Cannupa Hanska Luger: Artist as Social Engineer 📅 Monday, May 4 📍 ACT Bartos Theatre ⏰️ 6pm In this lecture, Cannupa Hanska Luger will discuss how his interdisciplinary practice functions as a form of social engineering, developing new methodologies and speculative approaches that reflect Indigenous innovation. He will explore how storytelling, community engagement, and land-based practice inform his work, offering new ways of understanding identity, responsibility, and our shared humanity. The event is free and open to the public, though registration is required. Link in bio for more info and registration! #art #culture #technology #actmit #actmitevent #cannupahanskaluger @mitsap @mitarchitecture @cannupahanska

Thrilled to be hosting the Center for Computational and Diagrammatic Philosophy at MIT next week - join in person or on zoom - ACT MIT and Disintegrator are pleased to present Reasoning Beyond Syntax: The diagrammatic Nature of Artificial Intelligence - A lecture by Fernando Thome, Rocco Gangle and Gianluca Catarina. Classical logic and early Artificial Intelligence were built upon a syntactic paradigm: the idea that reasoning is the manipulation of linear strings of symbols according to fixed rules. In this talk, the argument will be made that this perspective is insufficient for understanding complex systems, particularly modern Large Language Models (LLMs). We propose a fundamental shift toward diagrammatic reasoning not diagrams as mere illustrations, but diagrams as the primary engine of thought. This is demonstrated through Category Theory, Sheaves, and Toposes and prevent that they provide the rigorous mathematical foundation for this shift. Unlike syntactic logic, which processes information serially, diagrammatic mathematics captures reasoning as composition, structure preservation, and context-dependence.

HOOPcycle Milano is a MesoAmerican + contemporary basketball court on wheels designed for and in Italy. Created by architect @segal_rafi and artist @marisa_jahn , @thehoopcycle Milano is stewarded by @corvettostreetbasket and fabricated by @ilvespaio.eu @workbikegs Produced in partnership with the City of Milano (@comune_milano ), HOOPcycle’s premiere at Design Week Milano (Salone) included multiple stops at the city’s castle, a secret location, and at Corvetto’s Piazzale Gabrio Rosa! Photo and video by Marisa Morán Jahn Support from Dole Italia #basketball #bike #publicart

From MIT to Mexico City, work by Art, Culture, and Technology (@actmit ) lecturer Laura Anderson Barbata (@mx_lab ) is now on view at Museo Tamayo (@educacionmuseotamayo ). Wayamou: Common Tongues brings together Barbata and Yanomami artist Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe for the first time, presenting more than one hundred works spanning prints, drawings, paintings, sculpture, and documentary materials. The exhibition traces a collaboration rooted in a single formative encounter: a 1992 visit to the Venezuelan Amazon, where Barbata learned canoe making from the Ye'kuana community and led a papermaking workshop for neighboring communities. Among the young participants was Hakihiiwe, who would go on to become an artist following that experience. Over three decades, their shared practice has deepened into a sustained dialogue around reciprocity, intercultural exchange, ecology, and ancestral knowledge. Hakihiiwe's drawings and prints, inspired by Yanomami basketry and body painting, record the marks and traces of the forest's microscopic world. Together, the works confront the territorial and colonial crises threatening ecosystems and vernacular cultures. As co-curator Andrea Torreblanca writes, "reciprocity finds itself at a fragile and vulnerable moment; for this reason, telling the shared history of these two artists is more urgent than ever." 📍 On view through May 10, 2026 at Museo Tamayo, Mexico City. 🔗 More at the link in bio. 📷 Photographs by Gerardo Landa and Eduardo López (GLR Studio). Courtesy of Museo Tamayo. @mit @mitsap @artsatmit @actmit

Flying Fingers traces the journey of a textile—from sketchbook to loom to finished garment. On April 24, this workshop and exhibition brings into public view work developed in MIT’s Future Heritage Workshop (4.378U / 4.379G), led by Azra Akšamija (@azraaksamija ) in the Art, Culture and Technology program (@actmit ) within the School of Architecture and Planning (@mitsap ). Drawing on Bengali jamdani weaving traditions and research by Abhijit Banerjee (@abhijit_banerjee._ ), students created original motif designs through hand drawing, pattern exploration, and iterative prototyping. Selected works were woven by master weavers Habibul Mallick and Selina Mallick in West Bengal, extending the work beyond the MIT studio into a living craft community. The exhibition also features new garments by Suket Dhir (@suketdhir ) and illustrations by Cheyenne Olivier (@chey.olivier ). It is part of the MITHIC-funded project Performative Preservations and the Economics of Cool (@mitshass ), developed in collaboration with the MIT Center for Art, Science and Technology (CAST, @artsatmit ). 📍 ACT Wiesner Room (E15-207) 🗓 April 24 | 12:15 pm and 1:30 pm 🔗 Info at the link in bio @mit

Milano streetball player @vinnyvince.ig ’s sky-high jumps invoke the choreography of MesoAmerica’s 4,000 year old vertical bball hoops! HOOPcycle Milano is a MesoAmerican + contemporary basketball court on wheels designed for and in Italy. Created by architect @segal_rafi and artist @marisa_jahn , @thehoopcycle Milano was produced in partnership with the City of Milano (@comune_milano ) and @corvettostreetbasket with support from Dole Italia. @thehoopcycle Milano was fabricated by @ilvespaio.eu @workbikegs Premiering at Design Week Milano (Salone) Upcoming dates: April 23 (5-7:30 pm): Secret location! April 25 (10-12:30 pm): Corvetto, Piazzale Gabrio Rosa #basketball #bike #publicart

At the inaugural edition of Art Basel Qatar, "Water Witnesses" by Nida Sinnokrot emerged as a meditation on memory, ecology, and transformation. Presented as a solo project within the fair’s open-format structure, the work brings together industrial water infrastructure—steel pipes, irrigation valves—with hand-formed clay vessels and cast elements, tracing the entanglement of technology, land, and lived experience. The sculptures draw on long-term research into water systems, resource management, and vernacular knowledge, particularly in Palestine. By merging the language of modern utility systems with ancient craft traditions, Water Witnesses reflects on how infrastructures—both visible and invisible—shape access, memory, and care. Sinnokrot is a professor in the Art, Culture, and Technology program (@actmit ) at the MIT School of Architecture and Planning (@mitsap , @mitarchitecture ), where his work and teaching explore the intersections of art, ecology, and systems of governance. 🔗 Read more at the link in bio. 📷 Images courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation. Photos: Sahar Qawasmi. @mit

Episode 13 of Why Arts? – Building Participatory Environments Through Art with @coco_allred Coco Allred In this conversation, I’m in conversation with Coco Allred, a visual artist and educator whose work explores the intersections of public space, aesthetics, and experimental pedagogy. From sculpture and printmaking to participatory environments, Coco creates experiences that invite people to engage, question, and learn with one another—activating space as a site for collective learning and resistance. She is a current master’s student in the Art, Culture, and Technology program at MIT. @actmit In this episode, we also explore how, for children, art becomes a natural extension of play—a space to narrate experiences, express emotions, and grow through iteration. And importantly, how art can also feel challenging. That frustration, that tension, is often where the deepest learning begins. This conversation invites us to think about: ✨ How can art activate spaces for collective learning? ✨ What does it mean to create with others, not just for others? ✨ How can art nurture connection across generations? 🎧 Listen to the full episode on YouTube and Spotify. (PC in order: Carlos Avendano, Heidi Erikson, Studio Gerda and Rosario Oddo)

Artist and theorist Kwan Queenie Li (SMACT ’22) recently published Weeds: A Germinating Theory. She has been photographing weeds across the world. From Jerusalem to Shanghai, Varanasi to Athens, Cairo to Mexico City, she has trained her attention on these unintended but ubiquitous inhabitants of the contemporary urban sphere, finding them dwelling in corners and cracks, in spaces suspended between uses, in ruins and on construction sites. 🌱 Link in bio for more! #art #culture #technology #actmit #actmitalumni #kwanqli #kwanqueenieli #weeds @manymerrybruises @mack_publishing @mitsap @mitarchitecture

Sound as material. Performance as disruption. The Art, Culture, and Technology Program (@actmit ) at MIT (@mit ) welcomes artist Victoria Shen (@evicshen ) for a talk exploring her interdisciplinary practice across sound, performance, and sculpture. Working with custom-built instruments and body extensions, Shen challenges conventional sound production — creating what she describes as “chaotic sound” that resists fixed meaning and passive listening. Her performances are physical, unpredictable, and deliberately destabilizing, probing themes of control, gender, and the body as both subject and instrument. 📍 ACT Cube, MIT E15 🗓 March 30, 6–7:30 pm Free and open to the public (registration required) In collaboration with the List Visual Arts Center and Non-Event. 🔗 https://act.mit.edu/event/artist-talk-with-victoria-shen/ Images courtesy of the artist. @artsatmit @mitarchitecture

Pedro Zylbersztajn: Rehearsal for Return 📍 auroras, São Paulo, Brazil 📆 February 7 – March 28, 2026 A set of images, apparitions, gestures, and referential structures is seen successively across three screens positioned at different points in space. Centered on a video installation conceived from an invitation to occupy the auroras library, the work explores the strange relations between archives and time, turning past, present, and future into a single substance. Pedro Zylbersztajn (SMACT ’18) is an artist and researcher who makes drawings, texts, performances, sounds, installations and videos which aim to reconsider and redesign the protocols of everyday life. Link in bio for more! #art #culture #technology #actmit #PedroZylbersztajn #smact #smactalumni #mitalumni @pedrozylber @auroras.art.br

Artist Talk with Victoria Shen March 30, 2026 ⏰️ 6:00pm 📍 ACT Cube Victoria Shen is an interdisciplinary artist with a focus on sound and performance based in San Francisco. Shen’s practice is concerned with the materiality of sound and its relationship to the human body through a lens of disruption and experimentation. She creates and manipulates custom-built sculptures and extensions specific to her body to challenge conventional methods of sound production and erode the boundaries between performer, tool, and audience. Part of ACT’s Spring 2026 Lecture Series, this program is in collaboration with the List Visual Arts Center and Non-Event. The event is free and open to the public, though registration is required. Register through link in bio! #art #culture #technology #actmit #actmitevents #mitevents #listvisualartscenter #victoriashen #evicshen @evicshen @mitlistarts