Unbounded: Transmedia Storytelling @ MIT, 2019-2021

An exhibition of virtual productions by students across MIT engaged with the Transmedia Storytelling Initiative from 2019-21

Celebrating two years of operation (one and a half of them in a global pandemic), the Transmedia Storytelling Initiative (TSI) of the School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P) presents an exhibition of student work; beginning with the cellphone video made in the first subject taught with TSI curriculum development funds to the latest AR production that engages the dramatic street demonstrations during the Black Lives Matter protests, bringing these events “home” during the pandemic. Spatialized storytelling brings SA+P’s research into architecture and urbanism together with the expanding technologies of virtual production while TSI students push the boundaries of these tools into new directions and urgent current events.

superpose - A connected experience of sound and space

Karsten Schuhl, MIT Media Lab, Opera of the Future Group, Graduation 2021

superpose is a water-based multi-sensory interactive installation. It offers a glimpse into how sound and music operate as physical phenomena in space and how humans perceive them. The experience is in constant aural and visual flux, influenced by the presence of the people in its surroundings: an audible and visible choreography of perturbations. Mechanically created circular waves are the audience’s “agents” in the experience, propagating through the water, mixing and interfering with one another. The installation allows the audience to explore sound and its relationship to space by interacting with a metaphor of sound waves through the water.

The 2021 Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts

Featuring work by the 2021 award recipients: Po-Hao Chi, ACT; Chucho Ocampo, ACT: Carolyn Tam, Architecture; and Nina Lutz, Media Lab.

Each year, the Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Prize recognizes excellent student work in the visual arts at MIT. Portfolios span almost every imaginable medium and theme; many, if not most student artists bridge diverse disciplines and departments, drawing on MIT’s broad knowledge base and its culture of collaboration. Please note, the exhibition remains open virtually.

Trapped

Elaheh Ahmadi is a visual and performance artist and computer engineer from Tehran, Iran, currently based in Boston. She utilizes photography, performance, and writing to raise awareness of contemporary social issues, particularly problems of women’s rights, voices and identities around the world. She is currently studying in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, while independently developing her artistic practice and finding her creative voice.

In 2020, Ahmadi received a Bachelor of Science from MIT in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science with a concentration in Photography and Visual Arts. Her research area is mainly focused on robotics and autonomous vehicles. Ahmadi’s mission is to provide a space in which everyone, especially women, feel comfortable expressing different dimensions of their personality.

Botanical Ghosts

Work by Nancy Valladares, MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology ’20

Botanical Ghosts traces the transatlantic voyage of the ackee tree (Blighia Sapida), and its encounter with British botanist Dorothy Popenoe in Honduras. This project stages a fictional exchange between Dorothy, the ackee fruit and the artist, as they pull on a thread that unravels the history of Lancetilla Botanical Experimental Station. This website collects a film, fictions, letters, photographs, and documents into a speculative archive that reanimates the specters behind Lancetilla and the worlds that emerged from this site.

Misalignments

>Work by Dalma Földesi, M.Arch 2020 and Jung In Seo, M.Arch 2020

Misalignments resists the urge to optimize, orthogonalize, mathematize, and discipline matter. Instead, the hybrid ceramic fabrication processes explored in the galleries apply precision to the design of tools and actions. The artifacts emerge from this new approach to shaping clay. Here, the material is the performer; its qualities result from a balancing act between geometric specification and physical behavior. Controlled moments of instability play from an open score that allows different manifestations. Hands and machines equally involved, this process reintroduces authorship and foregrounds labor in an increasingly automated process. It is a risky endeavor.

2020 Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts Exhibition

Featuring work by the 2020 award recipients: Nicole L’Huillier, Media Lab; Rae Yuping Hsu, ACT; Jonathan Zong, CSAIL; Elaheh Ahmadi ’20, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; and Siranush Babakhanova ’20, Physics

Each year, the Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Prize highlights student work in the visual arts at MIT. Portfolios span almost every imaginable medium and theme; many, if not most student artists bridge diverse disciplines and departments, drawing on MIT’s broad knowledge base and its culture of collaboration.

BODY TEXT

BODY TEXT
Work by Jonathan Zong, G, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

BODY TEXT is reading as gazing as reading as writing; is a contest of control; is an imperfect way of rendering people and systems legible to each other.

Jonathan Zong is an artist who works with graphic design as his material. Zong uses its conventions and processes to think about technologies of social mediation and power. He works to imagine and build the repaired world he wants to live in in the future. Zong’s practice, includes experimentation with 3D printed letterpress type, printed books collecting algorithmic curations of found material, and created personal data visualizations used by tens of thousands. Working with visual form in a digital substrate helps Zong think about the continually negotiated boundary between bodies and machines in society. How should designers think about the social commitment of the forms they create? Answering this question will help Zong—and the field of contemporary art—come to a new understanding of design’s present and future territory.

Suspended in Mirage

Suspended in Mirage
Work by Jierui Fang and Julia Rue ’18

Suspended in Mirage brings together the digital and the physical in an interactive immersive experience that evokes the ethereal embrace of a darkened oasis where visitors can melt into the multitude.
Jierui Fang is a MIT Art Scholar studying design, biomedical engineering, and computer science. She is fascinated by how we interact with the natural world and enhancing our transient perceptions of our surroundings. In this work, she explores creating a surrealistic sanctuary to escape to nature.

Julia Rue’s multimedia art makes the incorporeal and transient beauty of the world tangible. Her visuals include abstract and realistic images and her work harnesses traditional methods as well as emerging technology. Her work has been featured in private and public juried group exhibitions and in publications such as Vice Motherboard, The Boston Globe, MIT News, MassLive, Deustche Welle Digital, Virtuality, and Boston Magazine.

Exposures II

Exposures II
Work by Members of the MIT Student Art Association
Exhibition on view November 7 – 30, 2019

Exposures II is the second exhibition organized by student photographers working in the Student Art Association darkroom. It features silver gelatin prints made by nine photographers, each experimenting with their own darkroom printing style and technique.

Closing Remarks

Work by Ohyoon Kwon ’20
Exhibition on view October 1 – 29, 2019

Ohyoon Kwon ’20 presents prints, paintings, and mixed media art created during her time at MIT.

A Brain and Cognitive Science and philosophy student, Kwon uses visual metaphor to evoke memories and emotions. She explores states of mind and mental health and hopes to provide emotional consolation for viewers.

Surrounded by Digitized Faces and Bodies

Works by recent MIT Integrated Design Management alumni Kamin Phakdurong ’16, Yangyang Yang ’16, Pushpaleela Prabakar ’16, Jenson Wu ’18

Surrounded by Digitized Faces and Bodies is a collection of interactive installations that mirror visitors’ own images in unexpected ways. Using immersive sound, video recording, and projection, faces and bodies of gallery visitors become part of works which reflect the skepticism and irony of postmodern life. The artists use vivid optimism to urge viewers to look inside and befriend their inner selves.

The Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts 2018 Recipient Art Exhibition

Featuring work by the 2019 award recipients:

FIRST PRIZE
Guillermo Bernal, G, Media Lab (Fluid Interfaces Group)

SECOND PRIZE
Erin Genia G, Program in Art, Culture and Technology

THIRD PRIZE
Emily Toomey, G, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

HONORABLE MENTION
Dipo Doherty, G, Integrated Design and Management

Read more about the 2019 Schnitzer Prize recipients.

Participatory Self-Portrait: art, environment, and community

Works by Laura Perovich and Community Collaborators

Participatory Self-Portrait is a collaborative exhibit investigating art, environment, and community in our past and present. It includes community-based environmental art from Chelsea, MA, and Cambridge, MA, and explores the intertwined systems that form our collective decisions about how to create our future. You are invited to shape and be shaped by this interactive installation.

Laura Perovich is a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab

OrigaMIT Wiesner Show

Work by OrigaMIT community

The exhibit showcases submissions from this spring’s origami competition and other models created by or donated to the OrigaMIT community.

About OrigaMIT
OrigaMIT is MIT’s origami club. They promote, practice, and teach origami folding, analysis, and design through their events such as weekly foldings, annual conventions, and origami competitions.

The February School

Work by ACT students
Exhibition on view February 2019

The MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology graduate students will set up a temporary school as an intervention into the nested ecosystem of education at MIT. This school will be a subsystem of education where students and the general public will be invited to participate in ACT student-led classes, exhibitions, discussions, workshops, construction, and celebrations throughout the month of February.

More information about The February School
Access the Full Event Schedule

Where's the Male Equivalent?

Work by Molly Humphreys ’21

Molly Humphreys’s pieces explore the consequences of derogatory labels on the overall female psyche. Works on view are from the portfolio entitled “Where’s the Male Equivalent?” and other selected pieces. “Where’s the Male Equivalent?” received a Scholastic Gold Key.

Where is Here and Leave No Trace

A dual exhibition featuring work by Gary Stilwell and Cole Hoffer

Gary Stilwell, a Fellow in MIT’s Advanced Study Program, creates art inspired by ancient astronomers and navigators. His work presents astrolabes constructed for future use on Mercury, Venus … and even Neptune, taking into account each planet’s unique obliquity to orbit, orbital period and rotational period. The project was initiated within the course EC.050/EC.090 Recreate Experiments from History.

Cole Hoffer ’20 presents a collection of pristine landscape photographs documenting summers on the trail. From the waterfalls along the Fimmvörðuháls Pass in Iceland, to the glacier lakes spotting the Alpine Lakes Wilderness in Washington. Featured locations include Landmannalaugar, Shi Shi Beach, Mt. Rainier National Park and The Enchantments.

Assemblies, Nature and Human Societies

Work by Neil Gaikwad and Isabel Moya Camacho

Decoding the Complexity of Assemblies, Nature, and Human Societies: A photography exhibition showing the contrast between the synthetic and the organic, from a nature-inspired design to a design-inspired nature.

Neil Gaikwad, a MIT Arts Scholar, captures the complexities of our planet, including glacier landscapes, cultures and burning societal challenges across the world.

Art Show! An MIT Student Art Association Contemporaspective

Work by Members of the MIT Student Art Association

Experience work created by members of the MIT Student Art Association.  This show is presented in honor of Mimi Luft, the founder and inaugural director of the MIT Student Art Association. Mimi is remembered fondly for her humanitarian spirit and her dedication to supporting the artistic practice of the MIT community. Mimi passed away in 2017 and as a tribute to her years of dedication to the SAA, we present this exhibition in her memory.

Exposures: Explorations of Darkroom Printing

Work by Megan Fu, Adam Jost, Yamini Krishnan, Javier Alejandro Masis, Nina Petelina and Julia Sokol

A black and white photograph is a sheet of paper tinted with shades of gray. Yet, despite the simplicity of the medium, the manifestations it offers are virtually limitless. In this group show, we explore some of these possibilities through variations of the developing and printing process. Experimenting with everything from subject matter and composition to film, paper, and exposure, each photographer is guided by his or her preferences and experiences.

Megan Fu and Yamini Krishnan capture the beauty in elements of our day-to-day lives that go unnoticed, each with her own unique approach. Adam Jost focuses on abstract shapes in natural and man-made landscapes, particularly where the two meet. Julia Sokolcaptures the ways in which light shapes our surroundings. Nina Petelina demonstrates how overlaying multiple images on the same photograph adds detail and strengthens the idea of the photograph. Javier Alejandro Masis explores the nature of perception and portraiture.

700 470 530

Work by: Nathan Tyrell & Javier Obando

“In visual perception, a color is almost never seen as it really is – as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art” ~ Josef Albers

Our retinas contain three color sensitive cells that capture light at wavelengths that roughly correspond to red, green and blue (700, 530, and 470 nm). These cells turn the red, green and blue photons into electrical impulses, effectively encoding the color world around us into three separate color channels. It is not until these separate streams reach our brains, and our brains decipher the channels based on where they came from, that we actually “see” in color. Even though color seems like such a natural and immediate part of our experience, it is in this sense artificial. The notion of color arises in our neural circuitry, where many factors come into play when perceiving a color, and it is not an external, immutable attribute of the objects we see.

Using a complex, home-made color projector, we seek to make this process tangible. Along with the mechanisms of color perception and reproduction, we are interested in machines that are both arbitrary and purposeless in the conventional sense. Such machines seem to rebel against their identity: they self-consciously defy the purposefulness inherent in the definition of a machine. This underscores a certain dialectic tension within machines: a machine is always idiosyncratic—it always loses something (information? understanding?) and thus cannot be perfect. True to form, our color projector is not perfect—in fact, it is the least efficient color projector we can think of—and it certainly loses information at almost every step of its process. But the truth is that so do our eyes and brain, which begs the question: what is real color, and what isn’t, and does it actually matter?

The Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts 2018 Recipient Art Exhibition

Featuring work by the 2018 award recipients:

FIRST PRIZE
Andrea Ling, Graduate Student, Media Lab

SECOND PRIZE
Nicolás Kisic Aguirre, Graduate Student, Program in Art, Culture and Technology

THIRD PRIZE
Brian Huang ’18, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

HONORABLE MENTION
Gary Zhexi Zhang, Graduate Student, Program in Art, Culture and Technology

Read more about the 2018 Schnitzer Prize recipients.

Euryhalia

Paintings by Jessie Wang, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

We always think there’s enough time to do things with other people.
Time to say things to them.
And then something happens and then we stand there holding on to words like ‘if’.
-Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

Orpheus said the mind is a slide ruler.
It can fit around anything.
Show me your body, he said.
It only means one thing.
-Sarah Ruhl, Eurydice

Now I’m not artistic.
I saw it was of a fellow with no clothes on –
I always wonder why it’s Art to take your clothes off:
they never put in the goose pimples.
– Diana Wynne Jones, Homeward Bounders

Murals of Senior Haus

Work by Residents of the Senior House

MIT’s oldest residence hall has long been a home for counterculture, people of color, minorities and LGBTQ folk. In the past 20 years, residents painted more than 450 murals in the building and used the internal architecture to create an immersive experience.

Last summer, the residence was closed and converted to graduate student housing. A group of students, alumni, staff and local artists joined together to document, preserve and share these murals beyond the walls of 70 Amherst Street.

Spring Fever

Work by Members of the Student Art Association

Spring Fever is a collection of pieces created by the Student Art Association’s ceramics and painting students. The work featured represents a range of skill level, subject matter and technique in both disciplines.

Diastrofismos

Work by Nicole L’Huillier, Yasushi Sakai and Thomas Sanchez Lengeling

Diastrofismos is a sound installation with a modular system that sends images through rhythmic patterns. The installation changes depending on its context. The last version was done in the context of the Media Arts Bienal in Santiago, Chile, where it was built on a set of debris from the Alto Río building that was destroyed by the 27F earthquake in 2010 in Chile. For this occasion, the piece is built with the detritus of MIT, where the production of things is extremely fast, the landscape is in a constant shift, and there is constant tension between the new and the obsolete, the future and the past.

The February School

MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology graduate students  set up a temporary school as an intervention into the nested ecosystem of education at MIT. This school is a subsystem of education where students and the general public are invited to participate in ACT student-led classes, cinema cycles, exhibitions, discussions, conferences, fellowship, workshops, construction and celebrations throughout the month of February. The intervention uses the structures and conventions of a typical university to explore other ways of learning, sharing and building knowledge and community.

This student-organized exhibition is part of ACT’s year-long celebration of the 50th anniversary of the internationally renowned MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS). You can read more about the anniversary festivities on the ACT website.

Kerala

Work by Aurelien van Hollebeke, Visiting Graduate Student in Aeronautics and Astronautics

Kerala showcases the work of Aurelien van Hollebeke through his photographs taken during his 2015 stay in the south Indian state of Kerala.

Detached

Work by Ivy Li, Sophomore, Physics

A series of works contending with emptiness while finding tranquility amidst the silence.

Shelter

Work by Ohyoon Kwon, Sophomore, Brain and Cognitive Sciences

Pistachios are a great snack. What happens to their protective crusts after the nuts are consumed? Their journey thereafter.

sheltered feelings, fragility, decadence

joy, craze, confusion, expression, explosion, chaos, celebration, consolation, acceptance

A series of mixed media works.

Success and Failure

A group show curated by Kate Weishaar, Architecture ’18

The pressures of MIT have a tendency to distort students’ definitions of “success” and “failure”. Faced with the high expectations of family and friends and the high standards set by highly successful peers, many MIT students self-identify as failures. This show, composed of art from several current undergraduate students, shares a few student definitions of “success” and “failure”, while challenging viewers to redefine these words for themselves.

2017 Schitzer Winners

An exhibition of selected works by the Schnitzer Prize winners—Ani Liu, Angel Chen, Jessica Rinland, Anne Graziano and Edwina Portocarrero.

MIT in Flight + briar

MIT In Flight is a photographic project created by Landon Carter to explore the fleeting moment of a leap, the twist of a ribbon and the beauty of traditional Chinese dance at MIT. Featuring dancers from the MIT Asian Dance Team, lighting collaboration with Jake Gunter, and assistance from Rachel Wu. Funded in part by a Director’s Grant from the Council for the Arts at MIT.

briar is a small pavilion intended to evoke a sense of comfort, curiosity and wonder created by Katherine Paseman and Maxine Beeman.

Made at MIT

The inaugural exhibition in the newly renovated space features work from twenty Art Scholars that they made at MIT—including video, sound art, photography, painting, drawing and performance.

2016 Schnitzer Winners

An exhibition of selected works by the Schnitzer Prize winners—Joshuah Jest, Emily Tow, Laura Perovich, Chris Kerich, Qiuying Lai, Deniz Tortum.

Paper Curiousities

What happens when we make circuits for self-expression? This exhibition featured interactive creations by artists and engineers to explore this question.

Visiting Artist Class, Underwater Photography

Visiting Artist Keith Ellenbogen and theoretical physicist Allan Adams created and co-taught “Underwater Conservation Photography,” a cross-disciplinary course. The class spent several intensive weeks in the MIT pool honing their diving and photography skills and testing equipment and techniques, before heading to the Wildlife Conservation Society on Glover’s Reef off the coast of Belize. They documented damselfish, parrotfish, seafans, Christmas tree worms, sponges and eels, among other creatures, and then exhibited their photographs in the Wiesner Gallery, accompanied by text explaining the technological, biological and ecological stories behind the images.

Student Art Association Ceramics

Ceramic work created by students of the MIT Student Art Association (SAA).