Unbounded: Transmedia Storytelling @ MIT 2019-2021

Virtual productions by students across MIT engaging with the Transmedia Storytelling Initiative, 2019-2021

Physical Location: Wiesner Student Art Gallery, W20-209

Virtual Location: http://transmedia.mit.edu/unbounded

Time: October 18 - November 23, 2021**

**Please note, the exhibition will remain open virtually. Click here to explore!

Architectural modeling was once a 2D affair. New virtual production tools and laser scanned point clouds have brought robust 3D capacities into the hands of makers across disciplines, uniquely capable of benefitting from the convergence of the spatial story-telling capacities of designers and the narrative urgencies of today.

The tools of 3D modeling and storytelling were well-known before the global pandemic, but their use in teaching and production has dramatically accelerated under the pressure of remote learning situations.  Students are burning with the desire to create immersive spatialized worlds, bringing their experience as gamers and makers to bear on the social issues they feel passionate about. Projects on exhibition will range from the cellphone that tells the story of its possession by a recycled predecessor suffering as e-waste, to the cinematic split screen that toggles between a pandemic workstation occupied by a human and its clean, virtual clone, to the point-cloud interactive metaverse now associated with memory itself.

Exhibition venue will be the Wiesner Gallery in the MIT Student Center at the heart of campus, a hub of activity for the MIT community of 40,000 students, post-docs, staff, and faculty. Positioned as the main Fall Semester exhibition, Unbounded will include monitor loops of videos documenting 3D and other projects, a full graphic timeline of the 100+ transmedia student projects, and a carefully curated showcase for the best immersive XR and projection works by students in professional graduate programs such as Architecture, visual art (the Art, Culture, Technology program), and Comparative Media Studies.

Produced by the Transmedia Storytelling Initiative, MIT*

* Additional partnership from MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST), MIT.nano, MIT Center for Advanced Virtuality, Virtual Experience Design Lab at MIT, The Art, Culture, and Technology program (ACT) at MIT, Department of Architecture at MIT.