Art, Culture and Technology

Boston Globe reporter A.Z. Madonna spotlights “The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage,” an opera with music by MIT lecturer Elena Ruehr, presented by the MIT Center for Art, Science and Technology, MIT Music and Theater Arts, and Guerilla Opera. Madonna writes that the show “may be the rarest of rare birds in modern opera: an actual comedy!”

Stir World reporter Sunena Maju spotlights “Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere,” an exhibit at the MIT List Visual Arts Center that explores the “collaborative potential of living materials.” Maju writes that the exhibit “brings a new perspective to marrying science and art,” and “invites people to reexamine human relationships to the planet’s biosphere, through the lens of symbiosis.” 

The new MIT Museum includes an exhibition by kinetic sculptor Arthur Ganson called “Gestural Engineering,” which features a collection of table-top sized kinetic sculptures. Boston Globe reporter Murray Whyte notes that “Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and The Biosphere,” an exhibition highlighting the collision of art and science, will premiere at the List Visual Arts Center on October 21 and run through February 26.

Sculptor Matthew Angelo Harrison and artist Raymond Boisjoly will both have art installations on display at the MIT List Visual Arts Center this upcoming spring, reports Pamela Reynolds for WBUR. Reynolds notes that Boisjoly’s “latest work continues the artist’s practice of working with text, photography and images in consideration of how language, culture and ideas can be framed and transmitted.” Harrison, “has frozen union organizing artifacts into chunks of resin,” writes Reynolds. 

Prof. Emeritus Leo Marx, “a cultural historian whose landmark book exploring the pervasive intrusion of technology on nature helped define the field of American studies,” has died at age 102, reports John Motyka for The New York Times. Motyka writes that Marx was a “pioneer in an eclectic and still evolving quest to determine an American national identity.”

MIT Press and Brown University Library have announced a new book series called “On Seeing," reports Nina MacLaughlin for The Boston Globe. The series is “'committed to centering underrepresented perspectives in visual culture,’ exploring places where visual culture intersects with questions of race, care, decolonization, privilege, and precarity,” writes MacLaughlin.

The Boston Globe highlights three new exhibits on display at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. New installations include “Andrew Norman’s two video pieces ‘Impersonator’ (2021) and ‘Kodak’ (2019); Sreshta Rit Premnath’s sculpture show ‘Grave/Grove’; and, in this era of stops and starts as we lurch from lockdown to reopening, the serendipitously named ‘Begin Again, Again,’ by the pioneering video artist Leslie Thornton.”

Writing for Wired, Prof. Nicholas De Monchaux compares the clear division between digital and physical reality presented in The Matrix films with life in real cities where the physical and virtual worlds are increasingly merging. “This new world is inhabited by our digital shadows,” writes De Monchaux. “They follow our steps in the real one and are born from the data trail we leave when we post on social media, search on Google Maps, order things from Amazon, or leave reviews on restaurant sites.”

In a new exhibit by Sreshta Rit Premnath, currently on display at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, “nine pieces perform as a sort of breviloquent visual haiku, touching on pressing social themes outside museum walls,” reports Pamela Reynolds for WBUR. “I’m very aware that the area that I'm living in always enters into my work, sometimes in more abstract ways,” says Premnath. 

Xin Liu SM ’17, art curator for the Media Lab’s Space Exploration Initiative, speaks with Los Angeles Times reporter Deborah Vankin about her work “Living Distance,” which is on display as part of the “Synthetic Wilderness” installation at Culver City’s Honor Fraser Gallery. “‘Living Distance’ is both a personal fantasy and a serious space mission,” says Liu. “A wisdom tooth is sent to outer space and back down to Earth again. Carried by the crystalline robotic sculpture, the tooth becomes a newborn entity in outer space.”

Erin Genia ‘19 a multidisciplinary artist, has been honored as one of The ARTery 25, which highlights artists of color in the Greater Boston area who stand out for the work they are making, reports WBUR. “Genia, a tribal member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate of South Dakota, sees her artistic mission as one of many efforts to make up for the centuries of assimilation and cultural repression.”

Prof. Nida Sinnokrot speaks with Artform editor-in-chief David Velasco about his piece KA (Oslo), which is currently on display at the Palestinian Museum. “Hacking technologies and infrastructures of control that give rise to the social, political, environmental instabilities has always been a driving force in my practice,” says Sinnokrot.

Alumnus and lecturer Matthew Mazzotta joins NPR’s Ted Radio Hour to discuss the importance of public spaces, and how every community needs public spaces to gather, discuss, and address issues.

Students in Prof. Azra Akšamija’s class created Covid-19 masks that reflected their experiences and shared powerful messages with the world, reports 7 News. “Students learn how to articulate problems they see in the world and issues that we are facing,” says Akšamija. “And to communicate that and translate that through their designs.”

The MIT List Visual Arts Center is presenting a series of remote artist-designed walks and experiences, aimed at helping people re-engage with their world and environment, which can be enjoyed anywhere, reports Cate McQuaid for The Boston Globe. “Artists can be pivotal in bringing us to re-engage with the world around us,” says List curator Natalie Bell.