‘Invisible city’ comes alive in new Emerson course

Aaron Fry and Amber Davis

Students in a course at Emerson are finding themselves turned into urban artists.

The class of about 20 is composed of artists, writers, photographers, new media majors and filmmakers from colleges in the ProArts Consortium, including Emerson, Berkelee College of Music, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts School, and Massachusetts College of Art. Most of the projects are collaborative.

The students are “really excited about intervening into a public space,” says Fry. Some students are even asking ‘Are we really allowed to do this?’ when considering working in the public sphere of city life. “That question is important because students need to build in an awareness of legal issues and an awareness of boundaries between private and public spaces into their proposals,” said Fry.

Instructors Fry and Davis think of the city as made up of the ‘invisible cities’ of the past. “The city is composed of this matrix of maps superimposed on each other to the point they become a sort of texture, and there are visible traces of those previous plans, schemes and urban systems in evidence in any urban space,” as Fry puts it. “But they become just that – traces. Invisible!”

 Davis adds, “We want to make the city visible to [the students].” In considering this “matrix,” students have to think like archaeologists, geographers, social historians and urban planners and also evaluate “how they see themselves as multidisciplinary artists and students in the city,” says Davis.

 One project has students searching for those spots in the city where pay phones once were before the popularity of the cellular telephone skyrocketed. The students plan on leaving a cell phone or speaker in the space to create a “phantom ring” or a “residual presence,” as Davis and Fry put it. When students gather to critique such an intervention, offers Davis, one suggestion might be “to take it further, to replace the ringing with a conversation, creating multiple narratives.”

 Students are also creating what are called “detournments,” that is, projects that “take content – an image, motifs – from the city and re-orient and reposition it in its original or in another context,” explains Fry. Possible presentations could be performative work out in the city or photographic documentation of an altered sign, for example, where an artist alters both male and female restrooms signs “to create two identical neutrally gendered signs by masking some graphic features of the figure while adding other features,” said Fry, recalling an example from a class he taught at Massachusetts College of Art.

 “Some of the work is quite political or quite socially oriented, and some of it experiments with space in more formal ways,” Fry says.

 Davis excitedly explains one group’s idea to use the imagery of a popular advertising campaign to make a social commentary on the current same-sex marriage debate in Massachusetts. The campaign, for Macintosh’s iPod MP3 player, uses dancing silhouette figures in which “the sweep of the hair or type of clothing gives the impression of an identity that’s ethnic or racial,” she explains. The students are hoping to play off that ad by projecting or stenciling a similarly styled image of a same-sex couple” on an existing iPod poster, creating “site-specific public art,” says Davis.

 One group of students proposed creating a “sound fill” where they would use pre-recorded sounds like cars passing and subway doors opening to fill in the silent spaces in the city. “You would end up with a continuous kind of roar, actually a combination of natural, phenomenal sound [with a] reconstituted artificial sound,” Fry explained of this audio project.

Both instructors point out that the class website is crucial to the course: “We’re hoping it will encourage students to think collaboratively and think outside of their various institutions,” said Fry. The web can be a gallery space, a production space and space for communication, the professors explain. Students can also be involved in building the site, can archive chat sessions about class topics, and can use the site for portfolio space.

While studio-centered, the course is also about research and scholarship and students examine texts that run the gamut – from the flaneur (one who strolls about aimlessly as an urban observer and occasional recorder of events) of Paris in the late 19th century to the European and American Conceptual Art interventions of the 1960-1970s to contemporary Boston.

 Aaron Fry is an artist and educator who has taught at Waikato Institute of Technology and Massey University and is currently at Massachusetts College of Art, where he teaches studio foundations and animation.

 Amber Davis is an artist and is on the faculty at Massachusetts College of Art and Princeton University, where she teaches courses in photography and new media.