Joshue Ott will be accompanying Son Lux with his Superdraw program for Friday’s Alt Cabaret.  We’re working on making it possible for the audience to draw too using an iPhone,  so bring yours to the show. (Just make sure to silence the ringer, thanks!)

This new product from an Australian designer just came across our desk.  Its called the Sky Planter and its by Patrick Morris. The website touts the Sky Planter’s ability to save water, floor space, and your plants, but we already knew the benefits of upside down plants here at MASS MoCA.  We’re checking our records to see if Mr. Morris has ever been a visitor….

In the August 31 edition, New York Magazine calls the Sol LeWitt Retrospective “one of the best single artists exhibitions ever.”    And they used the picture of Alec, our box office intern, and Jodi, our retail maven, admiring Wall Drawing #391 who are the hippest non-New Yorkers we can think of.

Production intern extraordinaire Rachel Wright snapped some shots of Project Bandaloop rehearsing yesterday. These show the dancers on the old Sprague Power Plant which you see from Route 2 when you’re driving over the overpass.  (It has the Dave Thomas banner of the fingers holding the Pearl Tower in Shanghai.)

Tickets are still available, but some of the shows are filling up.  Buy today!

One of our downtown galleries is filled with an amazing device — The Refractive Kinoscope.  Its an installation that puts you in the belly of a film projector which is a pretty amazing place to be.

Riffing on the form and function of an actual film projector, The Refractive Kinescope is put in motion by model steam locomotives and by the spectators themselves. The locomotives transport the projector bulbs illuminating more than 200 celluloid oversized film frames selected from the silent films (1910-1928) that form a ribbon spooling between two reels, spanning the entire space.

The moving lights invite you to walk along. Following the lights, you become the mechanism of the projector and bring the frames into motion.  The action in every frame – whether in a solo or a duet, was originally choreographed with great dramatic precision to express the full spectrum of human emotions. Moving through the installation, like a film editor, you assemble frames into the scenes.

As part of DownStreet Art on August 27, Kinodance Company presents a live performance in the space.

For the live performances we mine selected sequences from early silent films and reconstruct embellished gestures, zealous eye movements, exaggerated postures and dramatic spatial pathways with manipulations of speed, focus and movement quality influenced by Butoh and contemporary dance forms. Extracted from 2-dimensional celluloid and re-embodied, we explore what dances conjured from the lost theatrical performances of silent film actors have to say to us now; what can be learned about the communication of human emotion through performances that re-present the past? By choreographing these dances and installing live bodies alongside The Refractive Kinescope we consider and perhaps counteract the states of loss, decay and nostalgia that pervade our contemporary view of the silent era and that more broadly challenge our notion of history as an unknowable, untouchable, unfeelable, no-longer-moving archive.

Several folks have posted their photos from MASS MoCA Fest on Saturday with Josh Ritter, Ben Kweller, Kaki King, Elvis Perkins in Dearland and Samantha Crain.

Ben Sisto was our DJ at the end of the night. A few of his photos are on flickr including the one above.

Rich Oris is a terrific freelance photographer who’s posted one shot here. I’m sure he’ll have more soon on his website. About halfway through the show he told me he had taken 800 so far!

ShopClementine posted shots on flickr to our group.

Let us know if you have pictures to share or just post them to our flickr group.