VISA 0120 Foundations Media: Computation + Art

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Monday, February 23 at 7:00 PM
“Energy, Community, Communication”
Jegan Vincent de Paul, Wendy Jacob, Jae Rhim Lee
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‘Collision’ is a cross-disciplinary lecture series that examines the intersection of research in science, technology and contemporary art. This event pairs current research from the MIT Visual Arts Program with cutting edge research in other disciplines including mobile communication design, neuroscience, and robotics. The kick-off event introduces research-based artistic practice, presenting three current projects initiated in and supported by the MIT Visual Arts Program and the MIT School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P).

Location:
Joan Jonas Performance Hall, MIT Visual Arts Program, Bldg N51-337, 3FL
265 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139
(see directions below).

For more information:

http://visualarts.mit.edu

vap@mit.edu
617-253-5229

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SPEAKERS
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Jegan Vincent de Paul – Community Grid Project

Jegan Vincent de Paul is a second-year graduate student in the MIT Visual Arts Program. His current work deals with global energy access. With a background in architecture, Vincent de Paul has worked with Lot-ek, New York and Ai Wei Wei, Beijing. Project collaborators (UROPs Rachel Cheney and Jennifer Tran, and CMS graduate student Jason Rockwood) will also be present. The Community Grid Project envisions a novel utilization of advances in ultracapacitor technology: using human labor to close the gap between communities with access to energy resources and those without, through the physical transport of personal ultracapacitors. Human labor and capacitors are combined to bring essential levels of energy to everyone.

Wendy Jacob – Autism Studio

Wendy Jacob is an artist and research associate at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, MIT. She directs the newly-established Autism Studio in the MIT Visual Arts Program. Since 1989, she has also been part of the artists‘ collaborative Haha, whose site-based projects and public interventions have been shown internationally. Autism Studio is conceived as a multi-disciplinary studio where new and creative responses to living with autism are developed. In the United States, the prevalence of autism spectrum disorders has risen to one in every 150 children. The studio aims to explore perceptual features afforded by the broad range of autistic experience, and to create objects, spaces, and events that resonate with these experiences. Projects include a club to explore open space, an evening of video screenings and paper shredding, and the design of chairs that hug and clothing and architecture that extend the sensory reach.

Jae Rhim Lee – FEMA Trailer Project

Jae Rhim Lee is a Visiting Lecturer and alumna of the MIT Visual Arts Program. She also directs the FEMA Trailer Project. Her artistic practice includes N=1=0=Infinity, a post-apocalyptic, urban eco-burial system. The FEMA Trailer Project transforms one of the 94,000 surplus trailers into an alternative vehicle, to be donated to a community or non-profit organization. The FEMA Trailer has come to symbolize many of the environmental, social, economic, and administrative challenges associated with temporary disaster housing. The FEMA Trailer Project catalyzes positive change in these areas, and applies environmental justice and permaculture principles to the conceptualization and re-design of the trailer.

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SPECIAL THANKS
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Thanks to the Council for the Arts at MIT and the Office of the Dean, MIT School of Architecture and Planning for support for these projects.

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DIRECTIONS
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The MIT Visual Arts Program is located adjacent to the MIT Museum at 265 Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge. Enter through the grey door on Front Street and take the elevator to the third floor. Exit to your left and go down the ramp. The Joan Jonas Performance Hall is located on the right. .

By Public Transportation
Take the Red Line to Central Square. Walk four blocks along Massachusetts Avenue towards Boston and the Charles River or take the #1 bus to the Front Street stop.

CARPENTER CENTER LECTURE

WILLIAM POPE.L

Thursday, February 19, 2008

6pm

Reception to follow

Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Corbu Pops

Pope.L is a visual and performance-theater artist and educator who makes culture out of contraries. He has created multi-disciplinary works since the 1970s, and exhibited internationally, including New York, London, Los Angeles, Vienna, Montreal, Berlin, Zurich, and Tokyo. Select recent projects have been sited at Art Institute of Chicago, Santa Monica Museum of Art, Galerie Catherine Bastide and Sammlung Falckenberg. He is a featured artist in Intersections edited by Marci Nelligan and Nicole Mauro, and How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness by Darby English.

The artist in Corbu Head mask, courtesy of the artist. © 2008 William Pope.L

via Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts – Galleries and Programming.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2009
5:00 pm
Crystal Room, Alumnae Hall, 194 Meeting Street

Ursula Heise, Associate Professor of English at Stanford University, is also the Director of the Program in Modern Thought & Literature, a member of the Executive Committee of the Program in Science, Technology & Society, and of the Woods Institute for the Environment. She specializes in contemporary American and European literature and literary theory; her fields of interest are theories of modernization, postmodernization and globalization, ecology and ecocriticism, literature and science, narrative theory, science fiction, and media theory.

She has published articles on contemporary authors from the US, Latin America and Western Europe, and is the author of Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, Postmodernism (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford University Press, 2008). She is currently working on a book entitled The Avantgarde and the Forms of Nature, about the role of biological form in works of the European, Latin American and North American avantgardes of the twentieth century.