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A Target

The target at 180 Somerville Avenue is nothing special. As a place to observe adjacent spaces and events however, its boring and typical department store features become a meaningful backdrop to question patterns of daily life, street infrastructure, urban development and the multiple roles a parking lot plays within and in between these things. The photographs in this work are at once a survey, critique and minor celebration of a target parking lot and everyday urban relationships that generate questions rather than answers. Beginning at the parking lot, they record the range of fleeting events and more permanent ones; from […]

NeuraFutures

  Building on 15 years of our experience in designing and creating the most cutting edge interaction – fusion between the brain and computer, brain-computer interface, in our project NeuraFutures we are touching upon implanting memories, reading your dreams while you sleep and communicating a thought between two different people throughout the continents. We analyzed 450+ books, movies, TV shows to give our audience a better picture of what brain computer interfaces are and are not. From science to science fiction, from 1641’s brain in a jar to 2021’s Rick and Morty’s memory transfer helmet. We explore together with our […]

Ottoman Boston

Boston’s Little Syria (also known as Syriatown), thrived between the 1880s and 1950s in today’s Chinatown and South End, yet few Bostonians are familiar with it. Drawing from photographs, property maps, and memoirs of Syrian- and Lebanese-Americans, this exhibition narrates the history of a neighborhood which is nearly invisible today. The buildings of Little Syria–from Gridley J.F. Bryant’s Greek Revival Quincy Grammar School to the retro 1970s Syrian Sahara Restaurant–make up not just the history of one neighborhood, but are also important sites in Boston’s architectural past, present, and future. This exhibition follows the path of immigrants who fled blight […]

Andreas Refsgaard

Exhibit opening event: Monday, September 26, at 5pm in the Lewis Music Library (14E-109). Join us as Andreas Refsgaard and Caleb Hall, Music Technology and Digital Media Librarian, demonstrate the installations, try them out for yourself, and enjoy light refreshments. A 2022-23 visiting artist at the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST), creative coder Andreas Refsgaard allows people to experiment, interact, and have fun with algorithms and machine learning. Two of his projects will be on view in Lewis Music Library. Doodle Tunes converts hand-drawn images of instruments into musical tracks – users draw an object, like a […]

Wojnarowicz in Cambridge

Reception: September 14, 2022, 4-6pm in Rotch Library Gallery Wojnarowicz in Cambridge is a series of photographic portraits composed in response to David Wojnarowicz’s Rimbaud in New York series, in which the artist was photographed wearing a mask of the transgressive French poet Arthur Rimbaud. Wojnarowicz in Cambridge brings queer visibility into the public sphere, inviting viewers to consider identity—as something constructed, as something fluid and changeable—so that the current dialogue (and debate) about identity politics becomes more nuanced, more inclusive, more representative. The photographic images in the Wojnarowicz in Cambridge series were taken using an iPhone and several disposable […]

South Asia and the Institute

Researched by current MIT faculty, students, alumni, and staff, this historical exhibit tells the remarkable story of South Asia at MIT and MIT in South Asia to honor the determination and grit of multiple generations of South Asians at the Institute. The exhibit celebrates the far-reaching accomplishments, technical expertise, and ingenuity that have made significant contributions to the advancement of knowledge at MIT and life beyond the Institute, in South Asia, the United States, and across the world. It also highlights the ways in which MIT’s past and present have been shaped by histories of immigration and race in America, […]

Mindscapes IX

This exhibition is of paintings by MIT alumna Susan E. Schur. Her work utilizes various techniques of employing oil paint on paper and board to create works that provide exciting, multi-layer visual experiences, with each viewer becoming an active participant in the realization of the vision presented. The impact for a beholder, therefore, can be a rich, dynamic happening. The images seen in her paintings can range from the subtle and mystical to the bold and dramatic. In the New England region, showings of her works have included solo exhibitions at Harvard’s Gutman Gallery, the Nashua Arts & Science Center, […]

Soft City

Reception: March 11, 5-6pm Soft City is a large-scale textile series that maps the urban fabric of Black neighborhoods in the Boston area. The tapestries map historic (redlined) and contemporary Black neighborhoods, including Roxbury, Dorchester, and East Cambridge. The information mapped tells the story of the past, present and future of Black residents, and the ecological resilience of the neighborhoods they live in. Hard (impervious) and soft (pervious) land uses are codified using colors with overlays of future tree plantings and flood zones on the tapestry. The softness and materiality of tufting interrogates the traditional top-down approach to space planning […]

Shingles Nest

The Shingles Nest is a small pavilion installation that inhabits the Rotch Library and serves as a reading corner; visitors are invited to sit inside and enjoy the privacy and warmth of the wooden cocoon. The project is based on the local mining of material waste streams and proposes a shingling system as an assembly strategy that could extend to the upcycling of any sheet material offcuts. The structure is a self-supporting shingle assembly composed of wooden planks of different sizes salvaged from the recycling stream of heavy-duty pallets on campus. The planks are cleaned, and the wood is re-valuated […]

The Poetry of Science

By combining the intensity of poetry with vivid imagery, The Poetry of Science aims to strengthen the voices and experiences of distinct communities of color, synthesizing a striking poetic and visual language to help fill the gap between the sciences and the humanities. The Poetry of Science creates positive associations between people of color, the arts, the sciences, how nature is perceived, and what it means to generate knowledge. Presented are the visual representation of scientists as integral parts of the natural landscape, embedded into the very foundation of reality that they study, observe, seek to understand, and create. Accompanying […]