From mid-January to April, world-renowned Detroit DJ, producer and techno innovator Carl Craig will participate in the Michigan State University Federal Credit Union (MSUFCU) Arts Power Up Artist-in-Residence program.

Hosted by the MSU Museum’s CoLab Studio, in collaboration with the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) and sponsored by MSUFCU, the program aims to connect artists, researchers and students together.

Director of MSU Museum Devon Akmon said the program focuses on "bridging the arts and the sciences."

"The MSUFCU Arts Power Up Residency is really about bringing together disciplines to explore new ideas and new ways of working together — thinking about bridging the arts and the sciences, and really in different ways," Akmon said. "This isn't also just about the culmination of a wonderful work of art at the end, although, of course, that's what happens. It's really about challenging our academic community to come together and explore things in new ways."

Similarly, creative director of the CoLab Studio Mark Sullivan said the program was meant to be "interdisciplinary."

"One of the reasons that we focused on interdisciplinarity was that we wanted to do two things. One, we wanted to pull people in the arts into meaningful and productive collaboration with scientists and technologists. We also wanted to pull the scientists and technologists across their scientific orientation into working with artists and demonstrate to the scientists that art can contribute not just in symbolic or metaphorical ways to their disciplines, but actually spur scientific knowledge and research. At the same time, we wanted to demonstrate to the artists that science wasn't this technical, dry thing that didn't really have anything to do with meaningful artistic expression, but could actually reveal exciting and creative approaches that require art to bring it to life, and we wanted to do that across the campus," Sullivan said. "We wanted to create a culture on campus where art-science collaboration could thrive and expand and prosper."

This residency, Akmon said, is the third residency the MSU Museum has been a part of. 

The first two residencies involved creating an open call to find residents to participate in the program. However, Akmon said this time around, Craig was invited to be a resident, based on the previous collaborations he had with the MSU Museum.

"With this particular residency with Carl Craig, we had been doing some work with Carl now for about two years. We first did a presentation with him at WKAR — I think it was in February of 2024, during Black History Month — and that went over really well, having this wonderful Detroit icon of music coming to campus," Akmon said. "And then we did a whole exhibition last year on the rise of techno in Detroit, and Carl again engaged with us through that. So we began to immediately explore the possibilities of the work Carl had done in the past and his expression of interest in MSU. In this case, we actually just worked directly with the artist. We said, 'Here's a great person who's interested, we'd like to work together.'"

This collaboration with Craig through the residency program, Sullivan said, benefits the MSU Museum in different ways.