Matthew Mazzotta
Alumni
CULTURUNNERS@MIT
Ava Ansari: Artist and Edge of Arabia Associate Curator
Azra Akšamija: Class of 1922 Career Development Professor and Assistant Professor at MIT’s Program in Art, Culture and Technology
Stephen Stapleton: Artist, Curator, and Edge of Arabia Co-founder
Daanish Masood: Advisor, Political Affairs and Media for the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations
Ahmed Mater: Artist, Medical Doctor, and Edge of Arabia Co-founder
Regina Möller: Artist, Author, and Founding Editor of Regina
Carol Huh: Curator of Contemporary Art, Freer & Sackler Galleries, Smithsonian Institution
Matthew Mazzotta: Artist and Lecturer, MIT’s Program in Art, Culture and Technology
Artists and scientists come together to share technologies and applications for cultural collaboration between the United States and the Middle East.
CULTURUNNERS, a week of workshops and public events at MIT (October 1st to 6th, 2014), is a multidisciplinary gathering of artists, designers, filmmakers, scientists, curators, and scholars whose practices inspire novel approaches towards cross-cultural exchanges specific to the United States and the Middle East. Together, they will collaboratively share, develop, and test creative communication technologies and narrative techniques.
CULTURUNNERS is a core component of the Edge of Arabia’s US tour – in partnership with Art Jameel – and ACT’s Culture Fabric research on cultural empathy. Over the course of three years, an evolving group of artists, scientists, and thinkers will cross the country in the hope of investigating and experiencing commonalities interconnecting the narratives, economies, politics, cultures and landscapes between the United States and the Middle East. CULTURUNNERS will use custom-built artistic technologies to map, archive, and broadcast the experiences of the travelers over the course of their tour.
During the CULTURUNNERS@MIT evening lecture, panels made up of selected artists, scientists, and curators will present and discuss their findings from the previous week’s workshops dedicated to developing technologies for traveling artists. Findings will be presented in two categories, MOBILE & WEARABLE TECHNOLOGIES and ONLINE COMMUNICATIONS and ARCHIVAL PLATFORMS, and act as a coda for the weeklong collaboration between CULTURUNNERS, Edge of Arabia, and MIT’s Program in Art, Culture and Technology. The lecture will be followed by a Q&A moderated by Ava Ansari and Azra Akšamija.
