Lecture Series

The Spring 2010 lecture series, “The Theatrical/ The Performative/ The Transformative”, will introduce screenings and panel discussions with paradigmatic works by key artists with strong influence on contemporary art and its theoretical discourse. The focus will be on time-based work that navigates between art, film, theater, and dance. We also seek to juxtapose artists and […]

The Give Me Shelter lecture series draws together speakers from different disciplines to discuss questions such as: How can bodywear function as body extension or to support the human body under unusual conditions such as hot and cold climates? How can we expand the notion of the boundary between the body and environment? What kind of second […]

The ACT Monday night lecture series Collision 2: When Artistic and Scientific Research Meet draws together artists and scientists from different disciplines to discuss artistic methodologies and forms of inquiry at the intersection of art, architecture, science and technology. This series is part of AR – Artistic Research, a yearlong collaboration between the MIT Program in Art, […]

The Zones of Emergency: Artistic Interventions – Creative Responses to Conflict & Crisis Fall 2011 lecture series investigates initiatives and modes of intervention in contested spaces, zones of conflict, or areas affected by environmental disasters. We will explore whether artistic interventions can transform, disrupt or subvert current environmental, urban, political and social conditions in critical ways. How […]

Tess Thackara, Director, Survival International (USA) Popularizing the fight for indigenous rights: how using films and images can shift public opinion and change history This lecture explores the work and methodology of human rights group Survival International, with a particular focus on the group’s efforts to generate a groundswell of support for tribal people all […]

In 1992 Israeli curator Jack Persekian founded Anadiel Gallery, the first and only independent gallery for Palestinian artists in Jerusalem. Persekian later founded the Al-Ma’mal Foundation to continue the gallery’s mission and to further promote, instigate, and disseminate the production of art in Palestine. In his talk, Persekian will share his experience – the challenges […]

Moore’s law and the Internet have dramatically reduced the cost of producing and distributing information. This has greatly lowered the cost of collaboration and has empowered a qualitatively different “public” to think, express, and act without, or in spite of, central authority. These changes and advances in technology enabled interventions such as low-cost video cameras […]

How do we observe or quantify the impact of an artistic intervention? Or the impact of a documentary film? Lucy Walker will be reflecting on the experience of making and showing the film Waste Land, a documentary about artist Vik Muniz’s collaboration with the self-designated recyclables materials pickers of Jardim Gramacho, the largest landfill in the […]

How does creative activism contribute to society? How do we moderate crises through individual and collective art practice? How do we reconcile the arts, activism, and pedagogy? Stella McGregor, Founder and Director of Urbano Project, will share her experince of working with inner city youth and introduce projects such as Violence Transformed, and Pedro Reyes’Palas por […]

In the aftermath of the disaster suffered in Japan, MIT launched the MIT Japan 3/11 Initiative, a multi-year collaborative project focused on disaster-resilient planning, design and reconstruction. Back from the first MIT Japan 3/11 workshop which took place this summer, Shun Kanda and Jim Wescoat will discuss the process and challenges in planning and implementing […]

Art, culture and technology. What is the potential of such an intersection in the present? Being cognizant of historical and unusual crossings while exploring more profound investigations and productions suggest experiments in thinking, action and form. Questions raised by pursuing this matrix lead to a variety of histories of the present, the combination of official […]

Some contemporary art is profoundly engaged with the world in ways that go beyond interpretation. We seem to be in the midst of a cultural moment where the instrumentalization of art has never been more widely accepted among artists. Whether such artistic practices seek to work across disciplines like science or sociology, or aim to […]

Bruce Yonemoto works within the overlapping intersections of art and commerce, and the gallery world and cinema screen. Yonemoto juxtaposes cultural material from different international communities, such as those of the Japanese Americans, Nipo-Brasiliero, Peruvian Quechua and Hollywood communities. The photographic series North South East West focuses on the erased history of American Civil War soldiers of […]

Taru Elfving, curator and director of Contemporary Art Archipelago (CAA), calls into play the curatorial notion of the “dysfunctional” exhibition and its role within the larger concept of sustainability. CAA, a trans-disciplinary, cross-cultural exhibition spread across the isles of the Turku Archipelago (Baltic Sea), included over 23 international artists who researched the area’s environment and ways of life, […]

In the 1970s, broadcast television, cable, and even satellite transmissions were considered viable outlets for visual artists to experiment, tamper, and often times, spectacularly fail with, all the while engaging in a generative model of art production. This talk focuses on the institutionalization of media art with a particular emphasis on the Long Beach Museum […]

Muntadas’ work addresses social, political and communications issues such as the relationship between public and private space within social frameworks, and investigates channels of information and the ways these may be used to censor or promulgate ideas. His projects are presented in different media such as photography, video, publications, the Internet, installations, and urban interventions. […]

This talk will analyse the sonic and affective turns that have appeared relatively recently in both contemporary art practice and current critical thought from the standpoint of what Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi has termed “semiocapitalism.” Though the attention to sound and affect is typically held to be a remedy to the excesses of the past few […]

Desire for cinema perhaps existed before its creation. Today, cinema can be thought as the umbrella term for the variety of moving images and time-based forms that currently circulate and which have intersecting, yet specific, histories of emergence. These encompass the changing technological and spatial forms themselves—from collective halls to handheld devices—in which cinema appears, […]

What would a cinema that serves its subjects, rather than forces of capital, look like? A cinema of refusal, a cinematic non-form that breaks away from the conditions set by capital. A cinema made entirely of the process itself, that cannot be retained, that disappears and renews itself when recalled, that creates an unforgettable loss, […]

Screening and discussion with: John Akomfrah, OBE Director, filmmaker, and writer, Smoking Dogs Films, UK Lina Gopaul Producer and writer, Smoking Dogs Films, UK Renée Green Free Agent Media and ACT Director and Associate Professor Handsworth Songs (1986), an essayistic documentary film, explores the history of the contemporary British black experience, in particular the riots and […]

Chip Lord, Professor Emeritus, Film & Digital Media, UC Santa Cruz Chip Lord’s talk presents several recent projects and includes a historical introduction to the radical art and architecture group Ant Farm, 1968–1978. In 1970 Ant Farm travelled cross-country in a “Media Van” shooting video and networking with other artists. Ant Farm Media van v.08 , an […]

Ros Gray, Lecturer, Critical Studies, Goldsmiths University of London Within the context of cinematographic traditions and different liberation movements on the African continent, Ros Gray’s research focuses on revolutionary cinema and its global networks; the screen as a site of radical gathering; anti-colonial and post-colonial theory; and contemporary film and video art. Gray co-edited a […]

Krista Lynes, Assistant Professor, Communication Studies Department, Concordia University in Montreal, Canada In his critical analysis of postmodern culture, Fredric Jameson asserted that the particular temporality of video, its “total flow,” bound apparatus and subject in a new kind of materialism governed by measurement, a machinic time closer to the chronometer than the cinema. This produced […]

Desire for cinema existed before its creation. Today, cinema is an umbrella term for a variety of moving images and time-based forms, which have intersecting, yet particular, histories of emergence. These histories and contexts include changing technological and spatial forms themselves—from collective halls to handheld devices—in which cinema appears, as well as the movement and […]

Arthur Jafa, Artist, filmmaker, and cinematographer The realization of a black cinema is as central to American culture in the 21st century as was black music to the 20th century. What does this statement imply and what might it entail? What is black? What is cinema? What constitutes American culture in the 21st century? What was […]

John Akomfrah, OBE, director, filmmaker, and writer, Smoking Dogs Films, UK Lina Gopaul, Producer and writer, Smoking Dogs Films, UK The Stuart Hall Project (2012) is a film on the cultural theorist and sociologist Stuart Hall. Directed by John Akomfrah and produced by Lina Gopaul, the film debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January of 2013. […]

I Travel Because I Have To, I Come Back Because I Love You Screening and lecture with Karim Aïnouz, Filmmaker and artist I Travel Because I Have To, I Come Back Because I Love You 35mm, color, 75 min. Dir. Karim Aïnouz Film synopsis José Renato, a thirty-five-year-old geologist, is sent on a surveying trip to […]

Knut Åsdam, Artist and filmmaker How, amidst continual changes in society and media and the shifting relationship between psychology and film spectatorship, can we deal with notions of site, space, society, and subjectivity within cinema today? What narrative devices can be used to explore the interplay between these notions in the moving image? Åsdam examines these questions within the context of his […]

Nora Alter, Chair and Professor of Film and Media Arts at Temple University Nora M. Alter’s teaching and research focus on twentieth and twenty-first century cultural and visual studies from a comparative perspective, and she published the first English-language study of director Chris Marker in 2006. In her talk, Alter investigates Marker’s complex use of sound, […]

Simin Farkhondeh, Independent filmmaker, artist, educator, and activist Simin Farkhondeh is an award winning filmmaker, artist, educator, and activist. From 1995 to 2003 she produced and directed the acclaimed monthly TV show Labor at the Crossroads. Her films have been screened at the Whitney Biennial, Margaret Mead Film Festival, and MoMA, as well as on PBS and […]

Charles Atlas, Artist and filmmaker Charles Atlas has been producing film and video works since the mid-1970s. He constantly experiments with new technologies and works that range from the highly flamboyant to the very minimal, including pioneering media/dance works, multi-channel video installations, feature-length documentaries, video art works for television, and live electronic performances. Throughout his […]

Lovett/Codagnone, Multimedia artist duo As artistic practices broaden to embrace a variety of new media and expansive models such as cinema, theater, and music—practices that interrogate notions of authorship—the duo Lovett/Codagnone favor forms of cooperation as their source of inspiration. Mapping a work methodology and introducing new formats—their band, the staging of plays, and the […]

John Akomfrah, OBE Filmmaker and writer, Smoking Dogs Films, UK Lina Gopaul Producer and writer, Smoking Dogs Films, UK John Akomfrah, OBE, and Lina Gopaul co-founded the seminal film and video group Black Audio Film Collective and the more recent production company Smoking Dogs Films. Their collaborative and long-standing partnership has won them over thirty-five international […]

Tarek Elhaik Media anthropologist, film curator, and Assistant Professor of Media and Culture, San Francisco State University   Tarek Elhaik’s talk sheds doubt about the proliferation of medial acts deployed under the banner of the “Social.” It is in fact still unclear how social media and art practices have emerged as the dominant creative horizons […]

Joan Jonas, ACT Professor Emerita                    In Joan Jonas’s own words, Reanimation “is partly an homage to spiritual aspects of nature , but as glaciers are now melting, the work reflects the present-day situation.” The piece is based on the 1968 novel Under the Glacier by Icelandic writer Halldór Laxness. Originally […]

Cinematic Migrations is a multi-faceted exploration of the histories and contexts of moving images and time-based media within their intersecting and distinct paths of emergence around the world. The cinematic, as a poetic and essayistic form of examination and reflection, underlies the breadth of perspectives and practices explored by our guests. Filmmakers, multimedia artists, performers, and […]

John Akomfrah, OBE Filmmaker and writer, Smoking Dogs Films (UK) Lina Gopaul Producer and writer, Smoking Dogs Films (UK) John Akomfrah’s Transfigured Night is a two-screen installation and reinterpretation of Richard Dehmel’s poem Verklärte Nacht that reflects on postcolonial histories. Exploring the many facets of migration, human experience, and political struggle, Akomfrah and Gopaul’s films, gallery installations, documentaries, TV […]

Kazue Kobata Professor, Department of Intermedia Art, Tokyo University of the Arts Art curator and professor Kazue Kobata will explore themes of political and personal transformation in connection with aspects of technology, medium, and experience as they unfold in Japanese cinema. In 1982, Kazue Kobata opened Plan B in Nakano, Tokyo, Japan’s first alternative art […]

Where’s the Passion? Where’s the Politics? or How I Became Interested in Impersonating, Approximating, and End Running Around My Selves and Others,’ and Where Do I Look When You’re Looking at Me?   Yvonne Rainer Dancer, choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer’s lecture explores issues around self-expression, spectatorship, and the politics of both. Rainer is a […]

Elvan Zabunyan Art critic, historian, and Associate Professor, University of Rennes (France)   The starting point of Elvan Zabunyan’s talk is the work of Korean-born American artist and poet Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. In 1980, having left her native Korea seventeen years earlier, Cha returned to work on a film project she described as “memory materializes directly on […]

Since the millennial shift to C21 “the contemporary” has become a common topic in discussions of periodization, as well as a gauge used regarding how to perceive and think about what artists and thinkers are thinking about, doing, and producing in the present. This fall semester, topics explored in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT) events […]

Marko Peljhan: Artist, Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at UC Santa Barbara, and Director of Systemics Lab, MAT/ART, UC Santa Barbara Unmanned aircraft systems have recently been rediscovered due to their use in the so-called “war on terror,” but are an invention more than 100 years old. The lecture will explore the histories and interconnectedness of these […]

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 […]

Bernardo Bader: Architect and Principal of the bernardo bader architekten Eva Grabherr: Director, Center for Immigration and Integration Azra Akšamija: Class of 1922 Career Development Professor and Assistant Professor, MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology Nasser Rabbat: Aga Khan Professor and Director, Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT Can an Islamic cemetery be more than a […]

Kelly Nipper: Artist and Lecturer, MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology “My name is Tessa Pattern. I’m related to Thora Pattern, a character from The Edge of the Alphabet, a composition of letters pressed to pages and printed in 1962. I was educated at the technical school for clock making in the Black Forest. The school […]

Gabriel Kahan: Filmmaker, Producer, and Lecturer, MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology Multi-screen, rapid consumption of content is opening up new ways to communicate and engage viewers, in particular youth. At the same time, the complexities of modern social dynamics require one to develop novel ways of thinking about the role of government. Creating content […]

Daniela Pérez: Independent Curator Patrick Charpenel: Director, Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo Patrick Charpenel and Daniela Pérez will introduce the life and work of the artist Gustav Metzger and will expand on one of the artist’s most recent proposals regarding the construction and long-term activation of spaces for social change. The project explores questions regarding environment, climate […]

SPRING 2015 LECTURE SERIES | TOWARD CIVIC ART This lecture series investigates the critical spatial practices that claim manifold definitions of public art, through a diverse array of visual forms argued by key practitioners across the disciplines of art, pedagogy, architecture, and urban studies to identify the tools, tactics and consequences of actively reclaiming public […]

Doris Sommer is Founder of Cultural Agents, Harvard University and Ira Jewell Williams Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Director of Graduate Studies in Spanish, Harvard University. Founder of Harvard’s Cultural Agents Initiative, Sommer calls attention to art as a social resource, and she promotes best practices through workshops and public forums. Her book “takes […]

Jeanne van Heeswijk (Bard College, Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism), is a visual artist who facilitates the creation of dynamic and diversified public spaces in order to “radicalize the local.”  Van Heeswijk embeds herself as an active citizen in communities, often working for years at a time. These long-term projects, which have occurred […]

Doina Petrescu and Constantin Petcou from atelier d'architecture autogérée ("aaa"), revisit the notion of co-production in the context of their recent participatory projects in Paris  (www.urbantactics.org). They will speak about the tools, spaces and agencies needed for citizens to co-produce their cities in times of crisis and austerity and about the (political) role of architects […]

Liesbeth Bik and Jos Van der Pol, School of Missing Studies, Sandberg Institute Amsterdam Understanding artistic practice as a form of learning and as a space of experience and encounter, a strategy for emancipation, and a potential response to public issues, Bik Van der Pol, through their often site-sensitive practice seek to question ‘publicness’ as well […]

Rikke Luther, Learning Site, Copenhagen Luther will discuss her art practice and the political economies of place. The concept of a ‘site’ is narrow. In contrast, place entails consideration of access; how social spaces and interactions are constituted; how spaces are lived; and how they mediate our material behavior. Above all, places are constructed by speech. […]

Claire Pentecost, Professor and Chair, Department of Photography, School of the Art Institute of Chicago For her upcoming lecture series contribution, Pentecost will be presenting formal responses to her research into soil, microbes and money, Pentecost will demonstrate the artistic position she calls “the public amateur.” Claire Pentecost’s work engages collaboration, research, teaching, writing, lecturing, drawing, […]

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 […]

History and geography, storyboard and grid – Jafri’s talk will focus on the interstitial spaces between these poles opened up by three of her recent works. Jafri will discuss her ongoing photo research project “Independence Day 1934-1975.” The project is fueled by Jafri’s interest in questions of heritage and the archive, and the role of […]

Through her installations, Rosa Barba continues her exploration of film and its capacity to simultaneously be an immaterial medium that carries information and a physical material with sculptural properties. The category of film is expanded and abstracted beyond the literal components of the celluloid strip, the projector through which it passes and the image projected […]

Taking two case studies as references - Ubuntu Park, a community-organized public space in Soweto, South Africa, and sustainable extraction reserves and Indian territories in Acre, Brazil - Potrč argues that the appropriation of space by local communities, whether this is an urban public space or a territory in the rainforest, is fundamental for the […]

Beauty and the Right to the Ugly was the title of an exhibition in 1981 by the Brazilian-Italian architect Lina Bo Bardi, which took a stand against bourgeois taste and values presented at her seminal building SESC Pompéia in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The exhibition was organized in collaboration with employees of a national organization for […]

Methodology is not only the means of a system for describing realities; it is a political tool that takes part in the process of knowledge production. From the perspective of an integrated relational practice in the field of urban, pedagogy and contemporary art, Pelin Tan conveys how collective experience of the translocal production of knowledge […]

Curation: Agencies + Urgencies ACT’s Spring 2016 lecture series Curation: Agencies + Urgencies addresses the contexts and forces shaping the practice of curation today. Bringing together a cast of influential curators, critics, and educators operating across institutional boundaries and political scales—from the book to the biennial—these lectures consider the curator—as diplomat, as researcher, as (para-)artist, as speculator, […]

Drafting exhibitions: empathy and artistic relations. An old way that might be the best way of doing things – beyond the notion of professionalism Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev Director of Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, Turin ACT, in collaboration with AKPIA at MIT Present the first public lecture of the 2016 Lecture Series, Curation: Agencies + Urgencies. Carolyn […]

Future Island: Cuba Alejandro de la Fuente, Harvard University Magdalena Campos-Pons, SMFA  Doris Sommer, Harvard University Timothy Hyde, MIT    ACT present the second public lecture of the 2016 Lecture Series, Curation: Agencies + Urgencies.   Alejandro de la Fuente is the Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics and Professor of African and African American Studies […]

Curatorial-Editorial Urgencies/ A Palimpsest of Species and Spaces Anna-Sophie Springer Co-Director of K. Verlag, Berlin Arguing that current matters in natural history are messier than some of the most compelling scientific and artistic representations seem to suggest, Springer will discuss her current research and previous exhibitions and publications which have engaged a complex spectrum of species […]

Historical Resonances, Archives of the Present, Genealogies of the Future Corinne Diserens Director of ERG in Brussels; and curator of the 10th Taipei Biennial Corinne Diserens is currently director of the art academy erg (l’ecole de recherche graphique, Brussels) and curator of the 2016 Taipei Biennial; she was jury chairwoman of Akademie Schloss Solitude from 2011 to […]

Mediated Entities. In and Out of Curating. Lars Bang Larsen Co-curator of the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, Visiting professor at the Haute Ècole d’Art et de Design in Geneva Mediated Entities: In and out of curating. Counterintuitive to the idea of critical practice, how can a work of art be “holistic” and at the […]

This series invites artists, designers, and philosophers to help us speculate on the future of art, learning, and action in a rapidly intensifying age of software aesthetics, persuasive computing, intangible infrastructures, nonorganic vitalities, and ubiquitous sensing. Over the course of the term, our six visiting lecturers will present different ways of approaching division and inclusion, […]

“Imaginary property” is an artistic research project on the halting problem of a society after the spectacle when Guy Debord’s “autonomous movement of the non-living” has become almost trivial but fully embedded in biopolitics. The concept of imaginary property characterises a new regime of ubiquitous image-production which throws into crisis conventional conceptions of the vexed […]

Intangible infrastructures. Nonorganic vitalities. Digital solidarities. Technical debts. Human Machines. Bot torrents. Post-Media Through a survey of recent design projects from anexact office, The Nanyang Technological University Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore and PetaBencana.id, Etienne will argue for an interventive disposition toward the parametrization of life on earth. Etienne Turpin is a philosopher studying, designing, curating, and […]

In this two-part program, Cristina Ricupero casts light on “secret societies” through the prism of contemporary art and focuses on them as a fruitful locus of resistance to the excesses of today’s “open society.” Artists have always been fascinated by the obscure and the occult, and by the visual representation or transmission of secret knowledge […]

Today, yesterday’s LEFT has collapsed into what is referred to as “progressivism,” which aspires toward a MIDDLE, and today’s right has evolved into a neoliberalist faction and an ever more powerful faction in the form of an aggressive populism characterized by irrationalism, racism, xenophobia and misogyny. This reality is not limited to the United States […]

“The animal of the molecular revolution will be neither mole nor snake, but a drone-animal-thing that is solid, liquid, and a gas.” As the philosophical, religious, and historical systems that have produced the “individual” (and its counterparts, society and community) over the years continue to break down, the age of “dividuality” is now upon us. […]

About art, metamorphosis and exploring experience to enhance a different political imagination Ducks are capable of abstract thinking. This recent scientific discovery is no surprise to ducks; they are ducks, after all. The discovery just reveals that we, non-ducks, are deeply fascinated by sharing traits that are integral to our own idea of rationality. If […]

artworld agent, agent of social change counter-intel, counter-aesthesis insinuation, infiltration artist, provocateur What makes a double agent in art? What drives them? ACT’s Spring 2017 Monday Night Lecture Series, Double Agents, invites three renowned artists whose respective works provoke and thrive in the tension between competing systems of power, production, and exhibition. At play in these […]

Magid will be discussing recent projects, her engagements with the law, and permission as a material of the work with responses from international curator and art historian Lars Bang Larsen and SA+P Dean Hashim Sarkis. Bio Jill Magid is a widely celebrated MIT alumna now based in New York City. Her dynamic practice is deeply […]

Co-hosted with MIT Global Studies and Languages (GSL) Tania Bruguera defines herself as an initiator rather than an author. She often collaborates with multiple institutions and many individuals in such a way that the full realization of her artwork occurs when others adopt and perpetuate the models and proposals she creates. This presentation will show […]

With responses from Doris Sommer (Harvard, Cultural Agents) and Lawrence Susskind (MIT, DUSP) Pedro Reyes’s practice sews together the usually uneven goals/ends of art, architecture, psychology, theater, activism, and more. It’s understood that an expanded notion of sculpture is expanding into the social. His solutions engage us in the same way a practical joke would. According to Pedro, jokes […]

The fall 2017 ACT Lecture Series invites renowned artists and philosophers to help us challenge our habits of perception and expand our margins of thought. Artistic intelligence is drawn to the fertile edges of knowledge, engaging radically anticipatory modes of being, thinking, creating, and acting without certainty. The series will offer models for un-knowing science […]

Trevor Paglen is an artist whose work spans image-making, sculpture, investigative journalism, writing, engineering, and numerous other disciplines. Among his chief concerns are learning how to see the historical moment we live in and developing the means to imagine alternative futures. Paglen’s work has had one-person exhibitions at Vienna Secession, Eli & Edythe Broad Art […]

Following Cristina Ricupero’s special interest in the mechanisms of contemporary secrecy, she will focus this two-part program on espionage, a topic she is developing for an exhibition project with Alexandra Midal (independent curator and professor at the design program at HEAD-Haute Ecole d’Art et Design, Geneva). With examples from contemporary art and design, sociology, philosophy, […]

David Reinfurt will report on the last six months in Rome as a fellow at the American Academy interrogating one small, industrially produced artwork-product from 1965. The Tetracono was designed by Bruno Munari and produced by Danese Milano as an austere 15-cm black steel cube housing four aluminum cones, each painted half-red and half-green, which […]

Postcommodity will discuss their 2015 land art installation and socially engaged artwork Repellent Fence, and the implications of this work on their art practice, their future work, and the field of contemporary art as we approach the year 2043 (when the US transitions to a non-white majority). Postcommodity is an interdisciplinary arts collective comprised of […]

Professor Barry will be discussing recent projects with introductions by ACT Director, Gediminas Urbonas, and School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P) dean, Hashim Sarkis. Respondants Emily Watlington, SMArchS ‘18 and Curatorial Research Assistant at the MIT List Visual Arts Center Eugenie Brinkema, Associate Professor in the Literature Section of SHASS Kristel Smentek, Associate Professor in […]

ACT’s  lecture series draws together artists, scholars, and other cultural practitioners from different disciplines to discuss artistic methodologies and forms of inquiry at the intersection of art, architecture, science, and technology. Each spring and fall semester brings a different thematic focus and the format for each event shifts depending on the visitor(s) and the nature […]

Richard Sennett: The Good Craftsman Richard Sennett will be giving a lecture based on his book The Craftsman. “Good craftsmanship” stands for work of good quality.  What sort of work is this in the digital era?  The lecture explores this question in three domains:  the acquisition of craft skills, learning from others in workshops, and technical supports […]

ACT's Professor Emerita, Joan Jonas, and alumnus, Sung Hwan Kim, will be together in conversation with ACT Director, Judith Barry.This event will honor Jonas' being awarded the Kyoto Prize, her contributions to ACT, and highlight the re-emergence of performance art at ACT, to be taught by Kim in Spring 2019. Respondents: Jay Scheib, Professor in Theater, […]

It is often assumed that Conceptual Art pivots on bureaucratic means of communication such as text and documentary photography, and that it performs a dematerialization of traditional media such as painting and sculpture.  In this lecture, I will argue that since the '90s, artists have focused more on Conceptual Art’s legacy of remediation, rather than […]

ACT’s Monday Night lecture series draws together artists, scholars, and other cultural practitioners from different disciplines to discuss artistic methodologies and forms of inquiry at the intersection of art, architecture, science, and technology. Each spring and fall semester brings a different thematic focus and the format for each event shifts depending on the visitor(s) and […]

Free and Open to the Public   Eva and Franco Mattes are an artist duo originally from Italy, living in New York. They have continually made work that responds to and dissects the contemporary networked condition, always approaching the ethics and politics of life online with a darkly humorous edge. Their latest body of work, […]

Beth Stryker is Co-founder of CLUSTER (Cairo Lab for Urban Studies, Training and Environmental Research) a platform for urban research, architecture, art, and design initiatives based in Downtown Cairo. CLUSTER has received critical recognition for its work, including a Curry Stone Design Prize (2017), and inclusion in the Egyptian National Pavilion at the Venice Architecture […]

Extrastatecraft explored repeatable spatial formulas and large socio-technical infrastructures—the free zone world cities, mobile telephony networks and commercial spatial products that are making some of the most radical changes to the globalizing world. Her recent book, Medium Design, continues to expose the dangers and powers of this ubiquitous space by focusing on not only the […]

Inadelso Cossa is a Mozambican film director, cinematographer, producer, and the founder of 16mmFILMES, an independent film and television company based in Mozambique. His work explores different phases of Africa’s, particularly Mozambique’s, history from a personal perspective. Investigating the Colonial, Post Colonial, Independence, and Post Civil War periods, Cossa finds it his duty to document […]

As an artistic research program, ACT is perennially concerned with emerging modes of expression that explore evolving forms of knowledge production. In this context, the program’s Fall 2019 Lecture Series asks, “What is art if not an event?” Philosopher Alain Badiou describes an event as a multiplication of conditions which may not always make sense […]

Oppenheimer’s calculated manipulation of standardized spaces disrupts the embodied experience of spatial continuity, reorienting and clarifying the experience of the built environment. Upcoming and recent solo projects include N-01 (Kunstmuseum Thun 2020), S-337473 (Mass MoCA 2019), S-337473 (Wexner Center for the Arts 2017), S-281913 (Pérez Art Museum Miami 2016), S-399390 (MUDAM Luxembourg 2016) and 33-D […]

Throughout history, the project of architecture was realized by draining swamps, marshes, and wetlands. Dividing the land into a liquid and solid, butchering the territory for agriculture, waterways, and settlements, extracting and parceling it by expelling the indigenous—all are technologies of architecture and colonization. To notice the swamp below our feet is to switch to a […]

In December of our war year, a Communist filmmaker disappeared. Later, a rumor circulated: He was making a different war film, embarrassing to our own side. He had left behind a 16 mm film, hidden inside a can of cooking flour. It may not have been the enemy army that killed him. Mohaiemen’s work over […]

As of 3/10/2020, any event happening beyond 3/10 has been postponed per MIT’s response to COVID-19, the Corona Virus. We are hopeful that we will be able to reschedule it for Fall 2020. The Allegorical Resonance of Alchemical Affect Each speaker might be seen as engaging with these terms in different ways. Allegory as allowing […]

Schedule of Events 4:30 – 6:00pm | Screening of The Proposal 6:00 – 7:30pm | Discussion 8:00 – 9:30pm | Second Screening of The Proposal Speaker: Jill Magid Moderator: Caroline A. Jones Panelists: Ana Miljacki and Timothy Hyde Watch the lecture on Vimeo or below. Known as “the artist among architects,” Luis Barragán is among the world’s most […]

Speaker: Stephen Prina Respondents: Renée Green and David Joselit Stephen Prina will present English for Foreigners, 2017; galesburg, illinois+, 2015; and As He Remembered It, 2011. Watch the lecture on Vimeo or below. Stephen Prina (*1954, Galesburg, Illinois) lives and works in Los Angeles, California and Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is Professor, Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies,  Harvard University. MFA, California […]

Each speaker might be seen as engaging with these terms in different ways. Allegory as allowing interpretations that have the possibility of giving form to the immaterial while revealing hidden meanings. Alchemy as a forerunner of chemistry, encompassing the recognition that serendipity as a chance operation can lead to unforeseen outcomes. Affect as a verb generative of an experience, feeling, […]

Monday, October 26 6pm EDT Virtual Lecture – Register Here Watch Here Speaker: Barbara London Respondent: Caroline Jones Barbara London will investigate how media art is shaped by its DNA: technology, real-world politics, and art’s mutability. She will focus on how early pioneers and today’s young innovators combine forms, and along the way revise the […]

Speaker: Ekene Ijeoma Respondent: Dayna Cunningham During this lecture, Ekene Ijeoma will explore new forms of justice through art. Ekene Ijeoma is an artist, professor at MIT, and the founder and director of the Poetic Justice group at MIT Media Lab. Through both his studio and lab at MIT, Ijeoma researches social inequality across multiple fields including social science […]

Monday, December 7 Time 2pm EST Virtual Lecture Speaker: Cesare Pietroiusti Respondent: Jesal Kapadia Non aes sed fides. Georg Simmel, at the very beginning of the XX Century,  proposed his concept of “spiritualization” of money in capitalist society. It is not the “bronze” (aes) that assure strength and stability to economy, but faith (fides) that makes everyone believe […]

Spring 2021 Lecture Series | The Incidence of Fingerprints When Earth Meets the Sky Virtual Events: March 15 Lawrence Abu Hamdan | Natq (impossible speech) Lawrence Abu Hamdan presents ‘Natq’, a live audiovisual essay on the politics and possibilities of reincarnation. Through listening closely to “xenoglossy” (the impossible speech of reincarnated subjects), this performance explores […]

Monday, March 15 Virtual Event 12:30pm EDT Free event. Register here. Lawrence Abu Hamdan presents 'Natq', a live audiovisual essay on the politics and possibilities of reincarnation. Through listening closely to "xenoglossy" (the impossible speech of reincarnated subjects), this performance explores a collectivity of lives who use reincarnation to negotiate their condition at the threshold […]

Thursday, September 16 6:00pm EDT Watch Here In collaboration with MIT Architecture and the Architecture and Urbanism Group Sanford Biggers Interdisciplinary Artist and MLK Visiting Scholar Sanford Biggers’ work is an interplay of narrative, perspective, and history that speaks to current social, political, and economic happenings while also examining the contexts that bore them. His […]

This event is free and open to MIT Affiliated individuals. Registration is required and seating is limited. **PLEASE NOTE** In accordance with COVID-19 contact tracing guidelines, contact information for all event attendees, including name and cell phone number or email address will be collected via the RSVP form. All attendees are required to wear a face […]

Urgent, Critical, and Experimental Explorations Across Art-Culture-Technology The Spring 2022 programming aims to revisit the foundational parameters of the Art, Culture, and Technology Program, positioning ACT within the context of a changing world and its future challenges. By articulating key thematic avenues and methodological approaches that intersect the work of invited artists and ACT faculty […]

The event is free and open to the public. MIT will be observing all Covid-19 precautions, and registration is required. You can register here. Dr. Adesola Akinleye will speak about the research she began at MIT that focuses on a new lexicon. This event serves as a follow up to the first part of her […]

ACT welcomes Alia Farid (SMVisS '08) for a discussion of her recent projects, namely her  solo exhibition, In Lieu of What Is, currently on view at the Kunsthalle Basel. Alia Farid (b. 1985) lives and works in Kuwait and Puerto Rico. Through a combination of mostly film and sculpture, her work gives visibility to lesser-known […]

The event is free and open to the public. MIT will be observing all Covid-19 precautions ‘Microperformativity’ denotes a current trend both in performative art practices and theories of performativity to destabilize human scales – both spatial and temporal – as the dominant plane of reference and to emphasize biological and technological micro-agencies that, beyond […]

**Registration is REQUIRED via Eventbrite** **Live webcast link HERE** The Garden, in the context of Palestine, conjures conflicting imaginaries of security and abundance, of disobedience and control, inside and outside, and of exile and return. These binaries are the narrative components of the enclosures and infrastructures that have distinguished the Garden from untamed wilderness. As such, the […]

Between September 19-20 the artist duo Lundahl & Seitl will offer a studio showing of two works at ACT: Symphony of a Missing Room ( 2009 - ongoing), and The Memor (2019 - 2022) which was made with co-artist ScanLAB Projects.  The visit is an invitation from Urbonas Studio and the MIT ACT program in […]

Farmed salmon are a constructed animal, one of the most recently domesticated and industrialized species in human history. In this performative-lecture Cooking Sections reflect on their expansive body of work on the environmental impact of salmon farms which can be traced far beyond the circumference of open-net pens, and everything that escapes through them. Salmon […]

Ute Meta Bauer | Saying It Without Saying. Can a Biennale Be a Newspaper?: On The Process of Creating the 17th Istanbul Biennial The suspension of life-as-we-knew-it is a rare license to do things differently. Doing justice to this moment means resetting our expectations and our purposes, reimagining our formats and making way for a […]

As part of MIT Architecture Spring 2023 public program in collaboration with MIT ACT, this lecture will be held in person, at 6 PM ET in Long Lounge (7-429), followed by a discussion with Huma Gupta (AKPIA), Bish Sanyal (DUSP) and Gediminas Urbonas (ACT) as respondents. In the past decade, the Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory […]

As part of Spring 2023 ACT Lecture Series and in collaboration with MIT Morningside Academy for Design, this lecture will be held in person, at 6 PM ET in The Cube (E15-001). The talk will feature  Aubrie James (SMACT '24) as the respondent, and curator-director of the MIT Morningside Academy for Design Roi Salgueiro Barrio as the […]

In this event co-sponsored by CMSW, ACT, and ICEO, Prof. Frances Negrón-Muntaner (Columbia University) will discuss the origins, impact, and future of the award-winning artivist project Valor y Cambio (Value/Valour and Change), in conversation with Prof. Katerina González Seligmann (University of Connecticut). Starting in Puerto Rico in 2019, Valor y Cambio repurposed an old ATM to […]

The Fall 2023 programming aims to revisit the foundational parameters of the Art, Culture, and Technology Program, positioning ACT within the context of a changing world and its future challenges. By articulating key thematic avenues and methodological approaches that intersect the work of invited artists and ACT faculty members, we link these inquiries to concerns […]

György Kepes. Interthinking Art + Science documentary film by Márton Orosz, Hungary–Canada 97 min Part of the Fall 2023 Lecture Series. Film screening followed by Q+A with the filmmaker. Can technology save us from technology itself? "Can prosthetics be used to emulate the pageantry of nature and provide a viable alternative for building a sustainable […]

Nearly seven decades ago, British cybernetician Gordon Pask (1928-1996) envisioned a world in which machines engaged humans in conversation. Pask, who gained international fame in the 1950s for his innovative adaptive teaching machines, created cybernetic devices and environments that not only adapted to humans, but challenged them. Assuming that humans find it pleasurable to continuously […]

Sama Alshaibi, Sadik Alfraji, and Huma Gupta | From the Great Flood to the Great Migration Part of the Fall 2023 Lecture Series. In collaboration with the Aga Khan Program and the Department of Architecture. This lecture will be held in person in Long Lounge, 7-429 and streamed online. Iraki-Dutch Multimedia artist Sadik Alfraji works […]

Part of the Fall 2023 Lecture Series. In collaboration with the Department of Architecture. This lecture will be held in person in the ACT Cube (E15-001). Part storytelling, part lecture, and part live documentary film, Sarah Kanouse’s solo performance “My Electric Genealogy” explores the shifting cultures and politics of energy in Los Angeles and the West […]

Part of the Spring 2024 Lecture Series. In collaboration with the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST), and co-sponsored by MIT Native American and Indigenous Association (NAIA), MIT American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES), and Co-Creation Studio. This lecture will be held in person in the Bartos Theater (E15-070). The lecture is […]

A powerful examination of the unsettling history of photography and its fraught relationship to global antiblackness. Part of the Spring 2024 Lecture Series. In collaboration with MIT Press. This lecture will be held in person in the ACT Cube (E15-001). Following Kimberly Juanita Brown's presentation/reading, she will be joined by ACT lecturer Hector Membreno-Canales and […]

Imagining Communities through Architecture: The Mediterranean Sea as a Constellation This lecture will present three projects that bring together art and architecture united by the Mediterranean Sea as a coherent site of imagination, collective future and interconnectedness: 1.Cycles of Collapsing Progress, an exhibition held at the Oscar Niemeyer-designed Unesco World Heritage Site in Tripoli, Lebanon. […]

Techne: Evidence in the Anthropocene telescopes between galactic and planetary evidence that is presented by scientists and artist-investigators who contemplate both deep time and the fate of the human species. Using the framework of a simulation model developed at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory that considers the probability for intelligent life to occur in the Milky […]

The Fall 2024 programming aims to revisit the foundational parameters of the Art, Culture, and Technology Program, positioning ACT within the context of a changing world and its future challenges. By articulating key thematic avenues and methodological approaches that intersect the work of invited artists and ACT faculty members, we link these inquiries to concerns […]

In Anne Duk Hee Jordan's work, she explores the intersection of technology and nature, challenging the omnipotence of AI by embracing artificial stupidity. Through installations and sculptures, she reveals the poetic beauty of failure and the unpredictability of the digital gaze. Her creations simulate ecosystems where machines and organic lifeforms coalesce, questioning the boundaries of […]

Atif Akin's lecture will focus on works that examine science, nature, mobility, and politics through (a) historical and contemporary lens, exploring transdisciplinary issues within a technoscientific context. Akin delves into his decade-long research on radiation, mutation, and archaeology, offering a narrative on the intersection of art, science, and politics. He examines radioactivity and mutant spaces, […]

Presented with the MIT Department of Architecture. ONLINE Webcast Lucy Orta’s visual arts practice investigates the interrelations between the individual body and community structures, exploring their diverse identities and means of cohabitation and employing socially engaged methodologies. She works across a range of mediums including drawing, textile sculpture, photography, film and performance to realise singular […]

Emilija Škarnulytė is an artist and filmmaker, who reflects on human civilization through the topic of deep time. In the exploration of invisible structures and components of reality beyond human control, she uses the camera as an archaeological tool that pierces through cosmic and geologic, as well as ecological and political strata. Immersive experiences, exercising […]

In collaboration with the MIT List Visual Arts Center, we invite you for an evening of experimental sound and visual performance, “The Predictability of Unpredictability*…” by Andrew Neumann. The event is free and open to the public, though reservation is suggested. This performance, originally conceived as a small system designed for solo improvisation has for […]

For the last forty years, Julia Scher's research has explored social control dynamics in the public sphere, focusing especially on themes of surveillance. The art projects have taken the form of interactive installations, reformulated surveillance, site tours, interventions, performances, photography, writing, online projects, linear video, and sound. This talk offers a personal and critical reflection […]

5:00–6:00 PM - MIT List Visual Art Center open 6:00–7:00 PM - Artist Discussion in ACT Cube List Projects 33: Every Ocean Hughes features One Big Bag (2021) is a 40-minute single channel video. The video uses the “mobile corpse kit”—a bag filled with everyday objects doulas use to care for the newly dead—as both the visual structure and narrative driver […]

Modeling as Tektological Praxis By Reza Negarestani This event is Free and Open to the Public. Register here. This talk examines a cross-disciplinary problem: when compression in modeling—across scales or by computational cost—enables explanation and control, and when it effaces the organizational structure on which action depends. It is framed by Alexander Bogdanov’s account of […]

This lecture examines AI infrastructure through exocapitalism, a framework for understanding how capital can move independently of physical constraints like energy, labor, and raw materials. We'll explore the strange economics of the AI boom (trillion-dollar announcements, debts backed by computer chips, and endless layers of intermediary management services) to argue that the "datacenter" now exists […]

Victoria Shen is an interdisciplinary artist with a focus on sound and performance based in San Francisco. Shen's practice is concerned with the materiality of sound and its relationship to the human body through a lens of disruption and experimentation. She creates and manipulates custom-built sculptures and extensions specific to her body to challenge conventional […]