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    A bright and airy hub for climate at MIT

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    Seen from a distance, MIT’s Cecil and Ida Green Building (Building 54) — designed by renowned architect and MIT alumnus I.M. Pei ’40 — is one of the most iconic buildings on the Cambridge, Massachusetts, skyline. Home to the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), the 21-story concrete structure soars over campus, topped with its distinctive spherical radar dome. Close up, however, it was a different story.A sunless, two-story, open-air plaza beneath the tower previously served as a nondescript gateway to the department’s offices, labs, and classrooms above. “It was cold and windy — probably the windiest place on campus,” EAPS department head Robert van der Hilst, the Schlumberger Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences, told a packed auditorium inside the building in March. “You would pass through the elevators and disappear into the corridors, never to be seen again until the end of the day.”Van der Hilst was speaking at a dedication event to celebrate the opening of the renovated and expanded space, 60 years after the Green Building’s original dedication in 1964. In a dramatic transformation, the perpetually-shaded expanse beneath the tower has been filled with an airy, glassed-in structure that is as inviting as the previous space was forbidding.Designed to meet LEED-platinum certification, the newly-constructed Tina and Hamid Moghadam Building (Building 55) seems to float next to the Brutalist tower, its glass façade both opening up the interior and reflecting the sunlight and green space outside. The 300-seat auditorium within the original tower has been similarly transformed, bringing light and space to the newly dubbed Dixie Lee Bryant (1891) Lecture Hall, named after the first person to earn a geology degree at MIT.Catalyzing collaborationThe project is about more than updating an overlooked space. “The building we’re here to celebrate today does something else,” MIT President Sally Kornbluth said at the dedication.“In its lightness, in its transparency, it calls attention not to itself, but to the people gathered inside it. In its warmth, its openness, it makes room for culture and community. And it welcomes in those who don’t yet belong … as we take on the immense challenges of climate together,” she continued, referencing the recent launch of The Climate Project at MIT — a whole-of-MIT initiative to innovate bold solutions to climate change. In MIT’s famously decentralized structure, the Moghadam Building provides a new physical hub for students, scientists, and engineers interested in climate and the environment to congregate and share ideas.From the start, fostering this kind of multidisciplinary collaboration was part of Van der Hilst’s vision. In addition to serving as the flagship location for EAPS, Building 54 has long been the administrative home of the MIT-WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography/Applied Ocean Science and Engineering — a graduate program in partnership with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. With the addition of Building 55, EAPS has now been joined by the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI) — a campus-wide program fostering education, outreach, and innovation in earth system science, urban infrastructure, and sustainability — and will welcome closer collaboration with Terrascope — a first-year learning community which invites its students to take on real-world environmental challenges.A shared vision comes to lifeThe building project dovetailed with the long-overdue refurbishment of the Green Building. After a multi-year fundraising campaign where Van der Hilst spearheaded the department’s efforts, the project received a major boost from lead donors Tina and Hamid Moghadam ’77, SM ’78, allowing the department to break ground in November 2021.In Moghadam, chair and CEO of Prologis, which owns 1.2 billion square feet of warehouses and other logistics infrastructure worldwide, EAPS found a fellow champion for climate and environmental innovation. By putting solar panels on the roofs of Prologis buildings, the company is now the second largest on-site producer of solar energy in the United States. “I don’t think there needs to be a trade-off between good sound economics and return on investment and solving climate change problems,” Moghadam said at the dedication. “The solutions that really work are the ones that actually make sense in a market economy.”Architectural firm AW-ARCH designed the Moghadam Building with a light touch, emphasizing spaciousness in contrast to the heavy concrete buildings that surround it. “The kind of delicacy and fragility of the thing is in some ways a depiction of what happens here,” said architect and co-founding partner Alex Anmahian at the dedication reception, giving a nod to the study of the delicate balance of the earth system itself. The sense is further illustrated by the responsiveness of the façade to the surrounding environment, which, depending on the time of day and quality of light, makes the glass alternately reflective and transparent.Inside, the 11,900-square foot pavilion is highly flexible and serves as a showcase for the science that happens in the labs and offices above. Central to the space is a 16-foot by 9-foot video wall featuring vivid footage of field work, lab research, data visualizations, and natural phenomena — visible even to passers-by outside. The video wall is counterposed to an unpretentious set of stair-step bleachers leading to the second floor that could play host to anything from a scientific lecture to a community pizza-and-movie night.Van der Hilst has referred to his vision for the atrium as a “campus living room,” and the furniture throughout is intentionally chosen to allow for impromptu rearrangements, providing a valuable public space on campus for students to work and socialize.The second level is similarly adaptable, featuring three classrooms with state-of-the-art teaching technologies that can be transformed from a single large space for a hackathon to intimate rooms for discussion.“The space is really meant for a yet unforeseen experience,” Anmahian says. “The reason it is so open is to allow for any possibility.”The inviting, dynamic design of the pavilion has also become an instant point of pride for the building’s inhabitants. At the dedication, School of Science dean Nergis Mavalvala quipped that anyone walking into the space “gains two inches in height.”Van der Hilst quoted a colleague with a similar observation: “Now, when I come into this space, I feel respected by it.”The perfect complementAnother significant feature of the project is the List Visual Arts Center Percent-for-Art Program installation by conceptual artist Julian Charrière, entitled “Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More.”Consisting of three interrelated works, the commission includes: “Not All Who Wander Are Lost,” three glacial erratic boulders which sit atop their own core samples in the surrounding green space; “We Are All Astronauts,” a trio of glass pillars containing vintage globes with distinctions between nations, land, and sea removed; and “Pure Waste,” a synthetic diamond embedded in the foundation, created from carbon captured from the air and the breath of researchers who work in the building.Known for themes that explore the transformation of the natural world over time and humanity’s complex relationship with our environment, Charrière was a perfect fit to complement the new Building 55 — offering a thought-provoking perspective on our current environmental challenges while underscoring the value of the research that happens within its walls. 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      New MIT-LUMA Lab created to address climate challenges in the Mediterranean region

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      The MIT School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P) and the LUMA Foundation announced today the establishment of the MIT-LUMA Lab to advance paradigm-shifting innovations at the nexus of art, science, technology, conservation, and design. The aim is to empower innovative thinkers to realize their ambitions, support local communities as they seek to address climate-related issues, and scale solutions to pressing challenges facing the Mediterranean region.  The main programmatic pillars of the lab will be collaborative scholarship and research around design, new materials, and sustainability; scholar exchange and education collaborations between the two organizations; innovation and entrepreneurship activities to transfer new ideas into practical applications; and co-production of exhibitions and events. The hope is that this engagement will create a novel model for other institutions to follow to craft innovative solutions to the leading challenge of our time.The MIT-LUMA Lab draws on an establishing gift from the LUMA Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in Zurich formed by Maja Hoffmann in 2004 to support contemporary artistic production. The foundation supports a range of multidisciplinary projects that increase understanding of the environment, human rights, education, and culture.These themes are explored through programs organized by LUMA Arles, a project begun in 2013 and housed on a 27-acre interdisciplinary campus known as the Parc des Ateliers in Arles, France, an experimental site of exhibitions, artists’ residencies, research laboratories, and educational programs.“The Luma Foundation is committed to finding ways to address the current climate emergencies we are facing, focusing on exploring the potentials that can be found in diversity and engagement in every possible form,” says Maja Hoffmann, founder and president of the LUMA Foundation. “Cultural diversity, pluralism, and biodiversity feature at the top of our mission and our work is informed by these concepts.” A focus on the Mediterranean region“The culturally rich area of the Mediterranean, which has produced some of the most remarkable civilizational paradigms across geographies and historical periods, plays an important role in our thinking. Focusing the efforts of the MIT-LUMA Lab on the Mediterranean means extending the possibilities for positive change throughout other global ecosystems,” says Hoffmann. “Our projects of LUMA Arles and its research laboratory on materials and natural resources, the Atelier Luma, our position in one of Europe’s most important natural reserves, in conjunction with the expertise and forward-thinking approach of MIT, define the perfect framework that will allow us to explore new frontiers and devise novel ways to tackle our most significant civilizational risks,” she adds. “Supporting the production of new forms of knowledge and practices, and with locations in Cambridge and in Arles, our collaboration and partnership with MIT will generate solutions and models for the future, for the generations to come, in order to provide them the same and even better opportunities that what we have experienced.”“We know we do not have all the answers at MIT, but we do know how to ask the right questions, how to design effective experiments, and how to build meaningful collaborations,” says Hashim Sarkis, dean of SA+P, which will host the lab. “I am grateful to the LUMA Foundation for offering support for faculty research deployment designed to engage local communities and create jobs, for course development to empower our faculty to teach classes centered on these issues, and for students who seek to dedicate their lives and careers to sustainability. We also look forward to hosting fellows and researchers from the foundation to strengthen our collaboration,” he adds.The Mediterranean region, the MIT-LUMA Lab’s focus, is one of the world’s most vital and fragile global commons. The future of climate relies on the sustainability of the region’s forests, oceans, and deserts that have for millennia created the environmental conditions and system-regulating functions necessary for life on Earth. Those who live in these areas are often the most severely affected by even relatively modest changes in the climate. Climate research and action: A priority at MITTo reverse negative trends and provide a new approach to addressing the climate crisis in these vast areas, SA+P is establishing international collaborations that bring know-how to the field, and in turn to learn from the communities and groups most challenged by climate impacts.The MIT-LUMA Lab is the first in what is envisioned as a series of regionally focused labs at SA+P under the conceptual aegis of a collaborative platform called Our Global Commons. This project will support progress on today’s climate challenges by focusing on community empowerment, long-term local collaborations around research and education, and job creation. Faculty-led fieldwork, engagements with local stakeholders, and student involvement will be the key elements.The creation of Our Global Commons comes as MIT works to dramatically expand its efforts to address climate change. In February 2024, President Sally Kornbluth announced the Climate Project at MIT, a major new initiative to mobilize the Institute’s resources and capabilities to research, develop, deploy, and scale-up new climate solutions. The Institute will hire its first-ever vice president for climate to oversee the new effort. “With the Climate Project at MIT, we aim to help make a decisive difference, at scale, on crucial global climate challenges — and we can only do that by engaging with outstanding colleagues around the globe,” says Kornbluth. “By connecting us to creative thinkers steeped in the cultural and environmental history and emerging challenges of the Mediterranean region, the MIT-LUMA Lab promises to spark important new ideas and collaborations.”“We are excited that the LUMA team will be joining in MIT’s engagement with climate issues, especially given their expertise in advancing vital work at the intersection of art and science, and their long-standing commitment to expanding the frontiers of sustainability and biodiversity,” says Sarkis. “With climate change upending many aspects of our society, the time is now for us to reaffirm and strengthen our SA+P tradition of on-the-ground work with and for communities around the world. Shared efforts among local communities, governments and corporations, and academia are necessary to bring about real change.” More

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      in Environment

      Illustrating India’s complex environmental crises

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      Abhijit Banerjee, the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at MIT, and Sarnath Banerjee (no relation), an MIT Center for Art, Science, and Technology (CAST) visiting artist share a similar background, but have very different ways of thinking. Both were raised for a time in Kolkata before leaving India to pursue divergent careers, Abhijit as an economist who went on to win the 2019 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (an award he shares with MIT Professor Esther Duflo and Harvard University Professor Michael Kremer), and Sarnath as a visual artist and graphic novelist. 

      The two collaborated on a pair of short films, “The Land of Good Intentions” and “The Eternal Swamp,” that blend their expertise in a unique and captivating form. Each film addresses a particular environmental crisis facing present-day India by tracing its origins back through the centuries. The films are presented in a kind of lecture style, with Abhijit appearing as the narrator, unraveling historical details, as graphics by Sarnath visualize the story with an often wry and easy wit. The results apply logic and narrative coherence to problems with complex roots in the forces of nature, economics, and local culture. 

      “The Land of Good Intentions” explores the conditions and policies that led to mass protests by farmers, in Punjab and elsewhere, following the passage of farming legislation in September 2020. The film begins by providing historical context from multiple angles, including the significance of rice to regional culture, its growing conditions (which require a lot of water), the region’s climate (which produces very little), and previous government subsidies that led to its overproduction. The 2020 Farm Bills were intended to address rice overproduction and its consequences, including the depletion of Punjab’s groundwater supply, pollution from the burning of rice stalks, and a surplus going to waste. But farmers considered that they were being asked to shoulder the costs of a problem the government created. 

      “The arguments in the film don’t necessarily align with popular liberal arguments, but it gives subtler shape and layers to them,” Sarnath says. “That dialectical way of thinking is important to the liberal movement, which is driven by passion and a sense of justice. Abhijit is driven by factual analysis, which sometimes makes the argument more complex.”

      Their second film, “The Eternal Swamp,” addresses the crisis of flooding in Kolkata and its causes in the geographical and economic development of the city from the start. Because Kolkata was built on very wet land, and real estate has long been one of the only viable industries in the city, it has been developed without regard to proper drainage in a climate that produces more rainfall than it can handle. There is a pervading sense that Kolkata will eventually be entirely below water.

      “It was a good collaboration from the beginning,” Sarnath says of working with Abhijit on the CAST Visiting Artist project, a process which began just before Abhijit was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2019 and continued through the pandemic. “Both of us work on instinct, but the way he shapes an argument is very different from me,” Sarnath says. “My work does not follow a linear approach to telling a story; it’s fragmentary, driven by mood and emotion more than narrative, like composing a piece of music.”

      Since they first met at a literary conference years ago, Abhijit and Sarnath have been close friends and intellectual sparring partners. Though Sarnath is based in Berlin and Abhijit in Boston, the two often cross paths in different locales and have long, ambling discussions that traverse a wide array of topics. “We spend a lot of time walking together wherever we find ourselves, whether it’s down the Longfellow Bridge in Boston or through Delhi or Kolkata,” Sarnath says. The idea for this project was born out of such conversations, in response to pressing events in their home country. 

      Abhijit wrote a proposal to MIT CAST, and the questions they received through the process helped them further shape the project. “It’s important, when you have the luxury, just to spend time together. Thanks to MIT, we managed to do that across continents,” Sarnath says of their creative process. “It’s more than just telling a story; Abhijit unpacked what was in his head, and I drew and wrote a bit as well,” Sarnath says. And they worked with the editor and animator Niusha Ramzani, whom Sarnath says lent an Iranian aesthetic to the film’s animations. 

      As for the format of the films, they wanted to capture the sense of a serene Bengali afternoon, with Abhijit seated in his home in Kolkata speaking in a relaxed tone. “We wanted it to be a bit like a Royal Society lecture,” Sarnath says, somewhat like a TED Talk but more personable and intimate. The aim was to make their complicated subjects more easily comprehensible, through the language of Abhijit’s narration and with the help of visual metaphors. Still, they did not want to sacrifice complexity.

      “Economists are fabulists,” says Abhijit Banerjee. “We tell stories, simple stories, but that tends to get obscured in the telling, often because we like to be very careful about not overstating our case. Irony and the kind of playful humor that Sarnath brings to narration seemed to offer a different way to avoid being too emphatic, while allowing the story to be told in a way that it reaches a much larger audience. What is brilliant about Sarnath’s work is the play between reliable and the unreliable — the readers are happy to be misdirected because they know that it will ultimately lead them where they want to be. I was hoping we could bring a little of that into economics.” 

      “You have to emancipate yourself from any one definitive answer,” Sarnath Banerjee says, describing Abhijit’s expansive way of thinking, through which he follows multiple thought processes to their logical conclusions. The result allows for ambiguity and contradiction, though the pathways of thinking are clear. The films illustrate the situations facing farmers in Punjab and the waterlogged streets of Kolkata by tracing their roots and examining the history of cause and effect. The results provide clarity, but no simple answers.

      The process was an enriching one for both of them, the kind of advancement in understanding that can only come in dialogue. “With each collaboration, you learn, and learning to me is an artistic form,” Sarnath says. “We are always learning.” More

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      in Environment

      Co-creating climate futures with real-time data and spatial storytelling

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      Virtual story worlds and game engines aren’t just for video games anymore. They are now tools for scientists and storytellers to digitally twin existing physical spaces and then turn them into vessels to dream up speculative climate stories and build collective designs of the future. That’s the theory and practice behind the MIT WORLDING initiative.

      Twice this year, WORLDING matched world-class climate story teams working in XR (extended reality) with relevant labs and researchers across MIT. One global group returned for a virtual gathering online in partnership with Unity for Humanity, while another met for one weekend in person, hosted at the MIT Media Lab.

      “We are witnessing the birth of an emergent field that fuses climate science, urban planning, real-time 3D engines, nonfiction storytelling, and speculative fiction, and it is all fueled by the urgency of the climate crises,” says Katerina Cizek, lead designer of the WORLDING initiative at the Co-Creation Studio of MIT Open Documentary Lab. “Interdisciplinary teams are forming and blossoming around the planet to collectively imagine and tell stories of healthy, livable worlds in virtual 3D spaces and then finding direct ways to translate that back to earth, literally.”

      At this year’s virtual version of WORLDING, five multidisciplinary teams were selected from an open call. In a week-long series of research and development gatherings, the teams met with MIT scientists, staff, fellows, students, and graduates, as well as other leading figures in the field. Guests ranged from curators at film festivals such as Sundance and Venice, climate policy specialists, and award-winning media creators to software engineers and renowned Earth and atmosphere scientists. The teams heard from MIT scholars in diverse domains, including geomorphology, urban planning as acts of democracy, and climate researchers at MIT Media Lab.

      Mapping climate data

      “We are measuring the Earth’s environment in increasingly data-driven ways. Hundreds of terabytes of data are taken every day about our planet in order to study the Earth as a holistic system, so we can address key questions about global climate change,” explains Rachel Connolly, an MIT Media Lab research scientist focused in the “Future Worlds” research theme, in a talk to the group. “Why is this important for your work and storytelling in general? Having the capacity to understand and leverage this data is critical for those who wish to design for and successfully operate in the dynamic Earth environment.”

      Making sense of billions of data points was a key theme during this year’s sessions. In another talk, Taylor Perron, an MIT professor of Earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences, shared how his team uses computational modeling combined with many other scientific processes to better understand how geology, climate, and life intertwine to shape the surfaces of Earth and other planets. His work resonated with one WORLDING team in particular, one aiming to digitally reconstruct the pre-Hispanic Lake Texcoco — where current day Mexico City is now situated — as a way to contrast and examine the region’s current water crisis.

      Democratizing the future

      While WORLDING approaches rely on rigorous science and the interrogation of large datasets, they are also founded on democratizing community-led approaches.

      MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning graduate Lafayette Cruise MCP ’19 met with the teams to discuss how he moved his own practice as a trained urban planner to include a futurist component involving participatory methods. “I felt we were asking the same limited questions in regards to the future we were wanting to produce. We’re very limited, very constrained, as to whose values and comforts are being centered. There are so many possibilities for how the future could be.”

      Scaling to reach billions

      This work scales from the very local to massive global populations. Climate policymakers are concerned with reaching billions of people in the line of fire. “We have a goal to reach 1 billion people with climate resilience solutions,” says Nidhi Upadhyaya, deputy director at Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center. To get that reach, Upadhyaya is turning to games. “There are 3.3 billion-plus people playing video games across the world. Half of these players are women. This industry is worth $300 billion. Africa is currently among the fastest-growing gaming markets in the world, and 55 percent of the global players are in the Asia Pacific region.” She reminded the group that this conversation is about policy and how formats of mass communication can be used for policymaking, bringing about change, changing behavior, and creating empathy within audiences.

      Socially engaged game development is also connected to education at Unity Technologies, a game engine company. “We brought together our education and social impact work because we really see it as a critical flywheel for our business,” said Jessica Lindl, vice president and global head of social impact/education at Unity Technologies, in the opening talk of WORLDING. “We upscale about 900,000 students, in university and high school programs around the world, and about 800,000 adults who are actively learning and reskilling and upskilling in Unity. Ultimately resulting in our mission of the ‘world is a better place with more creators in it,’ millions of creators who reach billions of consumers — telling the world stories, and fostering a more inclusive, sustainable, and equitable world.”

      Access to these technologies is key, especially the hardware. “Accessibility has been missing in XR,” explains Reginé Gilbert, who studies and teaches accessibility and disability in user experience design at New York University. “XR is being used in artificial intelligence, assistive technology, business, retail, communications, education, empathy, entertainment, recreation, events, gaming, health, rehabilitation meetings, navigation, therapy, training, video programming, virtual assistance wayfinding, and so many other uses. This is a fun fact for folks: 97.8 percent of the world hasn’t tried VR [virtual reality] yet, actually.”

      Meanwhile, new hardware is on its way. The WORLDING group got early insights into the highly anticipated Apple Vision Pro headset, which promises to integrate many forms of XR and personal computing in one device. “They’re really pushing this kind of pass-through or mixed reality,” said Dan Miller, a Unity engineer on the poly spatial team, collaborating with Apple, who described the experience of the device as “You are viewing the real world. You’re pulling up windows, you’re interacting with content. It’s a kind of spatial computing device where you have multiple apps open, whether it’s your email client next to your messaging client with a 3D game in the middle. You’re interacting with all these things in the same space and at different times.”

      “WORLDING combines our passion for social-impact storytelling and incredible innovative storytelling,” said Paisley Smith of the Unity for Humanity Program at Unity Technologies. She added, “This is an opportunity for creators to incubate their game-changing projects and connect with experts across climate, story, and technology.”

      Meeting at MIT

      In a new in-person iteration of WORLDING this year, organizers collaborated closely with Connolly at the MIT Media Lab to co-design an in-person weekend conference Oct. 25 – Nov. 7 with 45 scholars and professionals who visualize climate data at NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, planetariums, and museums across the United States.

      A participant said of the event, “An incredible workshop that had had a profound effect on my understanding of climate data storytelling and how to combine different components together for a more [holistic] solution.”

      “With this gathering under our new Future Worlds banner,” says Dava Newman, director of the MIT Media Lab and Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics chair, “the Media Lab seeks to affect human behavior and help societies everywhere to improve life here on Earth and in worlds beyond, so that all — the sentient, natural, and cosmic — worlds may flourish.” 

      “WORLDING’s virtual-only component has been our biggest strength because it has enabled a true, international cohort to gather, build, and create together. But this year, an in-person version showed broader opportunities that spatial interactivity generates — informal Q&As, physical worksheets, and larger-scale ideation, all leading to deeper trust-building,” says WORLDING producer Srushti Kamat SM ’23.

      The future and potential of WORLDING lies in the ongoing dialogue between the virtual and physical, both in the work itself and in the format of the workshops. More

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      in Environment

      Hearing Amazônia: MIT musicians in Manaus, Brazil

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      On Dec. 13, the MIT community came together for the premiere of “We Are The Forest,” a documentary by MIT Video Productions that tells the story of the MIT musicians who traveled to the Brazilian Amazon seeking culture and scientific exchange.

      The film features performances by Djuena Tikuna, Luciana Souza, Anat Cohen, and Evan Ziporyn, with music by Antônio Carlos Jobim. Fred Harris conducts the MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble and MIT Wind Ensemble and Laura Grill Jaye conducts the MIT Vocal Jazz Ensemble.

      Play video

      “We Are The Forest”Video: MIT Video Productions

      The impact of ecological devastation in the Amazon reflects the climate crisis worldwide. During the Institute’s spring break in March 2023, nearly 80 student musicians became only the second student group from MIT to travel to the Brazilian Amazon. Inspired by the research and activism of Talia Khan ’20, who is currently a PhD candidate in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, the trip built upon experiences of the 2020-21 academic year when virtual visiting artists Luciana Souza and Anat Cohen lectured on Brazilian music and culture before joining the November 2021 launch of Hearing Amazônia — The Responsibility of Existence.

      This consciousness-raising project at MIT, sponsored by the Center for Art, Science and Technology (CAST), began with a concert featuring Brazilian and Amazonian music influenced by the natural world. The project was created and led by MIT director of wind and jazz ensembles and senior lecturer in music Frederick Harris Jr.

      The performance was part eulogy and part praise song: a way of bearing witness to loss, while celebrating the living and evolving cultural heritage of Amazonia. The event included short talks, one of which was by Khan. As the first MIT student to study in the Brazilian Amazonia (via MISTI-Brazil), she spoke of her research on natural botanical resins and traditional carimbó music in Santarém, Pará, Brazil. Soon after, as a Fulbright Scholar, Khan continued her research in Manaus, setting the stage for the most complex trip in the history of MIT Music and Theater Arts.“My experiences in the Brazilian Amazon changed my life,” enthuses Khan. “Getting to know Indigenous musicians and immersing myself in the culture of this part of the world helped me realize how we are all so connected.”

      “Talia’s experiences in Brazil convinced me that the Hearing Amazônia project needed to take a next essential step,” explains Harris. “I wanted to provide as many students as possible with a similar opportunity to bring their musical and scientific talents together in a deep and spiritual manner. She provided a blueprint for our trip to Manaus.”

      An experience of a lifetime

      A multitude of musicians from three MTA ensembles traveled to Manaus, located in the middle of the world’s largest rainforest and home to the National Institute of Amazonian Research (Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia, or INPA), the most important center for scientific studies in the Amazon region for international sustainability issues.

      Tour experiences included cultural/scientific exchanges with Indigenous Amazonians through Nobre Academia de Robótica and the São Sebastião community on the Tarumã Açu River, INPA, the Cultural Center of the Peoples of the Amazon, and the Museu da Amazônia. Musically, students connected with local Indigenous instrument builders and performed with the Amazonas State Jazz Orchestra and renowned vocalist and Indigenous activist Djuena Tikuna.

      “Hearing Amazônia: Arte ê Resistência,” a major concert in the famed 19th century opera house Teatro Amazonas, concluded the trip on March 31. The packed event featured the MIT Wind Ensemble, MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble, MIT Vocal Jazz Ensemble, vocalist Luciana Souza, clarinetist Anat Cohen, MIT professor and composer-clarinetist Evan Ziporyn, and local musicians from Manaus. The program ended with “Nós Somos A Floresta (We Are The Forest) — Eware (Sacred Land) — Reflections on Amazonia,” a large-scale collaborative performance with Djuena Tikuna. The two songs were composed by Tikuna, with Eware newly arranged by Israeli composer-bassist Nadav Erlich for the occasion. It concluded with all musicians and audience members coming together in song: a moving and beautiful moment of mediation on the sacredness of the earth.

      “It was humbling to see the grand display of beauty and diversity that nature developed in the Amazon rainforest,” reflects bass clarinetist and MIT sophomore Richard Chen. “By seeing the bird life, sloths, and other species and the flora, and eating the fruits of the region, I received lessons on my harmony and connection to the natural world around us. I developed a deeper awareness of the urgency of resolving conflicts and stopping the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, and to listening to and celebrating the stories and experiences of those around me.”

      Indigenous musicians embodying the natural world

      “The trip expanded the scope of what music means,” MIT Vocal Jazz Ensemble member and biomedical researcher Autumn Geil explains. “It’s living the music, and you can’t feel that unless you put yourself in new experiences and get yourself out of your comfort zone.”

      Over two Indigenous music immersion days, students spent time listening to, and playing and singing with, musicians who broadened their scope of music’s relationship to nature and cultural sustainability. Indigenous percussionist and instrument builder Eliberto Barroncas and music producer-arranger César Lima presented contrasting approaches with a shared objective — connecting people to the natural world through Indigenous instruments.

      Barroncas played instruments built from materials from the rainforest and from found objects in Manaus that others might consider trash, creating ethereal tones bespeaking his life as one with nature. Students had the opportunity to play his instruments and create a spontaneous composition playing their own instruments and singing with him in a kind of “Amazonia jam session.”

      “Eliberto expressed that making music is visceral; it’s best when it comes from the gut and is tangible and coming from one’s natural environment. When we cannot understand each other using language, using words, logic and thinking, we go back to the body,” notes oboist and ocean engineer Michelle Kornberg ’20. “There’s a difference between teaching music as a skill you learn and teaching music as something you feel, that you experience and give — as a gift.”

      Over the pandemic, César Lima developed an app, “The Roots VR,” as a vehicle for people to discover over 100 Amazonia instruments. Users choose settings to interact with instruments and create pieces using a variety of instrumental combinations; a novel melding of technology with nature to expand the reach of these Indigenous instruments and their cultural significance.

      At the Cultural Center of the Peoples of the Amazon, students gathered around a tree, hand-in-hand singing with Djuena Tikuna, accompanied by percussionist Diego Janatã. “She spoke about being one of the first Indigenous musicians ever to sing in the Teatro Amazonas, which was built on the labor and blood of Indigenous people,” recalls flutist and atmospheric engineer Phoebe Lin, an MIT junior. “And then to hold hands and close our eyes and step back and forth; a rare moment of connection in a tumultuous world — it felt like we were all one.”

      Bringing the forest back to MIT

      On April 29, Djuena Tikuna made her MIT debut at “We Are the Forest — Music of Resilience and Activism,” a special concert for MIT President Sally Kornbluth’s inauguration, presenting music from the Teatro Amazonas event. Led and curated by Harris, the performance included new assistant professor in jazz and saxophonist-composer Miguel Zenón, director of the MIT Vocal Jazz Ensemble; Laura Grill Jaye; and vocalist Sara Serpa, among others. 

      “Music unites people and through art we can draw the world’s attention to the most urgent global challenges such as climate change,” says Djuena Tikuna. “My songs bring the message that every seed will one day germinate to reforest hearts, because we are all from the same village.”

      Hearing Amazônia has set the stage for the blossoming of artistic and scientific collaborations in the Amazon and beyond.

      “The struggle of Indigenous peoples to keep their territories alive should concern us all, and it will take more than science and research to help find solutions for climate change,” notes President Kornbluth. “It will take artists, too, to unite us and raise awareness across all communities. The inclusivity and expressive power of music can help get us all rowing in the same direction — it’s a great way to encourage us all to care and act!” More

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      Building a better indoor herb garden

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      Randall Briggs ’09, SM ’18 didn’t set out to build indoor gardens when he arrived at MIT. The winner of the 2010 2.007 robot competition class, he was excited to work on designing fighter planes one day.

      But in 2016, halfway through his studies for his master’s degree in mechanical engineering, Briggs’s father passed away unexpectedly. “It was a big blow to me. My motivation took a big hit, so it was hard for me to keep working on my research,” Briggs shares.

      Briggs ordered a home hydroponic garden in the hopes that growing herbs inside his apartment could bring him some positivity. “There is something healing about seeing something organic and beautiful grow and develop,” Briggs says.

      When the garden arrived, Briggs found that many aspects of the design fell short. The plants weren’t getting enough light because the LEDs were dispersing light throughout the room and not focusing it on the plants. “It’s just not very pleasing aesthetically when it’s, like, a fluorescent color of light, and it just fills your room,” Briggs says.

      He set forth to create a better indoor garden. Briggs turned his spare bedroom into a hydroponics lab, testing herbs growing under various lighting conditions and with different nutrient solutions. He read every book and article he could find on the subject. “The same seed pods that I had used in that cheap garden, when I moved them over to my garden, they grew way faster and way healthier and more fragrant and full of flavor,” he says.

      Working on this project became a daily source of joy for Briggs. “Every day when you come home, you want to see if it’s growing a little bit more or to see how they’re doing. I think that made me happy, too.”

      Briggs saw the potential for his garden to improve the well-being of others. “I thought if people had fresh herbs at home, they might be more inspired to cook for themselves instead of always just eating out, as it’s normally a lot healthier to cook your own food at home.”

      After much research and experimentation, GardenByte was born in 2017: a tabletop indoor herb garden that is nearly 3 feet wide with almost 2 feet of height for the plants to grow, which is quite a bit larger than most models on the market. With Briggs’s hydroponics technology, the plants grow three times faster than they would grow outdoors. His garden allows anyone to grow fresh herbs in a wide range of settings. And since plants have a longer shelf life than cut herbs, they also cut down on food waste.

      Briggs was determined to make something that grows plants well and is attractive in a variety of settings. The outer case is handcrafted from solid hardwood from a local Massachusetts lumber yard, ensuring both durability and a visually pleasing aesthetic that seamlessly integrates into any kitchen or restaurant setting. The light bar, crafted from a single piece of crystal-clear acrylic, maintains an unobtrusive and ethereal appearance. This choice complements the overall design while allowing the LED lights to emit a powerful simulation of full sunshine. To ensure a smooth transition from daytime growth to evening, four different types of LEDs were incorporated. Polymer lenses focus the light directly onto the plants, preventing any wastage or unnecessary light spillage in the room. A light and color sensor on top detect the lighting conditions in the room and automatically adjust the lighting in the garden to match, enhancing plant growth. The grid tray is designed to accommodate up to 39 plants at once, offering ample space for an array of herbs. To simplify plant care, the garden is connected to a mobile app that will allow you to care for your plants while you’re away.

      The herb garden contains computer numerical control (CNC) machined-aluminum parts, in contrast with the flimsier plastic most products use. The heat flow capacity of aluminum disperses the heat from all the LEDs and the aluminum grid tray helps keep it compact and thin but rigid, so users can lift the plants up without it bending.

      Briggs received his foundation in machining as an undergrad at the MIT Edgerton Center, where he was on the MIT Motorsports team and MIT Electric Vehicle Team. He learned how to use the CNC machines in the student machine shop at the Area 51 garage under the tutelage of Instructor Pat McAtamney and Briggs’s teammates.

      Building an electric motorcycle on the Electric Vehicle Team for the Isle of Man TT Race in 2011 helped prepare Briggs for creating a robust product for production. The race took place on city streets, raising the potential for deadly crashes. “When we were building that motorcycle, the head of our team, Lennon Rodgers, kept reiterating to us, ‘you got to think aircraft quality, like aircraft quality. This is actually a life-or-death project.’ Seeing the way that he led, and the way that he really set the bar for quality and for execution and kind of kept things moving, was really helpful for me.”

      “My hope in the future is to make a more mass-market version that’s a little bit cheaper and more available to everybody,” Briggs shares.

      The feedback from his first customers has all been positive. After delivering the product to a chef in Boston, Briggs says, “He told me that the whole first evening he was sitting at home with his boyfriend and he just kept staring at it, and he’s like, ‘it is so beautiful. It is so beautiful.’”

      “I feel like something that my dad taught me was that sometimes to do hard things, it does take hard work, and that it’s not always going to be exciting, necessarily,” Briggs shares. “It’s good to be inspired, it’s good to be passionate, but it’s not always going to get you through. And sometimes it’s just hard work that you got to press through the tough parts.” More

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      MIT at the 2023 Venice Biennale

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      The Venice Architecture Biennale, the world’s largest and most visited exhibition focusing on architecture, is once again featuring work by many MIT faculty, students, and alumni. On view through Nov. 26, the 2023 biennale, curated by Ghanaian-Scottish architect, academic, and novelist Lesley Lokko, is showcasing projects responding to the theme of “The Laboratory of Change.”

      Architecture and Planning and curator of the previous Venice Biennale. “Our students, faculty, and alumni have responded to the speculative theme with innovative projects at a range of scales and in varied media.”

      Below are descriptions of MIT-related projects and activities.

      MIT faculty participants

      Xavi Laida Aguirre, assistant professor of architecture

      Project: Everlasting Plastics

      Project description: SPACES, a nonprofit alternative art organization based in Cleveland, Ohio, and the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs are behind the U.S. Pavilion’s exhibition at this year’s biennale. The theme, Everlasting Plastics, provides a platform for artists and designers to engage audiences in reframing the overabundance of plastic detritus in our waterways, landfills, and streets as a rich resource. Aguirre’s installation covers two rooms and holds a series of partial scenographies examining indoor proofing materials such as coatings, rubbers, gaskets, bent aluminum, silicone, foam, cement board, and beveled edges.

      Yolande Daniels, associate professor of architecture

      Project: The BLACK City Astrolabe: A Constellation of African Diasporic Women

      Project description: From the multiple displacements of race and gender, enter “The BLACK City Astrolabe,” a space-time field comprised of a 3D map and a 24-hour cycle of narratives that reorder the forces of subjugation, devaluation, and displacement through the spaces and events of African diasporic women. The diaspora map traces the flows of descendants of Africa (whether voluntary or forced) atop the visible tension between the mathematical regularity of meridians of longitude and the biases of international date lines.

      In this moment we are running out of time. The meridians and timeline decades are indexed to an infinite conical projection metered in decades. It structures both the diaspora map and timeline and serves as a threshold to project future structures and events. “The BLACK City Astrolabe” is a vehicle to proactively contemplate things that have happened, that are happening, and that will happen. Yesterday, a “Black” woman went to the future, and here she is.

      Mark Jarzombek, professor of architecture

      Project: Kishkindha NY

      Project description: “Kishkindha NY (Office of (Un)Certainty Research: Mark Jarzombek and Vikramaditya Parakash)” is inspired by an imagined forest-city as described in the ancient Indian text the Ramayana. It comes into being not through the limitations of human agency, but through a multi-species creature that destroys and rebuilds. It is exhibited as a video (Space, Time, Existence) and as a special dance performance.

      Ana Miljački, professor of architecture

      Team: Ana Miljački, professor of architecture and director of Critical Broadcasting Lab, MIT; Ous Abou Ras, MArch candidate; Julian Geltman, MArch; Recording and Design, faculty of Dramatic Arts, Belgrade; Calvin Zhong, MArch candidate. Sound design and production: Pavle Dinulović, assistant professor, Department of Sound Recording and Design, University of Arts in Belgrade.

      Collaborators: Melika Konjičanin, researcher, faculty of architecture, Sarajevo; Ana Martina Bakić, assistant professor, head of department of drawing and visual design, faculty of architecture, Zagreb; Jelica Jovanović, Grupa Arhitekata, Belgrade; Andrew Lawler, Belgrade; Sandro Đukić, CCN Images, Zagreb; Other Tomorrows, Boston.

      Project: The Pilgrimage/Pionirsko hodočašće

      Project description:  The artifacts that constitute Yugoslavia’s socialist architectural heritage, and especially those instrumental in the ideological wiring of several postwar generations for anti-fascism and inclusive living, have been subject to many forms of local and global political investment in forgetting their meaning, as well as to vandalism. The “Pilgrimage” synthesizes “memories” from Yugoslavian childhood visits to myriad postwar anti-fascist memorial monuments and offers them in a shifting and spatial multi-channel video presentation accompanied by a nonlinear documentary soundscape, presenting thus anti-fascism and unity as political and activist positions available (and necessary) today, for the sake of the future. Supported by: MIT Center for Art, Science, and Technology (CAST) Mellon Faculty Grant.

      Adèle Naudé Santos, professor of architecture, planning, and urban design; and Mohamad Nahleh, lecturer in architecture and urbanism; in collaboration with the Beirut Urban Lab at the American University of Beirut

      MIT research team: Ghida El Bsat, Joude Mabsout, Sarin Gacia Vosgerichian, Lasse Rau

      Project: Housing as Infrastructure

      Project description: On Aug. 4, 2020, an estimated 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate stored at the Port of Beirut exploded, resulting in the deaths of more than 200 people and the devastation of port-adjacent neighborhoods. With over 200,000 housing units in disrepair, exploitative real estate ventures, and the lack of equitable housing policies, we viewed the port blast as a potential escalation of the mechanisms that have produced the ongoing affordable housing crisis across the city. 

      The Dar Group requested proposals to rethink the affected part of the city, through MIT’s Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism. To best ground our design proposal, we invited the Beirut Urban Lab at the American University of Beirut to join us. We chose to work on the heavily impacted low-rise and high-density neighborhood of Mar Mikhael. Our resultant urban strategy anchors housing within a corridor of shared open spaces. Housing is inscribed within this network and sustained through an adaptive system defined by energy-efficiency and climate responsiveness. Cross-ventilation sweeps through the project on all sides, with solar panel lined roofs integrated to always provide adequate levels of electricity for habitation. These strategies are coupled with an array of modular units designed to echo the neighborhood’s intimate quality — all accessible through shared ramps and staircases. Within this context, housing itself becomes the infrastructure, guiding circulation, managing slopes, integrating green spaces, and providing solar energy across the community. 

      Rafi Segal, associate professor of architecture and urbanism, director of the Future Urban Collectives Lab, director of the SMArchS program; and Susannah Drake.

      Contributors: Olivia Serra, William Minghao Du

      Project:  From Redlining to Blue Zoning: Equity and Environmental Risk, Miami 2100 (2021)

      Project description: As part of Susannah Drake and Rafi Segal’s ongoing work on “Coastal Urbanism,” this project examines the legacy of racial segregation in South Florida and the existential threat that climate change poses to communities in Miami. Through models of coops and community-owned urban blocks, this project seeks to empower formerly disenfranchised communities with new methods of equity capture, allowing residents whose parents and grandparents suffered from racial discrimination to build wealth and benefit from increased real estate value and development.

      Nomeda Urbonas, Art, Culture, and Technology research affiliate; and Gediminas Urbonas, ACT associate professor

      Project: The Swamp Observatory

      Project description: “The Swamp Observatory” augmented reality app is a result of two-year collaboration with a school in Gotland Island in the Baltic Sea, arguably the most polluted sea in the world. Developed as a conceptual playground and a digital tool to augment reality with imaginaries for new climate commons, the app offers new perspective to the planning process, suggesting eco-monsters as emergent ecology for the planned stormwater ponds in the new sustainable city. 

      Sarah Williams, associate professor, technology and urban planning

      Team members: listed here.

      Project: DISTANCE UNKNOWN: RISKS AND OPPORTUNITIES OF MIGRATION IN THE AMERICAS 

      Project description: On view are visualizations made by the MIT Civic Data Design Lab and the United Nations World Food Program that helped to shape U.S. migration policy. The exhibition is built from a unique dataset collected from 4,998 households surveyed in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. A tapestry woven out of money and constructed by the hands of Central America migrants illustrates that migrants spent $2.2 billion to migrate from Central America in 2021.

      MIT student curators

      Carmelo Ignaccolo, PhD candidate, Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP)

      Curator: Carmelo Ignaccolo; advisor: Sarah Williams; researchers: Emily Levenson (DUSP), Melody Phu (MIT), Leo Saenger (Harvard University), Yuke Zheng (Harvard); digital animation designer: Ting Zhang

      Exhibition Design Assistant: Dila Ozberkman (architecture and DUSP)

      Project: The Consumed City 

      Project description: “The Consumed City” narrates a spatial investigation of “overtourism” in the historic city of Venice by harnessing granular data on lodging, dining, and shopping. The exhibition presents two large maps and digital animations to showcase the complexity of urban tourism and to reveal the spatial interplay between urban tourism and urban features, such as landmarks, bridges, and street patterns. By leveraging by-product geospatial datasets and advancing visualization techniques, “The Consumed City” acts as a prototype to call for novel policymaking tools in cities “consumed” by “overtourism.”

      MIT-affiliated auxiliary events

      Rania Ghosn, associate professor of architecture and urbanism, El Hadi Jazairy, Anhong Li, and Emma Jurczynski, with initial contributions from Marco Nieto and Zhifei Xu. Graphic design: Office of Luke Bulman.

      Project: Climate Inheritance

      Project description: “Climate Inheritance” is a speculative design research publication that reckons with the complexity of “heritage” and “world” in the Anthropocene Epoch. The impacts of climate change on heritage sites — from Venice flooding to extinction in the Galapagos Islands — have garnered empathetic attention in a media landscape that has otherwise mostly failed to communicate the urgency of the climate crisis. In a strategic subversion of the media aura of heritage, the project casts World Heritage sites as narrative figures to visualize pervasive climate risks all while situating the present emergency within the wreckage of other ends of worlds, replete with the salvages of extractivism, racism, and settler colonialism.   

      Rebuilding Beirut: Using Data to Co-Design a New Future

      SA+P faculty, researchers, and students are participating in the sixth biennial architecture exhibition “Time Space Existence,” presented by the European Cultural Center. The exhibit showcases three collaborative research and design proposals that support the rebuilding efforts in Beirut following the catastrophic explosion at the Port of Beirut in August 2020.

      “Living Heritage Atlas” captures the significance and vulnerability of Beirut’s cultural heritage. 

      “City Scanner” tracks the environmental impacts of the explosion and the subsequent rebuilding efforts. “Community Streets” supports the redesign of streets and public space. 

      The work is supported by the Dar Group Urban Seed Grant Fund at MIT’s Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism.

      Team members:Living Heritage AtlasCivic Data Design Lab and Future Heritage Lab at MITAssociate Professor Sarah Williams, co-principal investigator (PI)Associate Professor Azra Aksamija, co-PICity Scanner Senseable City Lab at MIT with the American University of Beirut and FAE Technology Professor Carlo Ratti, co-PIFábio Duarte, co-PISimone Mora, research and project leadCommunity Streets City Form Lab at MIT with the American University of BeirutAssociate Professor Andres Sevtsuk, co-PIProfessor Maya Abou-Zeid, co-PISchool of Architecture and Planning alumni participants   Rodrigo Escandón Cesarman SMArchS Design ’20 (co-curator, Mexican Pavilion)Felecia Davis PhD ’17 Design and Computation, SOFTLAB@PSU (Penn State University)Jaekyung Jung SM ’10, (with the team for the Korean pavilion)Vijay Rajkumar MArch ’22 (with the team for the Bahrain Pavilion)

      Other MIT alumni participants

      Basis with GKZ

      Team: Emily Mackevicius PhD ’18, brain and cognitive sciences, with Zenna Tavares, Kibwe Tavares, Gaika Tavares, and Eli Bingham

      Project description: The nonprofit research group works on rethinking AI as a “reasoning machine.” Their two goals are to develop advanced technological models and to make society able to tackle “intractable problems.” Their approach to technology is founded less on pattern elaboration than on the Bayes’ hypothesis, the ability of machines to work on abductive reasoning, which is the same used by the human mind. Two city-making projects model cities after interaction between experts and stakeholders, and representation is at the heart of the dialogue. More

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      Taking the long view: The Deep Time Project

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      How would we design and build differently if we learned to live at multiple time scales? How would human communities respond to global challenges if the short-term mindset of contemporary life was expanded to encompass new dimensions of past and future — diving into the depths of geological history and projecting forward to imagine the consequences of our actions today?

      These are questions that Cristina Parreño Alonso addresses in her practice as an architect, artist, and senior lecturer in the MIT Department of Architecture. Her field of research, which she has termed “Transtectonics,” explores the cultural and environmental implications of expanded temporal sensibilities in architectural material practice. A building, Parreño argues, is a “material event,” part of a process of construction and deconstruction that is shaped by the past and directly impacts the future — an impact that has become all the more apparent in the epoch of the Anthropocene, in which humans have become the dominant force influencing the physical composition and regulating systems of the planet.

      Parreño’s classes at MIT have included design studios that position architecture in relation to geological processes, and historical surveys of building practices that embrace traces of time and rhythms of maintenance. She recently devised a new class, 4.181 (The Deep Time Project), which launched in fall 2022 with the support of a 2022 Cross Disciplinary Class Grant from the MIT Center for Art, Science and Technology (CAST), in addition to the d’Arbeloff Fund for Excellence in Education.

      Learning deep time literacy

      “The course proposes that architects must develop deep-time literacy if we are to become true planetary stewards,” says Parreño. “Rather than attempting to identify solutions, the course is intended to provoke new ways of thinking that lead to greater accountability — a recognition that we, as architects, are intervening in something larger than ourselves, and that the consequences of our actions extend far beyond the timescales of our human lives and civilizations.” The class, which was offered to master’s students in the School of Architecture and Planning and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, culminated in a series of “material essays” that seek to bring deep time into contemporary consciousness. These multimedia projects — which include physical prototypes, text components, sound, and video  — are on display until March 24 at the Wiesner Student Art Gallery.

      “Being part of the exhibition has made me realize the advantages of belonging to a collective that recognizes the urgency of addressing the idea of time at different scales,” says architecture master’s student Christina Battikha, whose material essay “Plastic Time” imagines a future when plastic is integral to the geological structure of the Earth. Envisioned as a jagged plastic “rock,” the sculpture interprets the ubiquitous synthetic material as a natural phenomenon, a human-made product that far outlasts a human lifespan.

      Taking the form of a clay “Rosetta Stone” inscribed with multiple languages, architecture student Tatiana Victorovna Estrina’s material essay explores how the evolution of language impacts the built environment. “My project identifies a gap of imagination in deep time research,” she explains. “The installation became a futuristic exploration of opportunities for the adaptive relationship between the human body and its prosthetic additions of language and architecture.”

      Provocative perspectives

      “Developing the class here at MIT grants us the capacity to hold conversations across disciplines,” says Parreño. “That’s all the more necessary, because deep time literacy requires a very holistic way of thinking; it raises awareness of the fact that we are inherently interconnected, and makes it clear that we can’t afford to operate in compartments.”

      This attention to interdisciplinarity is exemplified by the guest speakers invited to share their ideas with the class, each providing a new way of accessing the deep time paradigm. Among the speakers were Marcia Bjornerud, a structural geologist and educator who argues that a geologist’s temporal perspective can empower us to make decisions for a more sustainable future. Richard Fisher, a senior journalist at the BBC, and Bina Venkataraman, journalist and author of “The Optimist’s Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age,” both shared their experiences of engaging the public in the perils of short-term-ism and the positive effects of taking the long view in daily life. The historian of science Jimena Canales provided a philosophical background to the conundrums of time perception, citing the renowned debate between Albert Einstein and the philosopher Henri Bergson.

      Alongside these large-scale thinkers and academic researchers were practitioners who directly apply planetary perspectives at a local level. Joseph Bagley is Boston’s city architect, investigating the layers of time that constitute the urban fabric. Faries Gray, the sagamore of the Massachusett Tribe at Ponkapoag, advocates for Indigenous ways of knowing that recognize the continuity between human cultures and the living history of the land. Together, these different ways of relating to deep time offer a toolkit for contemplating a concept too large to be held in the human mind.

      Thinking through art

      Parreño’s own way of conceptualizing deep time is informed by her artistic and philosophical inquiry into the paradoxes of time, tectonics, and materiality. Exhibited at the Schusev State Museum of Architecture in Moscow, her installation Tectonics of Wisdom focused on the typology of the library as a way of demonstrating how architecture is intertwined with geological and civilizational history. Carbon to Rock, shown at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale, explores new artificial manipulations of the geological timescales of the carbon cycle, rethinking igneous rocks as a resilient material for high-carbon-capture architecture. In addition, Parreño has published several essays on the subject of deep time for journals including Strelka Magazine, Log, and JAE Journal of Architectural Education. Her work as a writer and theorist is complemented by her art installations — or material essays — that serve as a research methodology and a means of communication.

      Likewise, the exhibition component of the Deep Time Project is a way of giving thoughts physical form. Estrina’s installation was initially prompted by the need to communicate the presence of buried nuclear waste to future generations — or even future species. Battikha’s sculpture is a response to the vast buildup of plastic generated by cycles of supply and demand. However, rather than making value judgements or condemning human actions, these works are intended to disrupt conventional patterns of perception, experimenting with longer-term perspectives that have the potential to change ingrained assumptions and daily habits. “There needs to be a paradigm shift before we can effectively address the enormity of the challenges ahead,” says Parreño. “The Deep Time Project is about taking a step back, reframing these problems in ways that will allow us to ask the right questions.” More

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      Q&A: Tod Machover on “Overstory Overture,” his new operatic work

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      Composers find inspiration from many sources. For renowned MIT Media Lab composer Tod Machover, reading the Richard Powers novel “The Overstory” instantly made him want to adapt it as an operatic composition. This might not seem an obvious choice to some: “The Overstory” is about a group of people, including a wrongly maligned scientist, who band together to save a forest from destruction.

      But Machover’s resulting work, “Overstory Overture,” a 35-minute piece commissioned and performed by the chamber ensemble Sejong Soloists, has come to fruition and will have its world premiere on March 7 in Alice Tully Hall at New York’s Lincoln Center. Opera superstar Joyce DiDonato will have the lead role, with Earl Lee conducting. On March 16, the piece will have its second performance, in Seoul, South Korea. MIT News recently talked to Machover about his original new work.

      Q: How did you get the idea for your new work?

      A: I’ve been a fan of Richard Powers’ novels for a long time. He started out as a musician. He’s a cellist like I am, and was a composer before he was a writer, and he’s also been deeply interested in science for his whole career. All of his novels have something to do with people, ideas, music, and science. He’s always been on my radar.

      Q: What’s compelling to you about this particular Powers book?

      A: “The Overstory” is made up of many stories about characters who come together, improbably, because of trees. It starts with short chapters describing characters with relationships to trees. One is about a family that moved to the Midwest and planted a chestnut tree. It grows for 150 years and they take pictures every year, and it’s at the center of the family until it gets cut down in the 1990s. Another guy is in a plane in Vietnam and gets shot down, and his parachute gets caught in a tree right before he hits the ground.

      One character is named Patricia Westerford and she’s a scientist. Her life work is studying the forest and trees, and she discovers that trees communicate — both underground, through the roots, and through the air, via particles. They’re much more like a network than they are static, isolated objects. Her whole world is discovering the miracle of this network, but nobody believes her and she loses her tenure. And she basically goes and lives in the forest. Eventually all the characters in the book come together to preserve a forest in the Northwest that’s going to be destroyed. They become connected through trees, but in the book, all their lives are basically destroyed. It’s not a happy ending, but you understand how human beings are connected through the natural world, and have to think about this connection in a radically new way.

      Every single character came alive. The book is just a miracle. It’s a great work of art. Immediately, reading it, I thought, this is something I want to work on.

      Q: How did you start turning that into an operatic composition?

      A: I got in touch with Powers soon after that. Richard knew my music and answered immediately, saying, “I’d love to have you do an opera on this, and let’s figure out how.” I started working on it just before the pandemic. Around that time he came to Harvard to give a lecture, so he came here to my office in the Media Lab, and we got to chat.

      Generally novels leave more room for you to decide how to make music out of them; they’re a lot less scripted than a movie or a play, and the many inner thoughts and asides leave room for music to fill in. I asked Richard, “Would you be interested in writing the text for this?” And right away he said, “Look, I’d like to be involved in the process, but I don’t feel equipped to write a libretto.” So, I went to Simon Robson, who worked on “Schoenberg in Hollywood” [another Machover opera], and we started working and checked in with Richard from time to time.

      Just about that time the ensemble Sejong Soloists, who are based in New York and Seoul, offered to have their string orchestra collaborate on a project with a theatrical aspect, which was new for them. I explained I was working on an opera based on “The Overstory,” and I felt we could explore its themes. I could imagine the string instruments being like trees and the orchestra being the forest.

      The next thing I did was contact my favorite singer, Joyce DiDonato. She’s such a beautiful, powerful singer. I did an opera in 1999 for Houston called “Resurrection,” which was based on Tolstoy’s last novel, and we were casting the main female character. We did auditions in New York, Los Angeles, and Europe, couldn’t find the main character, and finally the head of the Houston Grand Opera said, “You know, there’s this young singer in our apprentice program who’s pretty special, and you should hear her.”

      And sure enough, that was Joyce. It was her first major role. We hadn’t done another project together although we remained close over the years, but I called her and said “Joyce, I know how busy you are, but I’ve got this idea, and I’ll send you the book. It’s great and I’d love to focus on this one character, would you consider doing it?” And she said she’d love to, partly because sustainability and the environment is something she really cares about.

      Q: Okay, but how do you get started writing music for a piece when it’s based on a book about trees?

      A: I began with two things. Musically I started with the idea of creating this language for tree communication. I was inspired by this idea that one of the reasons we don’t know about it is it’s underground, it’s low, it’s spreading out. I’m a cellist, and I’ve always loved music that grows from the bottom. When you play the cello, in a lot of the great literature, you’re playing the low part of a quartet or quintet or orchestra, and often people don’t quite hear it as the most prominent thing.

      The second thing I did was start making this text. Which was hard, because it’s a big novel. It’s a 35-minute piece where Joyce is at the center. When she starts, she just talks, for a minute, and then little by little it turns into song. It’s her sharing with everybody what she learned, she brings you into the world of the forest. In time, there’s a crisis, they’re destroying the forest, and as she says, they’re tearing out the lungs — tearing out the mind — of the world. The last part of the piece is a vision of how the trees need us but we need them even more.

      Q: I don’t want to push too hard on this, but the composition sounds parallel with its subject matter. Trees are connected; an orchestra is connected. And then this story is about people building a connection to nature, while you want the audience to feel a connection to the piece. How much did you think about it that way?

      A: I was thinking about that pretty consciously, and I really tried to make something that feels very still and simple, but where there’s a lot going on. It feels like it’s living and moving. The piece starts out with solo instruments, so at first everybody’s doing their bit, then they all join in. The strings make a rich ensemble sound, but in the last section every single instrument has its own part — I wrote an individual part for all these string players so they’re kind of weaving in and out. Musically it’s very much constructed to lead people through a forest that is both diverse but connected together.

      I also enjoy using electronics to add another dimension. In this piece I’ve tried to create an electronic world that doesn’t necessarily remind you of electronics, except for one part where machines comes in ripping the forest apart. But mostly the electronics are blended with the orchestra in a way you might not always notice. The sound and feel, hopefully, will appear more natural than nature.

      Q: You also seem to have clearly identified a story with real operatic drama here, unusual as it may be.

      A: The emotional transition that happens is the awareness of what the forest means, and in your gut what it means to protects it, and what it would mean to lose it, and then a glimpse of what it might feel like to live in a different way. I think the contribution someone like myself might be able to make is to change attitudes, to think about our limits as a species and as individuals. Technical solutions alone aren’t going to solve things; people’s behavior somehow has to change. A piece like this is a way of having the experience of crisis, and a vision of what could be different.

      Q: Here’s something a lot of us want to know: What’s it like working with Joyce DiDonato?

      A: She’s one of those rare people. She’s completely direct and honest and lives life to the fullest. Joyce, I mean, thank God she has the best voice you’ll ever hear and she’s at the top of her game, but she also thinks about the world and ideas, and she did a whole project a few years ago performing a repertoire around the world about war and peace, to jolt people into a new understanding. Every project she’s involved with, she cares about the characters and she’s in it all the way.

      For this piece we did a bunch of Zoom sessions and tried things out. And she’s fantastic at saying, “To make that phrase the best you can for my voice at this point in the piece, would you consider changing that one note?” She has incredibly precise ideas about that. So, we worked musically on every detail and on the whole shape. What a pleasure! She also came here to MIT. She hadn’t been to the Media Lab, so she spent two days here at the beginning of August with her partner. She was so open to all the students and all the ideas and inventions and machines and software, just in the most gracious and truly excited way. You couldn’t have had a better visitor.

      Q: Any last thoughts about this piece you want to share?

      A: In my music in general, I’m pretty voracious at combining different things. I think in this project where it involves the natural world and the language of trees, and the language of melodies and instruments and electronic music, there may be more elements I’ve pulled together than ever. The emotional and even musical world here is larger. That’s my story here: These elements require and invite new thinking. And remember: This is just the first part of a larger project. I hope that you can hear the full “Overstory” opera — perhaps with trees growing in a major opera house — in the not-so-distant future! More