MIT Open Documentary Lab

✨HAPPENING NEXT WEEK AT ROBBINS LIBRARY IN ARLINGTON✨

The MIT Open Documentary Lab and IXRDC (Independent XR Distribution Coalition) presents a Artist Talk at Robbins Library, Arlington:
🎥Art as Ecosystem: Rethinking Immersive Media Through Community and Care: Immersive storytelling as a community-centered practice that transforms technology into a tool for connection, care, and collective voice.
About the artist: Rashin Fahandej is an Iranian-American immersive filmmaker, futurist, and cultural activist whose “Art as Ecosystem” methodology uses long-term community engagement and co-creation to reimagine social systems across differences while expanding access to emerging technologies.
📍 Robbins Library, Community Room, 700 Mass Ave, Arlington, MA
🗓 Thursday, June 4 | 6-7:30 PM

Part of Libraries as Immersive Storytelling Hubs, a civic research initiative by the MIT Open Documentary Lab exploring how public libraries can become spaces for immersive storytelling, community engagement, and new ways of knowing.

Upcoming VR Pop-Ups at other MA libraries:
📍 Robbins Library — June 6
📍 Boston Public Library: Mattapan Branch — June 24 & July 14
📍 Medford Public Library — July 13 & July 27

And more to come…

Upcoming artist talks and workshops:
✨ Michaela Ternasky-Holland , Peabody-nominated & Emmy award-winning director

✨ Michèle Stephenson , Emmy award-winning filmmaker, artist, and author
✨ Sister Sylvester , multimedia artist
✨ L’Merchie Frazier , American artist, educator, and poet

With generous support from

WatertownLibrary PublicLibraries VR ImmersiveMedia CivicMedia InteractiveDocumentary IXRDC

✨HAPPENING NEXT WEEK AT ROBBINS LIBRARY IN ARLINGTON✨

Step into immersive storytelling! 🎧✨

The MIT Open Documentary Lab and IXRDC (Independent XR Distribution Coalition) present at Cambridge Public Library:

🎥 IMMERSIVE DOCUMENTARY POP-UPS
📍 Robbins Library, Community Room, 700 Mass Ave, Arlington, MA
🗓 Saturday,, June 6 | Drop in 11 AM – 4 PM

Experience groundbreaking virtual reality works by trailblazing artists exploring climate change, identity, immigration, indigeneity, racial injustice, disability, memory, and civic life.

Featured projects include:
• Ice Sailors
• Less Than Five Grams of Saffron
• Travelling While Black
• You Destroy. We Create.
• Notes on Blindness
• Danse, Danse Matisse
…and more.

Part of Libraries as Immersive Storytelling Hubs, a civic research initiative by the MIT Open Documentary Lab exploring how public libraries can become spaces for immersive storytelling, community engagement, and new ways of knowing.

Upcoming VR Pop-Ups at other MA libraries:
📍 Boston Public Library: Mattapan Branch — June 24 & July 14
📍 Medford Public Library — July 13 & July 27

And more to come…

Upcoming artist talks and workshops:
✨ Rashin Fahandej , Iranian-American immersive filmmaker, futurist, and cultural activist

✨ Michaela Ternasky-Holland , Peabody-nominated & Emmy award-winning director

✨ Michèle Stephenson , Emmy award-winning filmmaker, artist, and author
✨ Sister Sylvester , multimedia artist
✨ L’Merchie Frazier , American artist, educator, and poet

With generous support from

WatertownLibrary PublicLibraries VR ImmersiveMedia CivicMedia InteractiveDocumentary IXRDC
Edited · 2w

Step into immersive storytelling at your local library! 🎧✨

The MIT Open Documentary Lab and IXRDC (Independent XR Distribution Coalition) present:
🎥 IMMERSIVE DOCUMENTARY POP-UPS
📍 Watertown Library — 123 Main St, Watertown, MA
🗓 Saturday, May 9 | Drop in 12–3 PM
🗓 Thursday, May 28 | Drop in 4–7 PM

Experience groundbreaking virtual reality works by trailblazing artists exploring climate change, identity, immigration, indigeneity, racial injustice, disability, memory, and civic life.

Featured projects include:
• Ice Sailors
• Less Than Five Grams of Saffron
• Travelling While Black
• You Destroy. We Create. 
• Notes on Blindness
• Danse, Danse Matisse
…and more.

Part of Libraries as Immersive Storytelling Hubs, a civic research initiative by the MIT Open Documentary Lab exploring how public libraries can become spaces for immersive storytelling, community engagement, and new ways of knowing.

Upcoming VR Pop-Ups at other MA libraries:
📍 Cambridge Public Library — May 14
📍 Arlington Library — June 4 & June 6
📍 Mattapan Public Library — June 24 & July 14
📍 Medford Public Library — July 13 & July 27
And more to come…

Upcoming artist talks and workshops:
✨ Rashin Fahandej , Iranian-American immersive filmmaker, futurist, and cultural activist
✨ Michaela Ternasky-Holland , Peabody-nominated & Emmy award-winning director
✨ Michèle Stephenson , Emmy award-winning filmmaker, artist, and author
✨ Sister Sylvester , multimedia artist
✨ L’Merchie Frazier , American artist, educator, and poet

With generous support from

WatertownLibrary PublicLibraries VR ImmersiveMedia CivicMedia InteractiveDocumentary IXROC

Join us for a Public Talk (online) - Examination of Burden of Other People’s Dreams: The creative process behind a film/book story world

Joe Bini and Tabitha Jackson will discuss the animating ideas and creative process behind Joe Bini’s latest immersive story world piece, Burden of Other People’s Dreams: Book One, Ganymede.

Best described as a “book-film,” Burden of Other People’s Dreams: Book One, Ganymede is an e-book that comes to life as a cinema experience, designed to be taken in by one person at a time, at their own pace. Similar in ways to a graphic novel, it crosses the interiority of being a reader with the visceral presence of being a film watcher and presents a story world framed in three storytelling traditions: oral, written word, and cinematic. It also questions the role of authorship, believing that stories are a shared experience that exist in an in-between space.

Over the course of his personal filmmaking career, Bini has been developing a more conversational, everyday language of filmmaking. This has led him to his current project, Burden of Other People’s Dreams.

Showing clips from foundational films in his editing and personal work, Bini will discuss the steps that led to the language of his book film.

Moderated by Tabitha Jackson.
📅 Tuesday, April 7, 2 - 3:30 PM EST
📍 Join Zoom Link Below

Don’t miss the WORLD PREMIERE of ’s at on Saturday, March 14 –  a must-see experience of six location-based interactive works that reveal unseen dimensions of Austin’s public spaces. Learn more at https://bit.ly/4rJoNca

🎟️ Book a tour at link in bio! 🔗

We are thrilled to announce Layers of Place: Austin will premiere at on March 15 - 17! Layers of Place is a site-responsive AR exhibition that transforms Austin’s public spaces into portals for memory, dialogue and imagination, revealing hidden histories and speculative futures through location-based works created in dialogue with community partners. Comprising of six different AR experiences, Layers of Place will take over the city of Austin in a first of its kind exhibition at SXSW.

Join Agog’s How to Fest Community Meetup tomorrow at 4pm ET / 1pm PT for a sneak peak at one of our experiences, the Founders Pillars, and hear from the project’s research scientist Sarah Wolozin and artist Rashin Fahandej

LAST WEEKEND IN LOS ANGELES. 🌌

The Music Center LA Presents Black Planetarium: Uncharted Anthologies is now in its final days. Created by Ethiopian American artist and alum Kidus Hailesilassie .hailesilassie, this immersive installation invites audiences into breath, movement, sound, and shared listening: a collective rehearsal for other worlds of Pan‑African knowledge‑making.

Rooted in 6,000 years of African traditions, the work draws from Hailesilassie’s Ancestral Algorithm (2020)—a cartography of 6,500 symbols across 20 African languages—and expands into textiles, moving image, installation, and virtual reality.

Uncharted was incubated at MIT Open Documentary Lab.

Don’t miss the chance:

📍 Digital Arts Space on Jerry Moss Plaza @ The Music Center in DTLA
🕒 Saturday – Sunday, Dec 13 - 14: 2:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.
🎟️ FREE with RSVP (link in bio)

Join us for a conversation between Syrian-Armenian-American storyteller and Hakawati founder Sona Tatoyan and Lebanese-Armenian-Canadian-American Entrepreneur and Moderna Co-Founder Noubar Afeyan, two visionary Armenian diaspora leaders bound by heritage and a shared mission to heal the world: one through art and the other through science. Hear how they turned their genocidal legacies and experience with oppressive regimes into triumphant acts of resilience, creativity, and healing. Learn how they innovate and iterate to create groundbreaking work in the arts and sciences. How does storytelling heal societal wounds? Can scientific leaps mirror artistic epiphanies and vice versa? How do their legacies inform their work and mission? What advice do they have for scientists and artists working in today’s climate? They will discuss these questions and more.

Moderated by Professor Lerna Ekmekcioglu.

📅 Friday, October 24, 6-7:30 PM
📍 MIT Museum, 314 Main Street, Lee Family Exchange Space, Cambridge, MA 02142
🎟️ RSVP: Link in bio 🔗

This event is generously supported by the MIT Program in Art, Culture, and Technology and Radius

We are thrilled to welcome five new fellows this semester by way of our partnerships with Onassis ONX Studio, Royal Shakespeare Company and through our Co-Creation Studio. They represent a range of disciplines including documentary, theater, games and art. They are from left to right May Abdalla , Asha Easton, Navid Khonsari , Pei-Ying Lin , and Neda Moridpour . They will be in fellowship with our three returning fellows. You can learn more about them here!
https://opendoclab.mit.edu/introducing-new-mit-opendoclab-2025-2026-fellows/

There is still time to see Uncharted VR this weekend at Tribeca Immersive 2025.

By ODL Alum Kidus Hailesilassie (.hailesilassie) and incubated at MIT Open Documentary Lab, Uncharted VR is an immersive cosmic choreography where the body becomes a vessel for ancestral storytelling. Mapping 6,500 cosmology of languages rooted in African and diasporic writing systems, this installation converges ancestral knowledge and AI data sculpture with one of the world’s oldest technologies - the human body. Through dance, this language archive comes alive in a new form of pan-African storytelling.

Come experience the work at Tribeca Immersive in NYC. The exhibit is still on view this weekend:

🗓️ June 28–29 (Saturday & Sunday), 1 - 7 PM ET
📍WSA, 161 Water Street, 5th & 6th Floors
🎫Tickets are available on Tribeca’s website (link in bio)

✨ We are grateful to .onx, and for the wonderful curation, vision and generosity that made this all possible.