In his keynote address for CAST’s first symposium, Seeing/ Sounding/ Sensing, Bruno Latour (Professor at the Institut d’études politiques de Paris) observed that “Much of our philosophy comes from the still life; it’s a disease of the Dutch. Descartes and … Continued
When the gods hand you a gift, they also hand you a whip for self-flagellation, to paraphrase Truman Capote. The Cassandra story typifies the blessing-and-coeval-curse topos. Apollo gives Cassandra the gift of prophecy to seduce her. When she refuses, he … Continued
Anyone who rides public transportation has likely experienced this breach of commuter etiquette: fellow passengers’ oblivion to the tinny blare emanating from their headphones. Students enrolled in “The Harmonic Archive: Music, Sound & Installation Art as Artistic Research” have used … Continued
“Food is connected to everything—language, texture, tradition,” claimed Chef Dani Lasa of Mugaritz to a packed audience at MIT. Now, the R&D chef can add engineering to that list thanks to Pedro Reis, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering … Continued
MIT Presents New Music Series: MIT Sounding Featuring World Premieres, Reconstructed Classics, and Grammy Award winning musicians in new concert series For the 2014-15 season, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) inaugurates the innovative annual performance series MIT Sounding, curated by … Continued
On September 26-27, CAST is convening artists, neuroscientists and scholars in the visual arts, music, physics, mathematics, history, anthropology and philosophy to participate in the symposium “Seeing / Sounding / Sensing.” Organized by MIT Professors Caroline A. Jones (Chair) and … Continued
Students create sound installations inspired by Visiting Artists Scanner, Stephen Vitiello, and Either/Or.
The musical trio EVIYAN was born in vocalist-violinist Iva Bittová’s house in the woods of the Hudson Valley after a few bowls of mushroom soup. In that rustic setting, performer-composers Bittová, Gyan Riley and Evan Ziporyn came together for the first time to create the kind of loose musical tapestries — weaving elements of the classical, folk, jazz, minimalist and global traditions — that debuted to high acclaim on Saturday, March 2 at MIT’s Kresge Auditorium. “It felt like a family reunion,” says Ziporyn, Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Music and Faculty Director of the Center for Art, Science & Technology.
Suzanne Bocanegra’s performance piece-cum-film, “When a Priest Married a Witch,” is a kind of creative origin story, the portrait of the artist as a young woman. She writes on her website it is “part artist’s talk, part performance, part cultural history, part sound installation.” Showing a rough cut of the film, Bocanegra kicked off CAST’s Spring Sound series as the first in a series of lecture/demonstrations by prominent sound and multimedia artists. Part of the MIT course, Music and Technology, the lecture/demonstrations are open to both students and the general public alike.
In Tomás Saraceno’s most recent installation On Space Time Foam, visitors are invited to enter three clear membranes of plastic suspended 25-meters in the air. The installation creates a new bodily experience, transforming everyday perceptions of space and one’s relationship to others. In this work, he takes as his material and inspiration the basics of physics: mass, energy, space, and gravity. At MIT, he had the opportunity to share his work with physicists Jerome Friedman and Robert Jaffe, Edward Farhi, and Alan Guth from MIT’s Center for Theoretical Physics.
The dream of Saraceno’s ongoing project, “Cloud City,” is not only to live among the clouds but also to create cities more like clouds – changeable, mobile, and responsive to atmospheric shifts. His experimental sculptures, expressing an aerial vision for the future, are often prototypes for incubating an interconnected existence in the sky. At MIT, Lodovica Illari, Adrian Dalca and Michael Rubinstein, and John Hansman shared with Saraceno their expertise on atmosphere and flight, representing the exciting possibilities in hinging visionary thinking to technical expertise, imaginative speculation to material realities.