AR – Artistic Research was a one-year collaboration between the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology and the Munich-based Siemens Stiftung. AR – Artistic Research was co-curated by Ute Meta Bauer, Associate Professor and Head of the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology; and Thomas D. Trummer, Curator of Visual Arts, Siemens Stiftung. The project explored artistic methodologies and forms of inquiry at the intersection of art, science and technology, and unfolded in multiple formats over the academic year 2010-2011. It included a series of displays at MIT’s recently inaugurated Media Lab Complex, that featured projects by artists who focus on the intersection of art and science in connection with ongoing research by faculty and fellows of MIT’s Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT).
AR – Artistic Research juxtaposed documentation of works by Hungarian artist Attila Csörgö and rarely-exhibited photograms and polaroids by MIT Professor György Kepes (1906-2001), who founded the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) in 1967. Jae Rhim Lee’s installation is part of her larger artistic and scientific inquiry Infinity Burial Project. The project by Argentina-based artists Guillermo Faivovich & Nicolás Goldberg researches the cultural impact of the Campo del Cielo meteorites.
The book AR – Artistic Research was published in 2013 by Koenig Books, London. Learn more…
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Featured artists
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Attila Csörgö
Hungrian artist Attila Csörgö applies the language of geometry and physics to traditional, pre-digital-age materials like sticks, strings and small electric motors to describe and reconfigure spatial relationships between ob¬jects. Csörgö’s work has been exhibited in Europe and the United States. Attila Csörgö received the Nam June Paik Award in 2008.
Guillermo Faivovich & Nicolás Goldberg
In 2006, Guillermo Faivovich and Nicolás Goldberg began working on A Guide to Campo del Cielo, a project that revolves around researching the cultural im¬pact of the Campo del Cielo meteorites by studying, reconstructing, and reinter¬preting their visual, oral, and written history, aiming to identify their historical and contemporary impact. In 2010, their exhibition Meteorit El Taco, held at Portikus, Frankfurt, brought together the two halves of the El Taco meteorite after almost 45 years of being apart. Their project is documented in The Campo del Cielo Meteorites – Vol 1: El Taco published by dOCUMENTA (13) and will also be fea¬tured at the 2012 dOCUMENTA (13) exhibition.Their artistic research methods involve bibliographical inquiry, archival research, oral history and scientific in¬vestigations. Faivovich and Goldberg live and work in Buenos Aires, Argentina
György Kepes
György Kepes joined MIT’s Department of Architecture in 1946 as associate professor of visual design, becoming a full professor in 1949. Previously in 1944, he published the Language of Vision, which set out his theories on the impact of the “new” technologies of photography, cinema, and television on visual culture.
In 1965-66 Kepes edited and published the influential seven-volume Vision and Value series, and in 1967 he founded MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS), a laboratory for interdisciplinary art practice and artistic research, one of the first of its kind. Kepes is the only visual artist of MIT’s faculty to have been awarded the rank of MIT Institute Professor.
Jae Rhim Lee
Jae Rhim Lee’s current work, the Infinity Burial Project, proposes alternatives for the post-mortem body and features the training of a unique strain of edible mush¬room to decompose and remediate toxins in human tissue. Jae Rhim Lee’s work challenges the boundaries prescribed by society and culture between self and other by proposing unorthodox relationships for the mind/body/self, and the built and natural environment. Lee has exhibited both nationally and internationally and is a recipient of a Creative Capital Foundation Grant (2009), Institut für Rau¬mexperimente/Universität der Künste Berlin Grant (2010), and the renowned MAK Schindler Center Scholarship, Los Angeles. Lee is currently an ACT fellow.