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Boston Globe TECHNO COMPOSER: ARTS AND TECHNOLOGY COLLIDE AT MEDIA LAB
By Beth Healy, Globe Staff The wrecking ball is about to start swinging outside Tod Machover's office window at MIT. Within days, the composer, cellist, and teacher will have a front-row view of a demolition project that's making way for an expanded Media Lab a place in Cambridge where technology and the arts can collide for years to come. The Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has for 25 years been a haven for all sorts of intellectual, aesthetic, and high-tech collisions. Inside one Kendall Square building are sound gurus, robot builders, film makers, biologists, and computer whizzes crafting machines that react to speech, body movement, touch, or a child's imagination. It's not a stretch to say these are the dreamers of MIT. They pound away on computers, just like other scholars on the famous campus, but writing code is not their only thrill. "The lab is about how technology affects interpersonal communications," said Walter Bender, executive director of the Media Lab. "It's all about perceiving, expressing or learning. Tod is right at the heart of expressing." Machover is slated to play a key role in the new $100 million lab, as director of its proposed Center for Future Arts. He envisions performance space for art and music that's developed at the facility. At its planned opening in late 2004, the corporate-funded lab also will house the Okawa Center, focused on the way children learn and play in the digital age, as well as people working on pure technology. With more than 400 graduate students, researchers, and undergrads working on 300 projects at the lab, what holds it all together? What do theater people and physicists and musicians and hologram experts have in common? It's the technology, Machover says. "It's part of the material of our times that I think we have to integrate into our world and our future," Machover said. "The Media Lab is a place that has so few set definitions about the past and the future. It turns out to be an incredibly fruitful place to be asking these questions and doing this work." A central question for Machover is: "What is it about our world that we want to reflect through technology?" Machover is not looking to replace musicians with machines. He wants to create a new generation of instruments so that more people can use them and try their hand at making music. "I'm not particularly interested in things that have a technological smell," said Machover, his hands waving as he fills the room with stories and music philosophy, his mane of unruly curls reflecting a life with few restraints. "I don't like building things physically that much. I like composing. I like playing." He is 47, a New Yorker inspired by his piano-playing mother and his father's entrepreneurial work in computer graphics. He grew up on Leonard Bernstein and the Rolling Stones. At Julliard in the mid-1970s, he studied electronic music when it was out of fashion. He spent seven years in Paris, at a musical research institute freshly launched at the Centre Pompidou, a 20th-century museum. Since his teens, Machover has been writing music and performing. He was in a rock band in high school, amplifying his cello and playing it like a bass guitar. "We were pretty good," he claims. More recently, he has written several operas. One was "Resurrection," a modern piece based on a Leo Tolstoy novel, that premiered in Houston in 1999 and is playing through tomorrow at the Boston Lyric Opera. And he has become known for his "hyperinstruments," electronic musical devices he invented to create new sounds, such as his hyperviolin and hypercello. Machover's instruments resemble traditional instruments with synthesizer technology. In "Resurrection," for example, he uses digital keyboards to enhance or alter the sounds coming from the orchestra. When he was writing music and pursuing his doctorate, he said, "I realized I would have to invent ways of making this music I was imagining." Now a father of two young daughters, he has a pressing interest in teaching children to interact more with music. When he was a child, the eldest of three, he said, his mother encouraged the kids to make music with household objects. He and a team of graduate students working with him are creating a program so kids can create symphonic sounds on a computer, by drawing colored strokes with a mouse. During any number of off-the-wall projects, Media Lab people end up producing valuable technology that can be applied elsewhere. That's why scores of large companies sponsor the lab, from Compaq Computer Corp. and Intel Corp. to McDonald's Corp. and Levi Strauss & Co. Companies like Wall Street's Merrill Lynch & Co. have made multimillion-dollar grants, while others pay $200,000 to do projects at the lab and gain access to its research. Kevin Teixeira, a spokesman for Intel, said the chipmaker supports the Media Lab because "you have access to new ideas. It's a place both to bring your own forward and to learn what advanced researchers are working on." Similarly, Jim Walker, a Merrill Lynch managing director, said the company wants to keep its finger on the pulse of new technology. He got to know the lab in 1997, when he was managing Merrill's Boston-area offices and brought 50 of the firm's financial advisers in for a visit. He wanted them to soak up the lab's philosophy. "The thing that truly matters in the future is relationships," Walker said. "Product becomes more cloudy." Whether companies actually make money on their investment in the lab is unclear. The Media Lab is not the first stop at MIT for venture capitalists; they'd rather walk the halls of the Lab for Computer Science. "The Media Lab makes whiz-bang stuff," said Todd Dagres, a general partner at Battery Ventures in Wellesley. But, he added: "We think the Lab for Computer Science creates a little more practical technology." There's a kind of rivalry between the labs, investors and technology people say. The Media Lab takes a different approach than a typical engineering department at MIT. It's part of the School of Architecture, from which Nicholas Negroponte, the lab's cofounder and current chairman, graduated. According to Bender, the lab's director, that foundation has spawned an unusual approach to innovation, using architectural critique: The mantra, he said, is "We imagine and realize, critique and reflect, then iterate." Negroponte spends most of his time these days traveling the globe, in an effort to start Media Lab projects in other countries. A European model was started in Ireland about a year ago, and there's a fledgling effort afoot in India. Talks are underway with countries in Latin America too. Now that it's a quarter-century old, there are questions about the future of the Media Lab and what shape it will take in the coming years. Where Negroponte and his cofounder, former MIT president Jerome B. Wiesner, grew famous for predicting quite accurately the convergence in 2000 of computing, publishing, and broadcast (think Internet), there's not one clear vision for the next 25 years. There is a fairly consistent message, however, that comes from nearly every person one encounters at the lab: education. Said Bender: "The future is not an e-revolution. It's an l-revolution. It's a learning revolution that needs to come about." The lab has a $36 million annual budget - not a penny of which comes from the university. That despite the fact the lab confers degrees in media, arts & sciences in MIT's name. That independent tradition goes back to the early days, spokeswoman Alexandra Kahn said, when Negroponte believed intellectual freedom would come only if the lab was beholden to no part of the academic bureaucracy. Corporations provide 90 percent of the funding, with government and other grants picking up the rest of the tab. The new center is counting in part on a generous grant from a New York investment executive, Alberto Vilar, founder of Amerindo Investment Advisors. Vilar has spoken publicly of his intentions to make the gift, but the deal is not yet official, the school says. Machover hopes to see his new group hire more experts in broad fields of art and performance. He wants to see more performances. And he hopes to see more children and adults learning as a result of tools that come out of the lab. "Everybody here wants to be involved in activities that make a difference in people's lives - the quality of lives," he said.
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