I am attached to a group putting on an exhibition in Cambridge this coming week, December 8-11th. It should be interesting, and it generating a bit of buzz in the art blogs and news letters going around the art world. It has something we have worked pretty hard on, so I am looking forward to the opening. My part was in collection, editing and display of the visual media of the exhibit, a sort of video collage of conceptions of utopia in modern media and collective consciousness.

This is from the press release about the exhibition:

<sub>"Graduate students from MIT's Department of Architecture display their investigations and the way these terms are represented in visual, audio and literary media. Following the principles of heterotopian spaces the way the French philosopher Michel Foucault defines them in his 1967 lecture 'Of Other Spaces', this project seeks to delineate the complexity of fictional narratives, virtual designs and existing realities. X-topia is a spatial collage where the viewer is invited to enter and to wander through islands of excerpts and citations, illuminated by film fragments and surrounded by sound bites. The elements of this exhibition – juxtaposed quotations gathered into a spatial narration offset by montages of film and documentary footage – portray the interrelation of these urban imaginaries from the 20th century. X-topia questions the overarching social constructs that lead to the pursuit of the utopian ideal society by mirroring it through its inherent dystopian aspects and conclusions. X-topia is an exhibition project of student participants in MIT's Visual Arts Program course 'This is Tomorrow? Urban Utopia, Dystopia, Heterotopia,' taught by Ute Meta Bauer and Yvonne P. Doderer. The course was inspired by 'This is Tomorrow,' a ground breaking, trans-disciplinary exhibition by the Independent Group at London's Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1956. X-topia is the result of reviewing and reflecting on selected texts and a wide range of 20th century fiction and documentary films supplemented by a weekly transdisciplinary lecture series with guest speakers from all over the world.

Students were assisted by Mary Hale and Morgan Pinney.
Contributions by Gabriel Chan, Lee M. Dykxhoorn, Adam B. Galletly, Mishayla T. Greist, Natsuki Maeda, Robert J. Mastro, Timothy R. Olson, Lisa M. Pauli, Mais M. Sartawi, Gerhard J. Van Der Linde."</sub>


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