Experimental Publishing and Archival Research
May 5, 7:00 PM
Stemming from a series of encounters with the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) Special Collection, anarchive under the custodianship of MIT’s Program in Art, Culture & Technology (ACT), the editorial board of Experimental Publishing at ACT presents an indefinitely temporary musing into the utopic matrimony of art and science. CAVS was conceived by its founder György Kepes, in the spirit of modern optimism, as a place for the free comingling of technological advancement and humanistic values. That was the concept, but what of the Center’s personalities and politics—its reality—as we find it today, working in and alongside universities so steeped in interdisciplinity.
Don’t Erase Till Monday will showcase five publications that negotiate with CAVS as an archive of Fellows’ aspirations and correspondences, always flirting with fiction or a not-yet reality. The publications make public pieces of the CAVS universe without necessarily adhering to its optimistic agenda for harmonizing art and science at the civic scale. Though MIT-affiliated, ACT’s Experimental Publishing editorial board approaches the Center as an outsider. This is not a CAVS event; there is no pretense of loyalty here, but rather an honest curiosity about how the Center might help us think and reflect contemporary urgencies.
Using forms of print, performance, video, and public intervention, Don’t Erase Till Monday occupies the space between eulogy and rejuvenation through meditations on landscapes, the sky, 1969, speculative ruins, dictatorship, frontiers, audience-making, and participation. The five publications engage with works of CAVS artists such as György Kepes, Otto Piene and Aldo Tambellini, the topics they worked on, and their positions within MIT and the art world.
Experimental Publishing Editorial Board
Nicole Ashurian
Natasha Balwit
Bik Van der Pol
Andrea Carillo
Angel Chen
Lucas Freeman
Raafat Majzoub
Abraham Zamcheck