Coming to a Screen Near You

Look up from your phone—two exhibits are offering larger, higher-tech screens to gaze at this spring.

Photo by Johnna Arnold

Digital artist Camille Utterback’s interactive installation Entangled (above) uses a software program to track visitors’ movements and translate them into trippy visuals projected on a two-sided 10-by-15-foot screen. On display through April 22 at the new Emerson Urban Arts: Media Art Gallery, the “Genius Grant” recipient’s piece is being presented in concert with Cybernetic Serendipity, a look back at a 1968 London show regarded by many as the first digital media art exhibition. Meanwhile at Le Laboratoire Cambridge, new exhibit Life in Picoseconds is making use of Atom Screens, technology created by Harvard scientists and French design team Millimètre that sandwiches swirling particles between glass panels. Through June 12, the screens will serve as ever-evolving canvases for Daniel Faust’s photos of Silicon Valley as well as a film by Charles Reilly (below), a video artist and a scientist at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.

THE IMPROPER’S 2017 SPRING ARTS PREVIEW: COMEDY | THEATER | MUSIC | DANCE | FILM