galleryblog @ tufts

September 8 to November 19, 2006
Tufts University Art Gallery at the Aidekman Arts Center, Medford, MA

How does technological change affect your everyday life? How many hours per day do you spend on a computer, cell phone, or other interactive digital machine? Do you choose the ATM or the bank teller window? Are you a media junkie or a neo-Luddite? The exhibition Media Machines by Austrian media artist Günther Selichar prompts you to consider these and other questions about your relationship to the “media machines” everywhere in our midst.

Over a generation ago the technology theorist Marshall McLuhan admonished that in order to harness technological change, we need to drive into the future while looking in the rear-view mirror. In this exhibition of 21 representative works spanning twenty years, Austrian media artist Günther Selichar presses the “refresh” button on McLuhan’s mantra “the medium is the message” with cutting-edge digital production techniques and a contemporary reference base.

The graphic strategies of mass media advertising have always played on viewers’ subliminal needs and desires in order to sell products. The manipulative power of “The Media” became synonymous with Madison Avenue’s seductive magic. Fast forward to the digital age: Selichar investigates how those advertising strategies of embedding a subliminal or manipulative message into the very structure of the image persist in the engineering and design of the ubiquitous digital machines and interfaces that deliver the information we consume and structure the way we communicate. Selichar uses various specialized cameras to expose hidden or obscured structures that the human eye cannot see, such as “cold” computer screens (turned off), film and video lamps, and the stand-by and test mode of television and computer screens.

The Tufts University Art Gallery (Medford, MA) is pleased to present the first major survey exhibition in the United States of Günther Selichar’s work as well as a mobile public art intervention taking place at different sites around the Boston metro area this fall.

Günther Selichar was born in 1960 in Linz, Austria and lives and works in Vienna. He studied art history and classical archeology at the University of Salzburg and at the Art Institute of Chicago. He has exhibited extensively since 1983.

Who’s Afraid of Blue, Red, and Green? Public Art Intervention

Selichar extrapolates his concerns with colored screen surfaces to the public realm in several public art “interventions” he has staged since 1993. He has orchestrated these interventions at venues in New York City, Shanghai, China, various European cities, and now in Boston. To learn more about Selichar’s public art interventions visit www.selichar.net, a new website launching on September 20.

In Boston, Selichar’s public art intervention is mobile and co-opts traditional advertising space. He typed the word “embedded” on a computer, photographed the screen, and enlarged it to monumental (9 ft. high x 52 ft. long) proportions, employing the rectangular aspect ratio of Cinemascope screens, a format well suited to a tractor trailer. Concept and image are perfectly united in this project. Look for it around campus and around town, and tell us what you think!

This blog and a photography competition let you become part of the action. Email your photograph of the public encountering this public art project to: galleryphotocontest@tufts.edu. A panel including the artist will judge the photographs and the winner will receive an iPod.