Ellen Sebring

An Evening Celebrating the Legacy of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS). Visions & Projections, Dec. 8, 2011, MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT). A panel discussion with former CAVS director Otto Piene and Fellows Elizabeth Goldring, Lowry Burgess, Joan Brigham, Alejandro Sina, Aldo Tambellini, Mark Mendel; presentation by Márton Orosz on CAVS founder György Kepes; and screening of the “Centerbeam” film made by the late MIT Professor Richard Leacock, of the CAVS collaborative project at Documenta 6, Kassel, Germany (1977).

Sackler-Freer deputy director, James T. Ulak wrote an essay for the Visualizing Cultures unit built on Koizumi Kishio's 100 Views of Tokyo. Scott Shunk and I worked with Jim and his assistant Kyoko Arakawa, using cut outs of Koizumi's prints. (Check out the resulting unit on the vibrant post-Kanto earthquake city, "Tokyo Modern" on http://visualizingcultures.mit.edu.)

Allen is an art historian who has authored several units for MIT Visualizing Cultures. We met at Dartmouth to look at source materials such as travelogues and photo albums. The complete set of Brinkley's JAPAN with many photographs can be seen, resulting in the two units, "Globetrotter's Japan: People and Places."

The "Black Ships & Samurai" exhibit Scott Shunk and I created for MIT Visualizing Cultures toured the US and Japan. It premiered at Commodore Perry's home city Newport, Rhode Island; is in the collection of the National Archives; and was featured on Broadway for Stephen Sondheim's "Pacific Overtures" directed by Amon Miyamoto at Studio 54.

TILT was co-developed with choreographer Paula Josa-Jones. Exploring the aftershock of a world disrupted, where gravity is lost, the stage version of TILT combined video with a "levitron" device on which the dancers attempted to balance. Ingrid Schatz, Alissa Cardone and dancers from the Kinaesthetics Lab performed at Kresge Auditorium.

Sally Weber's hologram of a woman looks wonderful at night. The MIT Museum is building a substantial holography collection under the direction of Seth Riskin (both Sally and Seth are fellow graduates of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT).