The Digital Hum of the Long, Slow Now

The MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology (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.

February 11: Franco Mattes, People Disguised as Algorithms
Eva and Franco Mattes are an artist duo originally from Italy, living in New York. They continually make 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, Dark Content, sheds light on the largely anonymous labor force of content moderators that has emerged with the rise of social media.

Respondent: Gary Zhexi Zhang, Graduate Student in Art, Culture and Technology at MIT (SMACT ’19)

April 1: Beth Stryker, Critical Mapping and Tactical Interventions
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 Biennale (2016, 2018). She is also the Executive Director of ArteEast in New York.

Respondent: Nida Sinnokrot, Assistant Professor in Art, Culture and Technology at MIT

April 29: Keller Easterling, Medium Design
Keller Easterling is an architect, writer, and professor at Yale. Her book 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. A forthcoming book, Medium Design, continues to expose the dangers and powers of this ubiquitous space by focusing on not only the buildings but also the medium of technologies, rules, and relationships in which they are suspended. 

Respondent: Rania Ghosn, Associate Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at MIT

May 6: Inadelso Cossa, Personal Perspectives on Mozambican History Through Film
Mozambican filmmaker Inadelso Cossa’s work explores the Colonial, Post Colonial, Independence, and Post Civil War periods of Mozambique’s history, in what he refers to as “acts of memory.” This lecture is a collaboration with Graham M. Jones and the MIT Anthropology Program, with support from the MIT History Program, and MISTI-Africa.

Respondents: M. Amah Edoh, Assistant Professor of African Studies at MIT / Kenda Mutongi, Professor of History at MIT

ACT’s spring 2019 lecture series is organized by Judith Barry, ACT Director.

Contact
Marissa Friedman (marissaf [​at​] mit.edu), ACT’s Communications and Public Programs Coordinator.

This series is made possible with the generous support of The Council for the Arts at MIT (CAMIT).