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
Novel Technology 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 … 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
The MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) is pleased to announce the 2016-17 Visiting Artists in visual arts and writing: Pedro Reyes, Tomás Saraceno, Karim Ben Khelifa, Agnieszka Kurant and Christian Bök. From repurposed and reimagined weapons to … Continued
A Study in Contrast? If you want to know what the upcoming 2016-17 season of MIT’s Sounding Series is all about, you need look no further than its two inaugural concerts in September 2016. The first, a performance by the … Continued
Now that new media has freed us from the tyranny of print, we can experiment with multiple publishing platforms to collect and disseminate texts and other cultural artifacts. “On the Record,” a series of programs focused on the public side … Continued
How underwater photography serves conservation efforts Coping with climate change is such a profoundly new part of the human experience that a new word, solastagia, has been coined to describe the emotional distress caused by violations against the planet. Underwater … Continued
It’s easy, watching Pamela Z perform, to get distracted by her gadgets: the MIDI controllers strapped to her hands like bionic appendages, the ultrasound-activated box that sings when her fingers flutter past, the laptop with its glowing screen. But if … 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
It is often said that Morton Feldman’s “String Quartet II” is an experiment in scale. That is a fancy way of saying that the piece is very, very long—approximately six hours. The players—perhaps better described as marathoners—cannot eat or relieve … Continued
Photos and text by Keith Ellenbogen, CAST Visiting Artist My work focuses on underwater photography, but sometimes it’s good to step away and try to use my photography skills in a totally different way, enabled by the fantastic resources here … Continued
CAST presents a variety of workshops, exhibitions and lectures this Spring, and we hope you will join us for some of these scintillating events! McDermott Awardee David Adjaye will visit campus for a series of discussions on “The Future of the Library,” “The … Continued
“In our dream, it has become a democratic society. You know, the city will become a kind of vehicle to help people live together and to be creative,” the artist Ai Weiwei remarks in Kapital Creation: Chasing the Chinese Dream, … Continued
Known for her Emmy award-winning multimedia project, Highrise, about life in residential skyscrapers throughout the world, documentarian Katerina Cizek recently completed a two-year residency at the MIT Open Documentary Lab and CAST. “I always think of the Highrise project as … Continued
The words “school” and “leisure” are etymologically linked, yet it is all too easy to forget this association of learning with enjoyment, given all the beastly competition in academe and the unremitting pressure to keep up your GPA. The Independent … Continued
Tomás Saraceno: Arachnid Orchestra. Jam Sessions Arachnid Orchestra. Jam Sessions, on view from October 23, 2015 to December 20, 2015 at Nanyang Technological University Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, is a new production by CAST Visiting Artist Tomás Saraceno that … Continued
Johann Sebastian Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin are Shakespearian in their iconicity. Every serious performer must subject them to study, memorizing a monologue or, in this case, a movement, tracing and retracing the familiar, fleet-footed phrases in the … Continued
Theo Jansen and his Animaris Ordis visit MIT Dutch artist Theo Jansen and two of his Strandbeests visited the MIT Media Lab on September 10, for the first “ML Talk” of the fall 2015 semester, “Theo Jansen in conversation with … Continued
Maya Beiser’s recent album of classic rock covers, cheekily titled “Uncovered,” may come as a surprise to those who know her as a daring cellist primarily focused on new classical works. But the Israeli-born soloist (she now resides in New … Continued
Award includes $100K prize, artist residency, gala and four public programs at MIT Architect David Adjaye OBE receives the 2016 Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts at MIT. The $100K prize awarded at a gala in his honor also includes an … Continued