This Open Project investigates how emergent technologies manipulate perception and explores their power to reshape social, political, and environmental systems. Building on previous explorations of perception as an active, malleable force, this year’s iteration grounds the inquiry in a specific site: MCI Concord, the recently decommissioned Massachusetts state prison now awaiting redevelopment.

The site, defined by histories of surveillance, confinement, labor, and contested narratives, becomes a speculative canvas for this Open Project. Students will define their own individual projects inspired by the specific context and the site. They will have the opportunity to investigate how spatial, sensory, and mediated conditions shape perception and behavior, and how shifting, remixing, or “hacking” perception through tools like immersion, simulation, AI interpretation, sound, sensing, mapping, or narrative can open new collective possibilities for sites in flux, including questions of memory and storytelling, surveillance and visibility, ecology and landscape, circulation and thresholds, and future forms of public encounter.

Emergent technologies that blur the boundaries between real and synthetic will serve as tools for reimagining relationships between individuals, communities, and landscapes formerly governed by carceral logics. Through hybrid-media experiments, immersive simulations, and speculative environmental interventions, students will explore how manipulated or augmented perception might transform public understandings of this place.