Books

Centerbook: The Center for Advanced Visual Studies and the Evolution of Art-Science-Technology at MIT (2019)

by Elizabeth Goldring and Ellen Sebring

The first comprehensive history of MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS), told through personal accounts and groundbreaking artwork.

In 1967, in a time of student unrest, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology did the unexpected: it established the first academic center for research and collaboration in art, science, and technology. The Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) brought artists to the MIT campus with radical expressions of a rapidly evolving technological era.

The brainchild of founding director Gyorgy Kepes, CAVS sought to repair the distance between practitioners of art and engineering within the halls of MIT. "The scientist may be an extra brain to the artist, and the engineer may be an extra arm to the artist, whereas the artist can be an extra eye to the scientist and engineer,” said long-time director Otto Piene in Centerbeam, a 1978 film about a CAVS collaboration. As a breeder of new art forms and future-oriented artistic education, CAVS became a pioneering model for the art, technology and media labs that proliferated worldwide.

This first comprehensive history of CAVS presents an inside view, told through personal accounts, exhibit documentation, and groundbreaking artwork, and and includes a new text on the genome of art and technology by Peter Weibel. The book chronicles, in vivid visual narrative and testimony by those who were there, the birth and flowering of a unique research node dedicated to multiple interactions of art, science, technology and environment.

SA+P Press and ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, MIT Press [link]

The Light Silo Das Licht-Silo (2014)

Sketches by Otto Piene and poems by Elizabeth Goldring Piene on the theme of their farm in Groton, Massachusetts. Introduction by Ante Glibota. Bilingual, English and German. (Amazon)

excerpt:

THE LAST TIME

I speak to you for the last time,
hear your voice for the last time,
your eyes,
your hug,
your final kiss,
your morning breath,
my Listerine.

For the last time
you catch the 4 a.m. breeze,
a gentle whip-o-will.

For the last time
I took a plane across an ocean.
For the last time
I felt entirely myself — no masks.
Where will I find new masks?
How can I make them strong enough
to last without

your footfall,
the way you close the doors,
your geomancy that lets me know
exactly where you are?

Fiction will forever haunt the platitude
“See you later”:
SEE, when I am mostly blind,
LATER, always potentially a lie,
YOU, slipping off already
Into the last time.

— Elizabeth Goldring, The Light Silo Das Licht-Silo, Delight Edition, 2014

Ey- (2002)

"When artist and poet Elizabeth Goldring found a way to use technology for visual art, the images she captured on her damaged retinas became "frozen traces of seeing, the memory of words that move and flow into meaning." These exquisite prints are grounded on the image of her optic nerve, "individual as a thumbprint," to embody not only Goldring's remarkable vision but the very process of creation. As a poet, Elizabeth Goldring pushes through silence to speak. As a visual artist who is blind, she uses darkness to frame the world she allows, then compels us to see. Eye is a work of transformative--and great--art." --Hilda Raz (Amazon)

excerpt:

DRIVING DOWN TO NICE

I remember
the four a.m. flowers
the fresh scents
the closed air of the car,
how red sun
filled the blue morning
as we drove down to Nice,
and how s h e came up
over the knobbed hairy tit mountain
(the citron sorbet in Cassis
with lemon rind pressed in it)
the sun
burned black at the center,
orange
opening into yellow
(the taste of lemon rind).

As we drove into Nice
I felt the earth shake
and the bitter aftershocks
as shadows of the black sun
crossed your eyes
clouding the lavender fields
back at Senanque,
stifling songs of Missa Solemnis
still hot in my gut.

— Ey-: poems & retina prints, BkMK Press, 2002

Without Warning: 49 Poems (1995)

excerpt:

SOCKS

Walking the tread mill
I watch the socks get in front of each other.
I’m mesmerized by their red color
and the idea that they’re your socks.
I’ve worn them without asking you.
Even if you won’t walk the tread mill
Your socks have gotten mixed up with my feet.
They’re our socks.
I grin despite the friction of tread mill
and walking feet.

— Without Warning. Kansas City: BkMk Press and Helicon Nine Editions, 1995