New Media Wall
Adjacent to the Tisch Gallery

Continuous screenings of art works in video and film adjacent to the Tisch Gallery entrance during Aidekman Arts Center hours.

Summer 2008
Harmony in the Age of Noise

Live video feed from Harmony in the Age of Noise. Anthropologist and poet David Guss, sound artist Bruce Odland, sculptor Mark McNamara, media artist Michael Luck Schneider, and over 80 undergraduates and grad students, faculty, and staff at Tufts University collaborated on the design and building of a sonic observation post that allows visitors to navigate through sound maps of the campus and surrounding community.

April 2008
art:21, 2007

Who are some of today's most fascinating artists? How do they work and why? Meet contemporary artists at work and speaking in their own words—direct, accesible, and unfiltered—in Season four of the Emmy-nominated series Art:21—Art in the 21st Century.

January 17-March 30, 2008
Ivan Navarro: Homeless lamp, the juice sucker, 2004-5

One of three works by Ivan Navarro on exhibit at Tufts in Spring 2008. Click here to learn more.

September 6 -December 23, 2007
Yuri Makoveychuk: The Institute, 2002

Yuri Makoveychuk is an artist, animator, and film producer based in Mongolia and New York City, with an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The Institute is a 20-minute animated film featuring a soundtrack by Taylor Deupree, Zoviet France, DJ Spooky, and others.

A patient enrolled at a specialized research facility becomes aware that the treatment he is receiving leads to immortality. Unfortunately, immortality has some unexpected side effects. Is science and technological progress a panacea or just a comforting fantasy, a utopian trust unable to illuminate a human condition?

June/July 2007
Peter Fischli and David Weiss: The Way Things Go, 1987

Inside a warehouse, artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss build an enormous, precarious structure 100 feet long made out of common household items. Then, with fire, water, gravity, and chemistry, they create a spectacular chain reaction.

April 2007
Jonathon Kirk: i've got a guy running, 2006

The visual elements of the video were created through an interactive edge-detection algorithm used with military combat footage of the Iraq War released by the U.S. Department of Defense. The images gradually progress from completely abstract and pixilated to still digitized but transparent of their source. The audio is a mixture of the extracted sounds from the video, as well as original music composed for the piece by the artist.

Digitally processing this video and audio explores the contention that the nature of war is becoming a purely visual perception. Simulation, media distortions, simultaneity, and the emergence of high-speed, ephemeral technologies have permanently changed the experience of the horrors of war (except, of course, for those wounded or killed).

NEW MEDIA WALL ARCHIVE:

January 2007
Jun Yang: Jun Yang and Soldier Woods, 2000

This short video deals with the question of translation by exploring how the pronunciations, interpretations, and associations of the artist’s name vary in different cultural contexts. The artist’s story examines the intricate relationship between name and identity. A common name in China, “Jun Yang” was re-spelled, re-written, and re-spoken in numerous different ways after the artist immigrated to Austria at age 4. The name was alien to the Europeans he encountered, and their misuse of it rendered it alien to the artist himself. For every country in which this video is shown, Yang re-titles it by translating his name, “Jun Yang,” from his original dialect into the native tongue of the exhibiting country. France gets “Soldat DuBois,” in Austria they know it as “Soldat Holzer,” and here we exhibit “Soldier Woods.”

September 8 — November 19, 2006
Günther Selichar, Who's Afraid of Blue, Red, and Green?, 2006

A photography competition lets you become part of the action of the public intervention designed by Günther Selichar as part of his exhibition Media Machines at the Tufts University Art Gallery. Can you find it and what is your reaction to it? Submit a photograph of the public art project to galleryphotocontest@tufts.edu. Submissions are featured in a slideshow on the New Media Wall. A panel that includes the artist will judge the photographs and the winner will receive a prize.

June—July, 2006
art:21, 2003

Who are some of today's most fascinating artists? How do they work and why? Meet contemporary artists at work and speaking in their own words—direct, accesible, and unfiltered—in Season two of the Emmy-nominated series Art:21—Art in the 21st Century.

April—May, 2006
Artur Zmijewski, 80064, 2003

Polish new media artist Artur Zmijewski orchestrates provocative experiments then records them with a movie camera and edits them into a meaningful whole. In 80064, Zmijewski endeavors to persuade a 92-year old Polish survivor of Auschwitz to "restore" his prison number tattoo. The artist's main objective is not to persuade the man one way or the other, but to record human psychology, sociology, and dialogue through the filmic experiment.

January - April 2006
Juan Manuel Echavarría, Bocas del Ceniza (Mouths of Ash), 2003

Juan Manuel Echavarría's Bocas del Ceniza is named after the mouth of the Magdalena River in Colombia, where bodies of war victims thrown into its waters wash up. The video depicts a series of performances focusing on the emotive faces of Colombian citizens who have witnesses massacres at the hands of paramilitary forces and guerillas. Each individual sings a song that he or she wrote, in an effort to heal the emotional scars of survival and re-create identity in the face of loss.

September - November 2005
Günther Selichar, Granturismo, 2002 (DVD, 5 min., 10 sec.)

Austrian new media artist Günther Selichar puts the viewer "in the driver's seat" in a fast-paced car ride through the countryside, a trip that conceptually parallels the evolution of painting from Renaissance one-point perspective to Modernist, "all-over" abstract compositions.

April 5–May 22, 2005
Joshua Mosley, Commute, 2003 (mixed media animation, 5 min.)

Commute is a hero's journey through the moon. A small hole leads to a search for "equilibrium." Warnings from a tour guide, who is based on the imaginative writings of Descartes, have no effect. The animation digitally incorporates stop-motion clay figures and rapidly cycling charcoal drawings.

February 10–March 27, 2005
Alex McQuilkin, Get Your Gun Up , 2002 (DVD, 2 min. 30 sec.) and Teenage Daydream: In Vain, 2002–03 (DVD, 1 min. 54 sec.)

Alex McQuilkin's provocative videos explore the fictional time and space that hovers between authentic existence and cinematic fantasy. Get Your Gun Up explores "female machoism" and competition through the typically male lens of the Spaghetti Western film. This psychological showdown borrows from Sergio Leon's The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, replacing guns with sexuality. The threat of death is transformed into a conceptual death via defeat.

Teenage Daydream: In Vain adopts the form of a music video. Fiction and reality clash violently as the protagonist struggles to hold on to an imaginary stardom.

September–October 2004
Kocot and Hatton, Flag, 2001 (DVD, approx. 41 min.)

Philadelphia-based conceptual artists Kocot and Hatton taped the American flag during an evening thunderstorm on the New Jersey coast using a stationary camera. This unedited, meditative video presents the flag in a distinctly non-iconic manner—limp and wet, bandied about by a storm at night with only a nearby spotlight as a light source—and invites viewers to contemplate the meaning of the flag as a symbol of nationalism and patriotism.

November–December 2004
Christian Nerf, Polite Force , 2002 (DVD, 5 min.)

South African artist Christian Nerf videotaped a performance at the entrance of the World Trade Center in Johannesburg on September 11, 2002, one year to the day after the terrorist attacks in the U.S., in which the artist, outfitted in police riot gear, politely greets visitors from behind a clear shield in which the letter "t" has replaced the letter "c".