Conflux


1. a creative collective
2. an interdisciplinary ecosystem
3. an art tech movement


get involved:
︎happenings
︎ projects
︎ residency

stay updated:

︎calendar 
︎instagram
︎︎︎mailing list

︎About
︎People







Our happenings are socials, workshops, field trips, and events focused on hands-on exploration of Art Tech. They are open to all interested members of the Harvard community, no experience necessary.

Winter 2024:


[residency]
Symbiotic Perceptions
tinyurl.com/confluxcalendar
We are making some of our virtual residency program open to the public!



Fall 2023:


[weekly] Saturdays @ 5PM
Dream Team
Mather Tranquility Room
a casual group for those interested in exploring the unconscious side of things through the lens of creativity and collective dream practices.

In each meetup, we’ll be pairing a dream-related activity with perspectives on dreams from different fields (art history, neuroscience, machine learning. etc.). As we discuss, then practice, different ways of experiencing, interacting with, and even incubating dream content, we will ground our group’s activities in recent and relevant research, while also allowing flexibility for individual exploration--especially exploration in step with contemporary technological advancements.

[meetup] 12/08
Apocalypse: a Boston art tech meetup

485 Broadway
6-8PM, dinner provided
OPEN PROJECTOR! We hosted artists and technologists from Boston-wide art tech groups (MIT Media Lab, metaLAB, CAMLab, Boston Tech Poetics, GSD) at our fall social, Apocalypse



[tour] 12/01
CAMLab Tour
485 Broadway
6-8PM, refreshments provided
A private and educational behind-the-scenes tour of CAMLab to explore the process of researching, theorizing, and developing projects at the intersection of art, culture, and technology



[exhibition] 11/09
Musical Chairs
MIT Museum
We exhibited one of our Spring 2023 installations at a sold-out MIT Museum After Dark event.



[workshop] 10/06
Conflux Projects Intro
Smith Center Riverview Commons
Learn about the launch of our project incubator program and meet other students interested in projects

[workshop] 9/29
Intro to Dye Sublimation SEC Undergrad Lounge

dye sublimate your own designs onto stickers, canvas prints, and shirts/sweatshirts to take home!



2022-2023:



May

[social] 5/01
Notes on Love

Advocate Building
@7pm



an evening of art-tech projects and genuine conversations centered around the theme of loving connection between people. Featuring beautiful art-tech projects and visualizations, food and drinks, and conversations all around the theme of life and love.




March



[movie] 3/31
Sisters with Transistors

Music Department (Classroom 9)
@8pm


This event was supported in part by the Ann Radcliffe Trust/Women’s Center Community Fund and the Harvard College Women’s Center.
Join us for our screening of the remarkable untold story of electronic music’s female pioneers, composers who embraced machines and their liberating technologies to utterly transform how we produce and listen to music today. The film—narrated by groundbreaking audiovisual artist Laurie Anderson—maps a new history of electronic music through the visionary women whose radical experimentations with machines redefined the boundaries of music, including Clara Rockmore, Daphne Oram, Bebe Barron, Pauline Oliveros, Delia Derbyshire, Maryanne Amacher, Eliane Radigue, Suzanne Ciani, and Laurie Spiegel.

[dinner + artist demo] 3/31
Kelley Sheehan & Elena Rykova

Music Department (Classroom 9)
@6:30pm, dinner provided


Discover the magic (and technology) behind New Music! Join us for dinner with electroacoustic composers Kelley Sheehan and Elena Rykova! Ask them questions about their journeys in music tech, and then participate in a special live demo where Kelley and Elena will show us how they creatively incorporate electronics into their music compositions.


January



[exhibition] 1/27
Liminal Interfaces

SEC Undergrad Lounge
@5:30pm, dinner provided
what are you in between?

We hosted a public exhibition exploring the ways in which art tech can transform liminal spaces—the transitory, ambiguous, and often painful spaces between locations or states of being—into personal and meaningful places. Featuring custom exhibition art tech pieces and six student art tech installations experimenting with various liminal spaces, this highly interactive exhibition guided the public through a series of immersive experiences encouraging visitors to generate, reflect on, and transform the liminal spaces in their own lives.


October



[event] 10/28
Nervous Network


SEC Undergrad Lounge
@8pm, snacks provided
visualizing collective experience of fright

Rarely are we conscious of subtle fluctuations in our internal states, yet our biosignals can convey multitudes about  ourselves and others. In our Halloween-themed monthly public event, we created a social experience at the intersection of wearable tech, costume design, horror narratives, biosensors, and virtual reality. We ran a workshop introducing participants (all experience levels welcome) to hardware wiring for jellyfish costumes. Each participant’s jellyfish tentacles pulsed to their heartbeat to achieve a “bioluminescent” effect. We then connected every participant to each other, creating a network that mapped heartbeats as we played horror VR games and watched scary movies in VR. Using long-exposure photography, we illuminated the otherwise internal affect of fright buildup during a shared scary experience.


Project team:
Peggy Yin ‘25 (Art, Design, Tech)
Alice Cai ‘25 (Tech)
AnhPhu Nguyen ‘25 (Tech)
Kunal Botla (Photography)



[trip] 10/15
Brain, Body + Breath


MIT Museum
@ 7pm

We attended Brain, Body + Breath, a multisensory musical experience featuring the world premiere of three music + tech pieces by Tod Machover exploring the ways that music affects our bodies and minds.



[trip] 10/7
Neurafutures & Borealis


MIT Media Lab & Kendall Square
@ 6pm, dinner provided
We took a trip to the Cambridge Science Festival to experience two exciting Art + Tech exhibits! The first exhibit, NeuraFutures, was an interactive art installation at the MIT Media Lab contrasting the reality and science-fiction of Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI-fi). We had the opportunity to listen to a special talk from Dr. Nataliya Kos'myna, one of the lead organizers of the exhibit. Then headed over to Kendall Square to check out the premiere of Borealis, a re-creation of the natural Aurora Borealis phenomena using cutting-edge projection technology.







September


[event] 9/16
DALL-T


SEC Undergrad Lounge
@ 6:30pm, dinner provided

you’ve heard of DALL-E. now get ready for: Dall-Ts!

As our inaugural monthly public event, we introduced participants to AI-art generation and dye sublimation, two methods that are changing the nature of printed graphics and production. Participants explored prompt desigining for generating AI art, using tools such as including Midjourney and DALL-E. Participants then received training on how to use the heat press to dye sublimate materials, a process that doesn’t produce as much wastewater as traditional dying techniques. We then printed participant AI-generated art pieces onto transfer paper and dye sublimated them onto T-shirts, sweaters, canvases, metal plates, and other materials for participants to take home.





© Conflux 2024 | info@confluxcollective.org