it could be an algorithm: karada/sex/watch/repeat/archive/chewing/clues/translation

MIT’s Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT) is pleased to present,

it could be an algorithm:
karada/sex/watch/repeat/archive/chewing/clues/translation

an exhibition of the work of ACT’s graduate students. These works are the culmination of this year’s artistic and academic research, and range from animation-performance to a feature film to sonic opera sculpture to flying objects to performative gestures and multi-media installations. These works share a common ethos of questioning, searching, and finding within a critical artistic practice that reflects the rigorous attitude towards research and knowledge-creation of MIT at large.

OF, OF, OF, the collaborative video/performance installation of Anne Macmillan and Gedney Barclay with Forrest Larson features four nine-foot square semi-transparent screens form a cube, open at the corners. A body is stationed in the center of this structure, and synchronized animations are projected onto the screens. An array of invisible objects surround and crowd a body; this body is anchored at the center of their assembly, only able to sense their presence indirectly, as shifting shadows.

Centered on a forest in southeastern Europe, Ian Soroka’s film Dry Country drifts between several characters as they go about their daily labors in the forest. The film compresses the landscape of the forest with the intimacy of the voices of characters discussing history, the banalities of their labor, and revealing the significance of the space. The forest is a site of conflicting memory politics; where local memory is embedded in the caves, sinkholes, ruins, and clearings that dot the landscape, and where buried conflicts and tensions that originated in World War II are resurfacing in light of regime change and austerity. The film presentation represents one version of an ongoing research project.

Bjorn Sparrman, Twin Trajectories: Describing of the experience of returning to one’s childhood home, Gaston Bachelard writes in The Poetics of Space, “We would push the door that creaks with the same gesture, we would find our way in the dark to the distant attic. The feel of the tiniest latch has remained in our hands… Each of its nooks and corners was a resting place for daydreaming. And often the resting place particularizes the daydream.”

Sparrman’s installation and video works derive from meditation on the oneiric possibilities of movement. Movements that one makes through a space, be it a house, or a landscape, as specific expressions of ideology, affect the dreams we have and the ways in which we are able dream.

Working at the intersection of virtual reality, cinema, and new media, Alan Kwan’s performance, The Flying Umbrella Project, consists of an aerial performance by a flying umbrella built with drone and animatronics technology.

Centered on the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on CIA interrogation techniques, Enemy Architecture questions the abstraction and obstruction of bureaucracy.  Ursula August reimagines the document as a color box multimedia installation accompanied by sculptures and performative gestures. Notions of invisibility and visibility, individuation and disinviduation emerge, revealing a site of paradox and spectacle, a fertile surface for reassembling.

Based on Michitaro Tada’s book by the same name, Adi Hollander’s, Karada is an interactive installation that invites the audience to treat their entire body as a sound receptor.  Like Tada’s text, this multi-sensor installation will take visitors on a journey from the head down to the toes, Karada will be comprised of 10 different sculptural pieces that permit sound to be felt through touch with different parts of the human body.