Art, Culture and Technology

The Boston Globe reports that Prof. Emerita Joan Jonas has been awarded the 2018 Kyoto Prize. The prize honors “important figures in the fields of advanced technology, basic sciences, and arts and philosophy.”

Allison Katz speaks with WBUR’s Pamela Reynolds about her new exhibit, “Diary w/o Dates,” which is on display through July 29^th at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. As Katz explains, the work is about “calibrating various ways of internalizing time,” particularly compared to “the evenly-paced grid of the calendar/clock/grid model.”

Mel King, who founded the Community Fellows Program in 1996, spoke to Crystal Haynes at Boston 25 News for a feature about his lifelong efforts to promote inclusion and equal access to technology. Haynes notes that King, a senior lecturer emeritus at MIT, “is credited with forming Boston into the city it is today; bringing groups separated by race, gender and sexuality together in a time when it was not only unexpected, but dangerous.”

Boston Globe reporter Cate McQuaid spotlights the new works Prof. Judith Barry created for the citywide collaboration, “Art + Tech.” The ICA’s chief curator Eva Respini says that, “Judith is a prescient thinker, working on a cutting edge with digital and video technology.”

In his latest project, Alan Kwan, a student in MIT’s Art, Culture and Technology program, makes umbrellas float through the air like jellyfish using drones, writes Thom Leavy for Popular Science. “People have this perception of drones as weapons and I’m trying to push this work in the direction of the poetic,” says Kwan. 

In a BBC News article about the Venice Architecture Biennale, Will Gompertz highlights a "drone-port" developed in collaboration with MIT researchers. “With the aid of cutting edge computer science and buried steel tension ropes, the largely self-supporting structure uses a fraction of the materials such a building would normally need.”

Hashim Sarkis, dean of SA+P, speaks with Vanessa Quirk of Metropolis about MIT’s widespread presence at the 2016 Venice Biennale, the Institute’s approach to architectural challenges and its interdisciplinary ethos. “MIT thrives on what it calls complex societal problems,” says Sarkis. “And what better complex societal problems are there today than cities and architecture and the environment.”

New York Times reporter Hilarie Sheets spotlights the artwork and collaborations developed through MIT's Center for Science, Art and Technology (CAST). Sheets writes that CAST, “revitalized an M.I.T. model…of bringing in artists to humanize technology and create more expansive-thinking scientists. M.I.T. is at the forefront of this cross-disciplinary movement.”

Casey Quackenbush reviews MIT visiting artist Anicka Yi’s new olfactory exhibition ‘Aliens and Alzheimers’ for The New York Observer. "Her exhibit is supposed to challenge the way we overlook our sense of smell in favor of taste and sight," writes Quackenbush.

Kevin Hartnett writes for The Boston Globe about “Drawing Apart,” a new exhibition on display at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. The exhibit “deals with the fragmented way distant yet familiar places live on in our imaginations,” explains Hartnett. 

Artist Pawel Romanczuk, who performed at MIT last week, has been working with MIT students to make instruments from different materials. Romanczuk explains to Boston Globe reporter Kevin Hartnett that his work is about “finding a new way for making music, searching for new sources of sound.”

Cate McQuaid writes for The Boston Globe about “Reanimation,” a piece of performance art created by Professor Emeritus Joan Jonas. “This densely layered piece deploys drawing, video projection, and passages read aloud from the novel ‘Under the Glacier,’ by Halldór Laxness, the Nobel Prize-winning Icelandic author,” writes McQuaid. 

In a piece for The Guardian, Charles Darwent looks back at the life and work of Professor Emeritus Otto Peine, the former director of the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies. Peine, who died last week in Berlin at the age of 86, was one of the pioneers of the ‘Zero’ art movement in postwar Germany.

The exhibit “features work by an international array of artists who apply such critical awareness to their art and their place in society that they keep stepping away, to reappraise and to escape labels and easy reads,” writes Cate McQuaid of the “9 Artists” exhibit at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. 

“The MIT List Visual Arts Center threw a party Wednesday for artist Joan Jonas, who was chosen recently to represent the United States in its national pavilion at the Venice Biennale,” write Mark Shanahan and Meredith Goldstein for The Boston Globe.