Media Lab Alum Breathes Life Into Kinetic Sculptures

Learn more about Andy Cavatorta SM '10 and his work on Slice of MIT: bit.ly/3veHYCZ
Constructed of maple, steel, and plastic tubing, the computer-controlled kinetic sculpture Whale largely fills one upstairs gallery at the MIT Museum. As its 14 rotors spin, the 20-foot-long piece emits an eerie song intended to last for 225 years-roughly the lifespan of a bowhead whale.
“The thing that I really wanted was for people to simply be drawn into this other sense of time and for it to be rewarding, for it to feel good, for it to feel beautiful, even if you don’t know why. So that’s the hope,” says Whale’s creator, Brooklyn, New York-based artist and engineer Andy Cavatorta SM ’10. “I think it’s my first piece that 100 percent feels the way I wanted it to feel, and it’s because it feels like it has this life inside of it.”
MIT’s reputation helped make his career possible, he says. “Having graduated from MIT transforms me in other people’s eyes from being this excitable weirdo with a lot of ideas and skills into an excitable weirdo with a lot of ideas and skills who went to MIT, which actually makes people believe, rightly so, that you can execute these plans that you’re sort of wildly gesticulating about,” he says.
#robotics #art #music #sculpture #massachusettsinstituteoftechnology #alumni

[@AlisonIrvine]

Wow! Go, Andy. What a genius!