Classes recently supported at MIT.nano
Creating Art, Thinking Science
Fall 2021, 2022, 2023
Class affiliation: Art, Culture, and Technology (ACT) program, School of Architecture and Planning
Instructor: Tobias Putrih
Co-instructor: Ardalan SadeghiKivi
MIT has a rich history of productive collaboration between the arts and the sciences, anchored by the conviction that these two manners of thinking can form a deeply generative symbiosis that serves to advance and humanize new technologies. The class “Creating Art, Thinking Science" is proposes a model for how the relationship between art and science might play out at a time of exponential technological growth.
The class was initiated by Tobias Putrih, lecturer in ACT, and co-developed and co-taught with Ardalan SadeghiKivi. Central to the success of the class has been the collaboration with Vladimir Bulović, the founding director of MIT.nano and Fariborz Maseeh Chair in Emerging Technology, and Samantha Farrell, the manager of Studio.nano that positioned the facility as an open-access resource for the class. “Creating Art, Thinking Science” unfolds the 100,000 sq ft of cleanroom and lab space within the Lisa T. Su Building, inviting participating students to take advantage of cutting-edge equipment for nanoscale visualization and fabrication in order to explore nanostructures and manipulate atoms as tools for rendering the invisible visible and deconstructing the dynamics of perception itself.
Projects from the class are showcased in the exhibition zero.zerozerozerozerozerozerozerozerozero, curated by Putrih and SadeghiKivi.
ACT Studio
Fall 2024
Class affiliation: Art, Culture, and Technology (ACT) program, School of Architecture and Planning
Instructor: Gediminas Urbonas, Tobias Putrih
Affiliate Instructor: Ardalan SadeghiKivi
ACT Studio, explores the theory and criticism of intersections between art, culture, and technology in relation to contemporary artistic practice, critical design, and media. Students consider methods of investigation, documentation, and display and explore modes of communication across disciplines. Students develop projects in which they organize research methods and goals, engage in production, cultivate a context for their practice, and explore how to compellingly communicate, display, and document their work. Regular presentation and peer-critique sessions, as well as reviews involving ACT faculty and fellows, and external guest reviewers provide students with ample feedback as their projects develop. In the Fall 2024 edition, students will be introduced to the MIT.nano facility and research center, where they will explore cutting-edge image-making and fabrication processes at the nanoscale. They will be encouraged to view these technologies as tools for generating inquiries into art and science production and how these fields can symbiotically address larger societal and philosophical concerns of the contemporary era.
Special Subject: Art, Culture and Technology — From Art at the Nanoscale to Large Generative Models and Simulations
Fall 2024
Class affiliation: Art, Culture, and Technology (ACT) program, School of Architecture and Planning
Instructor: Gearóid Dolan and Matej Vakula
An introduction to the tools and concepts of capturing and transitioning forms between the human scale and nanoscale. The generation of simulation-based art projects reflects these explorations and the ways they can be used in the context of art, culture, and technology. What dialogs can engage with society when operating on sub-visible scales or taking forms from the nano into the human macro scale, creating artistic simulations, motion from form, or form from motion?
Students will collaborate with MIT Nano on final projects intended for public exhibition in a gallery setting.
Synchronization of Senses
Spring 2024
Class affiliation: Art Culture and Technology program, School of Architecture and Planning
Instructor: Renée Green
Coordinator: Ardalan SadeghiKivi
Class affiliation: Art Culture and Technology program, School of Architecture and Planning
Synchronizations of Senses is a long-running ACT class taught by Professor Renée Green that invites in-depth examination of sense percepts, noting nuances, and articulating specificities. A generative focus is placed on the practices of varied practitioners –film directors, artists, musicians, composers, architects, designers– whose writings relay a process of thinking and feeling integral to their forms of material production.
In the SOS Spring 2024 edition, a special focus was placed on the MIT.nano facilities, where scientific visualization participates in forming micro, nano, and sub-nanoscale worlds, operating as vehicles for thought that constitute unique conditions of knowledge production. This exploration encompassed a network of visual codes, immersive technologies, and scientific methods that bear witness to the convergence of image-making and image-seeing rooted in contact and communication between the human and the machine. This exploratory endeavor was accompanied and informed by Ardalan SadeghiKivi.