Sign up by December 20, 2024 by emailing Lina Bondarenko.SSS is a workshop for the development of improvisational movements that survey sloped landscapes, negotiate with public infrastructures, and activate architectural sites. Inspired by dancer Anna Halprin’s Experiments in the Environment, we will practice foundational intuitive physical exercises and hand-drawing scores that recalibrate our notions of time and space. We will explore the historical relationship between urban design, choreography, and gravity, interrogating the persistence of horizontal surfaces and two dimensional representations in a tilted multi-dimensional world. By traveling locally on field trips to public parks and cultural sites, we will test a spatial practice for place-based learning inspired by landscape architect Lawrence Halprin’s RSVP cycles.SSS is a workshop for slorgs– sloped organisms. For millennia, human organisms have been collaborating with, traversing, inhabiting, perceiving, and relating to sloped terrain. Within the steep escarpments of the Great Rift Valley, a unique bioregional climate, landscape, and ecology fostered the evolution of our ancestors into upright hominids. The original stewards of this land, the Massachuseuk people, derived their name after the sacred hill Massa-adchu-es-et, massa meaning "large," adchu meaning "hill," et an identifier of place, translating roughly as "large hill place" (Jarzombek). The city of Boston was even founded as a colony in search of the “city upon a hill.” The condition of the slope is fundamentally coded within our very existence, the slorg’s physiology and cognition driven by the undulations of the land.Through learning to slow our attention to the subjective intelligence sensed by the body in space, slorgs are able to tune our pulse to the rhythms of the earth’s cycles, revealing environmental entanglements and response-abilities. We engage in sympoeisis—making with our communities of humans and non-humans (Haraway)—by moving with. SSS will culminate in the creation of a site-specific, collective happening in the legacy of the 1960’s Fluxus artists.SSS welcomes participants of all backgrounds and abilities with no prior familiarity with dance to experiment freely, embedding their own daily patterns within local ecology. As we transition between seasons and semesters, SSS is a method for grounding and acknowledging our position with this moment.COMMENTS/QUESTIONS1:00-3:00 Field Trips and score drawing (weather permitting) 3:00-4:00 Break/Rest/Commute 4:00-6:00 Movement in dance studio, guest speakersParticipants can Bring: a sketchbook and pens Wear: loose, comfortable, breathable clothing for studio sessions and warm weather-resistant layers for field trips.Lina Bondarenko is a current graduate student in SMArchS Urbanism at MIT Architecture, following a career practicing architecture and urbanism, teaching design at an arts high school, and a lifetime dancing and performing with various dance troupes. SSS follows her research on urban infrastructure of sloped terrain as spaces of subjugation and solidarity, presented as public happenings at architecture conferences in San Francisco titled “Steep Urbanist.”

Join Science Club for Girls to bring a little summer into January and explore the science of making BUBBLES! Science educator Sarah Weiner will lead participants through making a bubble mixture, testing and refining the mixture, and then creating bubbles with straws and wands. Finally, we will all build our own bubble frames to make a square bubble!Scientists of all ages will enjoy this activity but it is most suited for K-3rd graders.

Two sessions on Awe & Wonder for IAP 2025:Music & Neuroscience: the ordinary and extraordinary ways that music literally rewires our brains. Featuring pianist Dr. Mia Chung-Yee and neuroscientist Dr. Larry Sherman, author of Every Brain Needs Music.Beauty and Formation through the Lens of Rembrandt: For MIT students in 2025, a seventeenth-century Dutch painter may be an unexpected source of wisdom. Dr. Karen E. Bohlin will guide students to glean practical wisdom — everyday tools for discernment and growth — through the lens of Rembrandt’s extraordinary paintings.

Do you love cute stuffed animals and crochet? Want to learn a new skill over IAP? Sign up for a 3-day crochet workshop and learn to crochet your own amigurumi duck keychain! No crochet experience necessary. Amigurumi is the Japanese art of knitting or crocheting small, stuffed yarn creatures. This workshop will teach you everything you need to know to make your own amigurumi duck keychain; materials will be provided. You’ll learn to single crochet in the round, change yarn colors, name your new stuffed best friend, and more. Workshops will include instruction and time to crochet; each workshop will cover a different aspect of the project, from learning the basics of crochet to creating the duck keychain.This workshop with run in two sections, each meeting three times:Section 1: Tues (1/21), Wed (1/23), Sat (1/25) 2-4 PM Section 2: Tues (1/28), Wed (1/30), Sat (2/1) 2-4 PMSpots are limited to 20 and will be decided by lottery if necessary. Register by 5pm on Saturday, January 11.

As it does each year, Radius will co-sponsor this important annual event with Massachusetts Peace Action.From MAPA:The threat of nuclear war is increasing, rather than abating.Biden's recent actions in the Russia/Ukraine conflict has sharply increased the danger.The tragic Israel/Gaza conflict continues to expand.Cold Warriors in high places are beating the drums of war toward Russia and China.Enormous public expenditures are being made on upgrading all three legs of the nuclear weapons triadResponding to these costs and dangers, we will meet virtually to call for Reducing Congressional Spending for Nuclear Weapons and discuss how to organize to meet the challenge.

In this activity each student will learn about the design and construction of a mechanical watch. The student will take apart a watch movement and put it back together, with instruction from Jason Champion (instructor from the AWCI: American Watchmakers and Clockmakers Institute), with help from Jack Kurdzionak and Steve Boynton (professional watchmakers), and Prof. Gerry Sussman (an amateur watchmaker). The entire exercise will take 4 hours. Each session will be limited to 8 students. Students need no prior experience, and all tools and materials will be provided by the instructors, as needed.Enrollment is limited. You must sign up for one of the 4-hour sessions:Saturday, 25 January 2025, 9am-1pmSaturday, 25 January 2025, 2:30pm-6:30pmSunday, 26 January 2025, 9am-1pmSunday, 26 January 2025, 2:30pm-6:30pmRegistration is now closed. If you wish to be added to the waitlist for one of the sessions, please email Cindy Rosenthal (crosenth@mit.edu).As part of this activity Professor Sussman will give a lecture on the theory of the mechanical watch and its relationship to an electronic impulse-driven oscillator. There will be a discussion of friction (resistance) and its effect on Q and timing precision. The lecture will explain why it is essential for the impulse to be supplied to the oscillator at the zero crossings of the angle, and why the oscillator will enter a limit cycle of a known amplitude.The lecture is open to the MIT community. It will be from 11:30am-12:30pm, in 34-101 on Friday, 24 January.