Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) welcomes a new roster of visiting artists in the 2013-14 academic year working in a range of artistic disciplines -- from kinetic art to film and sound art to music.  Residencies at MIT are embedded in ongoing research and creative collaborations with faculty and researchers at the Institute and focus upon the experimental or developmental phases of an artist’s project.  This year, MIT’s thriving Visiting Artists program joins forces with the Mellon-funded  MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST), an initiative that fosters cross-disciplinary work at the intersections of art, science and technology.  Public events featuring the visiting artists will be held during each residency (schedule below).

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer creates interactive kinetic and light installations. His piece, Please Empty Your Pockets, will be displayed as part of the MIT Museum’s new cutting-edge kinetic art exhibition, 5000 Moving Parts, opening November 21. Lozano-Hemmer will work with students in MIT Museum Director John Durant’s project-based seminar, “Exhibiting Science.”

Katerina Cizek is an Emmy-winning pioneer in participatory and interactive documentary production. As a filmmaker-in-residence at the National Film Board of Canada, she explores how technology can enable new forms of storytelling and public engagement. Cizek is collaborating with MIT’s Open Documentary Lab to advance the multi-media project, HIGHRISE, which investigates how new communication and media technologies are reshaping the lives of residents in suburban high rise buildings around the world. Her multi-part, immersive series, “A Short History of the Highrise,” premieres on the NYTimes.com in October in collaboration with the Op-Docs, the newspaper’s forum for short, opinionated documentaries.

Filmmakers John Akomfrah and Lina Gopaul, founders of the influential Black Audio Film Collective, will continue the second year of their residency at MIT. Their work has transformed filmmaking, both technically and culturally, as they explore the many facets of the European migrant experience. Under the theme “cinematic migrations,” the artists explore ideas surrounding cinema and social activism; cinema in local and global contexts; cinema as art installation; and cinema and technological change, culminating in a symposium in the spring of 2014.

Scanner (aka Robin Rimbaud) and Stephen Vitiello are sound artists whose experimental and atmospheric work explores bodily experience and spatial practice. Their residency -- as part of an ongoing interdisciplinary dialogue between artists, designers, scientists and musicians -- investigates the physical and spatial dimensions of sonic environments as a common territory in visual research, music and cognition.

Either/Or is an avant-garde contemporary music ensemble expanding the fertile areas between composition and installation, composer and performer, and music and sonic environment. At MIT, the experimental group is performing and workshopping student compositions, as well as performing concerts of works by experimental music pioneer Alvin Lucier and MIT Associate Professor of Music Keeril Makan, recently described by The New Yorker as “an arrestingly gifted young American composer.”

The Jupiter String Quartet consists of violinists Nelson Lee and Megan Freivogel, violist Liz Freivogel, and cellist Daniel McDonough. During a two-year residency at MIT, the ensemble is performing Beethoven’s foundational String Quartets in a rare opportunity for audiences to experience the whole cycle in its dramatic entirety. The ensemble’s interpretation of this foundational literature adds new layers of insight into the work’s formal, emotional, and sonic depths.