EDITORIAL TEAM
Leah Talatinian
Communications Manager
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
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
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
The Clarinet The clarinet is not generally considered the most heroic of instruments. In classical music, that honor belongs to the violin. In jazz, it’s the saxophone; in rock, the guitar. But the clarinet, a single reed woodwind that is … 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
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
“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
Lou Harrison The great American composer Lou Harrison tried his hand at many things: painting, calligraphy and poetry, to name but a few. He went through a great many musical phases as well, inspired by the experimental work of both … Continued
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
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
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
MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte predicted in 1995 that “being digital” would have us entering a realm increasingly unconstrained by the materiality of the world. Two decades later, our everyday lives are indeed ever more suffused by computation and calculation. But unwieldy … Continued
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
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE Maya Beiser and the Ambient Orchestra perform David Bowie’s Blackstar March 3, 2017 / 7:30pm MIT Kresge Auditorium, W16 48 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA Reserve Tickets It has been just over a year since the news of … Continued
The recent spike in sales of George Orwell’s 1984, which hit No. 1 on Amazon’s best-seller list last week, says something about our dystopian times. If the future gets bleaker, we’ll need literature that not only records civilization’s collapse, but … Continued
Creativity according to Mugaritz and MIT “When you take the off-road and not the well-traveled road, it is much more painful, but it is exciting and it is worth it, even knowing that I am going to fail by trying … Continued
When he was young, the Swiss pianist and composer Nik Bärtsch was obsessed with rhythm. Once, when his father brought him along to a party, he spent the whole evening drumming on an ashtray. Nowadays he is apt to reach … Continued
CAST Visiting Artist Jacob Collier is well known for his YouTube videos, which the 22-year-old musical phenom performs and produces in his bedroom in North London. Collier’s work has garnered praise from such jazz icons as Herbie Hancock and Quincy … Continued
Explosively rhythmic music Jacob Collier is not like other YouTube stars. The English 22-year-old rose to fame with inventive video covers of popular songs like Michael Jackson’s “P.Y.T.” and Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely,” the arrangements rendered in dizzying multiplicity … Continued
Sumie Kaneko, an Omnivourous Musician When the Japanese koto and shamisen player Sumie Kaneko was invited to perform with Gamelan Galak Tika for MIT’s World Music Day, she was elated. Kaneko—who holds a degree in traditional Japanese music from Tokyo … Continued
When the Lumière brothers screened their 1895 film, The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat—so the famous anecdote goes—audiences frightened by the verisimilitude of the image screamed and got out of the way. As we enter a Virtual Reality … Continued
When Erica Azim and Fradreck Mujuru first met, in 1991, Mujuru was waiting tables in the Zimbabwean capital city of Harare and working as an instrument maker on the side. Azim was visiting the country as a student of that … Continued
Back in 2014, the legendary post-bop jazz saxophonist Joe Lovano met his friend and mentor, the great composer Gunther Schuller, for dinner in Boston. At 88, Schuller was in the midst of a particularly fertile period. That year he premiered … Continued
Cvetelin Andreev became enamored with the kaba gaida, a type of Bulgarian bagpipe, eleven years ago, after spending several weeks hiking Bulgaria’s Rhodope Mountain range alone. “If you stay, let’s say, two weeks, only with yourself, you change a bit,” … Continued
Simon Smith remembers vividly his first encounter with the work of Karlheinz Stockhausen. The piece was Trans, a composition for orchestra and recorded sound that the German composer, a giant of mid-century contemporary music, wrote in 1971. “It was immediately like … Continued