10 Nov MIT Open Documentary Lab and Villa Albertine Partner for Exploratory New Media Residency
Author/Director Mathieu Pradat to pursue project connecting film, architecture, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality during Boston residency
Cambridge, Mass. (November 10, 2021) — MIT Open Documentary Lab today announced its collaboration with Villa Albertine, a new cultural institution that launched this fall across 10 American cities and welcomed more than 80 residents for its inaugural season. To capture the vastness and diversity of the United States, and to respond to contemporary creators’ evolving needs, Villa Albertine reinvents the traditional residency model of a single building in a single city. Spanning the United States, the Villa aims to forge a new creative community through exploratory residencies that are uniquely adapted to the needs of each artist and thinker.
Together with Paris-based Forum des Images, the MIT Open Documentary Lab and Villa Albertine co-curated the residency of Mathieu Pradat, an author and director who has won international acclaim for his films and virtual reality experiences. His Villa Albertine project, entitled The Response, explores human relationships with artificial intelligence in the context of acute environmental and political crisis. Pradat begins the first stage of his residency this week, attending the MIT symposium, ‘Boundary Conditions: Architecture, Simulation, Cinema’. He will continue his work in Boston in February and April 2022.
“Like the MIT Open Documentary Lab, Villa Albertine is focused on supporting cross-disciplinary, collaborative, and future-thinking experimentation. With this common ground, we are delighted to have the Lab as a cultural partner for Mathieu Pradat’s residency, which will create new opportunities for engagement with some of the greatest issues of our time,” said Gaëtan Bruel, Director of Villa Albertine.
“We are honored to be a host site for Villa Albertine’s new residency program and delighted to welcome Mathieu Pradat into our community. We look forward to a rich exchange of ideas between Mathieu, our lab and the wider MIT community as he develops his project and explores the relationship between humans and AI using emerging media technologies,” said Sarah Wolozin, Director of MIT Open Documentary Lab.
Applications for Villa Albertine Season 2 are open until January 20, 2022. This application process, open to creators, researchers, and cultural professionals, aims to select innovative residency projects that will take place in the United States throughout 2023, for a period of between one and three months.
Discover the residents of this inaugural season, and learn more about the call for applications for Season 2, at villa-albertine.org.
About MIT Open Documentary Lab
Drawing on MIT’s legacy of media innovation and its deep commitment to open and accessible information, the MIT Open Documentary Lab brings storytellers, technologists, and scholars together to explore new documentary forms with a particular focus on collaborative, interactive, and immersive storytelling. The lab is housed at MIT’s Comparative Media Studies department in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
About Villa Albertine
Villa Albertine is a new kind of cultural institution whose mission is to create a community for arts and ideas, between France and the United States. With a team of 80 people deployed in ten major cities (Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.), Villa Albertine offers 60 custom exploratory residencies annually; a series of events; a magazine; and programs and resources for professionals in the cultural sphere. Villa Albertine is an institution of the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs, with support from the French Ministry of Culture.