EDITORIAL DIRECTOR
Leah Talatinian
Senior Officer for Marketing and Communications
“With Lodovica [Illari] and Bill [McKenna], we are trying to reimagine how human beings will navigate around the world,” says artist Tomás Saraceno, describing the lofty goal of his Aerocene project. These emission-free floating sculptures, made from silver and transparent … Continued
It is often said that Morton Feldman’s “String Quartet II” is an experiment in scale. That is a fancy way of saying that the piece is very, very long—approximately six hours. The players—perhaps better described as marathoners—cannot eat or relieve … Continued
Photos and text by Keith Ellenbogen, CAST Visiting Artist My work focuses on underwater photography, but sometimes it’s good to step away and try to use my photography skills in a totally different way, enabled by the fantastic resources here … Continued
CAST presents a variety of workshops, exhibitions and lectures this Spring, and we hope you will join us for some of these scintillating events! McDermott Awardee David Adjaye will visit campus for a series of discussions on “The Future of the Library,” “The … Continued
“In our dream, it has become a democratic society. You know, the city will become a kind of vehicle to help people live together and to be creative,” the artist Ai Weiwei remarks in Kapital Creation: Chasing the Chinese Dream, … Continued
Known for her Emmy award-winning multimedia project, Highrise, about life in residential skyscrapers throughout the world, documentarian Katerina Cizek recently completed a two-year residency at the MIT Open Documentary Lab and CAST. “I always think of the Highrise project as … 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
Musician and computer scientist Ge Wang prefers “those cases when technology takes a back seat to the human proceedings.”
“Prandit Pran Nath used to say, ‘You in the note, and the note in you,’ and that’s a good way to describe the state to be in when you’re performing. At least, it’s the state I want to be in … 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
Combined grants provide 8 years of funding, among largest gifts received by the arts at MIT Cambridge, MA, April 22, 2015–The MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) has received $1,500,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in support … 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
A couple familiar red and white bags from the COOP bursting with MIT textbooks sat in a corner of the green room while legendary audio engineer and DJ, Gimel “Young Guru” Keaton, talked to the press before his recent lecture … Continued
Lontano Ensemble: Rowland Sutherland, flute; Peter Furniss, clarinet; Caroline Balding, violin; Clare O’Connell, cello; Mary Dullea, piano; Odaline de la Martinez, conductor. The famed London-based Lontano Ensemble returns to MIT on March 15 to perform works by MIT composers in … Continued
Before the age of print all books were manuscripts (the word means hand written), and therefore each existing manuscript is a unique artifact. A manuscript’s text, images and material components contain clues to the cultural, artistic, political, and technological achievements of … 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
In his keynote address for CAST’s first symposium, Seeing/ Sounding/ Sensing, Bruno Latour (Professor at the Institut d’études politiques de Paris) observed that “Much of our philosophy comes from the still life; it’s a disease of the Dutch. Descartes and … Continued
When the gods hand you a gift, they also hand you a whip for self-flagellation, to paraphrase Truman Capote. The Cassandra story typifies the blessing-and-coeval-curse topos. Apollo gives Cassandra the gift of prophecy to seduce her. When she refuses, he … 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
Ukraine means “borderland, edge or outskirts.” Christine Southworth and Evan Ziporyn’s new collaborative project Borderland: A Cantata for Ukraine, which will premiere this week at Kresge Auditorium at MIT in a performance by Grammy-award winning ensemble Roomful of Teeth, operates … Continued
In their recent talk at the MIT Museum “Reverberations: Spiders and Musical Webs,” CAST Visiting Artist Tomás Saraceno and MIT Professor Markus Buehler (Professor and Head, Civil and Environmental Engineering, MIT) discussed their research in materials and structures inspired by … Continued
“Food is connected to everything—language, texture, tradition,” claimed Chef Dani Lasa of Mugaritz to a packed audience at MIT. Now, the R&D chef can add engineering to that list thanks to Pedro Reis, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering … Continued
MIT Presents New Music Series: MIT Sounding Featuring World Premieres, Reconstructed Classics, and Grammy Award winning musicians in new concert series For the 2014-15 season, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) inaugurates the innovative annual performance series MIT Sounding, curated by … Continued
