By Tom Moore

Watch three QuickTime clips about the exhibition:
Artist *John Roach discusses Transmissions from Beyond
Artist *Miya Masaoka discusses Piece for Plants
Co-curator *Mark Alice Durant discusses the exhibition

From October 20 through December 17, UMBC’s Center for Art and Visual Culture (CAVC) presents “Blur of the Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technology, and the Paranormal,” organized at the CAVC by Mark Alice Durant and Jane D. Marsching. This major traveling exhibition features 28 contemporary artists whose work employs modern communication technologies (photography, film, video, computers, radio, internet, and digital media) to explore culturally inbred questions/ superstitions concerning parallel worlds to our own.

From the infamous Cottingham fairy photographs through Victorian spiritualist images to recent grainy images of Sasquatch and sky-borne saucers, photographs have attempted to provide the material of proof of the otherworldly. The earliest photographic images rendered a detailed impression of the subject’s materiality, and, through the process of doubling and repeating, seemed to destabilize reality by producing the ghost image, a dematerialization of the three-dimensional world.

In response to this strange new technology, some Victorian minds associated photography with the occult, believing the human eye did not see at all, that human perception was blind to the spirit world. Occultists conjectured that the air was charged with floating images and disembodied spirits, and they set out to prove their claims by documenting episodes of visitations. Photography was the perfect tool conscripted in this effort.

Today, the amount of attention devoted to paranormal phenomena--UFOs, demonic possession, psychics, ghosts--in the media indicates that photography’s early fascinations have not disappeared. Millennial angst, bewildering leaps of science, wildly improbable technological inventions and ever-decreasing wilderness as human sprawl grows exponentially, make other worlds once again appear possible, even probable, and definitely alluring.

Our escalating desire to prove the existence of another dimension--no matter which one--is linked to photography and its history of providing us with our proofs. Seduced by the invisible in the face of the mediums relentless and dull dependence upon the physical, photography as a tool of fact (in science), fantasy (in spirit photography) and invention (in the hands of artists) is exploring new frontiers once again.

Included in the exhibition are works by Mark Amerika, Zoe Beloff, Diane Bertolo, Jeremy Blake, Corrine May Botz, Susan Collins, Gregory Crewdson, Paul DeMarinis, Spencer Finch, Ken Goldberg, Susan Hiller, Marko Maetamm, Miya Masaoka, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Maria Miranda and Norie Neumark, Mariko Mori, Paul Pfeiffer, Fred Ressler, John Roach, Ted Serios, Leslie Sharpe, Chrysanne Stathacos, Thomson & Craighead and Suzanne Treister.

“Blur of the Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technology, and the Paranormal” will be accompanied by a 200-page fully illustrated catalog, with essays on the significance of paranormal and the supernatural in contemporary culture. Published by the Center for Art and Visual Culture, as the ninth title of its Issues in Cultural Theory series, Blur of the Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technology, and the Paranormal will be distributed internationally by Distributed Art Publishers (DAP), in New York.

Events associated with the exhibition include:

*The Paranormal Party (7-10 p.m., October 28). Costumes are optional but encouraged. This event is sponsored by the CAVC, the UMBC Alumni Association, the UMBC Student Events Board and the UMBC Student Government Association. Admission is free.

*A Panel Discussion (6-7:30 p.m., November 3, Kuhn Library Gallery). Moderated by Mark Alice Durant, curator and professor of visual arts at UMBC and Jane D. Marsching, curator and assistant professor, Studio Foundation and Studio for Interrelated Media, Massachusetts College of Art, the panel will include Lynne Tillman, novelist, critic, essayist and professor/writer in residence at the University at Albany; artist Diane Bertolo, and Jeffrey Sconce, associate professor in the Screen Cultures Program, Northwestern University. Admission is free.