EDITORIAL DIRECTOR
Leah Talatinian
Senior Officer for Marketing and Communications
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
Going online expanded the Lab’s access to theater professionals, giving students and recent alumni a chance to learn new skills, refine their plays — and work with high-caliber actors and directors When Covid-19 forced the MIT campus to shut down … Continued
DJ Class Offerings in IAP 2020 How DJs Invented Hip-Hop: The Rise and Rise of Turntables in Rap Music January 6–9, 13 & 14, 2020 / 1-3pm (6 sessions) MIT Building W97, Room 160 Though rappers get most of … Continued
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
Ever since Ivan Sutherland, PhD ’63, developed Ultimate Display in 1965—a forerunner to augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) that uses tactile stimuli to mimic the physical world—MIT researchers have been engineering new forms of immersive media. Today, the … Continued
Seth Riskin, SM ’89, came to MIT in 1986 to coach the women’s gymnastics team, before applying to the graduate program in Visual Studies at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS), then under the direction of German artist Otto … Continued
“The central story I was thinking about when developing the idea of ‘embodied montage’ [for my SM Thesis in Comparative Media Studies at MIT] was the myth of Orpheus. Eurydice dies and Orpheus goes back to hell to save her. … Continued
A jetty, concrete tunnels, salt lakes, small towns, and long drives. Day one on the Landscape Experience Field Trip proved as expansive and jam-packed as the itinerary proposed. By Jessica Varner Laying out a plan for a trip collapses time … Continued
How underwater photography serves conservation efforts Coping with climate change is such a profoundly new part of the human experience that a new word, solastagia, has been coined to describe the emotional distress caused by violations against the planet. Underwater … Continued
“A sense of smell was my portal to a freer world as a child. I prefer to smell someone’s sweater that’s been on the body than to look at a picture of that person,” explains CAST Visiting Artist Anicka Yi. … Continued
When you hear the tagline, “There’s an app for that,” you may not think that ever refers to genuine human connection. For musician and computer scientist Ge Wang, however, he prefers “those cases when technology takes a back seat to … Continued
Forget the balsa wood and foam core of yesterday’s design classes. Students in Skylar Tibbits’s innovative studio course are using everything from gummy bears to glass to rubber to foam, to create three-dimensional representations of the generative drawings they produced … Continued
On his last visit to MIT, Tomás Saraceno brought a few boxes of fragile cargo to Professor Markus Buehler’s lab — a few Cyrtophora spiders and a couple of silken orbs spun by the Nephila species. As Saraceno built a … Continued
Artist Joan Levy Hepburn and Joe Bouchard (Blue Öyster Cult) presented their work in painting, color and music in the IAP course “Colors, Chords, Creativity,” which was sponsored by the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering. Influenced by mentorships with … Continued
With his canvas stretched on the floor, Jackson Pollock dipped brushes or sticks into paint cans; then he drew in the air, dripping paint on the canvas, hovering, leaning, lunging, and gesturing here and there with varying speed. His pace, … Continued
Media artist and composer Arnold Dreyblatt’s connection to MIT began in 2000. As both a visual artist and a composer, there have been multiple threads to his involvement at MIT over the years. In his residency this fall he was … Continued
Anyone who rides public transportation has likely experienced this breach of commuter etiquette: fellow passengers’ oblivion to the tinny blare emanating from their headphones. Students enrolled in “The Harmonic Archive: Music, Sound & Installation Art as Artistic Research” have used … Continued
An expandable table. A collapsible CNC router. Motorized wheels whose diameter can enlarge and contract depending on the terrain. These are a few of the examples of “transformable design” now on display from the course, “Mechanical Invention Through Computation” led by visiting designer, engineer and inventor Chuck Hoberman. The seminar, co-taught with MIT professors Erik Demaine and Daniela Rus from the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), was driven by a simple question: How can you create new transformable objects?
Check out these student projects from Neri Oxman and Meejin Yoon’s course, “Design Across Scales”. For this exercise, students were asked to make something that enables a person to make something, and then to use this tool to make that … Continued
The list of materials for robotic instrument builder Andy Cavatorta’s new project includes, but is not limited to, Mongolian horse hair, dried wasps nests, and plenty of vacuum tubes. For Cavatorta, a Media Lab alum who recently designed a twenty-foot … Continued
Late one night, violinist and MIT alumna Julia Ogryzdiak looked outside the window of her Oakland loft and saw an unusual sight. “I saw all these kids practicing choreography with fire on their heads,” she recalled at Wednesday’s lecture-demonstration.
What do you get when you bring together students from across disciplines — from mechanical engineering to materials science to architecture – to make things? This was, in part, the question posed by the new spring course, “Design Across Scales” … Continued
Reposted from MIT News Trimpin — he goes by his surname only — first immigrated to the United States in 1979 because there was not enough junk in his native Germany. In the scrapyards and Boeing surplus stores in Seattle, … Continued
In 1976, Christopher Janney was one of only four graduate students to enroll in MIT’s new masters program in Environmental Art, where he first began his formal experiments combining architecture and jazz under Otto Piene, Director of MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, founded in 1967. His thesis, “SOUNDSTAIR: The Nature of Environmental/Participatory Art,” was performed on many iconic stairways — from the Spanish Steps in Rome to MIT’s own Building 7 — in which the dancer’s footsteps would trigger sounds, altered in real-time by Janney. In essence, the entire building became a musical instrument.
The Sonic Banana, both playful and ingenious, is emblematic of Singer’s work. Singer is the founder of LEMUR, the “League of League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots,” a collective of artists and technologists who create robotic musical instruments. A self-described “engineer of very strange things,” Singers works as a musician, artist, and computer scientist to create interactive installations from unusual materials. Created with a DIY ethos, his instruments are playful, interactive, and intuitive. His philosophy: “How do I take things that aren’t musical instruments and turn them into musical instruments?”
