In our present condition

(n-z)

In Our Current Condition (N-Z) is an exhibition of student work from 4.314/5 ACT Advanced Workshop in Artistic Practice and Transdisciplinary Research: Porous Boundaries, Shifting Borders, and Fertile Edges, co-taught by the CAVS50th anniversary curatorial team: Laura Knott, Lars Bang Larsen, and Gediminas Urbonas.

The class focused on collaborative artistic research projects related to ACT’s recognition of the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, a unique and renowned center of artistic research founded at MIT in 1967, and the predecessor to ACT. Working with the curatorial team for the anniversary events and exhibits, the workshop investigated contemporary approaches to some of the key terms that emanated from the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, addressing questions such as: How does contemporary art conceive of and grapple with proliferating dimensions of “civic scale,” “environment,” and “the future”? Who comprises the “community” to which contemporary art is addressed? How might new and hybrid forms of visual communication act in partnership with, and parallel to, contemporary practices in exhibition-making? How does curatorial research become a site for intervention and action via strategies of display and spatialization?

Topics explored included: the porosity and permeability of the art concept to social space and to other forms of sentience and knowledge; the creation and protection of fictions that allow for engagement with the intractable; the instigation of problems at the limit of knowing and un-knowing; and the displacement of the art concept to an un-sited position that could be anywhere.

Bacteria hall of fame

the taxonomy and copyrights of crispr

The Hall of Fame has absorbed a significant number of readings that focus on MIT’s deep involvement in the founding of synthetic biology. Speculating that the organisms that make experimentation in synthetic biology possible might one day be recognized for their contributions to cross-species interventions, the Hall of Fame is a paean to microbes that, willingly or not, are essential to gene editing.

PLANTAE ANGIOSPERMS EUDICOTS ROSIDS FABALES FABACEAE MEDICAGO SUPER-SATIVA

ANIMALIA CHORDATA MAMMALIA ARTIODACTYLA SUIDAE SUINAE OSTEO-SUS