Creating Colliders for High Energy Ideas

Ben Rubin and David Small

Monday, October 21, 2013, 6-7 pm

Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT
in partnership with the Four Sculptors series at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Two media artists and longtime friends, Ben Rubin and David Small discussed 20 years of multidisciplinary pursuits spanning history, science, religion, data, and technology. The questions they ask through their work and the methodologies they employ have much in common with science, and they discussed the interplay between the practices of science, art, culture, and design.

Ben Rubin is a media artist based in New York City. Rubin's work has been shown at the Whitney Museum in New York, the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in Paris, among others. Rubin has created large-scale public artworks for the New York Times, the city of San Jose, and the Minneapolis Public Library. He has recently developed a site-specific sculpture called Shakespeare Machine for the Public Theater in New York, and completed Beacon, a luminous rooftop sculpture commissioned for National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia.

David Small, creative director and founder of Small Design completed his Ph.D. at the MIT Media Lab in 1999, where his research focused on the display and manipulation of complex visual information. He began his studies of dynamic typography in three dimensional landscapes as a student of Muriel Cooper, founder of the Visible Language Workshop, and later joined the Aesthetics and Computation Group under the direction of John Maeda. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Documenta11, the Centre Pompidou, and the Cooper-Hewitt.