Invisible College

As the 2018–21 Dasha Zhukova Distinguished Visiting Artist at MIT, Matthew Ritchie has created a multi-part transmedia artwork, The Invisible College. The central theme, as is often the case in Ritchie’s work, is the emergence of hidden narratives from the specific informational qualities of the site.

The Invisible College was inspired by new developments in artificial intelligence, collaborations with a multidisciplinary team of MIT faculty and students, and Sir Francis Bacon’s 1626 unfinished utopian science-fiction story, New Atlantis, which proposed the first description of the scientific method, ultimately becoming the model for research institutions like MIT. What has emerged from that confluence of ideas is a recursive reflection on experimental inquiry, embodied in a science fiction detective story set in an evocative, almost mythological version of MIT.

The first part of The Invisible College manifested in early 2020 as a site specific performative VR game, House of Strangers, using Generative Adversarial Networks (StyleGAN and CycleGAN) and artificial intelligence (GPT-2) to generate imagery and content and featuring music by Evan Ziporyn, Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Music at MIT.

When the campus was closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the VR game migrated across media to become a second work: Latent Island, that nested footage from the GAN’s and the VR game inside 360 video footage of the now empty campus.

The third iteration of the project, Color Confinement, premiered as part of the “Unfolding Intelligence” CAST symposium in April 2021. This even deeper recursion was also made without setting foot on the closed campus, using ‘actors’ derived from a video game engine. A richly textured mood piece, Color Confinement is a melancholy study of genre play, world building, and the physics of sight. Masked avatars representing the elementary colored quark and anti-quark particles called ‘Red’, ‘Green’, and ‘Blue’, move in and out of other informational narratives within the film, accompanied by the haunting score by Evan Ziporyn and Shara Nova, a further collaboration within this recursive structure. As these mysterious figures roam the almost deserted MIT campus, their activities might be read both as a meditation on the role of the masked persona in gaming and popular culture, and as a response to the masked world that defined 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The final iteration, House of Illusion, will feature the avatars reenacting scenes from the film in a large-scale public augmented reality work; completing the cycle from site information to site specific game, then to informational film, and finally back to the original physical site.

Past Events

The Invisible College: Color Confinement
“Unfolding Intelligence: The Art and Science of Contemporary Computation”
CAST Symposium, April 1–9, 2021 / Virtual
Free and open to the public

The Invisible College Beta Tests
January 28 and 29, 2020
An internal beta test of The Invisible College Virtual Reality experience, held on the MIT campus

MET x Microsoft x MIT Prototype Reveal
February 4, 2019
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 5th Avenue, New York, NY

MET x Microsoft x MIT Hackathon
December 12 and 13, 2018
New England Research & Development (NERD) Center
1 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA

Matthew Ritchie, 2018-21 Dasha Zhukova Distinguished Visiting Artist at MIT CAST, is a contemporary artist based in New York who works in installation, performance, painting, drawing, sculpture, and sound. Ritchie’s work addresses questions about the nature of the universe and our understanding of it, and asks what these enigmas might look like when manifested through artistic creation.

Biography: MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology
Website: matthewritchie.com
Social: Instagram

Evan Ziporyn, Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Music and Faculty Director of the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology, is a composer/clarinetist who has forged an international reputation through his genre-defying, cross-cultural works and performances. Imagery and content generated in The Invisible College features music by Evan Ziporyn.

Biography: MIT Music and Theater Arts
Website: ziporyn.com
Social: Facebook | Instagram | Twitter 

Caroline A. Jones is Professor in the History, Theory, and Criticism section at MIT Department of Architecture. Jones studies modern and contemporary art, with a particular focus on its technological modes of production, distribution, and reception. Jones’s exhibitions and/or films have been shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC, the Hara Museum Tokyo, the Boston University Art Gallery, and MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, among other venues.

Biography: MIT Department of Architecture

Peter Fisher, Professor and Department Head, Physics, carries out research in particle physics in the areas of dark matter detection and the development of new kinds of particle detectors. He also has an interest in compact energy supplies and wireless energy transmission. Fisher serves as a member of the advisory group for this project.

Biography: MIT Physics

Markus J. Buehler, Jerry McAfee (1940) Professor and Department Head, Civil and Environmental Engineering, pursues new modeling, design, and manufacturing approaches for advanced biomaterials that offer greater resilience and a wide range of controllable properties from the nano- to the macroscale. Buehler serves as a member of the advisory group for this project.

Biography: MIT Civil and Environmental Engineering
Website: lamm.mit.edu
Social:  Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

Sarah Schwettmann is a PhD candidate in neuroscience and machine learning at MIT. Schwettmann works on StyleGAN Implementation for this project.

Biography: MIT Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines
Website: cogconfluence.com
Social: GitHub | LinkedIn | Twitter 

Sarah Wolozin is the Director of the MIT Open Documentary Lab where she develops and oversees lab projects, operations, and collaborations with leading media organizations including Sundance Film Institute, Tribeca Film Institute, IDFA DocLab, and National Film Board of Canada. Wolozin serves as a member of the advisory group for this project.

Biography: MIT Open Documentary Lab

The Invisible College: Color Confinement
Written and Directed by Matthew Ritchie

Production
MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST)
Evan Ziporyn, Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Music and Faculty Director of the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST)
Leila W. Kinney, Executive Director of Arts Initiatives and the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST)
Lydia Brosnahan, CAST
Matthew Ritchie Studio
Supported by the Dasha Zhukova Distinguished Visiting Artist Program

Animation
Nick Roth

Music
“I Saw a Light Beam”
“How Did It Rain”
“As It Once Was”
Composed by Evan Ziporyn, Lyrics by Matthew Ritchie

“Cold and Alone”
Composed by Evan Ziporyn, Lyrics by Peter Fisher
© 2020 Airplane Ears Music (ASCAP)

“The Black Road”
Composed by Shara Nova, Lyrics by Matthew Ritchie
© 2008 Blue Sword Publishing (ASCAP), Administered by Domino Publishing Company USA

Editing and Sound Design
Matthew Ritchie & Nick Roth
Archival sound fragments with permission from bap-tizum.com and freesound.org

360 Cinematography
Matthew Ritchie Studio

StyleGAN Implementation
Sarah Schwettmann, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT
Matthew Ritchie Studio

CycleGAN Implementation
Chi-Hua Jonny Yu, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, MIT

Advisory Group
Markus Buehler, Jerry McAfee (1940) Professor in Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, MIT
Peter Fisher, Professor and Department Head, Physics, MIT
Peter Galison, Pellegrino University Professor of the History of Science and of Physics, Harvard University
Caroline Jones, Professor, History, Theory + Criticism Section, Department of Architecture, MIT
Sarah Wolozin, Director, Open Documentary Lab, MIT

© Matthew Ritchie, 2021, All Rights Reserved

“The portfolio of prototypes, all in various stages of development, offer tantalizing hints as to how AI could transform and shape interactions between viewers and art.”
– Artnet News, February 2019

“Artist Matthew Ritchie…reflect[s] on the ephemeral nature of information through a series of paintings, moving images, sculptures and sounds.”
— VICE , September 2014

The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Scenes from a Salon on Artificial Intelligence