Allison Tanenhaus is here to make friends. Glitch artist extraordinaire, she collaborates with musicians, sculptors and other glitch and digital artists to bring immersive, dynamic and other worldly art to audiences around New England. What is glitch art? Several decades old, it began with artists experimenting with altering analog signals, manipulating them with magnets and messing with wiring to intentionally create unpredictable visual “errors.” Tanenhaus started to be curious about glitch art when her computer crashed, and jagged lines appeared on the screen. Her reaction was contradictory, “Gorgeous! Terrible!” (because her computer was broken), but then willed the screen to stay still so she could grab her camera. After a lifetime of searching for her visual medium, she had finally found it in a computer glitch. Tanenhaus began her artistic journey with words and humor, composing … [Read more...] about UNPREDICTABLE VISUAL ERRORS: ALLISON TANENHAUS BRINGS HER GLITCHKRAFT TO SIMMONS COLLEGE

“Bag lady, you gon' hurt your back / Dragging all them bags like that / I guess nobody ever told you / All you must hold on to / Is you, is you, is you” — Erykah Badu, “Bag Lady” My hand reaches for my shoulders. Sure, I often have a tote bag on one side, a backpack, or if I am trying to look sophisticated, a handbag like the movie depictions of 20-something women in the workforce, but I found out that this area of my body carries my stress, anxiety and socio-political cargo. Although it is important to mention that I am not first-generation, I understand when the parasympathetic system is out of whack from the invisible burdens we carry. Every time I describe this, I think of Ernie Barnes’s “Miss America” with elongated limbs, carrying buckets with an unknown substance, an uneven stride into a forced contrapposto; for a while, she was the profile image of “Elbow Grease,” an Instagram … [Read more...] about BRANCHING OUT INTO SCULPTURE: JO NANAJIAN, KLEDIA SPIRO & FEDA EID’S HEAVY LOAD