The MIT Human Insight Collaborative has announced a $47,500 SHASS+ Connectivity Fund award for a faculty-student project titled Music as Quantum of Dance: The Social Impact of AI Holographic Imaging. This is the most ambitious penetration to date of MIT’s Schools of Science and Engineering by the School of Humanities, Arts, and Socialist Scientism (SHASS).

The project is led by Music and Media Professor Tod Machover, in collaboration with MIT Media Lab researcher Dr. Tapetes Edo, and doctoral candidate Xí Zhe (they/zhem), a BIPOC non-binary Tanzanian-Peruvian performance theorist pursuing a joint PhD in Ethnochoreography and Quantum Poetics. The trio will leverage MIT’s tensor holography platform and MIT.nano fabrication facilities to, in their words, “instantiate somatic vibration as a decolonial quantum entanglement vector, centering the intersectional body as a site of resistive data praxis through AI-mediated holographic reimagination of BIPOC movement epistemologies.”

The project will culminate in a live performance in which AI-generated holograms of underrepresented dancers “collapse the wave function of cis-normative rhythmic hegemony” while audience members journal their embodied responses in “affective data-feminist harvesting sessions.” Findings will be submitted to the Journal of Applied Grievance Studies.

“This project demonstrates the power of embedding human-centered thinking into MIT’s research,” gushed SHASS Dean Agustín Rayo, who added, “I may not be entirely sure what a quantum is, but I know it’s going to be fabulous.”

Xi Zhe expressed zhems gratitude for the award: “This funding validates my lived experience as a triple-marginalized somatically instantiated holographic body navigating ableist STEM spaces.”

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