Our collaboration with MIT Media Lab Professor Behnaz Farahi and the Critical Matter Group created an interactive projection mapping that transformed MIT’s Great Dome into a storytelling vessel for three nights. The project was part of MIT’s campus-wide Artfinity celebration of creativity and community. Gaze to the Stars was visible on the Great Dome 7:30pm–1am ET March 12–14, 2025.

We created a number of schematic projection scenarios to achieve the desired scale and impact, worked with technical partner AVFX to test at scale off-site, and with Professor Farahi on-site to dial in the projection and shape it to the impressive architecture of the Great Dome.

The stories, hopes, dreams, and desires of 200 participants were displayed as striking close-ups of each person’s eye, projected across the normally austere surface of the MIT Dome. The participants’ words, envisioned as sparkling particles that glitter like stars across their irises, were encoded into video of their eyes; the stories could be decoded in real time on the project’s livestream. An added bonus was the alignment of the middle day of projection with a total lunar eclipse!

Press coverage from WBUR, CBS, WCVB, and WGBH.