Center for Advanced Visual Studies
The Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) is an art-based laboratory for collaborations between artists, scientists, and technologists. These collaborations are typically built around projects undertaken by resident Fellows, who also conduct seminars and supervise student participation. An emerging mission of the CAVS is the exploration of the digital arts as a common ground for collaborative projects. Our goal is the creation of important art that could not or would not be possible except at MIT.
Activities of fellows and affiliated faculty during 2001–2002 included:
- Fellow Hisham Bizri produced a 34-minute film entitled La Rencontre, in collaboration with MIT students. He continued work on his multimedia installation "Nostos" based on Joyce's Ulysses.
- Fellow Naoko Tosa joined the center during the year, and is working on several artificial intelligence-based systems that sense the viewer's emotional state in order to shape the interactive experience.
- Fellow Ioannis Michaloudis, a Fulbright scholar, has been studying the artistic potential of aerogels, and working on his multimedia play "(Nob)Odyssey."
- Fellow Seth Riskin was invited to present "Light Dance" performances on seven occasions, including a new piece for the Kepes Memorial Event at Kresge Theater, MIT, in June.
- Fellow Elizabeth Goldring has been developing a portable non-laser version of her "seeing machine" to present images to visually-challenged people. In June, her retinal images were exhibited at MIT's Compton Gallery.
- Director Emeritus Otto Piene participated in five overseas exhibitions, including a 34-year 23-room retrospective entitled "Otto Piene—The Zero Experience," at the historic City Gallery of Prague, Czech Republic. At CAVS, he is organizing center documentation for 1968 to 1994 as preparation for a documentary volume, and making plans for a Sky Art Conference to be held at the island of Ikarea, Greece, in October 2003.
Educational Activities
Glorianna Davenport and Steve Benton conducted a fall-term seminar series in the CAVS conference space. The subject, entitled MAS.878 Experiences in Interactive Expression, brought the artists Vit Havrank, Daniel Rozin, Ben Rubin, Jonah Bruckner-Cohen, Ellen Sebring and Chris Csikszentmihályi to MIT for a day of discussions with students and faculty. At the end of the fall semester, an exhibition of student-produced interactive installations was presented at CAVS.
Fellow Hisham Bizri conducted a spring-term weekly seminar, MAS.879A Themes in Cinematic and Computational Art, with undergraduate and graduate students.
Fellow Seth Riskin conducted a spring-term weekly seminar/studio, MAS.879B The Culture of Light.
A total of eighteen MIT students joined CAVS as UROPs during this year.
Personnel
Artists Christine Sommerer and Laurent Mingnonneau were resident at CAVS for two months.
More information about the Center for Advanced Visual Studies can be found on the web at http://cavs.mit.edu/.