Two people sit in a white gallery surrounded by a network of many black fibers.
Tomas Saraceno. “14 Billions”, 2009 Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm. Photo: Studio Saraceno.

Articles

News, interviews, and stories about the arts at MIT

A multi-colored sound wave is juxtaposed on a photo of a white gallery with a dense web of black fibers
2014 CAST Symposium

About

SEEING / SOUNDING / SENSING A symposium hosted by the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) September 26-27, 2014 MIT Media Lab, 6th Floor 75 Amherst Street Cambridge, MA 02139 Art, science and technology are ways of knowing … Continued

September 26 – 27, 2014

A man holds two percussion mallets in front of his face
Alvin Lucier, Music On A Long Thin Wire, 1977

2014-15

 

For the 2014-15 season, MIT inaugurates the innovative annual performance series MIT Sounding, curated by Evan Ziporyn, featuring rare live performances by new music pioneers Terry Riley and Alvin Lucier, early music denizens Boston Camerata, and the Grammy Award-winning ensemble Roomful of Teeth.

The series includes world and US premieres by Ziporyn, Elena Ruehr, Christine Southworth, Arnold Dreyblatt, Gyan Riley and others.

 

Featuring World Premieres, Reconstructed Classics, and Grammy Award winning musicians in a new concert series

 

A multi-colored sound wave is juxtaposed on a photo of a white gallery with a dense web of black fibers
2014 CAST Symposium

Seeing/Sounding/Sensing

SEEING / SOUNDING / SENSING
A symposium hosted by the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST)

September 26-27, 2014
MIT Media Lab, 6th Floor
75 Amherst Street, Cambridge, MA 02139

Art, science, and technology are ways of knowing and changing the world. These disciplines frequently draw from one another, yet their devoted practitioners rarely have the opportunity for high-level intellectual and cultural exchange. “Seeing / Sounding / Sensing” was an intensive two-day event at MIT that invited creative artists to join with philosophers, cognitive neuroscientists, anthropologists, historians and scholars from a range of disciplines in an open-ended discussion about knowledge production. The two-fold goal was to challenge each domain’s conventional certainty about “what is known,” “how we know it,” or “how we can know more” and to stimulate new issues for possible cross-disciplinary scholarship in the future.

An elevated hallway with side walls made of pink and purple tinted glass
Olafur Eliasson, Your rainbow panorama, 2006-2011. ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Denmark. Credit: Studio Olafur Eliasson.

Olafur Eliasson

Renowned for the multi-faceted practice of his studio in Berlin, Olafur Eliasson creates ambitious public art projects, large-scale installations, architectural pavilions, major art exhibitions, spatial experiments, sensory experiences, and a distinctive art and social business enterprise — Little Sun, a solar powered lamp that is “a work of art that works in life.”

2014
A man looks into a miscroscope.
Image: Vik Muniz at MIT. Credit: L. Barry Hetherington.

Visiting Artists

The MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) Visiting Artists program is distinctive for its emphasis on the research and development phase of artistic work.  In addition to presenting new work, residencies embed artists in the ongoing research and teaching at MIT, where scientists and engineers are open to artists’ speculative and hands-on way of working.  The program hosts artists from a wide range of visual and performing arts disciplines each academic year, exposing students to the creative process and fostering cross-fertilization among disciplines.

The Dasha Zhukova Distinguished Visiting Artist Program, launched in Fall 2016, creates the opportunity for artists to shape new creative projects over a period of two years of sustained, in-depth research and development.

Visiting Artist Collaborations are supported by the Ida Ely Rubin Artists in Residence Fund, Abramowitz Memorial Lectureship Fund, and the Alan W. Katzenstein (1942) Memorial Fund.

Read more about the programs that CAST has sponsored in the 2012-14 Program Report (PDF), 2014-15 Program Report (PDF), 2015-16 Program Report (PDF), 2016-18 Program Report (PDF), 2019-20 Program Report (PDF), and 2021-22 Program Report (PDF).

Portrait of Maya Beiser. Credit: Ioulex.

2015-16

 

For the 2015-16 season, MIT continues the innovative annual performance series MIT Sounding which blurs the boundaries between contemporary and world music. Curated by Evan Ziporyn, Faculty Director of the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology, the 2015-16 season of MIT Sounding’s diverse offerings run the gamut, from Bach to Led Zeppelin and Morton Feldman, and from acoustic recitals to electronic manipulations of the human voice. “We sought out artists who are reinventing performance and presentation,” Ziporyn says. “We selected people who are innovating not just through new works and technologies but by reexamining—and reframing—our notions of genre and repertoire, translating between mediums, or radicalizing the performance experience itself.”