EDITORIAL DIRECTOR
Leah Talatinian
Senior Officer for Marketing and Communications
One student confesses that motors have always freaked them out. Amy Huynh, a first-year student in the Technology and Policy Program says “I just didn’t respond to the way electrical engineering and coding is usually taught.” Huynh and her fellow … Continued
With her one-of-a-kind musical style, Distinguished Visiting Artist Iva Bittová helps students make music that is authentically their own On a weekend in September, a group of students from MIT’s Vocal Jazz Ensemble visited CAST Distinguished Visiting Artist Iva … Continued
A new opera by MIT music lecturer Elena Ruehr turns the real-life inventors of modern computing into crime-fighters Over the course of her career, the composer Elena Ruehr has found inspiration in very different writers and very different worlds: … Continued
Architecture students address the urgent need to reframe the relationship between design and time How would we design and build differently if we learned to live at multiple time scales? How would human communities respond to global challenges if the … Continued
The Council for the Arts at MIT provides funding for arts projects that engage the MIT community. The Council’s Grants Committee considers proposals for projects in the fall and spring semesters. Applications for Undergraduate Mini-Grants and Graduate Arts Seed Grants are accepted … Continued
An MIT residency unlocks the dreamlike world of dance-theater piece The History of Empires I’ve thought about it before, living in the country…it seems to me, if you’re out there alone, maybe with a farm and fields and trees and … Continued
The digital artworks of Tamiko Thiel ’83 expand perception of our immediate environment Imagine walking in an urban setting, conjuring a spontaneous rewilding of the world around you; metro stations are dominated by native species, exotic invasives self-seed in … Continued
Sketch a doodle of a drum or a saxophone to conjure a multi-instrumental composition. Look into a webcam, speak, and watch your mouth go bouncing across the screen—the input for a series of charmingly clunky chain-reactions.
A contemporary reinterpretation of an 18th century ballet at MIT reveals the fragility of orientalist fantasies A faraway island. An evil magician. A prince transformed into a teapot. A princess on a rescue mission. When the first performance of … Continued
An exhibition at the Wiesner Student Art Gallery invites visitors to contemplate the intelligence embedded in living systems “When we attune ourselves to the multiple intelligences of nature, we recognize that the technology is already there. It’s just about … Continued
A new course explores the impacts of race, sexuality, and gender on the systems of everyday life For Danielle Wood, understanding identity–how experiences of race, gender, sexuality, and ability affect one’s experience of the world–is critical for designing better systems, … Continued
Departing from games that glorify European conquest, Promesa helps players understand Puerto Rico as a modern-day colony In the popular board game Puerto Rico, players are placed in the role of colonial governors. Their task, while growing crops on … Continued
Emma Kaye, Sloan ’22 and team Cosmosii win 2022 competition It is a rare competition where every entrant truly wins. This year’s $15K Creative Arts Competition was one of those. “This felt less like a competition and more like … Continued
A musician and a visual artist immerse their audience in the science and spirituality of gravity “How ’bout that!” It’s a mild exclamation for a historic moment on the surface of the Moon. In the grainy footage from NASA’s 1971 … Continued
Two installations at the Venice Architecture Biennale and the Guggenheim Bilbao invite visitors to explore the future of urban mobility How can we research the future? It’s a question that Gabriela Bílá Advincula (MS ’21) asks herself daily in … Continued
An unconventional format for her documentary about an unconventional pop star The Turkish songwriter, poet and performer Zeki Müren (1931-1996) was an idiosyncratic star, to say the least. A flamboyant fashion plate partial to platform boots, tight lamé outfits, … Continued
1. Trashion Show, Julia Chatterjee, 2. When The Coyote Stole The Fire, Stuti Khandwala, 3. 116 x 31, Karyn Nakamura, 4. Monologue, Montserrat Garza Julia Chatterjee, Montserrat “Montse” Garza, Stuti Khandwala, and Karyn Nakamura Every year, MIT students enrich their … Continued
Christopher Benton, Kwan Queenie Li, and Irmandy Wickasono Good art can be both timely and timeless. It can be rooted in a particular event or place and at the same time speak to audiences across oceans and eras and ideologies. … Continued
Student project 116 x 31 transforms an iconic building on MIT’s campus with a large-scale interactive installation It’s known on campus as “The Sponge.” But last week, undergraduate design major Karyn Nakamura transformed the iconic façade of Simmons Hall … Continued
Valerie Chen EECS ’22 is a gifted cellist at home in almost any musical genre. Her diverse and challenging repertoire ranges from Brahms and Debussy to the themes from “Game of Thrones” and Pokémon. She is also a gifted musical … Continued
The PhD alum, who works as a research scientist at Visa Research, performed his Emerson/Harris solo recital after a two-year delay. Srinivasan Raghuraman SM ’17, PhD ’20 was in the lab after hours during his first year at MIT when … Continued
An art-science collaboration tests the limits of visual technologies Try to picture a proton—the minute, positively charged particle within an atomic nucleus—and you may imagine a familiar, textbook diagram: a bundle of billiard balls representing quarks and gluons. … Continued
In the remote desert of Nevada, MIT students design shelter for all species In a rural valley of northwestern Nevada, home to stretches of wetlands, sagebrush-grassland and dozens of natural springs, is a 3,800-acre parcel of off-grid land known … Continued
For Gediminas Urbonas, the real project isn’t art or design. The real project is language. “At the turn of the last century, artists and designers created a visual language to help explore the complexities of their era–the automobiles and trains … Continued
Artist and architect Emma Yimeng Zhu 朱艺蒙 is challenging us to reimagine our world. Emma Yimeng Zhu 朱艺蒙 (SMACT ’21) is fascinated by lines. By the boundaries they form, by the blurring of them, and by how we might … Continued
