Events
Otto Piene Paths to Paradise
Exhibition at the Museum Tinguely.
Otto Piene (1928−2014) aimed high with his art: to shape a more harmonious, peaceful, and sustainable world. His expansive view explored new media and projected aesthetic forms and experiences into new spatial realms. Structured thematically, the monographic exhibition traces his utopian vision as expressed in works from his most significant series and projects in conversation with his lifelong practice of sketching.
ARTTRANSITION 2023
ARTTRANSITION 2023
A two-day symposium and CENTERBOOK launch
Fall 2023 at MIT
Hosted by ACT and the MIT Museum
A two-day event at MIT will reprise the ARTTRANSITION conferences held by the Center for Advanced Visual Studies in 1975 and 1990. A historical perspective on the themes of ARTTRANSITION revisits the origins of today’s multifaceted and rich art-science-and-technology terrain. The symposium will set the stage with a visual presentation of CENTERBOOK, a history of CAVS by Elizabeth Goldring and Ellen Sebring. Published in 2019, book launch events at MIT were delayed due to the pandemic.
Otto Piene, CAVS director at the time, wrote a seminal essay for ARTTRANSITION 90 that addressed art-science-technology fusion:
ARTTRANSITION means acting and creating artworks according to the insight that to humankind all matter is spiritual, a form of energy which we are here to articulate. To render matter into human, peaceful energy no one can work alone anymore. The artist needs the planner, the engineer needs the artist, the sociologist needs the scientist/scholar as Einstein needed Mozart. Collaboration occurs on two planes: general exchange of values on the one hand and intended, concerted, and carefully planned action on the other. We share scientific and artistic information on a basic human level as well as in practical, intricate, and professional cooperation. The latter mode of group work is the most badly needed when it comes to providing shelter and a garden of experience for ourselves and our fellow citizens. (Otto Piene, excerpt, Arttransition catalog, CAVS, MIT, 1975, xi)
Hosted by the Art Culture and Technology group (ACT) and the MIT Museum, ARTTRANSITION 2023 will explore the legacy of CAVS at MIT as a touchstone to today’s explosively cross-disciplinary, organic, temporally unbound media arts practice. Presentations at the symposium will be organized around topics and programs from the earlier conferences, going back to the transitional 1975 conference based on the teachings of founding director, Gyorgy Kepes.