MIT Museum Studio
Seth Riskin is the founder and manager of the MIT Museum Studio, encouraging art-science collaboration and interdisciplinary thinking at MIT.
The MIT Museum Studio connects MIT undergraduate and graduate students with the unique learning opportunities of the MIT Museum. In the tradition of mens et manus, “mind and hand,” the studio is a fully functional maker space and learning laboratory that supports the creation of student projects and installations. Through a series of MIT classes, students integrate design and communications to engage audiences in science, technology, and innovation.
Using Art to Understand the Brain
Riskin and the MIT Museum Studio are featured in the video “Using Art to Understand the Brain” from the MIT News Office
Q & A with Seth Riskin
You are co-teaching a class with Pawan Sinha and Sarah Schwettmann, Vision in Neuroscience and Art. What prompted you to create this course with them? What do you hope to accomplish?
Riskin: The course brings together two fields that complement each other beautifully: visual art and vision neuroscience. Recent developments in both fields present the opportunity for an in-depth exchange between vision science and the conscious visual perception practiced in art. We can theorize about vision, run experiments and use fMRI, but vision from the inside, that is, awareness of perceptual processes, which is manifest through artistic creations, offers distinct insights. Perhaps nowhere is this “inside” information needed more than in the study of the brain. Pawan, Sarah and I are passionate about the potential of this dialogue and collaboration, and we wanted to give students the opportunity to exercise the full scope of their intelligence that spans the sensory and semantic. Vision is the perfect subject of study for this.
Link to full article: Q & A with Seth Riskin
Link to read “The technology of enchantment” In a new anthropology and studio art course, MIT students investigate the human dimensions of interacting with technologies.
Images: scenes in the MIT Museum Studio from the video “Using Art to Understand the Brain,” MIT News Office, 2017
Video credit, banner, top of page: "Continuous Overflow" by Karyn Nakamura for exhibition "Emissive" from MIT Course "Vision in Art and Neuroscience," Fall 2021 in collaboration with the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. MIT Museum Studio