Ivaana Rungta (Founder/Director CCL), is a music researcher, lyrical storyteller and sound artist based in Cambridge,Massachusetts. She majored in English Literature, Theatre and Music and had been teaching high school and college students for 12 years till she decided to just focus on homeschooling her son. After her son was accepted to MIT at the age of 15, she found renewed passion in writing about all that intrigued her-dreams, sensations, memories, hardships, chaos and order, art and culture by extending new realms of experience beyond the habitual via actual findings and scientific research.
It took her 5 years to complete her project-“A Square and a Half-The Colors are Sounding”- which is a tribute to scientific research and an attempt to create a sense of place and of an open process; a new point of entry into the hidden spaces of creation via architectural spaces, connections between art and mathematical concepts and the analysis and synthesis of poetic and aesthetic intuition through structured inquiry.
All along her intention was to encourage a newer perspective towards storytelling, music and creative writing through a spontaneous interplay between technology, mythology, art, design, literature, science and music. The project was first privately launched (but not published publicly) at the MIT Museum on October 12th, 2018 amongst scholars, professors, artists and researchers. This was the first step towards defining the curricular culture and goals of her long harbored dream of an online academy - Cambridge Creation Lab (CCL) that would nurture and shape the imagination of the participants through an emphasis on innovative research projects that weaves together utopian visions, conversations and concepts that are interdisciplinary and highly inventive in nature. CCL is being built on the tenets of the rather invisible world where gaps are bridged, and interfaces of thought are created between disciplines, themes, practices, media and contexts that exceed precise definitions and are in a continuous process of flux.
Ivaana has always been intrigued by the relationship between the content of human expression and the naturally musical form of that expression through tempo, rhythm, melody, repetition and lyrics. She has thus been exploring the ‘human voice as instrument’ and how words might contribute to generating sonic scores and atmospheres to bring poetic and visual materials into chance relations. She has collaborated with many artists, scholars, poets and musicians and scientistson empathetic and transformative levels and believes that through artistic collaboration and the braiding and intertwining of hybridized sensibilities the proper state of being can be realized.
From dance and performance she has explored ideas about how to investigate and experience space from what she calls a “long blank handscroll that is pressured into composing visible and invisible calligraphic gestures that may or may not find expression through words, design or other narrative forms. The only intention is to extend pigments through the shimmering surfaces of the imagination to surprise, improvise and create something extraordinary.” She also believes that color-sound correspondences can be best perceived through synesthetic metaphors that are highly transdisciplinary in nature and that visual thinking does not need a “colored brain”- rather a mindset that is open to what lies beyond the rational processes or even cognitive theories. She feels “everything comes together as a synoptic image and when we are able to grasp these comings and goings of the discontinuous phenomenology of the material world as well as our unconscious responses to it as mosaic formula, we integrate sensation and concept.”
Deep seeing - deep listening - deep absorbing the intervals, gaps, apparent fragmentation and blurring the barely perceptible markings between disciplines is one of her favorite ways to explore who she truly is. Besides which she also likes to sing to her chance-based compositions, visualize illustrations, study space-bodying through imaginative silent choreographies of symbolic dance movements and talk about baseball with her son who just graduated with a major in mathematics from MIT and is now working as a data analyst at the MIT Office of Open Learning.
Shane Adams, President of Artist Accelerator is a twice GRAMMY nominated music educator (non-self-nominated), award-winning producer/songwriter, and author. Shane is a founding instructor for Berklee Online, where he has taught lyric-writing and songwriting to thousands of students since 2003. Shane is a featured songwriter and instructor for the Taylor Swift Education Center at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum where he received their TOP TEN HITMAKER award for 2014. He co-developed their current Words & Music, and Songwriting 101 outreach programs, which have enabled over 175,000 (and counting!) American students to learn to write songs. Shane has served on the Hall of Fame’s museum expansion advisory board and has facilitated other artistic community programs, such as Poetry in Motion, co-sponsored by the Nashville Arts Commission and the National Collegiate Athletic Association.
In 2013, Shane was named the Music Industry Professional of the Year by Chowan University, and in 2005 Shane earned the Tennessee-Songwriter-Association-International’s highest honor, the Hallman Award, for outstanding contributions to the songwriting community. Shane’s company, Artist Accelerator, received the 2020 Nashville Award as an outstanding small business in the music industry.
As a film composer, Shane produced the music and scored several independent film projects, including Fortune Cookie (featured at both the Sundance and Hollywood Film Festivals), and American Mobster for HBO. He is currently the featured composer for Fjor Films and recognized internationally as a groundbreaking songwriting lecturer and music production panelist. He is a featured contributor to iSingmagazine, and is author of the best-selling The Singer-Songwriter’s Guide to Recordings in the Home Studio.
Shane believes that as contemporary music goes on changing, it is important for him and his students to know not just what sound is but to truly comprehend the essence of sound in relation to changing sonorous environments or narratives. At Cambridge Creation Lab, Shane would try to build new relationships between different creative processes arising from nature, life, science and art by setting up visual, textual, and affective analogies through superimpositions of layers of sounds. Shane distinctively uses a conscious and intentional process of bringing forth or superimposing musical qualities — such as recognizable rhythmic or melodic qualities or distinct formal structures — in material, which is not conventionally seen as music. His method of teaching is very spontaneous and visceral and he is always open to adding color to musical compositions because he is interested in developing newer strategies and techniques to retain the sense of uniqueness and enrich the performative quality of music.
When he is not composing, teaching or recording music, Shane loves to play chess, watch movies and even go pick hunting. Teaching comes naturally to Shane as he allows every individual student to express themselves with a diversity of voice, performative abilities and approach.
Bobby Stanton is a world-class educator and master guitarist. Graduating with honors from Berklee College of Music, Bobby was the first recipient of their prestigious “Ovation” award. He has won seven Boston Music Awards and multiple songwriting awards from both BMI and ASCAP and contributes articles for several international music publications including Guitar Player magazine. The exhaustive list of artists Bobby has recorded and played with include: James Taylor, Richie Havens, Del Shannon, Gillian Welch, Martha Reeves, Bo Diddley, Susan Tedeschi, The Temptations, Charlie Daniels, to name a few. Bobby’s uplifting teaching methodology is a perfectly blended balance of style diversity and rock-solid playing technique implemented with achievable milestones for the beginner picking up their first guitar, to the hardened veteran seeking to expand their creative repertoire. Bobby Stanton is a musical Godzilla inspirationally saving the world from mediocrity one student and one note at a time.
Bobby says: “I am a mentor more than a strict disciplinarian. I love my students as if they were my children, and I try to help them to grow in the direction they’ve chosen so that they can fulfill their dreams and contribute back to society."
Bobby’s role at Cambridge Creation Lab is to help students understand their intrinsic qualities of the perception of music in relation to the space around them, to translate interdisciplinary narratives into evocative guitar pieces and to understand above all that the goal of music is to bring together varying chronicles of interdisciplinary thoughts into one form of a transformative performance.
Janne Parviainen was born in Kerava, Finland and currently lives and works in Helsinki, Finland. He was educated in metal art and audiovisual communication in Adulta, Järvenpää in 2005 and in painting and photography at the Hyvinkää Art School in 2003. He has been teaching at the Art School Alfa Art: (drawing, oil color painting, photography) at the Järvenpää Adult Education College (oil color painting, photography) and Kerava Adult Education College (oil color painting) and at Adulta Järvenpää (sculpting). He says: “In my installations I combine anamorphic drawings and light painting. I draw the precise forced perspective lines into my studio walls and floor in order to create an illusion of space inside the physical shape of the actual room. I found it very intriguing to have the illusion of another space while you still can see the shapes of furniture and the room they are situated in. The characters and elements drawn into the installation with light are completed with illuminated, forced perspective drawings.”
Janne works in the visible yet coextensive ethereal spaces between the finite and infinite, light and dark, illusion and reality to aesthetically smudge the distinctions between each. There is a secret sound in the illusion of motion in his light figures that is harmonized with the shapes of silence that he creates through his works. Some of his works are like the airy fluttering butterfly that continually transcends and translates itself and becomes winged in the orbits of the viewer’s imagination. Janne believes that light painting tools can be used as vehicles for new messages that express the purest forms of human longing so they could register onto the consciousness as an affective revelation.
Janne’s “language of light” resonates powerfully as he would extend his ability to seamlessly weave different genres of narratives, graphic representations, typographical styles, references from history, mythology, personal memoirs, photographs with the intention to highlight multimodal narratologies.
When he is not teaching or working on his own installations he is working on his graphic novels or sharing his magic lantern techniques with his children who become light and art themselves as the liquid luminosity almost gets under their skins.
Monalisa Ghosh is a performer, teacher and choreographer and one of the leading exponents of Odissi dance (an Indian classical dance form which celebrates ritualistic yet liberating impulses of temple architecture and sculpture suspended in a romantic, intangible construct of legend and myth). Monalisa’s merit lies in the deft combination of truthfulness to tradition, which accommodates distinct individuality and inspires audiences across continents and cultures. Protected by the prestige of classicism, the sensuality of the physical form is heightened by recurring traditional themes of the soul longing for union with the divine.
Monalisa has performed all over India sharing stage with leading maestros, in prestigious dance festivals and conferences since the year 1983. From 1990 her zest was to make the dance form more familiar to the discerning lovers of Indian Classical dancers in The Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Italy, France, U.S.A., U.K., Tajikistan, Sweden, Denmark,Spain,U.A.E. and Bangladesh.
To restore and preserve this rich classical dance form, she is one of the first contemporary Odissi dancers of Kolkata, to establish a residential Gurukul, inaugurated in 2003 February, in a serene natural atmosphere, named Kalajyoti. Students live in natural surroundings in an ashram-like atmosphere with the Guru, trained on Odissi Dance, Vocal, Percussion, Sanskrit, Yoga, and Aesthetics at the Kalamandap. The main emphasis is given on renewing the waning Indian traditional values and culture and spread it both nationally and internationally.
Her lecture demonstrations around the world delineate the Meditational, philosophical, spiritual, aesthetical and therapeutic value of our Indian classical dance and specially Odissi - in daily life. Her research and findings on classical dance as a therapy has been published in Stuttgarter Zeitung, the German daily.
Monalisa has been Invited as an assistant choreographer with Director Leo Sprecksel to compose Netherlands Contemporary Dance and Odissi Fusion at the premier show of Korzo Theater Netherlands.
She is in the expert committee of Masters Examination of Odissi Dance in Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata, 2018 and has been recognized by the Ministry of Culture, Government of India, as an outstanding choreographer both in traditional Odissi style and contemporary style. She is a maestro in blending chau, Gotipua styles which are associated with spectacular gymnastic movements hovering between bright playful rhythmic performances to powerful Martian energetic, ferocious and even fearful depictions of emotions. She is always traveling to different countries of the world to train aspiring dancers to recreate this dance form outside temple precincts for them to explore its endless possibilities.
At Cambridge Creation Lab, Monalisa would be dreaming and undreaming dance as a performance art to “communicate” interlocked dimensions or forms in various disciplines. She would be incorporating elements of surprise-spontaneity in her choreographies and allowing the body to connect unconnected dots having learned the key techniques of this devotional, theatrical and sensual dance form. They would learn rhythmic accuracy and spatial awareness and understand how to free their minds, emotions the way they want to, design their own bodies through space and realize their truest potential of the research that they have conducted via writing and music and be able to transform the same through their own bodies and thus become the art they have created.
When Monalisa is not teaching or listening to her favorite musical pieces or mentally translating the three-dimensional temple sculptures into actual space, she is busy with her three precious golden retrievers - Shan, Simba and Goldie (who was a rescue dog). Simba is just 3 months old and his favorite pastime is mud-digging and retrieving jackfruit seeds and flaunting it to her and as Monalisa revels in the performative power of such acts of innocent playfulness she says that she rediscovers the simple yet profound acts of “Bhava”(feeling) and “Rasa”(expression) and this helps her tide over life’s daily trials and continue to embrace the sublime in dance performance.
Sreya Sarker is a Graphic Designer and a Printmaker based in Kolkata, India. Her interaction with design has been two-fold where she was, on one hand trained to understand the impact of visual expression on an aesthetic scale through her education in the Government College of Art and Craft, Calcutta and on the other the commercial impact of design was what influenced her understanding of visual presence and application. She had been engaged as a Graphic Designing teacher between 2007 and 2014 where her role was to impart knowledge of designing based on commercially viable design structures to students. The course was planned to structure an idea about the marketability of design and the concept of designing as a commercial option. 2014 onwards Sreya has been involved with an organization aiming at developing community-based craft enterprises. She works directly with traditional rural artists of India who engage in generations long traditions of creative involvement through craft making. Sreya has also been involved in multiple book designing and illustration projects. She has also played the role of a design coach and aptitude analyst for aspiring design students.
Somewhere in the crossings between sensation and expression, image and text, embodied emotions and formless affect flows meaningful statements are made. Through these varied transformist approaches new dynamic ontologies are formed. Tracing the entire process of such mutations inspires a different sense of reality in all the participants or students at CCL. Operating in the here and the now as well as in relation to the past, they open up to moments of productive interdisciplinary and discursive interventions. The creative research practices at Cambridge Creation Lab are intended to embrace narrative analysis or configurations wherein the student researchers are guided through a process of deriving inspiration from many disciplines to present coherent yet spontaneous illustrations and above all understand the true essence of art through cultures.Our integrated approach to this learning will focus intensely on designing concepts and ideas that are highly visual and palpable yet fantastical. Sreya will be responsible for helping students reflect on the dialectical way of seeing and being able to synthesize the visible and the not so visible visualizations and thereby enriching their perceptual capacities.
Sreya is a crowd watcher. She likes noticing behavioral patterns as almost a pass time. Crowd according to her holds the key to every solution to a problem. Every need of design can be understood if a pattern of human beings can be recognized.
