Diversifying Space
2019 Mellon Faculty Grant Recipient
A boundaryless exploration
About the Project
Joseph A. Paradiso, director of the MIT Media Lab Responsive Environments research group and the faculty mentor of the MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative, collaborates with Xin Liu, Arts Curator in the initiative, and Marie-Pier Boucher, postdoctoral fellow in the MIT Program in Science, Technology and Society, on the project Diversifying Space.
The project centers on two classes: STS.058 Space Exploration and Interplanetary Habitation (Boucher, spring 2019) and MAS.S64 Prototyping our Sci-Fi Space Future: designing & deploying projects for zero gravity flights (Paradiso, fall 2019), as well as a series of workshops and presentations by visiting artists. Topics range from parabolic flight research to the social impact of science and technology at an interplanetary level. During the 2019 calendar year and in conjunction with the Zero-G and Outer Space courses, visiting artists will give lectures, run workshops, lead informal discussions with students about their research and host a movie screening with a Q&A.
Schedule
Spring 2019
Course: STS.058 Space Exploration and Interplanetary Habitation (Marie-Pier Boucher)
Artist residency: Agnes Meyer-Brandis
March 13-20, 2019
Beyond the Cradle 2019: Envisioning a New Space Age
Thursday, March 14, 2019
1:30pm: Space and the Arts Panel
MIT Media Lab
75 Amherst Street, Cambridge
Artist talk: Space Traveling with Agnes Meyer-Brandis
Friday, March 15, 2019 / 4–5:30pm
Wiesner Room (E15-207), MIT Building E15
Free and open to the public; no registration required
Fall 2019
Course: MAS.S64 Prototyping our Sci-Fi Space Future: designing & deploying projects for zero gravity flights (Joseph Paradiso)
About the Artists
Joseph Paradiso is Alexander W. Dreyfoos (1954) Professor and Associate Academic Head in the Program in Media Arts and Sciences, and directs the MIT Media Lab’s Responsive Environments group, which explores how sensor networks augment and mediate human experience, interaction, and perception. After two years developing precision drift chambers at the Lab for High Energy Physics at ETH in Zurich, Paradiso joined the Draper Laboratory, where his research encompassed spacecraft control systems, image processing algorithms, underwater sonar, and precision alignment sensors for large high-energy physics detectors. He joined the Media Lab in 1994, where his current research interests include embedded sensing systems and sensor networks, wearable and body sensor networks, energy harvesting and power management for embedded sensors, ubiquitous and pervasive computing, localization systems, passive and RFID sensor architectures, human-computer interfaces, and interactive media. He has authored 200 articles and technical reports on topics ranging from physics detectors to power scavenging.
Marie-Pier Boucher is MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) Postdoctoral Fellow in the Program in Science, Technology and Society. She received her PhD in Visual & Media Studies from Duke University in 2015.
Xin Liu is an artist and engineer, and Arts Curator in the MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative. She is an alumna of the Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces group. Mixing scientific research with personal narratives, she creates transformative, participatory experiences and bodily objects to examine the constitution of subjectivity and affects. Conventionally trained as an engineer, she claims technology as her native language and craft in art practice. In the midst of the paradigm shift between technology and humanity, she tries to weave new connections for active participation. The goal is to reconfigure the tools of technology, not for exploitation but for the recovery of human feelings, affects, and emotions; not for hegemonic control of life but for the discovery of a bottom-up evolution through subjective experience.
In the Media
Agnes Meyer-Brandis studied mineralogy for a year, then transferred to the Art Academy in Maastricht, the Düsseldorf Art Academy and the Cologne Media Art Academy. She comes from a background of both sculpture and new media art. Her work, exhibited worldwide, explores the zone between fact and fiction – artistic research on a quest for a degree of reality within constructions. Meyer-Brandis has had exhibitions at Centre Pompidou Paris, FR / Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum for Contemporary Art Berlin, DE / HeK, House of Electronic Arts Basel, CH / National Gallery of Denmark SMK, Copenhagen, DK / National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, TWN / FACT, Liverpool, UK / apexart, New York City, NY, US / Daejeon Museum of Art, Daejeon, KOR / ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, DE / The Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany, DE / Ars Electronica, Linz, AT / Oxo Tower, Bargehouse, London, UK amongst others.
More on the artist’s website: Agnes Meyer-Brandis
