By james art 
Giant eye projections filled with dazzling constellations. Interactive, increased reality poetry. A leading walk to the renaming of MIT spaces with local local leaders.
These art experiences are part of MIT’s first Artfinity Festival, which takes place from February 15 to May 2. Students, teachers and employees will participate in concerts, experience with extended reality, exhibitions, films and more. The festival is free and open to the public.
“It is to show that the arts are very important and very central to the lives of people in MIT,” says Marcus Thompson, a festival co-leader and professor of music.
The festival begins with Sonic Jubilance in Edward and Joyce Linde’s new music building on Saturday night. The show will include four global premieres: Grace’s Madrigal Grace by Chador Chadl, John Harbison’s Two Noble Relatives, and Miguel Zenon’s Summit. The night repertoire will cover classic, jazz, chamber music and traditional music by Senegal and Bali, made of vocal and instrumental ensembles.
Before the presentation, there will be an open house with a building. The Linde building was created to better support the music program at the MIT Conservatory level, which teaches 1500 students every year.
The center boasts a 390 -seater concert hall, a pavilion for the college music technology and calculations with rehearsals and spaces in the classroom, as well as a space for music and culture designed with acoustics, which has a traditional music that traditionally plays outdoors. The center for more than 35,000 square meters is designed by Tokyo -based architecture Sanaa.
Thompson said he enjoyed the introductory execution. “It’s a way to just thank MIT and present us … as a world -class place for people to learn music and do it in teams and communities,” he said. “He also carries a community of listeners, and this is our way of sharing this joyful moment.”
Thompson will also perform as part of the festival. He will play Viola with the Boston Society for Chamber Music in the Thomas Toul concert hall on March 16.
Behnaz Farahi, an assistant at MIT Media Lab, heads a “look to the stars”, an art project centering technology and humanity working on March 12-14. The immersion pods equipped with AI will travel through the campus to collect stories from participants, whether they are future dreams or painful memories. Pods will record the eyes of the participants’ eyes who will serve as a focal point for the project.
Farahi and her team will turn these messages into encoded videos of the participants, such as stars touring iris models. The works of art will be designed on the exterior of the large dome of MIT, where anyone who walks can scan the image with a QR code -like telephone camera and learn more about each person’s history.
Farahi said they were hoping to gather about 200 stories. She wants the project to express how public art can be a ship for social change. “My goal is to encourage awareness, to encourage social changes, to encourage culture, where it is good to share the history of failures, and dream stories are not always shiny,” she said.
The poet and researcher Monica Stars will submit the Mit Memorial Lobby’s “The Poeted Reality Machine” on March 5th. The interactive experience of poetry invites participants to develop live poet poems, which will then be put into an extended reality. “The project overcomes personal expression and technological mediation, creating a space where individual stories become shared experiences through poetry, expanded reality and relational aesthetics,” according to the description of the event.
The artists Deborah Barrera Gonzalez and Claudia Tomateo, along with Catherine D’Ignizio, Assistant Professor of Urban Science and Planning, work with local local leaders of MIT Restoration/Rename. The project started with actions on the day of the indigenous population to rename places in the campus and restore the land as a root space. Programming has expanded to Artfinity.
From February 28 on March 16, participants can join tribal leaders of guide pedestrian tours. Each person will receive five cards and an edited card to rename spaces in MIT. On the route, participants can put their cards into posters with empty names and write their work on the map. People are then asked to send the new names to an online folder, which will be made up in a final art exhibition and book.
Along with two and a half months programming, MIT has recently introduced Madrigal, a Sanford Biggers sculpture at the entrance of the Linde Music building. The geometric sculpture draws from the Biggers Codex series, where it processes ancient quilts into new works of art. The 18-foot track is named after a song written for several votes, linked to the music that will be made in the new building that stands next to.
“Many innovations come from the arts. People think about innovation only about technology, but there are many innovations and things that came from experiments with materials and storytelling, “said Thompson. “The idea is to bring the human dimension to decision -making when dealing with problems and problems that are related to people.”