Blur of the Otherworldly ─ Contemporary Art, Technology, And the Paranormal

The Blur of the Otherworldly presents twenty-eight contemporary artists whose work employs modern communication technologies (photography, film, video, radio, Internet, computers) to explore culturally inbred questions/superstitions concerning parallel worlds to our own. Whether it is conspiracy theories of alien invasion or age-old tales of haunted houses, believers and skeptics alike have utilized technology to prove or debunk stories of these visitations. We desire otherworldly experiences yet we want proof. Humans are programmed with these sometimes-contradictory impulses. By definition, having proof means that otherworldly experiences are brought into the concrete world of clarity and legibility. But when this happens they are in danger of losing their mystery and power to make us wonder. Much of human culture is a result of this ongoing struggle between our empirical demands and the need for an open-ended universe. The artists of Blur of the Otherworldly explore the vagaries of the shifting line between what we know from science and technology and what scuttles around the darker edges of the imagination.