Sponge: Center Sponge Center for Advanced Visual Studies, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts. January 26th–30th, 2009.
Center Sponge is a five-day experience in total immersion. During each "absorb-a-thon" day, one theme will be explored in depth: Organism, Fantastical Realism, Optimism, Cynicism, and Metabolism.
Center Sponge will string together encounters with the ocean floor, outer space, maple-sugaring, and singing in the rain. After a week of visiting expert presentations, film screenings, one intensive ukulele lesson, and three field trips (to an aquarium, a planetarium, and a museum), you will “wring-out” by delivering a presentation of your own. Prepare to leave the workshop (with a ukulele) ready to conduct future Sponges.
A Center Sponge Flickr set is here.
View the Center Sponge poster.
Presentations by:
- Adam Baldinger, marine biologist, taxonomist and curatorial associate of malacology and invertebrate zoology at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology.
- Leah Beeferman, artist, designer and VCU graduate student in the Painting and Printmaking Department.
- Carol Carlson, museum educator at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.
- Larissa Harris, curator at the Queens Museum of Art.
- Rachel Metz, aquarist at the Woods Hole Science Aquarium.
- David Mindell, engineer, historian of technology and director of the program in Science, Technology and Society at MIT.
- Katie Ray, librarian at the MIT Science Fiction Society and MIT student.
- Meg Rotzel, curatorial associate at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies and founder of the Berwick Research Institute.
- Joe Zane, arist and director of production at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies.
- Mirah Zeitlyn, recording artist on K Records.
Photo credits: Hope Ginsburg
Design: David Reinfurt
Thanks go to: Larissa Harris, Meg Rotzel, Joe Zane, David Reinfurt, Mary Hale, Mirah Zeitlyn, Lucy Hull, Lauren DeSimone, Dan Van Roekel, VCUarts and all presenters and participants.