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
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.
