHF Studio will be talking with Malic Amalya
2025-11-19 18:00 - 19:30
Wednesday, November 19, Artists talk 6:30- 7:30pm, 6pm doors –

In Conversation: Artists Jack Gruman and Logan Puleikis of VHF Studio will talk with Malic Amalya, Assistant Professor of Experimental Media and Film Production, about the conceptual underpinnings of their installation “Narcissus look back: and they love you,” that is currently on view at the Emerson Media Art Gallery until December 13th.

This embodied, multi-sensory experience with a camp aesthetic explores loneliness as a collective experience in our current moment. They will discuss the tenuous and often shifting relationship between spectator and performer, loops of identity, and the duality of being haunted/haunting. With Malic Amalaya, the artists will discuss major influences on their piece, the political and moral values intrinsic to their work, and the challenges they’ve faced making and relating to art at this socio-political moment.

VHF STUDIO is a new media collective founded by artists Jack Gruman and Logan Puleikis. As collaborators they make genre-defying installation work, blurring the boundaries of “low” and “high” art. They pull inspiration from the queer club scene, haunted houses, and popular media to create high concept large-scale multi-channel video and sound installations.

Moderated by Dr. Leonie Bradbury

Location: Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, MA

In Conversation: Nelly-Eve Rajotte and Margaux Crump
2026-01-22 12:00 - 13:00
Top: Margaux Crump, bottom: Nelly-Eve Rajotte.

In conjunction with A Sentient Land: Aesthetic Alliances with Forests, Beetles, Salt, and Air

Thursday, January 22, 2026 | 12–1 PMEmerson Contemporary25 Avery Street, Boston, MA 02111

Join artists Nelly-Eve Rajotte and Margaux Crump for an intimate conversation about their innovative practices of collaboration with the natural world.

Rajotte will discuss her work with bio-sonification and how she enables trees to generate their own sonic landscapes, including her installation Les arbres communiquent entre eux à 220 hertz, which translates forest communication into immersive audiovisual experience. Crump will share insights into her process of working with materials as co-creators, exploring how stones, beetles, and other elements inform the artistic outcome.

Together, they’ll explore questions at the heart of A Sentient Land: How do we share authorship with non-human collaborators? What does it mean to translate on behalf of materials? How can art deepen our empathy and connection across species?

This conversation offers a rare opportunity to hear directly from two artists reimagining the relationship between maker and material, challenging us to consider the agency of the more-than-human world.

Free and open to the publicNo registration required
