The Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) supports the development of creative projects, artist residencies, cross-disciplinary classes and research that integrates the arts and has significant student engagement or impact on campus.
CAST offers several categories of funding for MIT faculty and principal or senior research staff from all departments, labs and centers. Two new types of grants were established in 2016, the Mellon Faculty Grant and the Fay Chandler Creativity Grant. In 2018, the International Exhibition and Performance Fund was introduced to defray the costs of a faculty member’s performance, exhibition, installation or other creative project that will appear by invitation in a major international venue.
For more information, contact castgrants@mit.edu
Azra Akšamija’s Lightweaver prototypes are playful kinetic lighting machines and educational devices developed in collaboration with artists, engineers and inventors from the Al Azraq refugee camp. The Lightweaver translates stories from textiles into a sensory play of light, aiming to preserve cultural memory and inspire hope.
2017 Mellon Fellow
Judith Barry creates Something in Mind, a new work and the centerpiece of a solo exhibition at HOME arts center in Manchester, England, opening in 2019. Something in Mind examines relationships between media types and audience habits. The work includes images of viewing spaces across time, including medieval monasteries, panoramas, virtual reality (VR), home video rentals and more, charting transformations in shared social spaces as they have evolved in relationship to audience habits.
2019 International Exhibition and Performance Fund
Charlotte Brathwaite’s Bee Boy is an interdisciplinary artistic response to the violent murders of black men and women around the country, to bee colony collapse disorder, to #Blacklivesmatter, to an unjust prison/industrial complex, to human-animal-technological hybridization, to life in urban streets, and the emotional toil it takes to turn hate to love. It is a meditation on struggle and change in a world of chaos.
2017 CAST Faculty Grant
Brandon Clifford and Ashley Fure, Dartmouth College Assistant Professor of Music, designed and fabricated megaphones to distribute the visceral power of sound to the far reaches of a concert hall in a project titled Filament: Megaphones at the New York Philharmonic.
2018 Fay Chandler Creativity Grant
Ian Condry‘s “Dissolve Music @ MIT” was a two-and-a-half-day conference, workshop and sound festival held on March 7-9, 2018. Combining art and scholarship in a spirit of experimentation, the conference aimed to dissolve boundaries between different arenas of sonic engagement to identify paths towards alternative, more inclusive futures.
2017 Mellon Fellow
Ian Condry‘s “Sound, Learning, and Democracy” is a collaborative project aimed at developing works and performances for the MIT Spatial Sound Lab, an initiative led by Condry, a cultural anthropologist and professor in Global Studies and Languages with joint appointments in Comparative Media Studies/Writing and Anthropology at MIT. Working with the d&b soundscape, a new technology that enables high-resolution, precise localization of sound objects in 360-degree space, the Spatial Sound Lab is housed in the START Studio (W20-429).
2019 Fay Chandler Creativity Grant
As a CAST Mellon Faculty Fellow, McMillan-Stewart Associate Professor of History Lerna Ekmekçioğlu is creating an exhibition and digital archive, “Twelve Faces of Armenian Feminism, 1860s to 1960s.” The project, based on research conducted by Ekmekçioğlu and Dr. Melissa Bilal (Visiting Scholar at MIT 2017–18), highlights 12 pioneering Armenian women writers and activists who produced work from the 1860s to 1960s.
2019 Mellon Fellow
Stephanie Frampton’s ARTificial Intelligence is a collaborative project between MIT and the Cambridge Public Library. The project is a multifaceted ongoing program fostering public dialogue about the emerging ethical and social implications of artificial intelligence (AI) through art and design. ARTificial Intelligence radically draws on the university and the public sphere as sites of critical engagement and embodies the spirit of public-facing scholarship.
2018 Fay Chandler Creativity Grant
Rania Ghosn’s Blue Marble Circus is a monument to industrial humanity’s plastic footprint, which—although at a planetary scale—remains outside our geographical imagination.
2017 Fay Chandler Creativity Grant
Mikael Jakobsson and his collaborators are designing a counter colonialist board game to establish networks for social impact through creative practices.
2018 Fay Chandler Creativity Grant
Anna Kohler’s Mytho? Lure of Wildness is a surround-sensorial theatrical experience/experiment, conceived and performed by MIT faculty member Anna Kohler and directed by lecturer Caleb Hammond. It is an experiment, a study of the beast within, of beauty and its transformation from young and fresh to old and worn, but not resigned.
2016 Fay Chandler Creativity Grant
Persona, a chamber opera based on Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 classic film, composed by Keeril Makan, with direction and libretto by Jay Scheib, previewed in a workshop performance at MIT on October 17, 2015.
The fully staged production premiered at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, NY on October 23-24, 2015. Persona starred soprano Amanda Crider, was produced by Beth Morrison Projects (BMP) and conducted by Evan Ziporyn.
2016 CAST Faculty Grant
Through a series of interventions including workshops and public lectures, Critical Broadcasting Lab performs as a curatorial entity at MIT and beyond. In a series of Agit Arch Experiments in fall 2018, Miljački and participants of Critical Broadcasting Lab investigate contemporary media and methods of broadcasting architectural discourse and criticism. The lab simultaneously conducts an oral history, presented in the form of an exhibition, about two forms of refusal by architects to engage—refusal to accept commissions and refusal to sue for copyright infringement.
2018 Mellon Fellow
Richard Milner, in collaboration with physicist colleagues Rolf Ent and Rik Yoshida at Jefferson Lab and video artists Chris Boebel and Joe McMaster at MIT, have taken inspiration from the colorized Hubble images of the large-scale structure of the universe from original black-and-white exposures. The creators of these images describe them as “equal parts art and science.” This project’s goal is to create similarly scientifically authentic, visually inspiring images of the microcosm and explore the creative process, the challenge of scientific “accuracy,” evidence, and the very concept of “understanding.” Milner and his colleagues are motivated by new and planned electron accelerators that aim to deliver snapshots of the fundamental structure of matter with unprecedented clarity.
2019 Mellon Fellow
Diversifying Space centers on two classes: STS.058 Space Exploration and Interplanetary Habitation (Boucher, spring 2019) and MAS.S64 Prototyping our Sci-Fi Space Future: designing & deploying projects for zero gravity flights (Paradiso, fall 2019), as well as a series of workshops and presentations by visiting artists. Topics range from parabolic flight research to the social impact of science and technology at an interplanetary level.
2018 Mellon Fellow
NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), launched in April 2018, aims to survey 85 percent of the sky in the search for new planets. The TESS SciCon(cert) sets this mission to music during the MIT TESS Science Conference, the first academic gathering dedicated to TESS mission science, including exoplanets, asteroseismology, stellar binaries, variable stars, Solar System science, and extragalactic astronomy.
2019 Fay Chandler Creativity Grant
Pawan Sinha’s 9.S52/9.S916 Vision in Art and Neuroscience introduces students to core concepts in visual perception through the lenses of art and neuroscience. Students engage with these concepts through hands-on studio practice. The material has been selected both to expose students to the study of brain and cognitive sciences and to engage those already within the neuroscience community in art production as a means to explore and visualize the principles of perception.
2017 and 2018 Mellon Fellow
As an MIT CAST Mellon Faculty Fellow, Jay Scheib is reinventing Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence (1963). The film, described both as a “landmark of modernist cinema” (Lloyd Michaels) and a “tangle of brooding confusions and despairs” (The New York Times), exposes the tense and uncomfortable relationship of two sisters at a hotel in an unfriendly, unknown city.
2019 Mellon Fellow
The pavilion design, titled “Understorey,” is a large open-air vivarium built from a combination of off-the-shelf agricultural products, and custom, digitally fabricated structural elements.
2019 Fay Chandler Creativity Grant
The Immortals, a work in progress by playwright Ken Urban, draws from the strange and troubling case of Henrietta Lacks, an African American woman whose “immortal” cancer cells (HeLa cells) continue to be used in biological research over 65 years after her death. The idea for The Immortals stems from interviews with scientists who work in biological research labs, exploring the issues surrounding HeLa cells and the acquiring of cellular material for research purposes.
2019 Fay Chandler Creativity Grant
For the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, Gediminas and Nomeda Urbonas curate the Swamp Pavilion, which represents their native Lithuania. It is a networked effort to create new imaginary space for exercises in architectural and artistic practices, theory and pedagogy through events including public interventions, field trips, workshops, lectures, discussions, chat channels and printed publications.
2018 Mellon Fellow
J. Meejin Yoon’s FloatLab project is an educational platform to study and observe the transforming urban waterway and is sited within the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia. Professor Yoon leads an interdisciplinary team of researchers, engineers, and environmental scientists to explore how cities like Philadelphia are revitalizing their riverfronts and learning from urban river ecologies.
2017 Mellon Fellow