Coming through
"Skin" and "Control," parallel installations by Assistant Professor Chris Csikszentmihalyi, head of the Media Lab's Computing Culture research group, can be seen at Location One (26 Greene St., New York) through Dec. 30. The installations explore two central technologies of today's industrial society, the airplane and the control panel. "Skin" features an aluminum cylinder representing the fuselage of an airplane emerging from the gallery floor. Viewers can walk up to the windows, feel the vibrations of the plane in flight and hear the muffled conversations of passengers. "Control," a giant control panel roughly modeled on the one used in Chernobyl, emerges from a wall, wends its way through the gallery, breaks apart and disappears. The viewer interacts with the puzzling array of buttons, bulbs, indicators and dials of this complex technological system.
Film score performance
The Harvard Film Archive presents F.W. Murnau's classic silent film "Faust," with score performed and compiled by senior lecturer Martin Marks and sung by Professor Ellen Harris on Friday, Oct. 8 at 7 p.m. at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (24 Quincy St, Cambridge).
Multicultural performance
Curt Newton, department liaison in MIT OpenCourseWare, usually plays drums with cellist Jeff Song, but in a special program at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, the duo will perform on Korean instruments--the changgo (an hourglass-shaped drum) and kayagum (a 12-string zither). The Jeff Song/Curt Newton Duo will draw upon jazz, rock, folk, avant-garde and 20th-century classical music as they move through different spaces in the museum playing the traditional Korean instruments. Performances are Saturday, Oct. 16 at 11:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. and Sunday, Oct. 17 at noon.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on October 6, 2004 (download PDF).
