A woman wears long black gloves with wires on them in front of a wall of crumpled paper.
Credit: Elizabeth Woodward

Media Lab

The Media Lab checks traditional disciplines at the door. Product designers, nanotechnologists, data-visualization experts, industry researchers and pioneers of computer interfaces work side by side to invent—and reinvent—how humans experience, and can be aided by, technology.

Common Call for Proposals FAQ

Q: When can faculty, departments, labs and centers apply for CAST/VA funds? A: There are two calls each academic year, one per semester, for projects to be funded during the following academic years. Allow a minimum of one-year lead time. … Continued

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

SAA, Introduction to Gum Bichromate Printing. Credit: Richard Koolish
SAA, Introduction to Gum Bichromate Printing. Credit: Richard Koolish

About

The MIT Arts Studios (previously the Student Art Association) provide extra-academic, hands-on instruction in the arts for all levels in a range of media. Priority registration is given to MIT undergraduate and graduate students, though all MIT affiliates may participate as space permits. Sign up to develop or refine your art in an open, hands-on, relaxed environment.

MIT Arts Studios 
Stratton Student Center, MIT Building W20-424 (fourth floor)
84 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139
617-253-7019

About the Staff:

Audience members take their seats in an ornate theater.
Boston Opera House. Photo by Bill Damon (Flickr).

Boston Arts Access

The Council for the Arts at MIT underwrites MIT’s memberships at many Boston area cultural organizations, including the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (ICA), and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Please see below for more detailed information.

The Council also helps underwrite discounted student tickets to the Boston Ballet, and provides students with information about discounted tickets to performances by several area ensembles. The Bobko BSO Ticket Fund, created by Philip and Barbara Bobko, provides discounted student tickets to BSO performances, and is administered by CAMIT.

 

Eligibility for the Arts Access program is restricted to current MIT students (with valid MIT Student ID) and faculty/staff (with valid MIT Employee ID). Other MIT affiliates (with Spouse ID, Alumni ID, Affiliate ID, etc.) can explore discounted ticket options available through the MIT Activities Committee (MITAC).

MIT Lincoln Lab employees: to take advantage of MIT’s University Memberships with the MFA, the ICA, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, please request an MIT Employee ID card through the Atlas Service Center.

CAMIT is unable to make any representations that these arts organizations are safe to visit. Please ensure you understand each arts organization’s access procedures, as well as MIT’s community expectations regarding COVID-19

 

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).