Poetic Justice at MIT Media Lab

Poetic Justice at MIT Media Lab is a group of critical thinkers and makers researching social inequality across multiple fields, including social science, to develop artworks in sound, video, multimedia, sculpture and installation.

We question, if “Artists need to create on the same scale as society has the capacity to destroy,” as Sherrie Rabinowitz suggested in 1984, then how can social justice be expanded through conceptual art informed by computational and architectural design strategies? As some mediums are better for some messages than others, we question what new media should be used for these new forms of social justice. If a new form of social justice is searching for our truths, how can we find them at the intersections of oral histories and data studies? How can we create artworks which engage with and furthermore embody these truths? How can these artworks extend our perceptions and expose the social-political systems affecting our truths? How can the forms of these artworks function at the intersections of poetic acts and analytic insights as well as aesthetic quality and social efficacy?