Impressions The Arts At MIT
Description: A look at artistic endeavors that were available on the MIT campus in 1979 which included the DramaShop, Film Section, Creative Photography Lab, Student Art Association, Artist In Residence At the Hayden Gallery, Computer Graphics, Experimental Music Studio, and Symphony Orchestra. The film was created by the Film Section which was under the direction of Ricky Leacock at that time. .
Credits: Jonathan Spring, Mark Edwards
Making Beautiful Music Together
Jim Muller SM ’82, PhD ’83 and Sharon Horovitch PhD ’80 came to MIT to get their doctorates but left with much more. They got married while at the Institute, and they started a bluegrass band, Southern Rail, that has been playing for audiences around the country ever since.
Credits: Brielle Domings, Brian Geer, Executive Director, Strategic Communications and Marketing, MIT Alumni Association; Julie Fox, Editorial Director, Strategic Communications and Marketing, MIT Alumni Association
More information: https://alum-mit-edu.ezproxyberklee.flo.org/slice/making-beautiful-music-together
Copper Dreams
As we navigate the digital age and witness the rapid obsolescence of electronics, a new frontier emerges: urban mining. E-waste, often overlooked, holds immense value—where a kilogram of circuit boards from our discarded electronics contains ten times more precious metals than a kilogram of traditional ore.
The short documentary delves into the stories of Old Fadama in Accra, Ghana, home to one of the world’s largest e-waste destinations and a population of over 100,000 residents. The film highlights how informal workers in Ghana have developed circular economy systems that tap into the potential of urban mining, while addressing critical questions about electronic waste's environmental impact.
Credits: Georine Pierre, City Science Group, Nana Yaw Asiedu Appenteng / Asiedu Studios
Tipping
Federal tipped minimum wages are an insulting $2.13 per hour, making it impossible to live on without groveling for a dollar. The origin of tipped work is steeped in white supremacy and goes back to the end of slavery in the US, but the injury of tipped work still continues today. Let’s talk about how the system was rigged against the lowest paid and most oppressed workers, and the history of those same workers fighting back for a living wage and dignity on the job.
Credits: Jimmy Day
Hope Regenerated
A “failed experiment” became a life-saving discovery by MIT Professor Ioannis V. Yannas and his colleague Dr. John Burke when their search for a better way to treat severe burn victims led to the discovery of organ regeneration — thought impossible by the scientific and medical communities at the time — as well as a brand new field of medicine.
Credits: John Freidah, Cecilia Prestamo, Josh Ramos, Rebecca Miller, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, Debbie Douglas
Sky is No Limit for Deaf Pilot
Sheila Xu ’14 never imagined she could become a pilot, but she says MIT put her on that path. Born deaf to hearing parents, Xu first learned American Sign Language and connected with the Deaf community as an undergraduate. These experiences inspired her to want to open doors for more people who are deaf or hard of hearing.
Credits: Brielle Domings, Brian Geer, Executive Director, Strategic Communications and Marketing, MIT Alumni Association; Julie Fox, Editorial Director, Strategic Communications and Marketing, MIT Alumni Association
More information: https://alum-mit-edu.ezproxyberklee.flo.org/slice/sky-no-limit-deaf-pilot
Requiem
On Saturday morning, August 3, 2019, a 21-year-old self-declared white supremacist from Allen, Texas, targeted “Mexicans” in a hate crime and shot and killed 23 people and injured twenty-six others at the Cielo Vista Walmart in El Paso. Among the dead were 14 Americans, 8 Mexicans from nearby Ciudad Juarez, and one German. It was the 7th deadliest mass shooting in the United States since 1949 and the deadliest attack on Hispanic and Lantina/o Americans in U.S. history. Requiem for the Innocent: El Paso and Beyond is a collaboration between photographer John Willis, poet Robin Behn, and musician Matan Rubinstein. This film is intended to honor the memory of the twenty-three innocent souls who lost their lives and the twenty-six others who were injured on that fateful day in El Paso.
Credits: John Willis is a photographer and collaborated with Matan Rubinstein, composer and Robin Behn, Poet.
Recursive Gardens
Recursive Gardens explores how Kindergarten and its educators shaped the development of 20th century art and design in Germany and positions nurture rather than genius as a predictor of success. Paper weaving, a Kindergarten occupation, is both the primary material of the installation and a metaphor for how to build and mend the future in which the body is present, women’s work is fundamental, and care drives the process.
Credits: Coco Allred, Ava Rasti, Music
More information: www.cocoallred.com
In the Wake of Ruins
The film begins with my two year old student’s hand on a white page and captures the drawing under her brush. Building to saturation, soaking or tearing the page and becoming muddied and brown children’s drawings serve as a metaphor for history as a non-linear process, more akin to compost than a layered landfill. Worms, soil and shapes are collaged into this footage. These three sources of footage peak out beneath one another; keying out colors from monotypes I made, and the drawing made by my student, composite images form in a new sort of creative compost.
Credits: Coco Allred, MJ Swanson, Music
More information: www.cocoallred.com
An Order to Her Past
Two sisters, bound by the quiet threads of memory, receive a gift from the future. Filmed on 35mm Super 8, this work slips between time—caught in the silence of the past and the distant pull of what lies ahead. The sisters wander, lingering where they belong, where change feels like an unwelcome stranger. Do we move forward, or stay in the warmth of what we know?
Credits: Victor Wang, Yunseo Cho
More information: https://www.victor-yaneng-wang.com/, https://linktr.ee/yunseocho
Exordium
There are 7.7 billion ways to tell a story about how people eat together. This is one of them.
Credits: Amanda Dominique (Production Assistant), Cesar Dominique (Actor), Chelsea Polk (Sound Engineer, Grip), Cody Despins (Grip, Technical Assistant), Hana Omiya (Actor), Jessica Rinland (Cinematographer), John Anderson (Actor), John Steiner (Lighting Designer, Grip), Josė Rivera (Sound Designer), Kevin McLellan (Co-director, Co-writer, Actor), Laura Chasman (Actor), Laura Knott (Co-director, Co-writer, Actor), Laura Ryan (Photographer), Marissa Friedman (Communication Manager), Mary Jirmanus Saba (Assistant to the Cinematographer), Nicolas Consuergra (Graphic Designer), Monica Paez (Graphic Designer) , Nilma Dominique (Actor), Rainar Aasrand (Colorist), Tatsuya W. Daniel (Xylophonist), Zacharia Jama (Editor)
We Found a Roller Rink
We Found a Roller Rink is an experimental short film about finding joy in friendship at a time when relationships in major cities feel disparate and a schismatic capitalism is tearing us from each other to the point of delusion. The two main characters stumble upon an eerie roller rink smack dab in the middle of a concrete jungle that seems to chew them up and spit them out. Casting a repetitive magic spell propels our heroes, wheeling them out of the city and soon finding respite in the nearby verdancy of the river, the trees, and a taco bell. The film also explores several themes, especially doubles, twins, and parallel motion.
Credits: Jake Zelikovsky
The Immortal
This experimental short film is inspired by the novel of Jorge Luis Borges, "The Immortal". A series of lifeless copies derive from the existence of human beings. On the one hand, living bodies own the freedom in space, while eventually they would pass away. On the other hand, the fabricated copies are untransportable, while they occupy an eternal moment in the maze of time. The 3d printed lips and hands, the water-filled plastic gloves, the masks, the plastic membrane, and the digital illustration of human beings are nested and projected and overlaid, intertwining with each other. An intricate relationship, dialogue, complement, competition as well as coexistence comes to being.
Credits: Anna Borou Yu, Jiajian Min, Tiange Zhou, Hao Yan, Lu Ren
The Boardwalk is the Bridge Because Everything is Water
The Boardwalk is the Bridge Because Everything is Water is an experimental film that says, "Thank you, water" and serves as an environmental portrait of New Hampshire.
Credits: Scott Schaeffer, Jake
Start Me Up
A screencast movie entirely developed using historical computing from the late '90s, in order to explore how things might have been different if "computer-based audiovisual storytelling" had been around much earlier than the usual chronology tells us; at the same time, a powerful reflection on the complex genealogy of AI - as cheerfully (yet uncannily) mediated by the strangest possible omniscient narrator (from a very distant spatiotemporal infoscape). This "retroduction" is part of Albert Figurt's 2023-24 MIT CAST Residency which was dedicated to the theory, screenvestigation, and practice of "desktop narratives," along with their fascinating metanarrative & multifaceted features.
Credits: Albert Figurt (director, editor), Nick Montfort (producer, writer), Henry Jenkins & Karyn Nakamura (vocal actors), Stephanie Frampton (vintage photos' actress). The film received support from a grant from MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST). Special thanks to MIT Comparative Media Studies / Writing and MIT Music and Theater Arts.
More information: tinyurl.com/2a8465d3 for the related manifesto / declaration of intent
Flickers of home
Credits: Lama Alahdal, Class 21L.011
Demo Day
To escape the complicated grief of her mother’s death, 17-year-old Renella Mendoza takes a job recruiting slum teenagers for a scientific research study, then risks their fragile trust by sabotaging the study to prevent her boss, a millionaire financier, from trafficking the teens.
DEMO DAY is Part 1 of sci-fi arthouse animation series ""The Great Tit is a Bird,"" which follows Black and Brown feminine and trans-feminine people around the world, the losses they survive, and the ways they shape our high-tech era even as they are pushed to the margins.
Credits: Ar Ducao (MIT alum)- Director, Writer, Key Cast, Story, Animation, Software Code, Sound; Paula Hung - Writer, Key Cast, Illustration, Sound; Mercy Oladipo (MIT alum) - Key Cast; Kate Mytty (MIT alum) - Key Cast; Alexander Wright III - Key Cast; Chris Willard - Key Cast; Tyrone Bryant - Key Cast; David Briggs - Key Cast; Susan Osiche - Story; Paula Hung - Story; La'Tonia Mertica - Animation; Bryné Hadnott - Animation; Shelby Lee - Animation; Latasha Morris - Illustration; Brian Li - Illustration; Joseph Beer - Software Code; Jordi Frank - Software Code; Kamilla Ismailova - Additional Animation; Jovanny Alaniz (MITES alum) - Additional Animation; Giulio Gnash - Additional Animation; Junshen Gao - Additional Animation; Xinyi Liu - Additional Animation; Lakshmi Segura - Additional Animation; Darren Cole - Sound; Amelie Pollack - Sound; Kate Mytty - Sound; Francheska Njanja - Story Consultant; Alma Jam (MIT Staff) - Advisor
Swan Song
An ambitious young musician attends her first semester at one of the most prestigious music colleges in the country.
However, when she flunks out, she must find a way to hide her failure from her family, but more importantly from her beloved oboe teacher whom she is terrified to disappoint.
Credits: Arya Sasne, Ariel Narayan (Writer and Co-Director), Amanda Hess (Co-Director), Lydia Evans (Producer), James Ninneman (Director of Photography), Rachel Neil (Editor)
Don’t Call Me Friend, I Loved You
“Don’t Call Me Friend, I Loved You” is a short film detailing the heartbreak of relationships ending. The film follows Milo, a college student, who is struggling to move on after his last breakup.
Credits: Reuben Fuchs, Clay Lewis
Log Log Land
Log Log Land is an Original MIT Musical Film created in the Spring of 2024, drawing inspiration from La La Land. The film touches upon the struggle of students to choose between the arts or a STEM career. The movie follows three narratives: a freshman trio with desires to make music but faces internship pressure, a love story, and seniors worrying about grad school applications and regretting how they spent their undergrad.
The film has a completely original soundtrack (available on any streaming platform), with all singing and acting done by the MIT Logarhythms The project was praised on the Boston Globe, the MIT Tech, and was selected by CAMIT to be presented at their annual art sponsor event. Several clips from Log Log Land have garnered over 1 million views on Tiktok and Instagram.
Credits: Reuben Fuchs, Clay Lewis, Raymond Zhang, Ellison Scheuller, Amos Batalden, Mariabelle Azemar, The MIT Logarhythms
Selections from MITV (student created content from 1975 and 1976
Selections include response to new public art on campus, Interviews with Ravi Shankar, Art Buchwald, local Cambridge mayor’s race, options and other selections.
