4.390
ACT
STUDIO
FALL
2015
09:15 Gedney Barclay 09:50 Joshuah Jest 10:25 Jose Rivera 11:00 Angel Chen 11:35 Neil Sanzgiri 12:10 Raafat Majzoub 13:45 Rainar Aasrand 14:20 Alan Kwan 14:55 Yusef Audeh 15:35 Jessika Khazrik 16:10 Bjรถrn Sparrman 16:45 Ron Martin 17:20 Ursula August
DECEMBER 14 2015
Contents 05
about ACT
09
about 4.390 ACT Studio
13
Gedney Barclay
17
Joshuah Jest
21
Jose Rivera
25
Angel Chen
29
Neil Sanzgiri
33
Raafat Majzoub
37
Rainar Aasrand
41
Alan Kwan
45
Yusef Audeh
49
Jessika Khazrik
53
Bjรถrn Sparrman
57 61
Ron Martin Ursula August
65
about the Reviewers
71
about the Lecture Series
about ACT 05
Art, Culture & Technology
[Here at MIT,] the scientist may be an extra brain to the artist and the engineer may be an extra arm to the artist, whereas the artist may be an extra eye to the scientist and engineer. — Otto Piene, former director of CAVS
To be contemporary in a true sense demands a most advanced knowledge of the facts governing life today.… If we should make social application of scientific knowledge, present obstacles to human existence would be eliminated. — György Kepes, founder and former director of CAVS
Art, Culture & Technology (act.mit.edu) is an academic program and research unit at MIT headed by internationally renowned practicing artists. ACT invites students, fellows, and affiliates to engage in hybrid artistic research and practice that experiments with new compositions of media and new forms of art technologies and deployments at the personal and the civic scale. In the spirit of artist and educator György Kepes— founder of ACT’s predecessor, the Center for Advanced Visual Studies—ACT promotes artistic leadership. Born out of a merger between MIT’s influential Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) and the Visual Arts Program (VAP), ACT shares in a rich heritage of work expanding the notion of visual studies and pushing the capacity of art to enlist science and technology in cultural production and critique. Situated within the School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P), ACT inhabits a dynamic ecosystem of centers, institutes, and programs promoting the interplay between STEM and the arts. Within this broader network, ACT has a unique role to play: it offers students, researchers, and practitioners the opportunity to push the interrogative function of art: to use art as a set of perspectives and means for addressing the social and ecological consequences of technology; to use art to build bridges between technics and life, utility and culture, representation and embodiment; and to challenge the boundaries between self and other, public and private, human and non-human, art and non-art, research and real life. In addition to basic research production and medium-specific training, the program offers access to a robust set of institutional resources and facilities, both within and beyond MIT, as well as a community of students, professors, fellows, affiliates, and visitors with an astounding wealth of specialties and creative energy. We provide an innovative learning environment that fosters complex, eclectic projects and personalities, and are committed to ensuring that MIT remains a critical hub for doing and studying contemporary art—a hub of rigorous artistic and pedagogical experimentation and a launch pad for new modes of transdisciplinary and transcultural collaboration. The program currently offers an undergraduate minor and concentration, as well as a highly selective two-year graduate program, the Master of Science in Art Culture and Technology (SMACT). It also offers a variety of introductory courses to the general MIT student population and courses tailored to undergraduates majoring in architecture. Advanced courses related to specific media and topics are offered as electives for both undergraduate and graduate students. ACT studio courses are complemented by practical workshops and discussions in theory and criticism, often provided by fellows and visitors to the program. Studios also regularly involve in situ engagements and research field trips, which, in addition to their research/pedagogical value, are intended to establish an MIT presence in international circuits of artistic and scholarly collaboration.
Research and Pedagogical Frontiers at a Glance Exhibitions/Events
(In-House Programming)
ACT takes an integrated approach to public programing, events, and exhibitions, tying these into our pedagogical and community involvement strategies, as well as our publishing agenda. Many of these events, such as our biannual symposia/exhibitions and studio-led curations like Resonating MIT (2014), take place at the scale of SA+P and MIT, continuing the tradition of CAVS’s Symposium on Science and Art (1986), Explorations exhibition (1970, Hayden Gallery, MIT), and Sky Art Conferences (1981). Our spring and fall lecture series are core content inputs for ACT Studios and Workshops. 2012-14, for instance, saw Cinematic Migrations as both the theme of the lecture series and the ACT Workshop in Advanced Practice and Transdisciplinary Research. The 2015 series, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, a series exploring embodied and spatial practices, coincided with and complemented ACT studio. The internationally renown and award winning visiting lecturers give public talks and engage students in practical workshop and review sessions, as well as informal discussions. In this way, ACT prides itself on regularly exposing our students and members of the broader community to a wide range of important figures relevant to the ACT mission. Our spring 2016 lecture series, Urgencies and Agencies in the Curatorial, invites prominent curators of the major international biennales to discuss the forces and institutions shaping contemporary curatorial practice. Our biannual symposia, inaugurated in the spring of last year with Public Space? Lost and Found, further this gathering ethos, bringing together a wealth of field-leaders and emerging talents to MIT for lectures, project presentations, panel discussions, and accompanying exhibitions. These multi-faceted events are intended to set new tones and trajectories for research in the field, which support our curriculum for the coming year(s) and carry over into eponymous publications—touchstone readers for researchers and classrooms well beyond MIT. The themes for our symposia in the coming years include: Cinematic Migrations, Culturally Sensitive Design, Performance, and Critical Data Visualization. Our next symposium, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of CAVS, will interrogate the agency of art to intervene in radicalizing ecologies and zones of conflict caused by climate change. We also do smaller scale exhibitions based on faculty, student, and visiting fellow research and ACT Studio activities. Recent examples include Azra Akšamija’s multimedia installation Solidarity Work: Politics of Cultural Memory (2014) and Urbonas Studio’s Learning Machine (2012), both at the Wolk Gallery; our 2015 graduate exhibition, It Could Be an Algorithm, held in the Media Lab’s E15 Lobby; and The Disobedience Archive (2011-12), a research and exhibition project conceived by Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas, produced in collaboration with Milan based curator Marco Scotini and students from ACT 4.303 – Art, Architecture, and Urbanism in Dialogue and 4.330/331 – Introduction to Networked Cultures and Participatory Media. This latter project was hosted by the Media Lab’s E14 Lobby for four months. ACT currently lacks our own dedicated exhibition space to showcase faculty and student work, the findings of ongoing research in CAVS archive, and a supporting rehearsal/installation space for exhibitions and performances. This is a shortcoming we hope to address in collaboration with SA+P in the coming years.
about 4.390 ACT Studio 09
4.390 ACT Studio Fall 2015 Instructor: Prof. Gediminas Urbonas TA: Xiaorui Zhu-Nowell Explores the theory and criticism of intersections between art, culture, and technology in relation to contemporary artistic practice. Considers methods of investigation, documentation, and display. Examines individual and collaborative practices and explores modes of communication across disciplines. Students develop research methods and goals, engage in production, cultivate a context for their practice, and explore how to successfully communicate about, display, and document their work. Regular presentations and critiques by peers, ACT faculty and fellows, and external guest reviewers. Restricted to SMACT students. 
Course Structure
 Seminar on the Method: artists’ presentation  Critical Forum: discussion of the work  Writing assignments  ACT Studio Practical  ACT lecture series (Mondays 7-9pm)
Seminar on the Method Guests Azra Aksamija/ sep 14 Morgane Stricot/ sep 21 Renee Green/ oct 05 Sam Auinger & Bruce Odland/ oct 13 Node Berlin/ oct 19 Haseeb Ahmed/ oct 19
Critical Forum Guests Caroline A. Jones/ sep 28 Maryam Jafri/ oct 05 Mark Goulthorpe/ oct 19 Marjetica Potrc/ oct 26 Lara Baladi/ nov 9 Wendelien van Oldenborgh/ nov 9 Pelin Tan/ nov 16 Tobias Putrih/ nov 30
Gedney Barclay 13
no, yet– no, yet– is the most recent performance in a larger body of work exploring the (im)materiality of the body and voice, comprising one of several experimental projects within my thesis research into how different intersections of body, voice, prosthetics, and technology may resist or surpass current politics and poetics of representation. The text is taken from the letters of Emily Dickinson, and the materials are taken from the trash for the Center for Bits and Atoms. -With a foundation in theater and the actor’s process, Gedney Barclay use performance and diverse media in photography, video, and sculpture to explore constraints on the body and voice and the parameters of their power as they are re-performed and reimagined in live space and time. www.gedneybarclay.com
Joshuah Jest 17
Defining Boarders: Investigating The Convention of the Screen as an Equilibrium Between World My current and ongoing series of works serves as my due diligence to the conventional screen. I quickly became aware that unpacking the history of two-dimensional media is a vast undertaking. There is so much history there – all of painting, cinema, and the theory that goes with it. But for my purposes, I just need a firm understanding of the inherent strengths and weaknesses of the medium as used conventionally, so that I have a baseline to compare my other works. The primary purpose of the works is to interrogate the conventional language of two-dimensional time-based media, which constructs an illusion of perspective on a flat surface. These works explore an alternative and arguably more intrinsic method for compressing moving object in space into a two-dimensional format: shadows. Instead of capturing images beyond the lens, images are indexed by the shadows they cast on a physical capture plane. The transduction occurs before digital induction. The results are that the replayed media more closely approximates the original images captured. These works also explore physical spaces that function as territories for the digital – a three-dimensional space reserved for the stuff typically confined to planar screens. Limiting our perception naturally to the frame of the screen creates a degree of uncertainty about what’s on the other side. Then, this uncertainty can be exploited by suggesting something behind the occluding surface. If the time, space, and scale are kept constant, the media becomes even more convincing. -Joshuah is an architecturally-trained designer and technologist concerned with bringing digital information out of screens and into the tangible environment by perceptually integrating dynamic display systems into the physical world through architecture, installations, and sculpture. His current work synthesizes his architectural background (B.Arch. Rice University, Thomas Phifer and Partners) with his research on media facades and digitally augmented objects (Urbanscreen). Joshuahjest.com CV: http://tinyurl.com/ppqsvxu Portfolio: http://tinyurl.com/zc4fsz6 Current work: http://tinyurl.com/q5easc6
Jose Rivera 21
Reflections of a Thousand Faces Sound, by its very nature, is simultaneously now and always becoming. According to Salomé Voegelin, the listening experience engages us with life’s contingency as a dynamic process of embodiment. At a place like MIT, often facilitated by the incessant drive towards what lies beyond, there exists a confrontation with the present moment and the promise of the future. Further, this focus on the persistence of tradition concerning the production of knowledge occurs in spaces that are supported by complex building systems. Hidden away and inaccessible, these intricate sounding spaces employ various technologies that enable our architectural experience to exist as we know it. The differences of now and then, here and there, and the beyond implies temporal movement, passage, and a notion of progress. Thus, the resonant space of a stairwell is explored, evoking ideas of evacuation, journey, and transition. This liminality refers to what Marc Augé called, a non-space. These non-spaces are not concerned with identity, and are void of relational and historical notions of definition. As such, the spectator-traveler experiences a disorientation that occurs throughout the journey. Reflections of a Thousand Faces is a multichannel sound work that uses installation to probe a means of possible spatial reorientation. A tension occurs, and the suspension of time is a momentary detour that relocates a new experience, expands present circumstances of the space, and attempts to create a deeper relationship between listeners and their environment. -Jose A. Rivera (aka Proxemia) is a sound/media artist, and designer. Prior to receiving his BS in Architecture and Environmental Design from Kent State University in 2011, he received NASA’s Intern Team of the Year Award in 2008, held a graphic design residency with Building Bridges Arts Collaborative in 2009, and exhibited architectural work in Florence, Italy, in 2010. Exploring the intersections of aural and spatial experience, his current work is primarily expressed through the disciplines of experimental music, electroacoustic composition, sound design, cartography, acoustic ecology, art, and architecture. Along with numerous sound projects, live performances and collaborations, his fluid body of work also includes an open-air performance space for a youth dance and drumming group in rural Ghana. proxemiasound.net
Angel Chen 25
A murder-suicide story in two parts The story is based on a true event that took place earlier this year in Taiwan, where a young man commited murder and suicide within a 72-hour time frame. The project tells the story through two separate registers. On one register, the story is told with jorunal entries by a friend of the protagonists, as she finds out more and more information about the event, through the news, Facebook status updates, text messages and etc. On the other register, the story is told through interface of a cell phone spy software, where the protagonist’s every move on his cell phone during the last 72 hours of his life was recorded. This project is about how tools and technologis of communication enable us to perceieve different aspects of reality and how particular desires to know more are unlocked as a consequence. -Angel Chen is an artist from Taipei, Taiwan. Her work is conceptually-driven. Working with installation and public intervention, she investigates forms of social relations in the context of digital culture. Her current research compares the way Internet allows data scientists to study human society with the way microscope is used in microbiology. Chen holds a BA in Philosophy and Computer Science from McGill University (2009). http://chenchialing.com/
Neil Sanzgiri 29
The Production of Belief The Production of Belief is a temporary pop-up exhibition and installation by SMACT candidate Neil Sanzgiri featuring four new works centered around the events of the 1991 Persian Gulf War crisis, the rise of the 24 hour live news broadcast, and the effects of instantaneous communication in a globalized society. The installation consists of a ten minute rear-projected screening of Sanzgiri’s film “The Production of Belief ” interweaving a debunked 2009 conspiracy theory about falsified live coverage of the Gulf War from a CNN corespondent and monologues addressing Sanzgiri’s birth in 1989. The film is installed inside of a large re-created film set featuring a broadcast of a 1958 speech from American Journalist Edward Murrow and overlapping media artifacts from the Gulf War era. Radical public access television shows from 1991, featuring notables such as Edward Said and Douglas Kellner with “Alternative Views TV”, and more collaborative efforts such as Paper Tiger and Deep Dish Television’s “Gulf Crisis TV project” are paired next to each other to explore deeper investigations into the subject through issues of oil, imperialism, representation, and dissent. Sanzgiri repositions these original programs into the present by working with CCTV (Cambridge Community Television) to re-broadcast these episodes on local cable television without context, leaving viewers to draw their own connections between 1991 and 2015. Additionally, Sanzgiri invited curator and artist Alia Farid (VAP ‘08, Curator of Kuwaiti Pavilion) to contribute to the work, whom added a text by Lebanese poet and feminist Etal Adnan. The audience navigates the spatial terrains of the installation through different stations featuring commentaries and texts, construction sites and recreated film sets, all adding to the complexity of this particular moment in world history where post-cold war military censorship and media spectacle were mobilized to gain popularity and support for invasion of a region where U.S. forces have not since left. -Neil Sanzgiri is an artist, writer, and organizer working to understand how systems of oppression are informed and reinforced by collective memory, spectacle, and trauma. Sanzgiri’s work examines philosophical and poetic interpretations of historical events and their residual effect on current, complex networks of interaction, such as globalization and mass media, taking the form of installations, videos and sculptural works. Graduating from the Maryland Institute College of Art with a BFA in Interdisciplinary Sculpture in 2011, Sanzgiri continued to work and live in Baltimore, co-running the art gallery and performance venue Open Space Baltimore for five years. Sanzgiri also co-ran the Spiral Cinema migrating film series that ranged from screenings and lectures to panels and publications. In the Spring of 2015, Sanzgiri participated and organized in the Baltimore Uprising which continues to remain an important part of his identity. sanzgiri@mit.edu
Raafat Majzoub 33
TERRITORISM Raafat Majzoub
A graffiti text “Don’t forget to mention God” invades a white wall with a sign disclaiming, “No Unsolicited Ads,” both ubiquitous messages in the shared Arab landscape a.k.a. “Public Space”. The graffiti invasion hides in an unerasable aesthetic message, while expressing its true message through invisible compononents in its materiality. See caption 5. A compilation of commissioned videos from Jerusalem, received via Whatsapp messenger. The protagonist is following the recipe to create a stone varnished with a text of her choice.
TERRITORISM TERRITORISM is Majzoub’s latest experiment in world-building through Contemporary Art practice. This ongoing series that he started working on at MIT investigates the creation of accessible, shareable, discrete and site-specific interventions as tools for the “rightful” reclamation of cultural and physical territory from the central control unit to the mass. The name of this series alludes to the contemporary use of the word “Terrorism” as the institutional branding of acts of popular reclamation of land and ideas. It challenges the name and the methods of reclamation. TERRITORISM proposes popular activity outside the boundaries of legislation, to create an indestructible “shared space” by tools of consensus rather than of [orchestrated] democracy. It is an attempt at scripting an unimaginable world in reality (circa, architecture) as opposed to participate in a journey to attain a probably obsolete, clear version of one. Above is a still from a commissioned video shot in Jerusalem, a city inaccessible to the artist due to the state of war between Lebanon and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. The video is set in a Palestinian kitchen and showcases the protagonist following steps provided by the artist to transfer text into a varnish for stone. The choice of stone and text were up to her. She chose a palm-sized stone and “Lesson From The Kama-Sutra” a poem by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. For the Fall 2015 ACT Final Exhibition, Majzoub uses the installation space as a diagram demonstrating objects that do not belong in the gallery space, but rather use contemporary art as launch pad — an opportunity for transdisciplinary thinking and production methodologies. -Raafat Majzoub (b.1986) is a Lebanese architect, artist and writer. He is invested in creating a network narrative system where the writing of imagined fiction is coupled with a research and construction process that scripts it into reality — writing as architecture. His work revolves around a borderless Arab World and has taken various forms as outlets such as film, video, interactive performance, public installation, journalism, erotic and children’s literature. His novel “The Perfumed Garden: An Autobiography of Another Arab World” will be published soon. http://www.raafatmajzoub.com/
Excerpt from ‘The Perfumed Garden: An [ongoing] autobiography of another Arab world. A compilation of commissioned videos from Cairo, received via e-mail. The protagonist is following the recipe to create graffiti paint with a text of his choice.
Spray can filled with graffiti paint made of acrylic, water and ashes of “Naweit Asalli” (I meant to pray) a song by Egyptian singer and composer Sheikh Imam who was in prison multiple times during his lifetime because of his political songs indicting political elite in favor of the working class. This paint’s use changes “Don’t forget to mention God,” from an order for piety to a call for a critical conversation on religion. The coffee pot is a symbol for Arab gathering, “We are a nation the waits for its coffee to settle,” from ‘The Perfumed Garden’ was the starting point to use this as a tool to create the paints be-it at home or on the streets. For the past 4 years, ‘The Perfumed Garden’ has been written through a series of projects that materialize fiction into accessible experiences as a reality-scripting methodology. Its title, borrowed from a 15th century erotology manual, symbolizes this work’s aim to rekindle the visceral relationship between Arab people and their territory. Stone painted with varnish made from the ashes of “Surat Al-Nasr” (Divine Support) from the Quran mixed with linseed oil. Burning the Quran after use is an act of dignification to one of the Arab world’s holiest of texts to prevent it from ever being thrown in the trash. This technique was the basis for the development of this project.
Rainar Aasrand 37
Hope Products The video project Hope Products is looking at human movement between physical and digital spaces and how these separate entities come to meet and interact with each other. The work aims to mimetically visualize some of the non-object systems that are governing the relationships between humans and other species. The starting point for the work is a video showing the confrontation at the Missions playfield in San Francisco where two different realities clash. One of them is about the local and historical and the other about the efficiency and speed of global movement. In looking at this situation the work aims to query the movement of cultures and its larger effects. -Rainar Aasrand is a video artist and documentary filmmaker from Estonia. He is working across disciplines studying primarily the field of human condition in the digital age. He has studied documentary film in Baltic Film and Media School and cultural theory in Maastricht University and Estonian Institute of Humanities. Rainar has worked with various theatre and film projects and he is part of the SKATKA art collective.
Alan Kwan 41
The Hallway Whenever you exit you enter it again through the same door. -Born in 1990, Alan Kwan is a digital media artist and researcher from Hong Kong. He works at the intersection of virtual reality, cinema, and new media, and his projects have been shown at venues including the Ars Electronica Festival in Austria, ZKM Centre for Art and Media in Germany, and Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Shanghai. In 2014, he received the Hong Kong Arts Development Council Award for Young Artist (Media Art), and the Asian Cultural Council Fellowship to pursue his master’s degree in Art, Culture & Technology at MIT. In 2015 he was awarded the first prize of the MIT Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts. www.kwanalan.com
Yusef Audeh 45
Control/Automation Control/Automation is a short film about the desire to encapsulate human knowledge and decision-making capabilities into hardware and software, offering a deeper look into everyday technologies—joysticks, parking meters, microprocessors, autopilot systems— which regulate our behavior for greater safety and order. -Yusef Audeh is an artist working in photography and new media, probing how technological infrastructure—from simple machines to automated systems—can reveal dominant cultural and political ideologies. He has exhibited work on the the Qatar Foundation TV program Stars of Science, and at Red Bull Studios (New York), NEW INC, the New Museum’s Incubator for Art, Technology and Design, and Townhouse Gallery (Cairo). He is currently a candidate for a Master of Science degree in Art, Culture and Technology at MIT.
Jessika Khazrik 49
I Hate the Past but It Seduces Me
by The Society of False Witnesses / Jessika Khazrik Beach your ship upon the shore, upon the city, switch the time and reclaim the airborne channels. Lately, I have been particularly interested in flaring, studying and attempting to create instances of recoil. As I have been thinking of the variables of territory, speed, communication, and desire, I, Nahida Fadli El Dajani, have decided in these lavished times of crises not to die . This performance is preoccupied with the spectrality and resurgence of the voice through radio, exilic space and their correlations with the history of dance and the underground. Exiled during the Nakba from her home country Palestine, Nahida Fadli El Dajani was a very prominent female voice and poet who wrote and presented several shows on the national radio station, Radio Liban, from 1953 to 1977. She fled Beirut and the Lebanese Civil War in 1977 to Virginia, USA with no return. In this performance, I reclaim Nahida’s voice while presently speaking into the future in a fictional remake of one of her shows. By emulating her voice in tone and lexicon and creating a new episode of the weekly “Iqā’ wa nagham” / “Beats and Tune” (1969-1971) on the history of experimental opera, modern ballet and musique concrète, I will alter my voice; re-visiting a utopic past of Pan-Arabism. I, Nahida Fadli El Dajani, awakened by the sound of the decomposition of trash and hidden for 45 years in the underground, will row with you in stories of dance that have never laid ground. This live conversational attempt with the mucked, mired and protracted swathe of Lebanese land I miss, will be broadcasted on the same Radio Liban, in whose archives, I have heard Nahida for the first time. Commissioned musicians: Maurice Louca, Hamed Sinno and Samer Saem El Daher -The Society of False Witnesses was founded by artist and writer Jessika Khazrik in 2014 while re-investigating a buried trade of toxic wastes whose investigator scientist and ecotoxicologist, Pierre Malychef, was detained in 1995 and accused of being a false witness. Through performance, exhibition and writing, The Society of False Witnesses probes and plays with the geophilosophy, political economy and spectatorship of exiled matter, the undergound/undersea and battlefield.
Jessika Khazrik (The Society of False Witnesses) is an artist, writer and DJ born in Beirut or Baghdad in 1991. She studied Theatre and Linguistics at the Lebanese University, and was a participant in 2012-13 in Ashkal Alwan’s post-graduate program “ Home Workspace” in Beirut. Ranging across several disciplines, media and geographies, her work investigates the correlation between truth and testimony in art, science and the law. Her projects include The Influence of Prostitution on Tourism (2013), Flying City in the Aerial Paths of Communication (2013), My Body If Only I Could See You (2014), and the ongoing Blue Barrel Grove (2014-). She also collaborates with artists and collectives as writer, performer and translator and organizes parties. Her work was performed/exhibited in Aley, Aix-en-Provence, Beirut, Bern, Boston, Mannheim, Montemor-o-Novo and New York.
Bjรถrn Sparrman 53
A Speculative Vertical Vantage This work continues an ongoing series of video based works that breakdown and displace elements of recorded movements through space. The artist initially articulates the inescapable nature of ideology in that the assuming of any particular vantage through time and space (taking a path or road, looking in a certain direction etc), that within any motion through space there is carried a program of society. The series of works takes or makes record of various trajectories. Constitutive elements of these (the kinesthetics, location, timing) are extracted and inserted into new arrangements or locations. This process in various combination looks to find a fundamental, perhaps ideological aura of the given movement-vantage. A Speculative Vertical Vantage begins with found footage from one of thousands of dashboard cam videos online. it attempts to recreate the vertical perspective of the moving car, a perspective that once existent, is now lost to us. -Bjorn Sparrman received his BFA from Calvin College in 2012. He worked at the Walker Art Center as assistant and exhibition-tender for artist Fritz Haeg’s At Home In the City residency, and more recently at Guldagergaard: International Ceramic Research Center, SkÌlskør, Denmark. As recipient of the ArtPrize 2014 Pitchnight grant, he exhibited his large public work, The Grand River Checkpoint Project, during the citywide festival in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Ron Martin 57
The Boundless Air Lab Martin has spent the last semester investigating ways in which air is treated as a tool and subject of research at MIT, historically (as air was used by some members of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies) and in contemporary terms (as air quality is currently being explored and visualized by new affordable and high resolution sensing devices). For The Boundless Air Lab project, he curated specific instances from his research to represent them from a personal, critical and poetic stance to envision new meanings of air as artistic medium and air itself as a space of socio-economic and political contention. Referencing various works by Otto Piene such as Lift and Equilibrium (1969) and Silver Balloon Event (1969), amongst others, Martin reconsiders the ways in which air often combined with helium, was a defining tool for Piene. Similarly, Martin pays attention to how air was conceived of in the Sky Art movement. For this element, he looks specifically at Elizabeth Goldring’s text Desert Sun/Desert Moon and the Sky Art Manifesto (published in Leonardo, 1987) about “a series of temporary events and installations utilizing the temporal landscape of sky and space to evoke at the same time mythic and immaterial dimensions of that sky and space.”
From The Boundless Air Lab: Filling a balloon with air from the space in front of Apartment 19G, 60 Wadsworth St, Cambridge, MA; residence of Otto Piene when he was working on Lift and Equilibrium, 1969.
Front cover of Desert Sun/Desert Moon and the Sky Art Manifesto 1987, Elizabeth Goldring
For The Boundless Air Lab, Martin stages a vinyl graphic installation accompanied by a projection onto an installation of 28 36” latex balloons and a curated historical archive. While the balloons are inflated with samples of air from sites where Sky Art events happened around Boston, the configuration of the balloons reminisces the molecular configuration of Hellium-3 and Hellium-4. These are the most abundant elements in our known universe and, at the same time, the most difficult to mine on planet earth. -Ron Martin was born in San Francisco. He grew up in Mexico City and South New Jersey. He asks, why do people/artists forgo personal health and wellbeing in favor of production? Can we accurately visualize this dynamic and change it? His art also reimagines large and expensive technologies as small affordable devices to be used by wide audiences. Examples include making a mini-wind generator mounted to a bicycle and an inexpensive 3-D printed ultrasonic wristband to help diagnose osteoporosis. Martin harnesses the energy and data produced by these devices to make informative, critical art installations that manifest hidden ideologies in the global urban context. He studied art at the Cooper Union and the Staedelschule. He’s shown work, published articles and lectured at the Portikus Galerie in Frankfurt and the 2009 Venice Biennale.
From The Boundless Air Lab: Filling a balloon with air from Boston City Hall, site of Silver Balloon Event, 1969
Ursula August 61
August August is a film that maneuvers the impossible terrains of mapping the history of a family of mixed race heritage in 1940-50s South Africa, constructing subjective bridges throughout the gaps of time and space imposed - in one way or another - by apartheid. There is very little indication, trace or memorial of the family in any of the places they have lived, something it shares in common with migratory families. August subsequently constructs an image made from the assumptions made by the South African Broadcasting Corporation, the British Broadcasting Corporation, and American news station archives; family aural history and dialogue; and contemporary imagery of South Africa. Augustrefers to the family’s name, a slave name that means “dignity”. -Ursula August is a South African artist and film maker whose work investigates systems of representation and productions of identity. Her work integrates her background in cinema (Durban University of Technology), journalism (B.Sc Emerson College) and teaching high schoolers. Other topics of enquiry include pedagogy, diasporic communities and the commons.
about the Reviewers 65
Guest Reviewers Dennis Adams is internationally recognized for his urban interventions and museum installations that reveal historical and political undercurrents in photography, cinema, public space and architecture. Over the last twenty-five years, he has realized over fifty urban projects in cities worldwide from Antwerp to Zagreb. His work has been the subject of numerous one-person exhibitions in museums and galleries throughout North America and Europe., and is included in public collections including the Museum Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris; Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerp; the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich; and the Fotomusem Winterthur, Zurich. Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporáneo, Galicia, Spain, Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz, Austria and the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. Adams has taught at numerous institutions including: Parsons School of Design, New York; Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris; Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam; and the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich. From 1997 to 2001, he was Director of the Visual Arts Program and Professor in the School of Architecture at MIT. He is currently a Professor at the Cooper Union in New York City. Henriette Huldisch is curator at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts and recently organized Eva Koťátková: Out of Sight and the sound and performance exhibition Open Tunings there. Until May 2014, she worked at Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum for Contemporary Art – Berlin, where she curated shows such as Harun Farocki: Serious Games (2014/15), Body Pressure: Sculpture since the 1960s (2013), and Anthony McCall: Five Minutes of Pure Sculpture (2012), among others. From 2010-2014, Huldisch served as Visiting Curator at Cornerhouse, Manchester, and organized solo exhibitions with Rosa Barba and Stanya Kahn. From 2004-2008, she was assistant curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and curated or co-curated shows such as the 2008 Whitney Biennial; Small: The Object in Film, Video, and Slide Installation; Full House: Views of Whitney’s Collection at 75; and more. Among her publications is the 2008 Biennial Exhibition catalogue (with Shamim M. Momin) and numerous contributions to exhibition catalogues and publications such as Artforum. In the fall of 2009 she was a guest professor at the Malmö Art Academy, Sweden.
ACT Faculty and Staff Azra Akšamija is a Sarajevo-born artist and architectural historian. She is Class of 1922 Career Development Professor, Department of Architecture, and an Assistant Professor in the Art, Culture and Technology Program. Akšamija graduated from the Faculty of Architecture at the Technical University Graz, Austria in 2001, and received her M.Arch. from Princeton University, USA in 2004, and Ph.D. from MIT (HTC / AKPIA) in 2011. In her multi-disciplinary practice, she investigates the potency of art and architecture to facilitate the process of transformative mediation in cultural or political conflicts, and in so doing, provide a framework for researching, analyzing, and intervening in contested socio-political realities. Her recent work focuses on representation of Islam in the West, spatial mediation of identity politics, and cultural transfers through art and architecture. Her latest projects include The Mashrabiya, an installation of calligraphic textile panels that conceptually connects window lattice designs from Islamic architecture with Austrian chemical embroidery; The Museum Solidarity Lobby, a sound sculpture questioning the role of the national museum in a post-national context; and The Future Heritage Collection, a video installation with a collection of stories exploring heritage dynamics. assistant professor Jessica Anderson graduated from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 2004 with a bachelor’s degree in classical studies with art and art history related fields. After living and working in Texas for a few years, she was accepted to the graduate program in historic preservation at The University of Texas at Austin’s School of Architecture. Her thesis, Rehabilitation Models for the Treatment of Historic Motels and Motor Courts (2013), presents owners, developers, and preservationists with alternatives to demolition in an attempt to save these valuable roadside resources. academic assistant Seth Avecilla received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Washington where he studied sculpture and public art and studied architecture at MIT from 2006 to 2008. Seth is particularly interested in working with people to create things. He has been an instructor at the Artisan’s Asylum in Somerville, has worked as a fabricator with Höweler + Yoon and Design Communications, Ltd., and has his own fabrication consultancy, SCA Studio. Seth has worked in a variety of mediums and specializes in making “unbelievable projects possible.” fabrication associate
Dr. Paul O’Neill is an artist, curator, educator and writer based in Bristol and New York. He is the new Director of the Graduate Program at Bard Centre for Curatorial Studies, New York. Paul has co-curated more than fifty exhibition projects across the world including: The Curatorial Timeshare, Enclave, London (since 2012); Last Day, Cartel Gallery, London (2012); Our Day Will Come, Part of Iteration: Again, Hobart, Tasmania (2011); We are Grammar, Pratt Institute, Manhattan Gallery, New York (2011); Coalesce: happenstance, SMART, Amsterdam (2009); Making Do, The Lab, Dublin (2007); General Idea: Selected Retrospective, Project, Dublin (2006); Tonight, Studio Voltaire, London, (2004); Are We There Yet? Glassbox, Paris (2000) and Passports, Zacheta Gallery of Contemporary Art, Warsaw (1998). He has held lecturing positions on the MFA Curating, Goldsmiths College, London and Visual Culture at Middlesex University amongst others. He currently international research fellow with the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media, Dublin, and international tutor on the de Appel Curatorial Programme. His practice is interested in addressing the systems of interpretation that are involved in making sense of the world around us and the compulsions that lead to interpretation and meaning itself. His work explores the experience, of traversing territory, of moving across things rather than patrolling boundaries. This exploration may take a number of media, appoaches and forms, from curatorial projects and art-making, to discursive events, writing or lecture presentations. Paul explores notions of exhibition-making as a form of collaborative artistic practice with multiple actors and agencies at work together.
Egyptian-Lebanese artist Lara Baladi is internationally recognized for her multidisciplinary work. In her investigations into myths, archives, personal histories and socio-political narratives, Baladi makes use of a wide range of mediums including architecture, installations, photography, collage, tapestry, perfume and sculpture. Borg el Amal (Tower of Hope), Baladi’s ephemeral construction and sound installation, won the first prize at the 2008-09 Cairo International Contemporary Art Biennale. For Ukraine’s 2012 first Contemporary Art Biennial, she collaborated with the Kiev Kamera Orchestra to play live the Donkey Symphony —Borg El Amal’s sound component. In 2006, Baladi founded the artist residency Fenenin el Rehal (Nomadic Artists) in Egypt’s White Desert. During the 2011 Egyptian revolution and its aftermath, Baladi co-founded two media initiatives, Tahrir Cinema and Radio Tahrir, the first free Egyptian online radio. She has been an artist in residency at the MacDowell Colony (New Hampshire, 2015), Art Omi International Arts Center (Hudson, New York, 2014) and VASL (Karachi, Pakistan, 2010) among other places. In 2003, she received a fellowship from the Japan Foundation to research anime. In 2014, Baladi received a Fellowship from MIT’s Open Documentary Lab. For the 2015-16 academic year, she is the Ida Ely Artist in Residence at MIT’s Center for Art, Science and Technology (CAST) and a lecturer in MIT’s Art, Culture and Technology (ACT) program. Baladi is on the board of directors of the Arab Image Foundation (AIF) since it’s creation in 1997 (Beirut, Lebanon), of the Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art and of R-Shief, a web-based archive and media system since 2014. lecturer
James Voorhies is the John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Director of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University. He oversees a contemporary arts program dedicated to the synthesis of art, design, and education through the exhibition of existing works and production of new commissions. His writing has appeared in publications by Texte zur Kunst, Frieze, Harvard Design Magazine and Printed Matter, as well as many artist monographs and exhibition catalogues. Voorhies is the founder of Bureau of Open Culture, a nonprofit curatorial and publishing initiative that (from 2007 to 2014) collaborated with museums, universities, and foundations to make projects with contemporary artists and writers. He holds a Ph.D. in modern and contemporary art history from The Ohio State University. He previously taught art history at Bennington College in Vermont and in addition to Director of the Carpenter Center teaches curatorial practice and contemporary art in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University.
Madeleine Gallagher is an interdisciplinary artist and designer. Her practice embraces a wide variety of mediums, including traditional object making, photography, time-based media, and performance in order to investigate cultural phenomena related to technology. Madeleine brings a variety of experience to her role of providing technical instruction and support to students at MIT. This includes her previous work as a designer for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, exhibition coordinator for MICA, Visiting Assistant Professor in Film/Video at the Massachusetts College of Art and Teaching Fellow in the Design Media Arts Department at UCLA. media associate
Professor Renée Green is an artist, filmmaker and writer. Via films, essays and writings, installations, digital media, architecture, sound-related works, film series and events her work engages with investigations into circuits of relation and exchange over time, the gaps and shifts in what survives in public and private memories as well as what has been imagined and invented. She also focuses on the effects of a changing transcultural sphere on what can now be made and thought. Her exhibitions, videos and films have been seen throughout the world in museums, biennales and festivals. Ongoing Becomings, a survey exhibition of 20 years of her work was organized in 2009 by the Musée Cantonal des BeauxArts, Lausanne; in 2010, Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams, a survey exhibition highlighting her time-based work was produced in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. In 2008, Le rêve de l’artiste et du spectateur, a retrospective of Green’s films took place at the Jeu de Paume, in Paris. Other selected solo exhibitions venues include the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich; Portikus, Frankfurt; Centro Cultural de Bélem, Lisbon; Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Vienna Secession; Stichting de Appel, Amsterdam & the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. professor Claudia Joskowicz’s work looks at history and its repercussions on landscape. In her videos and installations, the viewer’s gaze is directed to the physical movement of the camera through a cinematic space where historic events and personal stories with a historic dimension are revisited and anchored in her native Latin American landscape. On the whole, her work addresses the way technology mediates and redefines concepts like history and memory. Joskowicz lives and works between New York and Santa Cruz, Bolivia. Recent museum and institutional exhibitions include the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in NY; Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain in Paris; Museo Amparo in Puebla, Mexico; Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde, Denmark; the Tenth Sharjah Biennial; the 29th São Paulo Biennial, Museo Nacional de Arte in La Paz, Centro Cultural Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz (Bolivia), and Lawndale Art Center in Houston. Other group exhibitions at the Tenth Habana Biennial, Slought Foundation in Philadelphia, the Videobrasil Festival in São Paulo, LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Asturias, Spain, Center for Book Arts, Socrates Sculpture Park, Artists Space, Exit Art, El Museo del Barrio and The Bronx Museum of the Arts, all in New York, the McDonough Museum of Art in Cleveland, Dukwon Gallery in Seoul, the Soap Factory in Minneapolis and the Dallas Contemporary. Her work is part of the collections at the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, the Kadist Art Foundation, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Asiaciti Trust LARA Project Collection. lecturer Working from research and structured improvisation, Kelly Nipper’s work tests the sustainability of recorded and repeated information as it changes from one form or medium to another including the acts of transcription and translation from the discipline of dance to time-based forms of image making. Working in a discursive manner she is interested in how one thing relates to another, an elastic spatial concept, endlessness, the process of creation and imagination and human and physical geography. Nipper’s practice expands from her background in photography and film/video; technologies that collapse vast fields and the passage of time into the here and now for an audience conditioned to receive in a state of delay. Her research pressures the industrialization and/or mechanization of body, senses and relationships. Nipper has explored specific historic practices from the late 1800s and early 1900s such as Hungarian movement theorist Rudolph Laban’s methodology as a means to evaluate ideas about composition and computation with specific reference to the human figure, social interaction, individual experience and its relationship to nature and technology. Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) provides a vocabulary and conceptual framework for investigating and understanding the materiality of time, space and the body. More recently, Nipper’s research has centered around an extension of LMA called Bartenieff Fundamentals, which is primarily about developing connections within the body (total-body connectivity) and the body/space intent. lecturer Tobias Putrih engages 20th century avant-gardes, particularly utopian and visionary concepts of architecture and design, through a range of conceptual and materially ephemeral projects. He designs makeshift architectural modifications of public spaces—cinemas, a library, galleries, and a university commons—constructing temporary environments out of paper, cardboard, plywood, monofilament, and light. Sculptures are made of fugitive materials such as soap bubble membranes, or through precise handling of everyday manufactured materials like Styrofoam and cardboard. His sculptures are products of precisely specified processes while also responding to their sites; some sculpture is problematized as furniture to be moved and inhabited, privileging bodily engagement over vision. Putrih deals with artworks as proposals, maquettes, or models—exploratory assertions of radical possibilities, the idea of the monument reconceptualized as something momentary and experimental. Putrih’s solo projects conceived in collaboration with MOS architects were presented at Museum Boijmans Van Beunigen, Rotterdam; BALTIC Center for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, Wexner Center, Columbus and MIT
List Center, Cambridge. His larger installations include an exhibition at Espace315 at Centre Pompidou, Paris and at Capella MACBA, Barcelona; and collaborations with filmmaker Runa Islam at Galeria Civica in Modena and Kunsthaus, Zurich. Group exhibitions include TRACK, S.M.A.K., Ghent; Forms of Resistance, VanAbbe Museum, Eindhoven; Manifesta 4, Frankfurt and 29th Sao Paulo Biennale. In 2007 he represented Slovenia at the Venice Biennale. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Musée d’ Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg; and Museum Boijmans Van Beunigen, Rotterdam, among other institutions. lecturer John Steiner is a performer, songwriter and visual artist working in audio, sculpture, electronic media and design. John’s musical accomplishments are many; aside from five successful international tours and two American tours, he has also enjoyed a long list of publishing credits. Many of his songs have been used on MTV, NPR, ABC, NBC, Showtime, as well as feature films. His work as a designer includes print media and data visualization for clients including MIT and Harvard Law. Today he enjoys incorporating all of these passions and accomplishments through his current practice as an artist. In his role at ACT as Media Assistant, he lends his expertise in sound, performance, installation and digital production. media assistant Gediminas Urbonas is Associate Professor and Mitsui Career Development Chair in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Architecture, and is co-founder with Nomeda Urbonas of Urbonas Studio, an interdisciplinary research practice that advocates for the reclamation of public space, stimulating cultural and political imagination as tools for social change. Combining new and old media, their work frequently involves collective activities contributing to the cross-disciplinary exchange between several nodes of knowledge production: network and participatory technologies; sensorial media and public space; environmental remediation design and spatial organization; and alternative planning design integration. They also collaborate with experts in different cultural fields to develop practicebased artistic research models that allow participants—including their students—to pursue projects that merge urbanism, new media, social sciences and pedagogy to critically address the transformation of civic space. Recent work includes Uto-Pia (commission for European Capital of Culture, 2011), a research project working with experimental media and communication techniques to map heterotopias of dysfunctional infrastructures, and to address and respond to the environmental damage left by the industrial and military interventions in the Turku archipelago of the Baltic Sea. River Runs, with Oxford Brookes University (UK), investigated the riparian territory of the river culture and initiated new dialogues which examined past, present and future interventions to the Charles River and its biosphere, and developed models for river structures that link it to citizenship, quality of life or artistic fiction through a residency and project along the Thames River. (Modern Art Oxford Museum, 2012.)Urbonas’ socially engaged and technology based practice has been exhibited at the San Paulo, Berlin, Moscow, Lyon and Gwangju Biennales; the Manifesta and Documenta exhibitions; and solo shows at the Venice Biennale and MACBA in Barcelona. Their work was awarded the Lithuanian National Prize (2007), Prize for the Best International Artist at the Gwangju Biennale (2006), a fellowship at the Montalvo Arts Center in California (2007/08), nominated for the Nam June Paik Award (2012), and the Special Prize for the best national pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2007). act director, associate professor Xiaorui Zhu-Nowell is a curator and writer based in New York and Cambridge. Her research focuses on methods of production in contemporary art, theory and practice; with particular inquiry into conceptual aesthetics and the global distribution of labor. Other areas of interest are Chinese experimental and collective practices of the 1990s, ephemeral monumentalities and the exhibition strategies of artistic projects that reside outside of art historical institutionality. She was the research curator for the 14th Istanbul Biennial, SALTWATER: A Theory of Thought Forms. Currently, she is the Curatorial Assistant, Asian Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and a SMArchS candidate at MIT’s History, Theory and Criticism of Art and Architecture program under the supervision of Prof. Caroline A. Jones. teaching assistant
about the Lecture Series 71
oct 5 \ maryam jafri \ between storyboard and grid, some recent works oct 19 \ rosa barba \ on objects as ideas oct 26 \ marjetica potrč \ public space is a social agreement nov 9 \ wendelien van oldenborgh \ beauty and the right to the ugly nov 16 \ pelin tan \ transversal methodology: labor, love, fear
Toward a Philosophy of the Act
ACT’s Fall 2015 lecture series, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, focuses on the method of the artist as embodied experience. At what point does experienced reality depart from representation? What are the corporeal consequences of living or performing artistic methodologies outside of traditional contexts? The title, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, refers to the early work of M.M. Bakhtin (1921), that meditates on the difference between physical and mental acts– lived experience versus representation of experience. Bringing together a complex selection of artists, filmmakers and cultural producers across the disciplines of art, pedagogy, architecture, and urbanism, this series engages MIT’s community and beyond through praxis in relation to themes of architectural simulacra; economies + systems; constructed realities; participatory design and designing social systems; collective production and sites for conversation; spatial practices of the commons and Rhizomatic platforms of exchange; and the problematic of teaching art: teaching as an artistic problem. While an account of an act (our discursive systems accounting for or giving meaning to the act) differs from the actual lived or performed act, this series presents speakers with the problem of describing the act, the implementation of methodology in a practice. With a focus on the physical act and the immediacy of experience, this series is structured in roundtable format, whereby the invited lecturer will first present their work, followed by a moderated discussion with faculty, students and experts, responding to the themes and challenges around the practice presented. Lecture series participants include Haseeb Ahmed, Ursula August, Vivek Bald, Rosa Barba, Gedney Barclay, Angel Chen, Henriette Huldisch, Maryam Jafri, Ron Martin, Xiaorui Zhu-Nowell, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Marjetica Potrč, Sandra Rodriguez, Neil Sanzgiri, Björn Sparrman, Anne Whiston Spirn, Pelin Tan, Rebecca Uchill. ACT’s Monday night lecture series is conceived by Gediminas Urbonas, ACT director, and coordinated by Amanda Moore, ACT alumna ‘11, in conversation with ACT graduate students. The Monday night lecture series was launched in 2005. The series draws together artists, cultural practitioners, and scientists from different disciplines to discuss artistic methodologies and forms of inquiry at the intersection of art, architecture, science and technology.
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