Centerbook: The Center for Advanced Visual Studies and the Evolution of Art-Science-Technology at MIT (Sa+p Press) - Hardcover

Goldring, Elizabeth; Sebring, Ellen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0998117056 ISBN 13: 9780998117058

Publisher: SA+P Press, 2019

Synopsis

The first comprehensive history of MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS), told through personal accounts and groundbreaking artwork.

In 1967, in a time of student unrest, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology did the unexpected: it established the first academic center for research and collaboration in art, science, and technology. The Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) brought artists to the MIT campus with radical expressions of a rapidly evolving technological era.

The brainchild of founding director Gyorgy Kepes, CAVS sought to repair the distance between practitioners of art and engineering within the halls of MIT. "The scientist may be an extra brain to the artist, and the engineer may be an extra arm to the artist, whereas the artist can be an extra eye to the scientist and engineer,” said long-time director Otto Piene in Centerbeam, a 1978 film about a CAVS collaboration. As a breeder of new art forms and future-oriented artistic education, CAVS became a pioneering model for the art, technology and media labs that proliferated worldwide.

This first comprehensive history of CAVS presents an inside view, told through personal accounts, exhibit documentation, and groundbreaking artwork, and and includes a new text on the genome of art and technology by Peter Weibel. The book chronicles, in vivid visual narrative and testimony by those who were there, the birth and flowering of a unique research node dedicated to multiple interactions of art, science, technology and environment.

Copublished with ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe

About this title

About the Author

ELIZABETH GOLDRING, (B.A. Smith College, M.Ed. Harvard University) writer, poet, and media artist, has been an active participant in the CAVS community since 1975. She served as Fellow, Exhibits and Projects Director, Lecturer, Acting Co-Director, and Charlotte Moorman Senior Fellow. Her artistic research focuses on ways of seeing for people who are blind or visually challenged.

ELLEN SEBRING, media researcher, artist, and designer, earned the SMVisS degree at MIT, and PhD at the Centre for Advanced Inquiry in Integrative Arts, Plymouth University in the UK. She was a Fellow at CAVS, Creative Director of the Visualizing Cultures project at MIT, and Postdoctoral Associate at Duke University. She explores visual narrative and the syntax of images in an age of global digital archives.

GEDIMINAS URBONAS is an Associate Professor at MIT and an artist, activist, educator, and is cofounder with Nomeda Urbonas of US: the Urbonas Studio, an interdisciplinary research practice.

PETER WEIBEL is Chairman and CEO of the ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe. He has edited other ZKM volumes published by the MIT Press, including, most recently, The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds.

From the Inside Flap

The Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was established in 1967 as a workshop for explorations in art, science, technology, and the environment. It became an incubator for new art forms and integrative ideas. The complex social fabric of CAVS brought together mature, mid-career, and young artists as well as students, to conceptualize and build innovative projects in collaboration with MIT scientists and engineers. CAVS's educational mission to explore the interactions between technology, human, planet, and space, became a model for many media labs that emerged in universities across the globe. Centerbook focuses on the twenty-seven years from the Center's founding in 1967 by György Kepes through Otto Piene's retirement in 1994. Centerbook tells the story of CAVS through words and artworks of its fellows and graduates, drawing on original sources, texts, interviews, and a newly digitized archive of nearly 30,000 images and documents. CAVS fellows included Maryanne Amacher, Jack Burnham, Harriet Casdin-Silver, Joe Davis, Paul Earls, Charlotte Moorman, Nam June Paik, Yvonne Rainer, Vassilakis Takis, Aldo Tambellini, Wen-Ying Tsai, and Stan VanDerBeek.

Edition details

• Publisher: SA+P Press
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0998117056
• ISBN 13: 9780998117058
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 364