Residencies Archives - Arts at MIT

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Ne:Kahwistará:ken Kanónhsa’kówa í:se Onkwehonwe is a site-specific, large-scale multimedia artwork created in the spirit and image of a Haudenosaunee longhouse as a communal virtual experience. Image courtesy of Jackson 2bears.

A Creation Story Told Through Immersive Technology

How Artist Jackson 2bears Reimagines The Haudenosaunee Longhouse and Creation Story In the beginning, as one version of the Haudenosaunee creation story has it, there was only water and sky. According to oral tradition, when the Sky Woman became … Continued

Chloe Bensahel, credit Cyrille de La Motte Rouge

Weaving Memory into Textiles

For the MIT visiting artist Chloé Bensahel, fabric itself tells the story In 2021, a curator at the Smithsonian contacted Chloé Bensahel, currently the MIT 2023-24 Ida Ely Rubin Artist in Residence, and told her about some objects that … Continued

Albert Figurt presents his project on a big screen to a group seated on bleachers.

MIT Museum screening

From The Big Screen to The New Next Best Spot: The Desktop

Albert Figurt’s residency at MIT CAST has involved Grammy-winning rappers, guerrilla filmmaking, and generating some vapor-rich STEAM from STEM students Cambridge, MA—“Is it possible to make a film without cameras, or to develop a story without sounds?” Albert Figurt … Continued

Natalie Lin Douglas (left) and Clarice Assad (right) at the Hearing Amazônia concert. Credit Caroline Alden.

The Amazon Inspires New Music at MIT

Visiting musician Clarice Assad applies her inclusive approach to a new project about the Amazon The accomplishments of Brazilian-American composer, vocalist, and pianist Clarice Assad are many. She has won accolades, earned prestigious residencies, and her work is performed … Continued

Iva Bittová with MIT students in Rhinebeck, NY, courtesy Laura Grill Jaye.

MIT Students Find Their Voice

With her one-of-a-kind musical style, Distinguished Visiting Artist Iva Bittová helps students make music that is authentically their own On a weekend in September, a group of students from MIT’s Vocal Jazz Ensemble visited CAST Distinguished Visiting Artist Iva … Continued

The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, MIT W97 Theater Building. Photo: Sham Sthinkya.

Comedy Meets Math in A New Opera at MIT

A new opera by MIT music lecturer Elena Ruehr turns the real-life inventors of modern computing into crime-fighters Over the course of her career, the composer Elena Ruehr has found inspiration in very different writers and very different worlds: … Continued

Workshop in Lewis Library, credit Heidi Erickson.

Machine Learning and the Arts: A Creative Continuum

Sketch a doodle of a drum or a saxophone to conjure a multi-instrumental composition. Look into a webcam, speak, and watch your mouth go bouncing across the screen—the input for a series of charmingly clunky chain-reactions.

Adesola Akinleye stands in front of the Charles River and Boston Skyline with an arm and a leg raised.

Visiting Artist Adesola Akinleye Choreographing the Campus. Credit TLemp/MIT.

Dance As a Language for Design

For Gediminas Urbonas, the real project isn’t art or design. The real project is language. “At the turn of the last century, artists and designers created a visual language to help explore the complexities of their era–the automobiles and trains … Continued

A dopamine still from Jenna Sutela and Markus Buehler's wet-on-wet image.

Jenna Sutela and Markus Buehler, film still from Wet-on-Wet, 2021.

Finding the Love Hormone in a Stressed Out World

A new art-science collaboration uses molecular structures as creative medium In MIT CAST Visiting Artist Jenna Sutela’s work, which ranges from computational poetry to experimental music to installations and performance, she enlists microbes and neural networks as co-creators. “I want … Continued

People walking in large room with headsets

As the 2018–20 Dasha Zhukova Distinguished Visiting Artist, Matthew Ritchie creates a new transmedia work in collaboration with a multidisciplinary team of MIT artists, faculty, and students. This new collaborative work takes inspiration from the “invisible college” of MIT: the interactions, discussions, and thought processes that take place outside of the formal classroom and administrative structure of the Institute.

The Invisible College

In the late days of January in 2020, Matthew Ritchie staged a beta version of his VR game, The Invisible College, in the U-shaped atrium of MIT’s Physics building, a former century-old courtyard. On the bright grid-like floor designed by … Continued

Isabelle Su: "I control what part of the web the viewer sees while Ian Hattwick plays with the hearing distance. All the fibers within this hearing distance (in blue/white) are sonified while the fibers outside of this range (in green/brown) do not produce sound. Evan Ziporyn and Christine Southworth improvise with the web instrument, building on Ian's sound, with Evan on EWI (Electronic Wind Instrument) and Christine on electric guitar with EBow."

A Three-Dimensional Spider Web Soundscape Comes to Life

Spider’s Canvas was performed February 16-18, 2019 at the MIT Building W97 Main Theater. Visit sounding.mit.edu for more information. Following the live performances, the piece was displayed in the MIT.nano Building 12 in Spring 2019. Spider’s Canvas / … Continued

Image: Ben Bloomberg SM '14. Credit Justin Knight.

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

Pedro Reyes, Manufacturing Myschief,Noam Chomsky. Credit: HErickson/MIT.

Object Lesson: Noam Chomsky Puppet

Object Lesson is an ongoing blog series that highlights some of the art, artifacts, machines, devices, books, instruments and tools that give physical form to ideas that enhance the MIT campus and community. What is the Noam Chomsky puppet? This … Continued

Photo of man interacting with floating sculptures from the Aerocene Project

Aerocene. Credit: KHigginsMIT

MIT Arts Events at the 2018 Cambridge Science Festival

Every spring, the Cambridge Science Festival (CSF) makes science accessible, engaging and fun for everyone through multifaceted, multicultural events. In spring 2018, Arts at MIT created a list of of CSF events that taking place on the MIT campus. We … Continued

2017 Hacking Arts, "Signature Hack" with CAST Visiting Artist Agnieszka Kurant. Shown here are two real animals and two fictional animals. Credit: Adam Harr Horowitz.

Agnieszka Kurant, Hacking Arts *Signature Hack*, 2017. Credit: Adam Harr Horowitz.

Behind the Artwork: Adam Haar Horowitz on The Animal Internet

Adam Haar Horowitz, together with Agnes Cameron, Ishaan Grover, Tim Robertson, Owen Trueblood and Gary Zhang, worked with CAST Visiting Artist Agnieszka Kurant at the 2017 Hacking Arts Festival on a “signature hack,” a new feature of the festival that … Continued

Aerocene. Credit: KHigginsMIT

Object Lesson: Aerocene Explorer

Jason Levine livecoding at an Algorave. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

‘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

2017 Hacking Arts, "Signature Hack" with CAST Visiting Artist Agnieszka Kurant. Credit: Sharon Lacey.

Collectively Powered Animatronic Fictional Animals, a “Signature Hack”

The Signature Hack At the 2017 Hacking Arts Festival, MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) Visiting Artist Agnieszka Kurant worked with a team of MIT graduate students and researchers to create a “signature hack,” a new feature of … Continued

Pedro Reyes, Mexico City–based artist, named the first Dasha Zhukova Distinguished Visiting Artist. Credit: Chris Hind.

In the Making: Pedro Reyes

“My main material is my library. I consider that a very big palette,” says Pedro Reyes, the Mexico City-based artist known for his politically charged participatory and performative installations and multimedia works. “I feed myself materials twice as fast as … Continued

MIT Museum Presents North American Premiere of Groundbreaking Virtual Reality Experience The Enemy by Visiting Artist Karim Ben Khelifa.

CAST Announces 2017-18 Visiting Artists in Visual and Computational Arts

The MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) is pleased to announce the 2017-18 Visiting Artists in visual and computational arts: Pedro Reyes, B. Stephen Carpenter II, Agnieszka Kurant, Diemut Strebe, Karim Ben Khelifa, Newton Harrison, Jason Levine and … Continued

Lou Harrison. Courtesy of the artist.

MIT’s Sounding Concert Series Is All About Coming Together

This fall sees the return of the MIT Sounding series—and, as usual, a penchant for border crossings and experimentation. The season kicks off on October 12 with a tribute concert to the influential composer Lou Harrison, who would have turned 100 … Continued

Guillermo E. Brown. Bee Boy. Photo: Dekoit Pictures.

Guillermo E. Brown. Bee Boy, directed by Charlotte Brathwaite, MIT 2017. Credit: Dekoit Pictures.

Bee Boy uplifts in the face of inequity’s sting

The word Ba, represented by a bee-sign in hieroglyphs, meant ‘soul,’ ‘honey’ and ‘bee’ to Ancient Egyptians. This ancient commingling of our fate with bees isn’t lost on MIT assistant professor of theater arts Charlotte Brathwaite, whose new project Bee … Continued

NoteStream app in use at the Blackstar concert. Photo: Justin Knight.

The concert program gets a digital makeover fit for Bowie

When I was an art student in New York in 1999, David Bowie visited our school and offered to host images of our work on BowieNet, an ISP he had launched the previous year. Glimpsing Bowie was enough to blow … Continued

Luciana Souza and Guillermo Klein. Image credit: Souza (left) by Kim Fox and Klein (right) courtesy of the artist.

Luciana Souza and Guillermo Klein. Image credit: Souza (left) by Kim Fox and Klein (right). Photo: Courtesy of the artists.

With “Works on Hope,” Latin Jazz Luminaries Guillermo Klein and Luciana Souza Invite MIT Into Their Tribe

Back in the mid-90s, the Brazilian-born singer Luciana Souza, who was living in Boston at the time, would sometimes drive down to New York to sit in on a Monday night session at the legendary Smalls Jazz Club in Greenwich … Continued

duoJalal. Courtesy of the artists.

In duoJalal, A Real-Life Marriage Leads To A Musical One

The day the two members of duoJalal met in 1998 marked a convergence of musical worlds. Violist Kathryn Lockwood had launched a career in chamber music, while Yousif Sheronick excelled in a gamut-spanning array of percussive traditions, from Brazilian folk … Continued

News, interviews, and stories about the arts at MIT