A portion of the museum's general operating funds for this fiscal year has been provided through grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a Federal agency that fosters innovation, leadership and a lifetime of learning, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency.

Williams College Museum of Art Presents Media Field: Old New Technologies
April 20–July 21, 2002

Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) is pleased to announce the opening of Media Field, a newly redesigned gallery space dedicated exclusively to video and new media work. The gallery’s inaugural video program, Old New Technologies, will be on view from April 20 through July 21, 2002.

WCMA’s historic Field Gallery has been converted to a media viewing space called Media Field. Originally a reading room in the college’s library, the Field Gallery is the museum’s most architecturally historic gallery, and it has been utilized for decades as a space for traditional exhibitions. While still maintaining the gallery’s nineteenth-century architectural character, the transformation to a permanent space exclusively for projected media art, emphasizes the museum’s continuing commitment to current art forms. Video is among the most important and widely used mediums for artists working today and has been established in museums for several decades. Explorations in digital, internet, sound and other forms of new media are increasing as quickly as the technology allows. Few institutions, however, have committed valuable gallery space to showing video and other forms of media work on an ongoing basis.

Media Field’s twelve-seat cinema-style arrangement encourages viewers to spend a few extra moments in the gallery and engage with time-based media works in an intimate setting. Artworks will be shown individually or consecutively as part of themed exhibitions that will change every two to three months.

Among the featured artists are Emile Devereaux, Sam Easterson, Christian Marclay, Fatimah Tobing Rony, and Leslie Thornton, Media Field’s first video program, Old New Technologies, addresses one-time cutting edge technologies that are now taken for granted. Upon their emergence, these technologies—including the train, the telephone, photography, film, space exploration, and early computing systems—dramatically altered human vision, perception of space and time, and representation. In spite of, or perhaps also due to their increasing obsolescence, many of these old “new” technologies continue to provide intriguing source material for video investigations by contemporary artists.

Leslie Thornton’s Strange Space, for example, juxtaposes interior views of the body from a medical examination with archival images of lunar probes. Emile Devereaux’s The Subtler Matter is concerned with the transmission of messages through the lens of nineteenth-century theories of ether as a medium for electromagnetic waves. On Cannibalism by Fatimah Tobing Rony shows how early medical and ethnographic uses of film helped to construct native identities for the benefit of Western consumption. Whether the use of older technologies in these videos represents a strictly aesthetic choice, the primary method of production, or the dominant subject matter of the piece, this practice suggests that there is a place for “obsolete” technology in the digital age, and more importantly, places our current technological development into perspective within a historical continuum.

Old New Technologies appears in conjunction with a video production course taught by Williams College Assistant Professor of Art, Liza Johnson and is organized by Lisa Dorin, Curatorial and Programs Assistant at WCMA

A portion of the museum’s general operating funds for this fiscal year has been provided through grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a federal agency that fosters innovation, leadership, and a lifetime of learning, and from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency. The Williams College Museum of Art is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m. Admission is free and the museum is wheelchair accessible.

The Williams College Museum of Art is a participating member in The Vienna Project, a collaboration among eleven arts and cultural institutions in the Berkshires.

Contact: Jonathan Cannon, Public Relations Coordinator
413.597.3178; WCMA@williams.edu