Watch the ALBERS x MIT event replay

Anni Albers’s 1959 exhibition, Pictorial Weavings, held at The New Gallery in MIT’s Charles Hayden Memorial Library marked an important moment in her career and a crossing of the paths of two significant approaches to material and technology.

Continuing the fundamental material investigation at the heart of MIT and of Anni and Josef Albers’s teaching and artmaking, scholars and artists from the Albers Foundation paired with faculty and students from MIT for a one-day program of talks and workshops. The lunch and evening sessions are available on replay.

This event, spearheaded by artist Chloe Bensahel, was hosted by the Future Sketches group, MIT Media Lab, and supported by the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and MIT MAD.

Lunch session

Material as Inquiry, Technology as Vision in Motion

Zach Lieberman, Associate professor of Media Arts and Sciences, Future Sketches Group, Chloe Bensahel, affiliate researcher at the Media Lab, Gediminas Urbonas, Associate Professor in the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology, and Fritz Horstman, Education Director at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, explore the rich pedagogical lineage of Material Studies — from the experimental curriculum of the German Bauhaus, through Black Mountain College, and into the research culture of MIT.

Reflecting on figures such as Anni and Josef Albers, György Kepes, and László Moholy-Nagy, the conversation draws on Moholy-Nagy’s concept of “Vision in Motion” to consider how education rooted in material experimentation fosters new ways of seeing, sensing, and imagining. Together, they discuss how materials and methods shape thought, and how technology can be reimagined not as a tool, but as a generative space of inquiry and imagination, also leaning on research projects conducted at the MIT Media Lab.

Evening session

The Anonymous Designer as Radical: A Reading of Anni Albers

Amy Jean Porter, Assistant Curator at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation

To Let Threads be Articulate: Anni Albers and Materials

Karis Medina, Associate Curator at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation

Artist & Technician: Collaboration and Process in Josef Albers’s Printmaking

Kyle Goldbach, Collections Assistant at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation


Followed by presentations from:

• Lucy Li, graduate student, MIT Media Lab
• Jessica Stringham, graduate student, MIT Media Lab
• Erik Demaine, Professor in Computer Science, MIT
• Marcelo Coelho, MIT department of Architecture, Design Intelligence Lab
• Vlasta Kubušová, designer Crafting Plastics, visiting researcher Center for Bits and Atoms
• Alfonso Parra Rubio, researcher, Center for Bits and Atoms
• Ekaterina Kormilitsyna, artist and researcher, Center for Bits and Atoms