IAP Session: Visualizing Daily Rituals: A Photo Project

December 7, 2020 - January 6, 2021
Event Types
MIT Community
Virtual

Please note:  This IAP Session is SOLD OUT.

MIT List Visual Arts Center invites community members to participate in a one-use camera photo project and capture new daily routines. Visualizing Daily Rituals hopes to help participants overcome physical distance with another offline project that encourages members of the MIT community to be aware of their daily rituals and immediate surroundings.

Participants of Visualizing Daily Rituals can reflect on routines and developed habits, and consider the limited number exposure camera as a measure of time. The project encourages us to think about sharing images if there is temporal delay between taking, processing, digitalizing, and sharing images. 

The camera project is inspired by Hito Steyerl’s “In Defense of the Poor Image”, a theory of global circulation of images and mass communication through the process of making images that will be reproduced, compressed, and distributed. Steyerl defines the poor image as “a copy in motion” and argues that the value of a poor image is in its rapid circulation. By participating in transmission of images from analog to digital to print, the project facilitates a passage of visual information. Participants will take photos and receive a photo book as a physical reminder of the connectedness to others in our daily lives.

To participate:

  1. Please fill out the Google Form with your address to receive a disposable camera and packaging materials for return.
  2. Take photos with the provided camera of parts of your daily routine, rituals, or habits that have become important to you.
  3. Place your camera and film processing order form in prepaid packaging, and mail to the imaging lab no later than Friday, January 22.
  4. The photos will be developed and you will receive your digital processed photos. 
  5. One image per participant will be selected to be included in a printed photo book visualizing the communal project. Each participant will receive one by the end of spring term.  
  6. Limited to the first 50 participants.

This program is part of the Independent Activities Period (IAP), a special four-week term at MIT that runs from the first week of January until the end of the month.