After Dark is a monthly after-hours event created by the MIT Museum. Attendees will enjoy a variety of hands-on making demonstrations, conversation, and interactive play accompanied by live music and a pop-up cash bar featuring artisan lite bites by culinary specialists from around the city.

As part of the Artfinity festival, the March edition of After Dark celebrates the artistic and cultural community at the Institute and is free and open to adult members of the public (18+). No registration necessary; admission is available on a first-come, first-served basis. Come explore, create, and connect; whether you’re an artist, a tech enthusiast, or simply curious, there’s something here for you.

‍

Don’t miss this expanded celebration of art in all its forms, including activities available in the MIT Museum throughout the evening:

• Live DJ sets
• Food and drink available for purchase
• The galleries are open, including two exhibitions of work by MIT faculty.
  • Rania Ghosn's Cosmograph: Speculative Fictions for the New Space Age, an exhibition that brings art and science together to examine possible futures where outer space is both a frontier for human exploration and a new territory for exploitation and development by private enterprise.
  • Professor and Director of the Art, Culture and Technology program Azra Akšamija’s Hallucinating Traditions‍ is a 5-channel video installation that utilizes AI to envision future iterations of traditional fashion. Aksamija’s speculative designs blur cultural and temporal boundaries, prompting viewers to reconsider the notion of ‘traditional’ as a construct of the imagination.
• Engage in a unique drawing experience with a Flash Portrait Session! You'll be paired with a stranger to carefully observe and draw them without looking at your paper or lifting your pencil. This will provide a preview of MIT Face to Face, a collective event and pop-up exhibition inspired by Congregation, an artwork by Es Devlin, the 2025 Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts recipient.
• Challenge traditional ideas of solo artistry by embracing play and co-creating new forms alongside artist and MIT graduate student Coco Allred.
• Design textile patterns inspired by plant intelligence and explore how plants adapt to climate change, pollution, and migration with MIT Future Heritage Lab's Telltales of Tide and Terra co-creation project.
• Join us in creating climate critters as we think about sustainability with Interwoven, a data visualization exercise with Sara Wilson, Supreetha Krishnan, and Marwa Al Alawi.
• At 7:00–7:20pm, take a closer look at Gaze to the Stars by award-winning designer Behnaz Farahi and her team at the Critical Matter Group at the Media Lab, which transforms the MIT dome into a living canvas that reflects the resilience and aspirations of those who have shaped, and been shaped by, the MIT experience. Join Farahi to explore how she is using technology in critical and transformative ways—sparking the imagination, provoking conversation, enhancing perception, augmenting social interaction, and empowering voices that have not been heard. The talk will be introduced by MIT Museum Director Michael John Gorman.

‍

Additional Artfinity events happening on campus

After Dark attendees are invited to expand their evening and engage with additional Artfinity events taking place at nearby locations on campus including:

‍

MIT Media Lab

• Observe MIT’s active mission to the Moon from Mission Control, a custom designed and built structure inspired by the basalt-rich terrain of the lunar surface
• Boston premiere of MAICE composed by professor Tod Machover for marimba, electronics, and a new live AI system created at the Media Lab by PhD student Manaswi Mishra
• Voyage through the Media Lab building, exploring the relationship between space-and-sound with live performances by Ana Schon

‍

Open Spaces

• View a screening of Intervention: Ocean Blues (Behind-the-scenes), 2018, a behind-the-scenes look at Laura Anderson Barbata's Intervention: Ocean Blues, a performance featuring The Brooklyn Jumbies Stilt Dancers in Bushwick, New York in 2018.

‍

Wiesner Building E15 // List Visual Arts Center

• Encounter List Projects 31: Kite, an exhibition where dreams become ancestral technology in Kite's multifaceted works, translating visions into a geometric visual language rooted in Lakȟóta traditions

‍‍

Wiesner Building E15 // Art, Culture and Technology Gallery and Cube

• Examine the complex history of the United Fruit Company, a global banana exporter with deep ties to Greater Boston and MIT, via original artworks displayed alongside archival objects, photographs, documents, and ephemera exhibited in Golden Cargo: Conquest of the Tropics

‍

MIT Welcome Center

• Contribute to a collaborative art installation featuring Wide Tim
• Connect with artists and creatives from Cambridge and MIT at an informal speed networking session‍
• Get immersed in traditional rhythms and cultural knowledge at a drum circle led by Indigenous musicians

‍

Exterior of the MIT Dome

• Reflect on the resilience and aspirations of those who have shaped, and been shaped by, the MIT experience through professor Behnaz Farahi's Gaze to the Stars

‍

MIT Museum Studio

• Visit the Argus Installation, a collaboration between members of the MIT Glass Lab, MIT Museum Studio, Media Lab, and Edgerton Center that explores the stunning interplay of light and hand-blown glass. This installation features a projection system that magnifies the intricate structures within the glass—traces of its handmade creation—transforming these microscopic details into an immersive, room-scale experience.

‍

Along the Infinite Corridor (MIT Stratton Student Center Lawn, Lobby 7 Portico, Infinite Corridor)

• Layers of Place reimagines MIT's campus as a tapestry of dialogues across time and space, using augmented reality (AR) to reveal hidden histories, stories, and perspectives where physical sites meet digital spaces through three featured projects—The Fovnder's Pillars; 1 to Infinity, MIT; and Moving Memory.