Visitors to the Rose Art Museum's new exhibit can interact with the art on display with the help of a cell phone tour conceived and executed by the students of Prof. Mark Auslander's (ANTH) "Cross-Cultural Arts and Aesthetics" class. After dialing a number and entering a code for each work of art, guests are treated to the comments of the contributors regarding each artwork. The cell phone tour puts the Rose in good company. "Hundreds of museums, aquariums, and walking tours in cities around the world are now using cell phone-based tours, and we think this technology will become more and more common," Auslander wrote in an e-mail to justArts. However, his class sought to create commentary that would stand out from the pack. "A lot of the tours just use a single voice that sort of lectures to viewers," he points out. "At Brandeis we thought we'd try to incorporate as many voices as possible, in as many languages and styles as possible, so that as many people as possible would feel included and represented in the tour."

The project's creators reflect these many backgrounds, with Prof. Andreas Teuber (PHIL) and the artist Steve Miller contributing their disciplines to the anthropological focus of the class. Additionally, the class was cross-listed in the International and Global Studies major, attracting students such as Daniela Modiano '11 and Ji Yun Lee '11 to enroll.

Lee, who contributed three commentaries to the tour, said, "I really took to Prof. Teuber's suggestion that we should try to ask the viewers questions about the paintings-about what they see, what they feel and what they think about it. His recommendations served as a basis for most of my commentaries."

Modiano's commentary on Roy Lichtenstein's "Forget It! Forget Me!" envisions two dialogues between the characters that appear in the painting, identified as Lois Lane and Clark Kent, regarding their future as a couple. Lane, voiced by Modiano, asks Kent, voiced by Jonathan Turbin (GRAD), to stop talking about "ethics, humanities and the value of art," while Kent dreams of escaping to the planet Krypton. In the metacritical second dialogue, the pair spars over whether the Rose's collection ought to be sold at auction. Modiano, who has never been involved in scriptwriting before, says she went through three or four drafts before settling on her final product. She discarded a version linking Lichtenstein's painting to the problem of anti-Semitism, which Modiano says she has encountered in her native Greece.

In inspiring museum visitors to, as Lee puts it, "use their own imagination and look back on their memories," the project has sought to make the exhibit accessible to members of other cultures. Two students have recorded segments in both Japanese and English. Auslander's class is now collaborating with women in the Waltham Family School who are native speakers of Hatian Creole, Spanish, Cantonese and Lao to record commentaries on the artwork in their native languages. This cooperation highlights the importance of the Rose as a center of cultural dialogue. "Our most important goal is to demonstrate that the important works in the Rose's permanent collection really are vital to the overall academic mission at Brandeis, encouraging interdisciplinary inquiry and the creative play of mind," says Auslander.