Arts

Prof. Tod Machover’s composition “already and not yet,” was performed by members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra along with an AI system that listens to musicians and adds improvisations, reports A.Z. Madonna for The Boston Globe. “Music is something that’s meant to plumb your soul, and have you discover things,” says Machover. The composition is “about my view of where we are, how to take a deep breath and figure out, gather strength to go somewhere else, and then what a possible future of democracy might be.”  

Prof. Tod Machover speaks to WBUR’s Andrea Shea about “already and not yet” an interactive composition he wrote for the Boston Symphony Orchestra and an AI instrument developed by Machover and graduate student Manaswi Mishra. Machover explains that they designed the AI tools so that they’re “always going to make a kind of variation, a coloration, an extension of what the musician's playing – but exactly what it's going to do I do not have complete control over. I'm trying to show that it [AI] can be integrated in a beautiful, provocative and interesting way in a serious piece of music.”  

Metropolis reporter Anthony Paletta details how MIT’s inaugural Future Fest “brought together visionary leaders across design, technology, and art to address the world’s most pressing problems,” and also featured the public debut of the redesigned Metropolitan Warehouse. The festival featured discussions, exhibits and demonstrations on architecture, design and technology, including a new technique that utilizes knitted fibers as a flexible formwork for concrete, a discussion on how AI could be used to increase sustainability in construction and exploration of how “reef legos” can rebuild beaches and combat costal erosion. “There are no shortage of things going wrong in the world, and others likely to follow,” writes Paletta, “but MIT’s Future Fest offered reassuring proof that we’ve not run out of means to address these problems.” 

Prof. Behnaz Farahi’s “Ocean of Dreams,” an interactive art installation currently on display in Kendall Square that features submissions from more than 400 international participants, is featured by Dezeen reporter Ben Dreith. “For me, design is ultimately a way of asking: what could be otherwise, and how might we help bring that possibility into being,” says Farahi. “That is also how I think about ‘Ocean of Dreams,’ as a space for collectively imagining and designing possible futures.”  

The newly renovated, historic Metropolitan Warehouse, home to MIT’s School of Architecture + Planning “has become a teaching tool” for students who can look up at features such as the “cutaways of the terra cotta subway arches vaulting across the old building’s ceilings” and “understand what structural engineers were thinking 130 years ago,” writes Bloomberg’s Anthony Flint. “The whole multiyear process for rehabbing the Met has been left delightfully legible.”  

For The Architectural Record, reporter Izzy Kornblatt details how the Metropolitan Warehouse was converted into the MIT School of Architecture + Planning’s signature building, a reimagining that “makes the case for the reconstituting of existing structures as a creative act of design.” Kornblatt notes: “The completion of this project also marks a repositioning of design within both MIT and Cambridge. The building gives the School of Architecture and Planning distinctness—a perceptible structure of its own. Yet one of the project’s aims...is to frame design as a set of practices and techniques that are as relevant for scientists and start-up founders as they are for architects.”   

Prof. Behnaz Farahi joins GBH’s, “The Curiosity Desk," to discuss “Ocean of Dreams,” a public art installation that projects participants’ collective hopes for the future into a “living ocean,” which is on display at Kendall Square Plaza as part of MIT Future Fest. “At the moment when we have so many conversations about the future that are shaped by uncertainty about AI, war, climate change, and displacements, I hope this work creates a space for something a little different,” says Farahi. “Before we can build a different future, we first have to be able to imagine one.” 

In a video short, The Boston Globe’s Daniel Kool spotlights “The Living Bucentaur,” a parade of 250 people dressed in repurposed sail cloth to celebrate the opening of the School of Architecture and Plannings’ new home in the Metropolitan Warehouse. “In 1916, when MIT moved from Boston to Cambridge, they built this elaborate barge called Bucentaur. It was white and it had this beautiful decoration with angels and stucco and everyone was wearing costumes and waving tea squares,” says Prof. Azra Aksamija. “This project is in a way a reenactment.”  

MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P) Dean Hashim Sarkis speaks to WBZ News Radio’s Emma Friedman about “The Living Bucentaur,” the Sept. 8 procession made up of 250 people, to SA+P’s new home in the redesigned Metropolitan Warehouse. “This is really a very conscious reenactment of the moment that MIT decided to move to Cambridge from Boston,” says Sarkis. “After all, moving into this building is an act of renewal.” 

A new study by MIT researchers found that it is impossible to draw a direct link between AI diffusion model outputs and an artist’s body of work, writes Gizmodo’s Webb Wright. “If a [diffusion] model generates something, you want to be able to say, ‘Oh, this part of the training data was responsible,'” says Zheng Dai, PhD ’24, lead author on the study. “It’s important for us to understand how these models work to properly study them or regulate them.” 

WBUR’s Maddie Browning highlights exhibits by artists Uri Aran and Hao Jingban set to be displayed at the MIT List Visual Arts Center from Oct. 23 to Feb. 28. Aran’s first major institutional solo exhibition in the U.S “includes new works that feel strange yet recognizable," while Jingban’s “‘I Witness’ (2025) explores the aftermath of the pandemic through four people experiencing different forms of loss,” writes Browning 

Prof. David Gifford and Zheng Dai PhD ’24 discovered that AI diffusion models can replicate the style of an artist even when their work was omitted from datasets, leading to ‘attribution decay,’ writes Fast Company’s Jesus Diaz. “This trend, what the researchers call ‘attribution decay,’ means that artificial intelligence can produce an image that resembles a particular artist’s work, while having no provable causal link to that artist’s actual contribution to the training data,” explains Diaz.  

The Boston Globe’s Mark Feeney chronicles MIT’s adaptive reuse of the historic Metropolitan Warehouse into the new home of the School of Architecture and Planning. “As spaces, our studios used to be a lot more like labs, but now they are grand and full of light and celebratory in a way that hopefully enables better work,” says Prof. Ana Miljački, Head of the Department of Architecture.