EDITORIAL DIRECTOR
Leah Talatinian
Senior Officer for Marketing and Communications
The Trope Tank is directed by Nick Montfort, an Associate Professor of Digital Media in MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program. As a lab for research, teaching, and creative production, the mission of the Trope Tank is to develop new poetic practices and new understandings of digital media by focusing on the material, formal, and historical aspects of computation and language.
This week for Studio/Lab, a new series featuring a glimpse into all the interesting spaces of making and doing around the MIT campus, we’re spotlighting the MIT Media Lab’s Fabrication Lab. Edwina Portocarrero, a doctoral student in the Media Lab’s Object Based Media Group, kindly gave us a tour of both the lab and her personal workspace.
Welcome to the first installment of our new web series, Studio/Lab, featuring a glimpse into all the interesting spaces of making and doing around the MIT campus. First up is the Horvitz Laboratory in MIT’s Biology department.
By her own account, Beth Galston (SMVisS ’81) is a sculptor, an architect, a structural engineer, and a material investigator. A former student at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, Galston’s immersive architectural environments draw their inspiration from the complex patterns, shapes, and phenomena of the natural world.
Check out our Inaugural Visiting Artist Tomás Saraceno’s newest installation, a netted web that extends 65 feet into the air, in Germany’s K21 Staendehaus Museum. For more information on the ideas that drive Saraceno’s work, read about his far-ranging conversations with MIT scientists and engineers on biomimicry, atmosphere, and cosmology.
It was the mysteries of the ocean, the enigmatic movements of its dizzying whorls, which brought together Larry Pratt, a professor of physical oceanography at MIT/Woods Hole Oceangraphic Institute, and Anastasia Azure, a textile artist and metalsmith.
Spliced with the same protein molecule that causes jellyfish to light up so brilliantly, Tal Danino’s e. coli bacteria pulse and flash like blinking neon signs. Danino, an MIT postdoc in Dr. Sangeeta Bhatia’s lab at the Koch Institute for Integrated Cancer Research, programmed the bacteria to release the protein through a phenomenon called quorum sensing, a way in which bacteria communicate with one another in order to function as a group.
“I was observing their observations,” said Peter McMurray, a doctoral student in Harvard’s Ethnomusicology program, who recently completed a short documentary on MIT’s new Glass Band, screening it on Wednesday as part of the program “The Lab as Observational Art.”
An expandable table. A collapsible CNC router. Motorized wheels whose diameter can enlarge and contract depending on the terrain. These are a few of the examples of “transformable design” now on display from the course, “Mechanical Invention Through Computation” led by visiting designer, engineer and inventor Chuck Hoberman. The seminar, co-taught with MIT professors Erik Demaine and Daniela Rus from the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), was driven by a simple question: How can you create new transformable objects?
Check out these student projects from Neri Oxman and Meejin Yoon’s course, “Design Across Scales”. For this exercise, students were asked to make something that enables a person to make something, and then to use this tool to make that … Continued
UP: The Umbrella Project was a collaboration between the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and internationally acclaimed dance company Pilobolus, bringing together more than 250 members of the MIT community to participate in a large-scale live performance … Continued
The list of materials for robotic instrument builder Andy Cavatorta’s new project includes, but is not limited to, Mongolian horse hair, dried wasps nests, and plenty of vacuum tubes. For Cavatorta, a Media Lab alum who recently designed a twenty-foot … Continued
Late one night, violinist and MIT alumna Julia Ogryzdiak looked outside the window of her Oakland loft and saw an unusual sight. “I saw all these kids practicing choreography with fire on their heads,” she recalled at Wednesday’s lecture-demonstration.
What do you get when you bring together students from across disciplines — from mechanical engineering to materials science to architecture – to make things? This was, in part, the question posed by the new spring course, “Design Across Scales” … Continued
Congratulations to Jie Qi of the Media Lab’s High-Low Tech Group, the first place winner of the Schnitzer Prize! Check out her interactive light painting, “Pu Gong Ying Tu (Dandelion Painting).”
Reposted from MIT News Trimpin — he goes by his surname only — first immigrated to the United States in 1979 because there was not enough junk in his native Germany. In the scrapyards and Boeing surplus stores in Seattle, … Continued
The Demaines’ curved-crease sculptures exemplify collaborative, cross-disciplinary exploration. Finding origami to be a powerful tool to study mathematics, the father-and-son duo explore foldable forms from both mathematical and artistic perspectives.
Tristan Perich writes music in 1s and 0s. His is an art determined by the binary on/off logic of the computer, an art in search of foundational laws. He is interested in processes, scripts, and scores: cyclical and infinite sets of rules that illuminate the possibilities and limitations of the knowable world.
It was likely the first time Senegalese sabar drums, a cello, a didgeridoo, an accordion, a piano and panpipes made from test tubes all occupied one stage together. A follow-up to 2011’s FAST Forward Marathon concert, the concert celebrated the convergence of art and technology — from simple percussive acts to the most sophisticated gestural controls — and showcased the many creative tools and techniques used by artists from MIT and beyond.
In 1976, Christopher Janney was one of only four graduate students to enroll in MIT’s new masters program in Environmental Art, where he first began his formal experiments combining architecture and jazz under Otto Piene, Director of MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, founded in 1967. His thesis, “SOUNDSTAIR: The Nature of Environmental/Participatory Art,” was performed on many iconic stairways — from the Spanish Steps in Rome to MIT’s own Building 7 — in which the dancer’s footsteps would trigger sounds, altered in real-time by Janney. In essence, the entire building became a musical instrument.
Victor Gama is a composer whose process begins with the creation of an entirely new instrument, one whose design is steeped in symbolic meaning. Concept design, the selection of materials, fabrication, and scoring is all part of the rigorous way Gama creates new music for the 21st century, blending current fabrication technologies with ideas, materials, and traditions inspired by the natural world.
The musical trio EVIYAN was born in vocalist-violinist Iva Bittová’s house in the woods of the Hudson Valley after a few bowls of mushroom soup. In that rustic setting, performer-composers Bittová, Gyan Riley and Evan Ziporyn came together for the first time to create the kind of loose musical tapestries — weaving elements of the classical, folk, jazz, minimalist and global traditions — that debuted to high acclaim on Saturday, March 2 at MIT’s Kresge Auditorium. “It felt like a family reunion,” says Ziporyn, Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Music and Faculty Director of the Center for Art, Science & Technology.
The Sonic Banana, both playful and ingenious, is emblematic of Singer’s work. Singer is the founder of LEMUR, the “League of League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots,” a collective of artists and technologists who create robotic musical instruments. A self-described “engineer of very strange things,” Singers works as a musician, artist, and computer scientist to create interactive installations from unusual materials. Created with a DIY ethos, his instruments are playful, interactive, and intuitive. His philosophy: “How do I take things that aren’t musical instruments and turn them into musical instruments?”
“The room is the most important instrument I play,” Sheppard said. In 2011, he transformed the entire concrete hulk of a former Nazi submarine station into a musical piece, drawing attention to the acoustic properties of the airport-sized docking point while at the same time creating an environment for other musicians to inhabit. Alone and with others, he calibrates the structural relationship between acoustics and physical space to create the conditions of new possibility.
