The List Visual Arts Center in Building E15 will open its fall exhibition season on Thursday, Oct. 9 with The Art of Detection: Surveillance in Society, which presents the work of eight contemporary artists: Bill Beirne, Niels Bonde, Diller and Scofidio, Laura Kurgan, Richard Lowenberg, Steve Mann and Julia Scher, several of whom will be present at a public opening reception that day from 5:30-7:30pm. The exhibition will remain on view through December 28.
Technological change -- producing smaller and more discreet surveillance devices, along with digital innovations in communications, entertainment and marketing, and the declassification of formerly military technologies -- has broadened the opportunities for surveillance significantly within the last decade, said Jennifer Riddell, LVAC curatorial fellow and curator of the exhibition. "The artists represented in this exhibition insert their work within this ecology of data and images, scrutinizing their flow in order to question and reflect upon the effects of surveillance -- of watching and being watched," she said.
The exhibition represents the first showing of Dr. Mann's work in wearable computing/imaging systems outside a scientific/technical context. He recently received the PhD in media arts and sciences at the Media Lab.
Also opening at the List Visual Arts Center on October 9 will be Recovering Lost Fictions: Caravaggio's Musicians, a collaborative project between contemporary artists Kathleen Gilje and Joseph Grigely which uses the recently restored painting The Musicians as a case study for an examination of how works of fine art are authenticated, valued, studied and appreciated.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on October 8, 1997.
