Emerson Contemporary

Public Encounters: Using New Media Technologies to Build Community Violeta Ayala
2021-03-17 18:00 - 20:00 (America/New_York)
Join artist, writer, and film director Violeta Ayala as she discusses the making of “Prison X: The Devil and The Sun,” an immersive ‘play’ staged in VR created using the 3-D painting technology Tilt Brush. Set in Bolivia’s San Sebastian prison, “Prison X: The Devil and The Sun” immerses participants into the social dynamics of the prison while simultaneously placing them in a world of Incan and Quechan mythology.
Violeta Ayala is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, artist and technologist. She is the first Quechua member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Violeta’s credits include the VR animation Prison X (2021) and the award-winning documentaries Cocaine Prison (2017), The Fight (2017), The Bolivian Case (2015) and Stolen (2009). Her films have premiered at A-List film festivals including Sundance and Toronto, distributed in cinemas, broadcasted on PBS, Channel 8, Señal Colombia, Ibermedia, World and online platforms such as Amazon Prime and The Guardian. She has won over 50 awards including a Walkley (Australia’s Pulitzer) and nominations for the IDA (Los Angeles), Rory Peck (London), Platino (Panama) and Fenix (Mexico). Artist website: www.violetaayala.com.

Public Encounters: Using New Media Technologies to Build Community featuring Pierre Friquet
2021-03-10 18:00 - 20:00
In part 1 of this 3-part public programming series, Pierre Friquet, Violeta Ayala and Pamela Hersch share how they use emergent technologies to build and connect new communities online and in person.

Join artist and immersive interactive designer Pierre Friquet as he discusses VR, narrative design and traumatology. Via tools of fiction like world-building and innovation like social VR, Friquet explores how we can build connections and a sense of belonging in digital space. The talk is addressed to artists, designers, developers and psychologists, or whoever interested in seizing the opportunity of VR to create virtual worlds and online communities.

Pierre Friquet is a digital artist who creates immersive worlds. His intent is to make people reconnect with their body and sense of self through art and technology. Coming from a film background, Friquet focuses on creating content for the 3rd digital revolution, which is designing Reality through spatial computing. Passionate in virtual reality since 2010, he has designed more than a dozen XR experiences (interactive, fiction, documentaries, dome, music videos). His latest independent VR work is SPACED OUT, selected at Sundance New Frontier 2020. It’s an aquatic VR experience which uses the first waterproof VR headset by Ballast Technologies, that allows users to be submerged in a swimming pool while breathing from a snorkel. Artist’s website: https://pierrefriquet.net/

Tamiko Thiel: Rewilding the City
2021-02-18 14:30 - 16:00
Tamiko Thiel: Rewilding the City
Please click the link to join the webinar.
Join artist Tamiko Thiel for a virtual artist talk and AR workshop. Thiel’s artworks explore the intersection of space, place and cultural memory. Thiel’s most recent AR project ReWildAR offers a vision of how Washington D.C. can be ‘rewilded’ to create a thriving, sustainable environment for nature in the city.
In the first half of the event, Thiel will give an artist talk with a general yet personal overview of different technologies and uses for VR and AR art. The second half will present a deeper dive into topics ranging from dramatic structure for interactive experiences to platform choices to address conservation and archiving of artworks.
Participants are encouraged to download ARpoise, Thiel’s free and open source app, from the App Store or Play Store. Upon opening the apps there is a list of demo works by her and her partner /p. During the talk, she will give tips for viewing other artworks of theirs on ARpoise around the world.
Artist website and Instagram
This event is co-presented by Boston CyberArts

Kerry Tribe: Artist Talk + Screening
2021-01-26 18:00 - 20:30
Kerry Tribe Artist Talk and Screening
Bright Family Screening Room, Paramount Center, 559 Washington St. Boston, MA
Wednesday, March 16, 6:30pm – 8:00pm (in person). Artist Reception to follow
Please join us for this special, in person event held in conjunction with the exhibition Onomatopoeia on view in the Media Art Gallery until March 27, 2022. Tickets are available at the Paramount Center Box Office starting at 5:30pm on the day of the event (Wed, Mar 16). Tickets are free and general admission.

Tribe will present a lecture and screening of several early autobiographical videos including Here & Elsewhere, (2002) a two-channel projection featuring British film critic and theoretician Peter Wollen and his daughter Audrey. As the interview unfolds, their conversation touches on history, memory, intersubjectivity, temporality, epistemology and photography; H.M. (2009) a two-channel presentation of a single film based on the true story of an anonymous, memory-impaired man, the famous amnesiac known in scientific literature only as “Patient H.M.” In 1953, when he was 27 years old, H.M. underwent experimental brain surgery intended to alleviate his epilepsy.The unintended result was a radical and persistent amnesia. The Aphasia Poetry Club (2015) A cinematic-scale three-channel video installation narrated by three individuals who have aphasia, a neurological condition caused by damage to the language centers of the brain. As they share their thoughts and stories, their words trigger elaborate arrangements of character animation, still photographs, and live action footage.

Presented by Emerson Contemporary and The School of The Arts at Emerson College

Bundlehouse: Rising into Something Else
2020-10-27 08:00 - 2020-11-24 17:00
Bundlehouse: Rising into Something Else is a multi-media exhibition distributed across Emerson College’s campus that features performative videos, photographs, and new works on paper by Nyugen Smith, a first-generation Caribbean-American artist based in Jersey City, NJ.
The subtitle for this exhibition Rising into Something Else is taken from a scene in the book The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates, where the enslaved protagonist Hiram Walker begins to drown while attempting to save the slavemaster’s son from drowning in a river. As Hiram begins to go under, he remembers ‘legions of the lost,’ and while he descends feels himself ‘rising into something else.’ Smith explores water as an in-between space with vast potentialities: water as history, as culture, as memory and metaphor for the plight of Africans in the diaspora, complicated by the legacy of slavery.
The project is a metaphor for the traumatic experiences that people of color face in the United States, further instigated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Smith recognized the point during the pandemic where he himself felt as if he was sinking in ‘the water’ and when he began ‘rising into something else’. According to Smith, we are at a moment in time as a society, where collectively, Black people are ‘rising into something else’. Not lost in all of this, is the fact that we are living through a pivotal moment of a changing climate where water is bringing upon us an unprecedented level of devastation around the globe and within this, we are collectively ‘rising into something else’.
The exhibition takes place across multiple locations and times, and extends Smith’s ongoing Bundlehouse series that was developed as a response to the past and present conditions of African diaspora with the aim of creating a vision of renewed futurity. The various sites of this exhibition are distinctly transitory, as the exhibition materializes within the liminalities of sidewalks, hallways, lobbies, and other threshold spaces. These placements, although informed by Covid-19 safety precautions, poignantly echo the artist’s larger project: self-becoming in life’s in-between spaces.

Memorials: As Monuments Fall. Panel: Artist Activist Tory Bullock, Art Historian Cher Krause Knight, Artist Activist Zsuzsanna Szegedi.
2020-10-14 18:30 - 20:00
The two Memorials panels are organized in collaboration with Professors Anya Belkina and Cher Krause Knight, and inspired by their co-taught class Boston Memorials Revisited and Reimagined: Public Art and Virtual Modeling. Bringing together artists, activists, architects, urban planners, and scholars, the conversation centers around issues of memorial design and how our relationships to memorials can be understood and contextualized in terms of audience response.
The recent surge in the removal of public monuments—whether by the public and/or by the cities and towns that own them—will be our topic this evening. Panel: Artist Activist Tory Bullock, Art Historian Cher Krause Knight, Artist Activist Zsuzsanna Szegedi. Moderated by Curator Leonie Bradbury.

Video and Digital Art Drive In, Area Code Art Fair
2020-08-20 08:00 - 17:00
The Area Code Art Fair drive-in screening offered a wide selection of artistic content, ranging from abstract glitch art, computer generated rhythms and sounds, and Zoom karaoke, to moving personal testimonials and critical, documentary short films. You can review a complete list of artists. In addition to the screening, the Drive In displayed six independent light projections created by Liz Nofziger, Maria Servellon, Zsuzsanna Szegedi, Ellen Wetmore, and Stephanie Benenson’s “Harbor Voices,” to be showcased directly onto the walls of Salem State University’s O’Keefe Sports Complex. Their selections were accompanied by a creative light installation on the glass facade of the complex by light artist Joey Nicotera of Retonica.

Read more about the process and project details on Emerson Today.
The drive-in took place in conjunction with AREA CODE—New England’s first art fair dedicated exclusively to regional artists—and in collaboration with the North Shore’s Creative Collective, Salem State University Center for Creative and Performing Arts, and City of Salem. The evening event is sponsored by LuminArtz, a non-profit organization that highlights local and regional artists who create innovative light art experiences.
The event was curated by Dr. Leonie Bradbury, Distinguished Curator-in Residence at Emerson College. Emerson Contemporary’s Exhibitions Manager Jim Manning serves as the Manager of Digital Content and Pamela Hersch of LuminArtz is the Technical Director of the event. The one-night experience was organized in partnership with John Andrews of Creative Collective, an organization that works to support and provide opportunities to the creative workforce across the North Shore. Special thanks to the City of Salem and Mayor Kimberley Driscoll for supporting this project and the creative community.

Subversive Dreams: Allison Maria Rodriguez
2020-08-01 08:00 - 2020-09-13 17:00
Emerson Contemporary, presents “Subversive Dreams,” an exhibition featuring digital video animations by Cuban-American visual artist Allison Maria Rodriguez.
The exhibition is also featured as a Special Project in the AREA CODE Art Fair, New England’s first art fair dedicated exclusively to regional artists. Images from the exhibition are available.

“Subversive Dreams” features work from the “Legends Breathe” series, an ongoing project based on interviews with different female-identified and non-binary artists about childhood fantasies that assisted them in overcoming trauma. This project speaks to a strategy of survival activated through the power of creativity and invokes the imaginary, a force that is socially embraced in youth, but suppressed in adulthood.
Each of the six videos, which are installed together as an interactive installation, explores these individual fantasies, highlighting their uniqueness, their commonalities, and their inherent power. One primary element evident in all the fantasies is a harvesting of strength and transcendence through a deep connection to the natural world. The work is populated by endangered species and threatened habitats, conveying a link between the trauma and healing of our planet to that of the individual.
Artist Statement: “There is power in creativity. There is strength in reimagining.”
“Subversive Dreams” reclaims the concept of fantasy as a tool of empowerment for social change, not as a method of escapism. Declared worthless in a capitalist society centered around white patriarchal notions of productivity, fantasy and play are the building blocks in creating something new – they are exercises in resistance and in the possibility of reimagining our world.
Operating at the intersection of environmental and social justice, this work also illustrates a harvesting of strength and transcendence through a deep connection to the natural world. It conveys a link between the trauma and healing of our planet to that of the individual. Ultimately, “Subversive Dreams” emphasizes the interconnection of our universe and celebrates the power of the imagination and its crucial role in the process of actualizing new ways of being.
This project was funded in part by a grant from The CreateWell Fund.
About Allison Maria Rodriguez
Allison Maria Rodriguez is a first-generation Cuban-American interdisciplinary artist working predominantly in video installation and new media. She creates immersive experiential spaces that challenge conventional ways of knowing and understanding the world. Her work focuses extensively on climate change, species extinction and the interconnectivity of existence.
Through video, performance, digital animation, photography, drawing, collage and installation, Rodriguez merges and blends mediums to create new pictorial spaces for aesthetic, emotional and conceptual exploration. She uses art to communicate beyond language – to open up a space of possibility for the viewer to encounter alternative ways of connecting to the emotional realities of others.
About AREA CODE
On view August 1-31, 2020, AREA CODE is an inaugural art fair presenting work by contemporary artists with ties to New England. Informed by values of collective intelligence, transparent experimentation, and open access in the wake of COVID-19, the Fair has been developed in collaboration with a volunteer team of Boston-area curators, and will be free for exhibitors and viewers.
Through online and decentralized in-person experiences across Boston, the Fair will feature works from New England’s most inspiring art galleries, nonprofit organizations, and individual artists (including recent graduate students) without gallery representation. Along with the Fair’s Main Section, AREA CODE will debut curated sections of performance art, drive-in or drive-by outdoor presentations of digital/video art, and storefront displays, along with live programming. For more information: www.areacodeartfair.com.

Investigating the Material feat. Sarah Trahan and Zsuzsanna Szegedi
2020-02-23 14:00 - 16:00
Join us for an intimate conversation in the gallery with spacetime artists Trahan and Szegedi and the exhibition curator as they discuss their experiences collaborating with machines as each artist investigates digital technology through its imperfections. Learn what happens when the work of art has no center and exists across multiple media, both virtual and real, as it manifests the various stages of an unfolding process.

Spacetime (x, y, x + t) is a multi-dimensional exhibition that features experimental works by regional and international artists, features digital projections, 3D printed objects, inkjet prints, virtual reality drawings, video, site specific light installation, and a dancing robot.

Performativity of Objects feat. Katherine Mitchell DiRico and Nicole L’Huillier
2020-02-02 14:00 - 16:00
Join us for an intimate conversation in the gallery with spacetime artists DiRico and L’Huillier and the exhibition curator as they explore non-human performativity through movement, sound, and light. We’ll discuss the agency of objects and how the art works on display are in a continual state of becoming.
Spacetime (x, y, x + t) is a multi-dimensional exhibition that features experimental works by regional and international artists, features digital projections, 3D printed objects, inkjet prints, virtual reality drawings, video, site specific light installation, and a dancing robot.

Spacetime (x, y, z + t)
2020-01-21 08:00 - 2020-03-15 17:00
Katherine Mitchell DiRico, Stilling Time. 2020. Mixed media installation.
Spacetime (x, y, z + t) is a multi-dimensional exhibition in the Emerson Contemporary Media Art Gallery that features experimental works by regional and international artists Katherine Mitchell DiRico (US), Monika Grzymala (GER), Nicole L’Huillier (CL), Zsuzsanna Szegedi (HUN), and Sarah Trahan (US).
The exhibition features digital projections, 3D printed objects, inkjet prints, VR drawings, video, site specific light installation, and a dancing robot. In putting together this exhibition, Bradbury considered how our perceptions are challenged and consequently change when artists include a durational element into an otherwise object-based artistic practice. Additionally, Spacetime includes both subtle and dramatic sonic elements that, when combined with drastic scale shifts of the various installations, contribute to a compelling immersive exhibition experience.
https://vimeo.com/430152669?share=copy

The works included in Spacetime (x, y, z + t) investigate the dynamic relationships between objects, their materiality, and demonstrate how an idea, object, or artistic concept can ‘travel’ across time, multiple media, and physical locations. Together these five artists’ aesthetic experiments offer an exploration of the rapidly changing intersections between the physical and the digital, objecthood and performativity, and expose how the virtual and the real interact in new ways as a result of current technological advancements.
According to curator Dr. Leonie Bradbury, “What interests me in these works is a broader theoretical concept of ‘art as event.’ These objects, ideas, and material manifestations are assembled as dynamic relational forms, but only temporarily, as they will soon be dismantled and re-distributed back into the studio, the file cabinet, or returned to a computer folder. As such, these works – and this exhibition – are in a continual state of becoming.”
In 1905, Albert Einstein demonstrated that space and time are both relative and integrated and are essentially the same thing: a single unified entity called ‘spacetime.’ Spacetime is a dynamic entity that fuses the three dimensions of space (x,y,z) and the dimension of time (t) into a single, four-dimensional continuum. In curating the exhibit, Bradbury explored the question of what happens when an artwork becomes an event that exists in the four dimensions of Einstein’s concept of ‘spacetime’ – rather than as an object in space and/or time.
About the Artwork
Katherine Mitchell DiRico‘s room-sized installation Stilling Life in the Project Room brings together an assembly of technology, objects, video, movements, and light to question the constructed nature of reality. These materials exist in varying degrees of completion, imploring us to combine their relationships anew each time they transform. Traversing between the virtual and the material, and quite literally between two separate spaces in the gallery, Stilling Life challenges the viewer’s ability to locate oneself in time and space. Various materials – light, air, mirrors, reflections– are moving at different rhythms to create a dynamic installation that is always changing, and therefore continually becoming; much like current relationships to the real and mediatized worlds we inhabit.
Monika Grzymala’s virtual landscapes Maze_VR_one and Maze_VR_two, are autonomous, immersive, spatial drawings, designed to exist in virtual reality (VR) and can be understood as simulated spatial structures. When the viewer puts on the VR headset, they “fly” through a seemingly endless web of lines, a spherical, cosmic-looking installation while listening to the soothing sound of the artist’s heart beat. These VR drawings are an extension of Grzymala’s sculptural practice whereby she creates room sized sculptural installations using tape called “space drawings” or raumzeichnung in German. On view will be Raumzeichnung (stretch), a video work that shows the deconstruction of such a site-specific drawing and one-time kinetic sculpture (duration 7 minutes) that took place in 2016 as part of a collaborative performance project.
Nicole L’Huillier‘s robotic sculpture The Dancer (2020) explores the performativity of an object as it moves across space and ‘draws’ through movement in time. The result is an unstable and irregular vibrational dance triggered by sounds emerging from its own body as the resonant frequencies of its material composition causes the object to move. Thus The Dancer dances as a way of embodying its own noise. This object is animated by sounds that are drawn as a dance across space and time. Exploring other levels of animacy and performativity, this vibrational body exists in a continuous dialogue between gravity, resonance, and trance.
Zsuzsanna Szegedi‘s latest work In the Fracture (2018-2020)explores the dynamics of control between human and machine, made visible through the lens of digital photography and related physical outcomes. Using a 3D image scan of her body as a point of origin, Szegedi visualizes the human-machine power dynamics through a virtual reality video simulation, a digital projection on raw clay and two 3D printed prototypes. While exploring the dimensions of space and time within the digital photographic imaging process, Szegedi shows how this medium produces distortion, breakage, and a disrupted image. In doing so, she magnifies the limitations of current imaging technologies.
Sarah Trahan’s multimedia installation Hand of the Machine (2019 – 2020) investigates digital manufacturing through its imperfections. What we commonly understand as a uniform and infinitely repeatable dialog between user, computer, and 3D printer belies a much more nuanced and imperfect system. Communication breakdowns, bugs, and evidence of the unpredictable nature of hot plastic become apparent as we look more closely. Impressions, abstractions, and mutations are interpreted through lenses, light, and ink. Hand of the Machine halts the fabrication process to focus on these aberrant details: anomalies build up, forms break down, and are reconstituted into new structures ripe for exploration.

Indigenous storytelling with Larry Spotted Crow Mann
2019-12-08 14:00 - 16:00
Join award winning author, poet, and Nipmuc storyteller Larry Spotted Crow Mann as he contextualizes the exhibition with local histories, traditional stories, and poetry. The art of Native American storytelling has been passed down for thousands of years. They give life and meaning to everything in the Universe and offer lessons of love, courage, kindness, respect, humility, truth, and wisdom. The stories teach us the skills to interact with our environment as a living being and codify those teachings within our own existence.
About the artist
Larry Spotted Crow Mann is a citizen of the Nipmuc Tribe of Massachusetts. He is an award winning writer, poet, cultural educator, Traditional Storyteller, tribal drummer, dancer and motivational speaker involving youth sobriety, cultural and environmental awareness. Mann is also a board member of the Nipmuk Cultural Preservation,an organization set up to promote the cultural, social and spiritual needs of Nipmuc people that also serves as an educational resource of Native American studies.

“Future Traditions: Theorizing the Native Avant Garde” Talk by Emerson professor Dr. Adam Spry
2019-10-24 18:00 - 19:00
What does it mean for Native writers and artists to embrace the avant garde, along with its deep mistrust of the traditional? In this talk, Dr. Spry will discuss the history of the rise of Native American experimental art and literature in the 20th and 21st centuries—and its surprising roots in the U.S.’s efforts to promote the idea of Native artistic ‘tradition.’

Future Ancestral Technologies: nágshibi
2019-10-17 08:00 - 2019-12-15 17:00
Cannupa Hanska Luger’s Future Ancestral Technologies: nágshibi is a multi-media Indigenous-centered science fiction exhibition using creative storytelling to radically reimagine the future and promote a thriving Indigeneity. Nágshibi is the Hidatsa word for ‘to be past, to be after’ or ‘to exceed, to go beyond.’ The exhibition, an approach to creating art objects, videos, and performance with the intent to influence global consciousness, included a 21-foot tall canvas tipi, a two channel video installation, performative video works, photography, and ceremonial regalia created by the artist.
https://vimeo.com/430149890?share=copy
Regarding Future Ancestral Technologies, Nagshibi, Cannupa Luger states: “In this ongoing series, I prototype designs for objects and their use. I test rituals and conduct ceremonies. This project operates with the assumption that these ‘artworks’ will become customary in the future. I create a space of futuristic vision in which societies are nomadic, tipis are solar-powered, and humans create their own functional regalia to live through ceremony in acknowledgement of land.”
About the exhibition
Future Ancestral Technologies debuted in 2018 in the form of an immersive exhibition at the University of South Dakota. A series of land-acknowledgment performative actions have since followed and manifest as video works, several of which will be on view in the Emerson Contemporary Media Art Gallery. The project continues through the prototyping of dwellings, clothing, tools, and videos that illustrate a world in which artificial intelligence and virtual reality support ritual and ceremony. Though currently viewed via exhibitions and in other art world contexts, this project operates under the assumption that these artworks will become useful in the future.
Exhibition Reviews
Boston Globe
Boston Art Review

Cannupa Hanska Luger: Indigenous Science Fiction, The Imagination and Long-Term Thinking
2019-10-16 18:00 - 19:30
A reception was held Wednesday, October 16, in the Jackie Liebergott Black Box Theater at Emerson’s Paramount Center, 559 Washington Street, followed by the talk Indigenous Science Fiction, The Imagination and Long-Term Thinking, where artist Cannupa Hanska Luger was in conversation with author and historian of science Dr. Jimena Canales. The conversation was presented by Emerson’s Media Art Gallery and Long Now Boston, an organization that fosters long term thinking. It was moderated by Dr. Leonie Bradbury, Henry and Lois Foster Chair of Contemporary Art Theory and Practice and Distinguished Curator-in-Residence at Emerson College.

GlitchKraft Artist Talk: Allison Tanenhaus, Ben Foley, and Lauren Klotzman
2019-10-03 12:30 - 15:30
Artist Talk Featuring exhibiting artists Allison Tanenhaus, Ben Foley, and Lauren Klotzman
Video Art Performance MEMORY RECOVERY : : AFTERDARK REVISITED by Lauren Klotzman.

GlitchKraft Artist Talk: Alex Kittle
2019-09-20 12:00 - 13:30
Artist Talk featuring illustrator, art historian, and film curator Alex Kittle
Since 2018, Kittle has been devoted to women filmmakers, creating portraits and zine biographies as a way to share their stories and works in an accessible way. She also co-hosts a monthly screening series and discussion group called Strictly Brohibited, which highlights women-made films in a welcoming community for women and non-binary film fans. Visit @panandscan and @strictlybrohibited for more information.

GlitchKraft Glitch Workshop
2019-09-14 12:00 - 15:00
Glitch Workshop with Allison Tanenhaus
One-on-one guidance on iPads (and BYO devices), with preloaded images and apps.
