A flow of creativity
Gediminas Urbonas, the Mitsui Career Development Associate Professor in Contemporary Technology Photo: Allegra Boverman In May 2011, near the end of MIT’s 150th anniversary celebration, a giant inflatable screen resembling the letters “MIT” was fastened to a floating platform and launched into the Charles River. Called “Liquid Archive,” and designed by Nader Tehrani and Gediminas Urbonas, the piece allowed viewers to engage with images of unrealized projects that other artists, such as MIT’s Gyorgy Kepes, had created in the 1970s while proposing improvements to the Charles. Like much of Urbonas’ work, “Liquid Archive” was bold, technologically savvy, informed by a keen sense of history, and collaborative in character. Those elements in his work come, in good part, from the momentous changes he experienced firsthand in his native Lithuania as it suddenly changed from being a part of the totalitarian Soviet Union to an independent state. “Every day here at MIT...