Don't Erase Till Monday


  • Raafat Majzoub, An outline of György Kepes on a table with flowers, test sketch, 2016. Original photo: Nishan Bichajian, ca1970


Book Event + Performance

  1. May 7, 2016, 7 – 9 pm
Level 3, CRC/bookshop

Stemming from a series of encounters with the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) Special Collection, an archive under the custodianship of MIT’s Program in Art, Culture & Technology (ACT), the editorial board of Experimental Publishing at ACT presents an indefinitely temporary musing into the utopic matrimony of art and science. CAVS was conceived by its founder György Kepes, in the spirit of modern optimism, as a place for the free comingling of technological advancement and humanistic values. That was the concept, but what about the CAVS’s personalities and politics—its reality—as we find it today, working in and alongside universities steeped in interdisciplinarity?

Don’t Erase Till Monday will showcase five publications that negotiate with CAVS as an archive of aspirations and correspondences, always flirting with fiction or a not-yet reality. The publications make public pieces of the CAVS universe without necessarily adhering to its optimistic agenda for harmonizing art and science at the civic scale. Though MIT-affiliated, ACT’s Experimental Publishing editorial board approaches CAVS as an outsider. This is not a CAVS event; there is no pretense of loyalty here, but rather an honest curiosity about how it might help us think and reflect contemporary urgencies. Using forms of print, performance, video, and public intervention, Don’t Erase Till Monday occupies the space between eulogy and rejuvenation through meditations on landscapes, the sky, the year 1969, speculative ruins, dictatorship, frontiers, audience-making, and participation. The five publications engage with works of CAVS artists such as György Kepes, Otto Piene and Aldo Tambellini, topics these figures addressed, and their positions within MIT and the art world.

Experimental Publishing Editorial Board
Nicole Ashurian, Natasha Balwit, Bik Van der Pol, Andrea Carillo, Angel Chen, Lucas Freeman, Raafat Majzoub, and Abraham Zamcheck.

Agency for Critical Inquiry

Don't Erase Till Monday is part of the CCVA initiative Agency for Critical Inquiry, an open invitation to academic and Boston-area communities to connect with the Carpenter Center, forging a site for collective learning in the public realm.