Robert Blackson, the new director of Temple Gallery at the Tyler School of Art, has been doing research on the history and aesthetics of quiet. He will present five months of rotating "silences" in the gallery, starting with moments of recorded silence called to commemorate 9/11. "When we have a moment of silence, we're trying to communicate with something that's beyond us — that may not be human," said Blackson. "That punctuation of a bird, or a cough, reminds that we are human. We wish to have this moment of communal silence, but like so many things it's never quite within our reach."