Future Sketches

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Future Sketches

The Future Sketches Group at the MIT Media Lab is led by Zachary Lieberman

04/07/2026

Join us for a talk with Studio Lemercier () tomorrow, Tuesday April 8 at MIT Media Lab!

Joanie Lemercier is a visual artist and climate activist, and Juliette Bibasse is an independent curator and artistic director. Together they run Studio Lemercier out of Brussels, creating light projections on water, mist, and landscapes—no screens, just light and natural elements. Their work spans immersive installations like Lightfall at Superblue Miami to solar-powered art experiments. They’ll be talking about sailing across the Atlantic, low-tech approaches, and solar futures.

12/31/2025

There are 563 trillion possible black-and-white images living on the 7×7 grid, which references the Media Lab’s visual identity.

mapped them all out.

Instead of stepping through every configuration (an impossible act), you pan, draw, and teleport across possibility. From smiley faces to the MIT Media Lab’s logos, everything already exists somewhere.

Check out our blog for the full write-up.

12/02/2025

Our final lunch lecture features Nathalie Miebach! Join us on Thursday, December 4 @ 12-1pm ET over Zoom.

Nathalie () explores the intersection of art and science by translating scientific data related to meteorology, ecology and oceanography into woven sculptures and musical scores and installations. She is the recipient of numerous awards and residencies, including a Pollock-Krasner Award, TED Global Fellowship, Virginia A. Groot Foundation Grant, and two Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowships. Her work has been shown in the US, Canada, Europe and Australia and has been reviewed by publications spanning fine arts, design, and technology. She lives in Boston.

11/25/2025

Our final lunch lecture is this THURSDAY at noon ET, featuring Nathalie Miebach ().

Nathalie explores the intersection of art and science by translating scientific data related to meteorology, ecology and oceanography into woven sculptures and musical scores and installations. She is the recipient of numerous awards and residencies, including a Pollock-Krasner Award, TED Global Fellowship, Virginia A. Groot Foundation Grant, and two Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowships. Her work has been shown in the US, Canada, Europe and Australia and has been reviewed by publications spanning fine arts, design, and technology. She lives in Boston.

Please refer to the link in our bio for details.

11/17/2025

Next up in our Lunch Lecture series is Jesse Louis-Rosenberg () of Nervous System (.system). Join us at 12:30 ET on Zoom (see our bio)!

Nervous System (.system) is a generative design studio that works at the intersection of science, art, and technology. They create using a novel process that employs computer simulation to generate designs and digital fabrication to realize products. Drawing inspiration from natural phenomena, they write computer programs based on processes and patterns found in nature and use those programs to create unique and affordable art, jewelry, and housewares.

Jesse Louis-Rosenberg is an artist, computer programmer, and maker. Jesse is interested in how simulation techniques can be used in design and in the creation of new kinds of fabrication machines. He studied math at MIT and previously worked at Gehry Technologies in building modeling and design automation.

11/11/2025

Join us for another “Creating with Nature” Lunch Lecture this Friday at noon ET with Jer Thorp. Please find the Zoom link in our bio.

Jer Thorp () is an artist, writer and teacher living in New York City. He is best known for designing the algorithm to place the nearly 3,000 names on the 9/11 Memorial in Manhattan. Jer was the New York Times’ first Data Artist in Residence, is a National Geographic Explorer, and in 2017 and 2018 served as the Innovator in Residence at the Library of Congress. Jer is one of the world’s foremost data artists, and is a leading voice for the ethical use of big data.

10/15/2025

Rebecca’s recent blog post discusses an approach to encoding-decoding Islamic art-inspired constellation patterns. By combining this mathematical abstraction with computation tooling, she recreates classical designs, develops new patterns, and generates freeform—even random—compositions.

10/07/2025

Silverspot is a suite of tools developed by Jessica Stringham () for exploring vast design spaces, with multiple views and navigation strategies.

1 — Get a sense of the space via an infinite scroll

2 — Zoom in and out of variations in a hex grid

3 — Lock and randomize selected parameter groups

4 — Explore embeddings

04/12/2025

Less than a week away to our Live Letters show at ! Come to see how code can make live music and visuals that brings the audience along for the journey!
Featuring
A talk by .lieberman
Visuals by and
Music by
Our exhibit Future Type will be open late to enjoy after the show.
The exhibition and program are part of an ongoing investigation into how technology can extend creative expression, particularly in how we visualize and interact with language in digital environments. The experience offers a glimpse into how tomorrow’s designers might approach the fundamental building blocks of written communication.

03/15/2025

Second year PhD student Lingdong Huang .ng made a digital flute from designing the PCBs to soldering to sampling to performing, inspired by the nose flute he saw in Hainan (second slide)

02/27/2025

Here is a snippet of a new post by our first year masters student Jessica !

“As a machine learning engineer, I love a good parameterization that represents something interesting, like a creative coding sketch, as a core set of interesting numbers. You can sample from distributions and automatically generate values through hyperparameter search methods! You can interpolate! You can explore the latent space!

When I take a screen capture of the output of a system, it also records a snapshot of the full Data Type. In an experiment last fall, I loaded the previous few months of screencap data types, squashed the features into a vector, and ran it through UMAP. UMAP is a way to reduce dimensions that pull items together that are close to each other and nudge things away that are far away. The result was a visual representation of the space I had explored and had found interesting results in. When I saved a new image, it would run the learned mapping and mark where I was on the map.”

The images are four examples of the location in the latent space based only off of the configuration file and the corresponding image. You can read more at www.media.mit.edu/projects/sketching-data-types/

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Cambridge, MA

Website

https://www.media.mit.edu/groups/future-sketches/overview/

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