The Boston Globe reports that the MIT List Visual Arts Center has received a gift of $200,000 from the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation to support Joan Jonas’ presentation at the Venice Biennale. Jonas is developing a new multimedia installation for the Biennale incorporating video, drawings, objects and sounds.
Kevin Hartnett writes for The Boston Globe about “Drawing Apart,” a new exhibition on display at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. The exhibit “deals with the fragmented way distant yet familiar places live on in our imaginations,” explains Hartnett.
The Naked Scientists feature Prof. Nicholas Makris explaining his research on the evolution of violin design and performing on the lute. Makris explains his finding that the violin’s “F-hole length increased from the Amati time period to the Guarneri time period," making the instrument's sound more powerful.
The Economist writes about a new MIT study examining the development of violin design, which was found to have evolved by chance. The researchers also found that the shape and length of the violin’s “f-holes” give the instrument its acoustical power.
Devin Coldewey of NBC News writes about new MIT research into the evolution of violin design. The researchers found that “the characteristics of the instruments underwent changes surprisingly like evolution by natural selection,” Coldewey explains.
Artist Pawel Romanczuk, who performed at MIT last week, has been working with MIT students to make instruments from different materials. Romanczuk explains to Boston Globe reporter Kevin Hartnett that his work is about “finding a new way for making music, searching for new sources of sound.”
S. I. Rosenbaum of Boston Magazine speaks with the new dean of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, Hashim Sarkis, about his desire to create a new vocabulary to describe existing habitats. “It is time to come up with a richer lexicon,” says Sarkis.
Russell Platt writes for The New Yorker about Professor Keeril Makan’s music. “The work’s brave exploration of expressive territory makes it memorable. It’s lulling, thrilling, and, at times, downright eerie,” writes Platt of Makan’s piece “Resonance Alloy.”
David Weininger reports for The Boston Globe on the Radius Ensemble’s performance of “Nothing is More Important,” a piece composed by MIT Professor Keeril Makan. “Makan's piece begins with an obsessive focus on a single note, from which it never completely escapes,” writes Weininger.
Writing for The New York Times, Michael Cooper reports on Prof. Tod Machover’s new work about Detroit, “Symphony in D.” “I look forward to working with Detroiters from all backgrounds to create a collective musical portrait of this exciting moment in the city’s history, when everything is being rethought and anything is possible,” says Machover.
Cate McQuaid writes for The Boston Globe about “Reanimation,” a piece of performance art created by Professor Emeritus Joan Jonas. “This densely layered piece deploys drawing, video projection, and passages read aloud from the novel ‘Under the Glacier,’ by Halldór Laxness, the Nobel Prize-winning Icelandic author,” writes McQuaid.
In a piece for The Huffington Post, Heidi Legg interviews Prof. Hashim Sarkis, the newly appointed dean of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, about his vision of the world as one city. “The city as an entity has become difficult to understand or explain because it's everywhere and nowhere,” explains Sarkis.
Three new works composed by MIT lecturer Elena Ruehr are premiering over the coming weeks, reports David Weininger for The Boston Globe. “The next two weeks constitute a sort of bicoastal mini-festival of new works by Ruehr,” he writes. “It’s an enviable burst of activity for any composer.”
Keith Powers writes for WBUR about the upcoming premieres of three new works by MIT lecturer and composer Elena Ruehr. “Most composers are happy to have one premiere of a major work every year. Elena Ruehr has three in November alone,” explains Powers.
Boston Globe reporter Cate McQuaid writes about the growing popularity of performance art at Boston-area museums, highlighting the MIT List Visual Arts Center’s long tradition of presenting the medium. “But the List, at an institution as forward-thinking as MIT, is exceptional,” writes McQuaid.