News, interviews, and stories about the arts at MIT

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A woman performs on a stage surrounded by colored pointe shoes on poles.
Suzanne Bocanegra, Little Dot performance at the Tang Museum, 2010. Credit: Peter Serling.

Music/Tech: Suzanne Bocanegra

Suzanne Bocanegra’s performance piece-cum-film, “When a Priest Married a Witch,” is a kind of creative origin story, the portrait of the artist as a young woman. She writes on her website it is “part artist’s talk, part performance, part cultural history, part sound installation.” Showing a rough cut of the film, Bocanegra kicked off CAST’s Spring Sound series as the first in a series of lecture/demonstrations by prominent sound and multimedia artists. Part of the MIT course, Music and Technology, the lecture/demonstrations are open to both students and the general public alike.

People climb on large inflated transparent sheets in an atrium space.
Tomas Saraceno’s “On Space Time Foam,” Hangar Bicocca Milan, 2012. Photo: Barry Hetherington.

Saraceno: Conversations on Cosmology

In Tomás Saraceno’s most recent installation On Space Time Foam, visitors are invited to enter three clear membranes of plastic suspended 25-meters in the air. The installation creates a new bodily experience, transforming everyday perceptions of space and one’s relationship to others. In this work, he takes as his material and inspiration the basics of physics: mass, energy, space, and gravity. At MIT, he had the opportunity to share his work with physicists Jerome Friedman and Robert Jaffe, Edward Farhi, and Alan Guth from MIT’s Center for Theoretical Physics.

Clusters of clear orbs float in a blue sky.
Tomás Saraceno, Flying Garden/Air-Port-City, 2005. Image courtesy of Tomás Saraceno; pinksummer contemporary art, Genoa. Installation view: Villa Manin, Center for Contemporary Art, Codropio. Credit: Sillani.

Saraceno: Conversations on Atmosphere

The dream of Saraceno’s ongoing project, “Cloud City,” is not only to live among the clouds but also to create cities more like clouds – changeable, mobile, and responsive to atmospheric shifts. His experimental sculptures, expressing an aerial vision for the future, are often prototypes for incubating an interconnected existence in the sky. At MIT, Lodovica Illari, Adrian Dalca and Michael Rubinstein, and John Hansman shared with Saraceno their expertise on atmosphere and flight, representing the exciting possibilities in hinging visionary thinking to technical expertise, imaginative speculation to material realities.

A complex irregular network of many black fibers in a white gallery space.
Tomás Saraceno, 14 Billions, 2010. Credit: Studio Tomás Saraceno.

Saraceno: Conversations on Biomimicry

When asked who the audience was for his work during a public lecture here at MIT, Tomás Saraceno replied, “spiders!” Here we explore the artist’s ongoing interest in biomimicry –- the creative application of natural systems and processes towards human solutions -– through the work of several MIT researchers. Like Saraceno – whose aerial installations take inspiration from spider webs, soap bubbles, neural circuits, and cosmology – faculty Markus Buehler, Neri Oxman, and Dörthe Eisele are similarly interested in harnessing the power of nature to create new materials for a more sustainable future.