News, interviews, and stories about the arts at MIT
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Leah Talatinian
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Machine Learning and the Arts
Exploring the creative potential of emerging digital technologies
Tree Clocks: an interactive rhythm and language work
Code Cypher, hosted by CAST Visiting Artist and Grammy-winning rapper Lupe Fiasco and Professor Nick Montfort, invited MIT students to develop computational artworks that play with language and rhythm… Our interactive rhythm and poetry performance centered around multiple tree trunk rings as … Continued

Neoperceptions
Augmenting human perception with live performance technology
Sound and Technology Unlock New Innovation at MIT
Sound is a powerfully evocative medium, capable of conjuring authentic emotions and unlocking new experiences. This fall, several cross-disciplinary projects at MIT probed the technological and aesthetic limits of sound, resulting in new innovations and perspectives, from motion-sensing headphones that … Continued

‘The Instrument is Code:’ Jason Levine Brings Musical Live Coding To MIT
It’s not uncommon, in this day and age, to go to a concert and spot a performer hunched behind a laptop. Head bobbing and fingers flying, she may be doing any number of things: DJing, remixing, playing live backing tracks. … Continued

Ian Condry’s “Dissolve Music”
Dissolving boundaries between arenas of sonic engagement to identify paths towards alternative, more inclusive futures
Spring Sound Series
Uniting artists across genres to present new music at the cutting edge, CAST brings 20 leading sound artists to MIT for 4 concerts, 13 lectures, and more.
Co-presented by MIT Music and Theater Arts

Ge Wang’s musical laptopian utopian vision
Musician and computer scientist Ge Wang prefers “those cases when technology takes a back seat to the human proceedings.”

Q&A: Evan Ziporyn on Music Visionary Alvin Lucier
Composer and MIT professor discusses the enduring legacy of Visiting Artist Alvin Lucier.

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.

Victor Gama
Victor Gama’s work addresses the relationship between instrument building and music composition, while using new technologies and the creative practices of Africa and the Diaspora.
Tristan Perich
In composing, Tristan Perich opens up the sound-making possibilities of the raw machinery itself, always “getting one step closer to the flow of electricity through the microchip.
Hauschka
Fueled by a love of rhythm, Hauschka’s (Volker Bertelmann) classicist training, chamber music sensibilities and pop cultural interests all come together to create playful, unpredictable and inventive music.
Florian Hecker
In his installations, live performances and publications, Florian Hecker’s psychoacoustic experimentations dramatize perceptions of sound and space in an immersive intensity.
Scanner and Stephen Vitiello
Sonic investigations into bodily experience and spatial practice
Visiting Artist Florian Hecker’s Sound Art Explores “Auditory Chimera”
2011 Visiting Artist Florian Hecker, a renowned sound artist, releases the publication, Chimerizations, based on work developed at MIT.

Mariel Roberts, Tristan Perich: New Music for Cello & Electronics
Cellist Mariel Roberts performs works by Tristan Perich, Pauline Olivares, Alex Mincek, and the world premiere of Evan Ziporyn’s “Old Growth” at MIT.

Pamela Z
Transforming elegant physical gestures into complex aural and visual landscapes
Tristan Perich’s 1-Bit Symphony
Tristan Perich writes music in 1s and 0s. His is an art determined by the binary on/off logic of the computer, an art in search of foundational laws. He is interested in processes, scripts, and scores: cyclical and infinite sets of rules that illuminate the possibilities and limitations of the knowable world.

HAPPY ACCIDENTS: Pamela Z and Hauschka
Guest post by Evan Ziporyn, Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Music at MIT and Inaugural Director of the Center for Art, Science & Technology. Pamela Z and Hauschka met only moments before their back-to-back lecture/demonstrations last Wednesday; two days later … Continued