IvaanaRungta, Founder and Director of CCL, is a music researcher, lyrical storyteller, and sound artist based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She specialized in English literature, theater, and music, teaching high school and college students for 12 years before focusing solely on homeschooling her son. After her son’s acceptance to MIT at the age of 15, she rediscovered her passion for writing about her diverse interests—dreams, feelings, memories, challenges, chaos and order, art, and culture—by exploring new dimensions of experience through empirical discoveries and scientific inquiry. Over five years, she dedicated herself to her project, “A Square and a Half—The Colors are Sounding,” which pays tribute to scientific research and aims to create a sense of place and an open process. This project offers a new perspective on the hidden aspects of creation through architectural spaces, the connections between art and mathematics, and the use of structured inquiry to examine and unite poetic and aesthetic intuition. She aimed to foster a fresh viewpoint on narrative, music, and creative writing through spontaneous interactions among technology, mythology, art, design, literature, science, and music. On October 12, 2018, academics, professors, artists, and researchers quietly inaugurated the initiative at the MIT Museum, keeping the event private and unpublicized. This marked the first step toward her long-standing dream of establishing an online school called Cambridge Creation Lab (CCL), focused on creative research projects that blend utopian visions, dialogues, and naturally creative ideas from various fields to help students enhance their imaginations. CCL operates on the idea of an elusive realm where differences can be resolved, allowing multiple fields of study, concepts, practices, mediums, and situations to come together and generate thoughts that transcend precise definitions and are in constant flux. Ivaana has always been captivated by the relationship between human expression and its inherent musicality, expressed through pace, rhythm, melody, repetition, and lyrics. She has been exploring the concept of ‘the human voice as an instrument’ and the potential of words to create sound scores and atmospheres that forge serendipitous connections between lyrical and visual elements. Her work has involved compassionate and transformative collaborations with numerous artists, historians, poets, musicians, and scientists. She firmly believes that an ideal state of being can be attained through creative cooperation and integrating hybridized sensitivities. Ivaana has also delved into ideas about exploring and experiencing space through dance and performance, referring to space as a “long blank handscroll” that must reveal both visible and invisible calligraphic gestures that can manifest in words, design, or other storytelling forms. Her sole objective is to spread colors across the luminous realms of imagination to astonish, innovate, and create something extraordinary. She asserts that the best approach to discovering color-sound connections is employing synesthetic metaphors that naturally bridge disciplines. She contends that visual thinking requires not a “colored brain” but rather an openness to ideas that extend beyond rational processes and cognitive theories. Ivaana believes that “everything converges to form a synoptic image, and when we perceive the changing, discontinuous phenomenology of the material world alongside our unconscious responses as a mosaic formula, we unite feeling and thought.’ Currently, Ivaana is engaged in a distinguished project titled “Disremembering” with American physicist, astronomer, and Executive Editor of Leonardo Publications, Roger Malina, a leading professor of arts and technology and physics at the University of Texas at Dallas, together with Swiss-German composer, sculptor, and artist Thom Kubli.
Her upcoming book, The Shape of Memories, suggests that our recollections are not just abstract concepts but have distinct forms and structures that influence how we perceive the past. This title invites readers to explore how memories are formed, stored, and recalled, emphasizing their tangible impact on our identities and experiences. This book features a collection of discussions, expressions, illustrations, poetry, and fragmented narratives from various conversations with artists, scientists, and scholars.
Her favorite methods of self-discovery include profound observation, careful listening, and fully integrating the breaks, gaps, apparent fragmentation, and subtle differences within disciplines. Additionally, she enjoys performing her chance-based compositions, visualizing illustrations, studying spatial embodiment through imaginative silent choreographies of symbolic dance movements, and discussing baseball with her son, a mathematics graduate from MIT who currently works as a data scientist at the MIT Office of Open Learning.
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