Drawing from geography and history, Nathan Friedman’s vision of architecture extends beyond buildings When asked what architects do, most people tend to think that they design buildings. And of course, that is part of their purview. But many architects … Continued
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
Joshua Sariñana hopes that combining science, poetry, and photography can create new avenues for understanding and advocating for social justice. Joshua Sariñana (PhD ‘11) has always asked big questions. “I wanted to understand consciousness,” Sariñana says of studying neuroscience … Continued
The community project provided a close up of prison life and revealed the power of art to inspire and transform. When MIT freshman Sherry Xiao and MIT junior Helen Read signed up to participate in the House Of Correction Augmented … Continued
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
Artistic Collaboration Between MIT, German-Jordanian University and Refugees in the Al Azraq Camp in Jordan Associate Professor Azra Akšamija, Art, Culture & Technology Program, MIT Department of Architecture, first visited the Al Azraq refugee camp in Jordan in 2016. “Once … 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
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
Listening is an undervalued act in our civic sphere, where the squeaky wheel routinely gets the grease. But MIT’s Community Innovators Lab (CoLab), a center for planning and development within the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), is … 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
“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
MIT Media Lab Hosts Their First Design Summit, Knotty Objects Must design fill current human needs before imagining new futures? That was the topic for debate at the close of the MIT Media Lab’s first design summit, Knotty Objects. With … Continued
Artist Olafur Eliasson, the 2014 McDermott Award Winner, has found MIT an eminently suitable place for collaboration on his Little Sun project. Described as “a work of art that works in life,” Little Sun is a high-quality, portable, solar powered … 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
MIT alumni and researchers are spotlighted in Visiting Artist Vik Muniz’s documentary, “This is Not a Ball,” coinciding with the 2014 World Cup.
Exhibit by MIT professor Azra Akšamija explores how art and architecture can act as vehicles for community making in contexts of conflict and crisis.