��������� "Although the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is rightly acknowledged for science and technology, what is less evident is its great contribution to the arts and humanities," notes an article in the April/May Art New England about the List Visual Arts Center's new director, Jane Farver. "Significantly, [Ms. Farver] talks about responding to the needs of MIT, its brilliant faculty, staff and student body, and to the extended Boston arts community as well," writes Charles Giuliano. Her appointment, he says, "feels refreshingly different."
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��������� The Museum Loan Network, the MIT-based program that promotes collection sharing among US museums, was the subject of a feature story on NBC Nightly News on April 8. The network is "helping institutions large and small bring America's hidden heritage out in plain sight," said NBC, which noted that "since its founding in 1995, the program has provided over 2 million dollars in grants to 132 institutions in 42 states."
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��������� Alumna Teresa Marrin Nakra is MIT's latest cover girl. The April 27 Boston Globe Calendar cover story on "digital maestros" pictured her wired to a laptop while conducting a synthesized orchestra. Ms. Nakra, who received the PhD in media arts and sciences in February 2000, is artistic director of Immersion Music and the assistant conductor of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, which will produce Barber's Vanessa on May 5 and 7. She's also working on a new performance for a June debut in Lowell with the "conductor's jacket" she developed in 1998. She's been performing the piece with a noise artist and video artist and played at the recent Geek Pride Festival.
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��������� Associate Professor Tod Machover was also featured in this "Cyberarts Special" issue of the Globe Calendar. Calling MIT's Media Lab the "epicenter of the city's classical electronic music scene," Christopher Muther wrote, "Machover plays musical Willie Wonka over a fantastic array of futuristic technology. There are bottles that emit sounds when the stoppers are removed, a denim jacket sewn with a thread that plays music as you walk, and a ball stuffed with a tiny MIDI synthesizer that makes music as you squeeze it."
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on May 3, 2000.
