>> I'm not saying that technology is bad, but this work does definitely question how much you let it into your life.

>> BOWEN: I'm Jared Bowen.

Coming up on Open Studio, artist Tabitha Soren looks at our relationship with touch screens and lets the fingers do the talking.

Then, how the Museum of Fine Arts goes high-tech to understand low-tech antiquities.

>> It is in the philosophy of the Greeks to aspire to be like the gods.

The hero Heracles, perfectly muscular.

Aphrodite, perfectly sensual.

>> BOWEN: Plus, how artist Fatimah Tuggar uses technology as a medium and a metaphor.

>> The part of being an artist, right, is the opportunity for me to do what maybe isn't possible here, in the world or on the planet.

>> BOWEN: And photographer Steve Koppel, a pioneer in the digital experience.

>> People who are dealing with illness, let's say substance use disorder or cancer, or dealing with stress, they say, "I just can't really express what this feels through words."

>> BOWEN: It's all now on Open Studio.

♪ ♪ >> BOWEN: Welcome to this special edition of the show all about the tech and the technique.

We're revisiting conversations about the role of technology, not only in making art but also how it can augment the way we experience it.

First up, take a look at your phone's screen and you'll see a road map of your digital self, with all those finger swipes and smears.

It's a notion that intrigued Tabitha Soren.

I spoke with the one-time MTV journalist turned artist in 2019, when her exhibition Surface Tension was on view at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College.

>> After I spend a lot of time on screens and on my computer, my head feels like these pictures look.

>> BOWEN: Which is a glimpse of life caught beneath a gauzy haze.

>> I think Surface Tension is me working out my ideas about how much technology is dominating my life and almost everyone around me.

>> BOWEN: In her photographic forays, Tabitha Soren dives deep.

Her series called Running conjures senses of panic and foreboding.

For her Fantasy Life project, she spent years following players baseball-bound by way of the Major League farm system.

Now, in Surface Tension at the Davis Museum, she explores the divide of the digital world.

These are real-life images, but photographed through the residue left by fingers on digital devices; essentially the grime of the swipe.

>> It is grime, bacteria, dirt, sweat.

But I feel like that is a representation of our humanity that's in direct conflict with these perfectly designed, oleophobic, you know, oil-resistant, and perfectly smooth devices.

I feel like there is a clash between man and machine in the grime.

>> BOWEN: She sources her images from the internet and messages from family and friends.

They span glorious landscapes to the fraught streetscape of Ferguson, Missouri.

>> I'm not saying that technology is bad, but this work does definitely question how much you let it into your life, how much authenticity is left over, what's true, what's not.

>> BOWEN: And what do our anonymous and distant interactions with tragedies like the Lake Tahoe wildfires reveal about us?

>> You can see fingerprints.

It's such a compelling juxtaposition and melding, right, of the human, the bodily, the corporeal, and the digital that allows us to look at something so horrific, at a safe distance.

>> BOWEN: Lisa Fischman is the director of the Davis Museum.

In curating this show, she focused entirely on the consequences of touch-- our hand in climate change, scenes of sensuality, Soren's own daughter blowing kisses.

>> You see sweetness and you see devastation.

The image of a, of a cell, absent the detainee becomes so poignant, right?

So there's a sense of harm without, um, maybe the more graphic depictions of harmful touch or violence.

>> BOWEN: Soren is, after all, an inherent storyteller.

>> Instead of surrounding himself with people with silver spoons in their mouths, Jerry Brown has enlisted the help of people with platinum records.

>> BOWEN: She launched her national profile as a journalist for MTV and later NBC, before giving it all up for photography.

>> In my first career, I was chasing after who, what, when, where, and why, and the truth.

And now I'm digging into a more emotional truth, I think.

Which there wasn't a lot of place for before.

>> BOWEN: Right.

>> You know?

I can't... That wasn't something Tom Brokaw wanted to hear about.

(laughs) Or had time for, frankly.

>> BOWEN: Here, there is beauty in truth and beauty in general.

Her work has a painterly quality, with the fingerprints doubling as virtual brush strokes.

>> I feel like I have, uh, quite a dark side.

I feel like I'm so productive because I have a little bit of darkness chasing me all the time.

But the antidote to that is that there's beauty in it, too.

>> BOWEN: Both in the frame, says Lisa Fischman, and beyond.

>> The work is so strong, I think, visually, aesthetically.

But then, conceptually, it takes these ideas about technology and devices and access to humanity to a whole different level.

I think it's a really simple idea, but really eloquent, really beautifully done.

♪ ♪ >> BOWEN: We continue our tech talk revisiting our trip to the Museum of Fine Arts, which has unveiled new galleries of Greek and Roman objects dating back thousands of years.

Here, though, everything old is new again, with technology offering a fresh look at works from the ancient world.

This is a moment to experience the divine.

>> It is in the philosophy of the Greeks to aspire to be like the gods.

These are idealized-- the hero Heracles, perfectly muscular; Aphrodite, perfectly sensual in all the right places.

>> BOWEN: The gods and goddesses are within reach here at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, which has just unveiled a series of reimagined galleries featuring the work of ancient Greece, Rome, and the Byzantine Empire.

They take visitors back thousands of years-- scaling the heights of a veritable Mount Olympus and dipping into the bustle of daily life.

>> We are listening in on conversations of folks that lived 3,000 years ago, who drank good wine, who had parties in which they sang odes to the heroes, told stories about the gods, and had philosophical discussions that resulted in democracy, major drama that we still perform.

>> BOWEN: Christine Kondoleon is chair of the museum's Greek and Roman collections.

She says in this gallery of the gods, these statues represent their stand-ins-- often sculpted for worship in temples.

Zeus might still be the front and center king, but it's the flanking gods who got down to business.

>> You could pray to them.

If you were sick, you would go to a place like Epidaurus and seek help from Asclepius, the god of medicine.

Hygeia, who is the goddess of health.

(chuckling): We really need her in the world today.

You could invoke help from them and you could honor them.

Because if you didn't honor them, they might hurt you.

So this is part of the deal.

>> BOWEN: A formidable thought when it comes to the 13-foot tall, 13,000-pound Juno, married to Jupiter or Zeus.

The largest classical sculpture in America, she descended from the sky into the museum ten years ago, after standing anonymously in a suburban Boston estate for more than a century.

>> My research has tracked her back to the late first century B.C., standing in the Theatre of Pompey, the first marble theater of Rome.

>> BOWEN: These galleries meander from the monumental to the matters of everyday-- to fashionable hair, tools, and drinking cups; to commemorations of creativity and carousing.

>> What really touches me, it's the human connection.

It's this thread that, you know, ties you to this person 2,000 years ago that touched the objects.

>> BOWEN: Laure Marest is one of the galleries' curators.

She says some of what we find here carries the same urgency it did thousands of years ago.

Like a seemingly simplistic triangle.

It carries a much deeper meaning.

>> It's shaped like female genitalia, and on the top there is, there is an inscription.

And the inscription clearly says it's a gift given by a woman named Daphne as a thank you to Zeus Hypsistos for having healed her.

And, you know, those are things that we still experience, and when you might not have the modern medicine we have today, you have to turn to something, someone, maybe a greater someone, to try to, to help.

>> Meet Andokides, a highly regarded master potter... >> BOWEN: Marest was also instrumental in bringing technology into the galleries.

>> In the sixth century B.C.E., Athenian vases were prized far and wide for their superior shapes and designs... >> BOWEN: This film describes a fictional story about the very real and revolutionary practices at play in creating this Athenian vase from the sixth century B.C., when artisans discovered a way to depict figures in red and not the usual black.

>> It's not only a history of aesthetics, it's also a history of technology, because really this requires huge experiments in firing, in basically chemistry that probably had to do thousands of experiments to come up with this really complicated system.

>> BOWEN: Back in the Gods and Goddesses gallery, a Roman replica of a statue at the Acropolis is a digital revelation all its own.

For a long time, I think we've all looked at ancient statues and thought, "Well, this is how they were created."

Is this how they were created?

>> It's not.

Originally it was very brightly painted.

It's almost garish sometimes, (chuckling): we think today.

>> BOWEN: (chuckles) >> And so we decided that really part of our mandate here was to convey this, because we need to show how the ancients encountered those works.

>> BOWEN: To determine how the statue originally looked, the museum employed a host of methods from old-school scrutiny... >> If you look really closely, for example, here.

>> BOWEN: I do see those, yeah.

>> You see the reddish hues.

So our Lady Athena had red hair.

>> BOWEN: ...to special lighting, photographic techniques, and chemical analysis.

>> What especially reacted is a-- it's a blue pigment called Egyptian blue that reacts under specific light conditions.

And we did find a lot of it on the aegis, on her helmet.

>> BOWEN: It all means we may need to credit the Greeks and Romans with giving us Technicolor, too.

♪ ♪ >> BOWEN: The work of Fatimah Tuggar invites a closer look because all is not as it initially appears.

Using technology and collage, her pictures tell more than words, they speak volumes.

To find out what her work might say to you, we're revisiting her 2019 exhibition, also at the Davis Museum.

Don't for a second think this exhibition at the Davis Museum is simply a photography show.

These works invite you in, into a living room where you think you get the picture-- until you break left.

What is she doing here?

What is happening in this piece titled "Lady and the Maid"?

And who exactly is the maid?

>> The part of being an artist, right, is the opportunity for me to do what maybe isn't possible here, in the world or on the planet.

>> BOWEN: Artist Fatimah Tuggar has been serving up sliced-up scenes since graduating from Yale University more than 20 years ago.

She calls the collages she makes an alternative imaginary.

>> Some people will get just the surface read, which is sort of the draw in, and then uncovering the rest is sort of part of the engagement and exploration.

It's a little bit like a poem, really.

>> BOWEN: Tuggar was born in Nigeria, was educated in England, and now lives in Missouri.

The show is called Home's Horizons.

It's fair to say her notion of home is different than most.

>> If you live in one place for your entire life, for example, in the same home, I think there are other viewpoints and perspectives that you may not be engaging or understanding.

So I think that that's sort of part of the reason why I'm engaging that notion.

>> BOWEN: Tuggar is an observer.

Each of her works begins with a photograph she takes-- not on the fly, but of situations she's absorbed.

Like the scene at the heart of her piece Sibling Rivalry.

Here, she found two sisters tasked by their mother to peel peanuts.

>> The older girl wanted to do it by herself, and then the younger girl decided that she wanted to be involved.

And then it became a circumstance where, every time the little girl picked up the peanut, the older girl knocks it out of her hand.

So I started sort of thinking about the shift in power.

>> BOWEN: So Tuggar inserted images she found of a richly developed city at their feet and Wall Street looming over them.

>> It's not, like, necessarily you don't have to take over physical land, or geographical location, you know.

We have Wall Street, there's a lot of power online.

>> BOWEN: Tuggar says one of her chief artistic influences is the late 19th, early 20th- century artist Marcel Duchamp, who famously used existing materials.

Notoriously so in 1917, when he unveiled this urinal as a piece titled Fountain.

>> That changed everything for me.

It became less about making and more about thinking and ideas.

>> She was one of many artists in the 1990s grappling with these rapid changes, including the internet.

>> BOWEN: Amanda Gilvin is the show's curator, and says technology has always been paramount in Tuggar's art.

>> In Fatimah's work, I saw someone else investigating the materials and themes around technology, which, she always is very clear about, includes everything from the handmade to the newest kinds of digital technologies, like augmented reality.

>> BOWEN: Which is Tuggar's most recent work, created specifically for this show.

Deep Blue Wells is an augmented-reality experience, inviting us into the indigo dye wells of Nigeria.

>> The fabrics all have different markers.

And the markers generate imagery.

>> BOWEN: Tuggar has embedded the piece with her own documentary work, on everything from the goats that live around the wells to their long histories.

>> Let's try and see if we can get it started.

(on tablet): This is the story of Daurama, a young female ruler who came to be the founding matriarch of the Hausa kingdom.

>> BOWEN: From her use of technology to her dissections of society and home, Tuggar is an artist very much dwelling on the horizon.

>> I'm not making art for the art world.

I'm interested in making work that anybody can walk off the street, come here, and they'll be able to engage the work.

♪ ♪ >> BOWEN: As a photographer, Steve Koppel knows the power of pictures.

But never more so than when he discovered that for many people suffering from cancer, substance abuse, and more, images can be vital means of expression.

I spoke with him last year to talk about his innovation E.D.I., or Expressive Digital Imagery.

Steve Koppel, thank you so much for joining us.

>> Thank you very much, really appreciate being here.

>> BOWEN: So I'm very curious to talk to you about expressive digital imagery.

E.D.I.

What is E.D.I?

>> Yes, so Jared, again, E.D.I., stands for expressive digital imagery, and it's this idea of being able to create an image that expresses a feeling or an experience or an emotion that so often might be difficult through words alone.

And the idea is doing it on a mobile app that just takes a couple minutes to learn.

>> BOWEN: And so you have used this for people dealing with substance abuse issues, mental health issues, stress.

We'll talk in a moment about doctors who are using this in this time of the pandemic.

Why does it work?

How, how is this a good means of therapy?

>> So the reason it works is because so often those feelings like you talk about people who are dealing with illness, let's say substance use disorder, or cancer or dealing with stress, they say, "I just can't really express what this feels through words."

And an image allows such a deep and visceral connection with those who are there trying to share these, these feelings with.

>> BOWEN: So what are some of the things that you've seen communicated to you as people start with just one image?

>> So often it's stories, and that often what is what can be so powerful.

So, for example, there's an image that this individual with chronic Lyme disease created.

And it started actually as a photograph of just a stark tree on a landscape.

In the first image that she created, she took out all the color, and she added a distortion and she entitled it "Still Life."

And her story was she was still living, but it was such a difficult life dealing with the pain, and the exhaustion, and the uncertainty as far as whether this would ever end.

So that was the first image.

But then the story continued with the next image.

And, if you look closely at this image, you can still see the outline of the tree.

But in this image, she's added a sense of peace to it, and calming and flowing lines and shapes and colors.

And she shared this in a group with other people dealing with the same illness.

And she said and she titled it "Re-emerging".

She said, "This is where I am now in my life.

"I'm in a whole different place.

"I can see where I'm headed back to the life I always wanted to live."

And so these series of images tell the story in such a powerful way.

And that's a very common way that expressive digital imagery is used.

>> BOWEN: Do you often see an arc like that, a really marked transition?

>> Often we see an arc, but we also work with people who are really more in the despair stage of their illness.

And, for example, in this image there's a title that talks about rage, which started as a matchbox with matches.

And this woman who was dealing with mental illness created all these flames around it, and said, "This is really the first time I've been able to express "this, this anger that I feel at this illness that I... that I'm experiencing."

And so often that is therapeutic in itself, Jared, being able to say this is how it feels, I want to be heard, I want to share this with others.

And this image is what allows me to do this.

>> BOWEN: What are some of the things you've heard from from clinical staff in terms of the awakenings, the realizations they've had through through E.D.I.?

>> We hear from staff that they have worked with patients who were just at logjams, who wouldn't open up, and wouldn't express themselves and couldn't.

So often what they've heard is, "Don't ask me that same question.

"I've been asked a million times why I'm using drugs "or why it... what it felt like "when I started using again, I'm sick of being asked that question."

The clinicians say once you allow that same person to express those things through an image that they take pride in, that they enjoyed creating, that they can't wait to share with others, it changes the therapeutic dynamic entirely.

>> BOWEN: This is becoming widespread it sounds like.

>> It is.

We really started in the Boston area.

I happen to be on the board of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute.

So that's where it began because that was an easy first step for us to test this.

But from then, it's grown initially in the Boston area of places like McLean Hospital and Boston Children's Hospital, Tufts Medical Center, Massachusetts General Hospital.

But then we're national now as well at renowned organizations.

>> BOWEN: I can imagine some of the images that people take themselves are very revelatory.

>> They are.

In fact, in this example, this is a young woman who has dealt with chronic mental illness for many, many years.

And it begins with her striking a very poignant pose with her head between her knees.

And she had somebody take a photograph of her in this pose and then she took all the color out of it and added some effects to make it look even more stark.

And her title on this image is "Sick and tired of being sick and tired".

So, so powerful.

>> BOWEN: Do you recommend that people title their images?

>> Yes, we learned very early on that just a few words as a caption with the image add some very important context and power.

>> BOWEN: So what about you?

You're, you're not a doctor.

Growing up you weren't necessarily an artist.

I don't think you would call yourself that.

So how did you come to this?

>> So, yeah, I was a business consultant for my whole career.

So very, very different from what I'm engaged with now.

I had taken up photography as a hobby, and then very unexpectedly, it became therapeutic when we had a medical challenge in my own family.

And I began to realize how my own imagery was allowing me to express aspects of my life and things that I was going through in a way I never could have anticipated.

>> BOWEN: So you have two books, one just recently released.

You have The Brewster Flats, The Cape Cod National Seashore is your second, most recently released book.

You definitely have an aesthetic, a tone, I would argue.

Is that your ongoing E.D.I.

process?

>> I think it is.

And the images that I create really are my own expressions.

And those images on the Brewster Flats, on Cape Cod, or on the Cape Cod National Seashore are really created in times when I am alone.

And the images that I create are really reflections of what I'm experiencing in any given moment.

>> BOWEN: And, finally, I just want to end by asking, I've been really struck to see how doctors now are using E.D.I.

in what is this horrific, horrifically traumatic time, especially now, especially as we see the hospitals so strapped, people have been in this morass of a pandemic for, for almost the better part of a year.

So how are they using it?

>> Yes, so you're absolutely right, and while we began on the patient side, our work has extended very significantly, significantly to caregivers.

Probably the best example of that is now in the, in the age of COVID.

And in this example, actually, from Tufts Medical Center, really is... really kind of shows how this can be so powerful.

So this is Dr. Emory Petrack, who is the chief of pediatric emergency medicine at Tufts.

And now with COVID, when he approaches patients, in many ways, he looks like an alien, right?

So what he is done, as you see in this image, is he has created images with E.D.I.

that he has now affixed to his gowns.

>> BOWEN: Well, Steve Koppel, it's such a, it's so interesting to speak with you, showing us the ever-expanding bounds... boundaries of the power of art.

And we should also mention that your two books that we mentioned benefit E.D.I.

They also benefit preservation of the seashore on Cape Cod.

Thank you so much for joining us.

>> Thanks.

It's been a real pleasure, Jared.

I really appreciate it.

♪ ♪ >> BOWEN: And that is all for this edition of Open Studio.

Next week, we kick off Pride month with a look at the LGBTQ-plus artists who are celebrating identity and creating inclusion.

As always, you can visit us online at GBH.org/OpenStudio.

And you can follow us on Instagram and Twitter, @OpenStudioGBH.

I'm @TheJaredBowen.

We leave you now with a look at Graffiti Alley, in the heart of Cambridge's Central Square.

It's a 24/7 open-air museum with an ever-changing canvas, featuring street art and local artists creating it.

I'm Jared Bowen, thanks for joining us.

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