School of Architecture & Planning
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Thursday, December 8, 2011, 6–8:00 PM
MIT Cube, Wiesner Building (E15-001)
20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, USA
[email protected]
+1-617-253-5229
act.mit.edu
visualarts.mit.edu/about/events.html
PROGRAM
Introduction: Ute Meta Bauer, ACT Associate Professor and Head of Program
Lecture: Márton Orosz, Curator and György Kepes Fellow for Advanced Studies and Transdisciplinary Research in Art, Culture and Technology
Screening: Centerbeam, Directed by Richard Leacock and Jon Rubin. CAVS 1978, 16 mm, color, 13 min.
Round table discussion:
Otto Piene, Professor and CAVS Director Emeritus
Elizabeth Goldring, former CAVS Co-Director and ACT Fellow
Joan Brigham, former CAVS Fellow
Lowry Burgess, former CAVS Fellow
Alejandro Siña, former CAVS Fellow
Aldo Tambellini, former CAVS Fellow
Moderated by João Ribas, Curator, List Visual Arts Center
György Kepes founded CAVS in 1967 at MIT as a fellowship program for artists, which advanced “cooperative projects aimed at the creation of monumental scale environmental forms” while fostering the “individual creative pursuits” of the artists involved. In his lecture, Márton Orosz, who is currently writing a monograph on Kepes, will focus on the role and function of visual design as a form of social engagement in urban, large-scale environments. The second part of the program highlights the CAVS mission under Otto Piene’s directorship, and will focus on transdisciplinary collaborations such as Centerbeam. The newly restored documentary of the same title, co-directed by the late MIT Professor Richard Leacock, traces the large-scale collaborative sculpture Centerbeam, which combined a 144-foot long water prism, holography, and projections on steam. Centerbeam was commissioned and installed at Documenta 6, Kassel, Germany, in 1977, and on the National Mall in Washington, DC in 1978. The discussion will consider the production, vision, and social engagement of Centerbeam.
The György Kepes Fellowship for Advanced Studies and Transdisciplinary Research in Art, Culture and Technology is a joint initiative of the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT), tranzit.org and ERSTE Foundation. The preservation of Centerbeam is supported in part by the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant program funded by The Film Foundation.
For more information contact Laura Anca Chichisan, Public Program Coordinator, at [email protected].
ABOUT ACT
The MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology operates as a critical studies and production based laboratory, connecting the arts with an advanced technological community. ACT faculty, fellows and students engage in advanced visual studies and research by implementing both an experimental and systematic approach to creative production and transdisciplinary collaboration. As an academic and research unit, the ACT Program emphasizes both knowledge production and knowledge dissemination. In the tradition of artist and educator György Kepes, the founder of MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies and an advocate of “art on a civic scale,” ACT envisions artistic leadership initiating change, providing a critically transformative view of the world with the civic responsibility to enrich cultural discourse.
MIT program in art, culture and technology
School of Architecture & Planning
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Avenue, E15-212
Cambridge MA 02139-4307
act.mit.edu
617-253-5229