The iconic sci-fi opera VALIS reboots for a new generation In the mid-eighties, composer Tod Machover came across a copy of Philip K. Dick’s science fiction novel VALIS in a Parisian bookstore. Based on a mystical vision Dick called … Continued
In 1945, towards the end of World War II, Germany’s ten most accomplished scientists were taken captive by the allies and confined to Farm Hall, a villa in the English countryside outside of Cambridge, UK. The group included three Nobel … Continued
Departing from games that glorify European conquest, Promesa helps players understand Puerto Rico as a modern-day colony In the popular board game Puerto Rico, players are placed in the role of colonial governors. Their task, while growing crops on … Continued
Tauba Auerbach’s uncompromisingly abstract art has likewise always been premised on inducing a visceral reaction to abstruse ideas—from chirality to rotational symmetry to tetrachromacy and quantum states. The artist’s tacit, muscular ways of knowing and mark-making are what initially draw … Continued
A new online exhibit and film explore iterative and generative processes In 1975, artist Sol Lewitt created a list of instructions for drawing red, yellow, and blue lines on a wall. A piece of conceptual art, the wall could be … Continued
Thom Kubli and Hiroshi Ishii on 3D Printing Floating Sculptures Speculative Machines In Thom Kubli’s “Black Hole Horizon,” a stream of bubbles slides out of a series of three large black horns. With the vibration of the horns churning liquid … Continued
Reserve your ticket to The Silence, part of the MIT Performing Series The Silence Work-in-Progress Performance Directed by Jay Scheib December 12-14, 2019 / 7:30pm Free for students, $5 general admission MIT Theater Building W97, 345 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA … Continued
Songs from Extrasolar Spaces: Music Inspired by TESS Tuesday, July 30, 2019 8:00-8:30pm: Public Lecture George Ricker, TESS Principal Investigator; Sara Seager, TESS Deputy Director of Science; and Natalia Guerrero, TESS TOI Manager 8:30-9:00pm: Program of music by Lorelei Ensemble … Continued
Michael Bove and David Levine collaborate with MIT students to push the boundaries of 3D cinema. Imagine walking into a darkened room. As your eyes adjust, a figure, floating in space, beckons. You get closer. The story begins. Welcome to … Continued
The MIT PhD student explains how the study of visual perception can translate students’ creativity across domains. Computational neuroscientist Sarah Schwettmann is one of three instructors behind the cross-disciplinary course 9.S52/9.S916 Vision in Art and Neuroscience, which introduces students to … Continued
Students share their experiences from a workshop with theater professionals Director Logan Vaughn, dramaturg Ignacia Delgado, and actors Heather Alicia Simms, Eddie Kaye Thomas, Naomi Jacobson, and Jordan Geiger came together at MIT to work with Ken Urban, Senior Lecturer … Continued
“In our increasingly complex society, science and technology can no longer be segregated from their human and social consequences. The most difficult and complicated problems confronting our generation are in the field of the humanities and social sciences.” This declaration, … Continued
Audra McDonald, recipient of the 2018 Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts at MIT, visited MIT campus on several occasions this spring, meeting with students and faculty. In February, she joined Martin Marks’s class, The Musical, for an intimate exchange … Continued
“The notion of ‘artistic research’ has really taken hold and captured the imagination of the art world in the past fifteen years,” explains Gediminas Urbonas, associate professor in the Art, Culture & Technology (ACT) program in the MIT School of … Continued
The Clarinet The clarinet is not generally considered the most heroic of instruments. In classical music, that honor belongs to the violin. In jazz, it’s the saxophone; in rock, the guitar. But the clarinet, a single reed woodwind that is … Continued
Jay Scheib, Professor of Theater at MIT, directs Bat Out of Hell, a rock ’n’ roll musical based on Jim Steinman’s eponymous albums made famous by Meat Loaf. First written over forty years ago, Steinman’s dystopian, futuristic adaptation of the … 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
A Momentous Day April 4, 1968 was a momentous day for Marcus Thompson. That was the day that the young violist made his debut in a recital at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. It also turned out to … Continued
Lou Harrison The great American composer Lou Harrison tried his hand at many things: painting, calligraphy and poetry, to name but a few. He went through a great many musical phases as well, inspired by the experimental work of both … Continued
Suspend disgust at the thought of trash; make it a compelling subject for designers and the broader public. That’s Rania Ghosn’s tactic for getting more people to improve our built environment and ask the necessary questions about landfills, oil rigs, … 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
A performing arts building ushers in a new era of theater at the Institute In 1597, when the Lord Chamberlain’s Men’s lease expired on their theater building in Shoreditch, then still a suburb of the City of London, the company … 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 word Ba, represented by a bee-sign in hieroglyphs, meant ‘soul,’ ‘honey’ and ‘bee’ to Ancient Egyptians. This ancient commingling of our fate with bees isn’t lost on MIT assistant professor of theater arts Charlotte Brathwaite, whose new project Bee … Continued
MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte predicted in 1995 that “being digital” would have us entering a realm increasingly unconstrained by the materiality of the world. Two decades later, our everyday lives are indeed ever more suffused by computation and calculation. But unwieldy … Continued