Feb 20, 2025 — The MIT Open Documentary Lab brings storytellers, technologists, and scholars together to explore the future of documentary through collaborative, interactive, and immersive storytelling using emerging technologies....
Dear friends, The new year is upon us. The work continues. We are committed more than ever to supporting documentary and non-fiction in its multitude of forms and co-creative approaches, and...
Oct 14, 2024 — The MIT Open Documentary Lab brings storytellers, technologists, and scholars together to explore the future of documentary through collaborative, interactive, and immersive storytelling using emerging technologies....
The MIT Open Documentary Lab welcomes three new fellows this semester. Two come to us as joint fellows with our partners Royal Shakespeare Company and Onassis Onx Studio and one...
Visiting Artist Jackson 2 Bears spent two years at the Co-Creation studio and one of the outcomes was a virtual Haudenosaunee long house and creation story. Read all about it...
On May 9th at 8PM, tune in for a journey through history and heritage with the Broadcast & Streaming Premiere of the award-winning documentary 'In Search of Bengali Harlem', a film...
The MIT Open Documentary Lab proudly welcomes our new Spring fellows. Each brings a unique blend of expertise and creativity, harnessing cutting-edge technologies and diverse media to challenge conventions, foster...
Co-Creation Studio's WORLDING Initiative in MIT News Our WORLDING initiative, a partnership between Co-Creation Studio and Unity for Humanity, is featured in MIT News. At the intersection of climate science, real time...
Fellows MIT Campus Retreat in Pictures We ended this semester with a a campus retreat which we wanted to share in pictures. We have many documentarians in our group who meticulously...
We Tell: Fifty Years of Participatory Community Media Date & Time: Friday, December 7th, 7:00 PM Location: 20 Ames St, Bartos Theatre, Lower Level AtriumRoom E15 - 070, Wiesner Building, Cambridge,...
The MIT Open Documentary Lab is thrilled to introduce our new 2023-2024 fellows. As always, they come with a range of backgrounds and expertise and use emerging technologies and many types...
[caption id="attachment_21134" align="aligncenter" width="700"] ODL Fellow and MLK Scholar Louis Massiah chats with Jibo, a working social robot.[/caption] As part of our commitment to hybridity, we brought MIT Open Documentary Lab...
Do you like working at universities? Do you want to be part of a community of artists, scholars and technologists? Do you like immersive and interactive documentaries? Wearing many hats? Is...
June 27, 2023 (Cambridge, Mass.) — We're excited to announce the formal launch of the Access and Disability Innovation Working Group. This group brings together emergent media storytellers, creative technologists, curators, funders,...
May 8, 2023 – Unity Technologies and Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab are excited to announce the second year of WORLDING, an initiative to advance thought and practice at...
Cambridge, Mass. (Mar. 13, 2023) — The MIT Open Documentary Lab is excited to announce Lamont “Jack” Pearley as the inaugural recipient of a new fellowship offered in partnership with...
Spring has sprung at the MIT Open Documentary Lab! This semester, we’ll welcome three new additions to our community. Louis J. Massiah is a documentary filmmaker and the founder/director of Scribe...
Find the application form here. Cambridge, Mass. (Jan. 17, 2023) – The Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab is collaborating with The Indigenous Screen Office (ISO) to offer an intensive four-day incubator for mid-career...
Cambridge, Mass. (Dec. 12, 2022) — The MIT Open Documentary Lab’s (ODL) “Creating Community in Hybrid Festivals” white paper is now available on the ODL website. This white paper is...
Cambridge, Mass. October 20 – We are pleased to announce that our book Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating Media for Equity and Justice will launch at International Documentary Festival of Amsterdam (IDFA) as IDFA’s Recommended...
[caption id="attachment_20977" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Headshots of new fellows Damien McDuffie and Kidus Hailesilassie.[/caption] Cambridge, Mass. (Oct. 13, 2022) — Damien McDuffie and Kidus Hailesilassie have been selected as the third cohort...
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Sept. 27 – The inaugural WORLDING workshop is here! Co-Creation Studio at MIT ODL in collaboration with Unity is thrilled to announce that the 5 teams selected for...
CAMBRIDGE, Mass, August 18 – Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab (ODL) is announcing a cohort of five projects for WORLDING, a workshop in partnership with Unity (NYSE: U), the...
We are pleased to announce that Louis Massiah SM'82 will join the lab as an MIT MLK Visiting Scholar in 2023. Massiah is an award-winning documentarian and the director/ founder of...
Andrea Walls is a conceptual artist using a genre-inclusive, multimedia approach to storytelling, and a recipient of the MIT & Black Public Media Fellowship, hosted by MIT Open Documentary Lab...
February 2, 2022—The MIT Open Documentary Lab brings storytellers, technologists, and scholars together to explore documentary forms and processes with a particular focus on collaborative, interactive, and immersive storytelling using emerging technologies....
January 31, 2022—MIT Open Documentary Lab (ODL) is thrilled to introduce our new ODL Fellows who will be joining us at MIT this semester: Natasha Blatsiou is a Greek writer and documentary filmmaker...
December 15, 2021—Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab is pleased to announce the launch of a new report called JUST JOKING! Deepfakes, Satire and the Politics of Synthetic Media...
[caption id="attachment_20457" align="alignleft" width="612"] Headshot of Tamara Shogaolu [/caption] Cambridge, Mass. (December 10, 2021) — Un(re)solved, an interactive documentary project directed by MIT Open Documentary Lab Fellow Tamara Shogaolu as part of...
Author/Director Mathieu Pradat to pursue project connecting film, architecture, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality during Boston residency Cambridge, Mass. (November 10, 2021) — MIT Open Documentary Lab today announced its collaboration...
Cambridge, Mass. (October 14, 2021) — This year, several members of the Open Documentary Lab (ODL) community will be featured in the Double Exposure Symposium (Oct. 13-15, 2021), which will...
Cambridge, Mass. (October 8, 2021) — “In Event of Moon Disaster'', an interactive website supported by the MIT Open Documentary Lab (ODL) and produced by MIT’s Center for Advanced Virtuality,...
We are thrilled to introduce our new OpenDocLab Fellows who will be (virtually) joining us at MIT this semester: shirin anlen is an artist and creative technologist based in New York. Her artistic...
MIT Open Documentary Lab (ODL) has partnered with LucidWeb (Belgium) to make a unique selection of award-winning 360º films by internationally renowned studios & VR content creators available for one...
(ENGLISH) Cambridge, Mass. (April 7, 2021) — The MIT Open Documentary Lab (ODL) and the University of Antioquia in Medellín, Colombia (UdeA) are launching a two-year partnership supported by MIT’s MISTI...
Fabiano Mixo is a Brazilian artist, filmmaker, and the second recipient of the MIT & Black Public Media Fellowship, hosted by MIT Open Documentary Lab (ODL) and sponsored by MIT...
The MIT Open Documentary Lab brings storytellers, technologists, and scholars together to explore documentary forms and processes with a particular focus on collaborative, interactive, and immersive storytelling using emerging technologies. Join the...
Originally posted on the Co-Creation Studio blog Cambridge, Mass. (January 27, 2021) — Two Virtual Reality projects incubated at Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab will have their world premieres at...
Happy New Year! We are thrilled to introduce our new OpenDocLab Fellows who will be (virtually) joining us at MIT this semester: Fabiano Mixo is a Brazilian artist and filmmaker. He is the...
MIT Open Documentary Lab Fellow Tara Roberts is a journalist, storyteller and changemaker. She is also a 2020-2021 National Geographic Storytelling Fellow and received a grant from National Geographic to...
Originally posted on the Co-Creation Studio blog Cambridge, Mass. (Nov 25, 2020) – Ten Indigenous media scholars and artists have been named ISO-MIT Co-Creation Fellows at Open Documentary Lab 2020-21, during the inaugural Indigenous...
Cambridge, Mass. (November 18th, 2020) — At the 2020 International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, ODL Principal Investigator and Founder William Uricchio announced a new two year-long research initiative with IDFA...
Cambridge, Mass. (October 29th, 2020) – Ten Indigenous media scholars and artists are headed to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) — virtually — next month for the inaugural Indigenous Digital Delegation...
To support the field, MIT Open Documentary Lab and Co-Creation Studio will begin offering pro bono virtual "office hours" for the emerging media and documentary community, starting with 10 available...
Cambridge, Mass. (October 5th, 2020) — Last month, ODL Affiliate Jessica Clark and Carrie McLaren launched Making a New Reality: A Toolkit for Inclusive Media Futures, a project that updates...
Cambridge, Mass. (September 23rd, 2020) — Carla LynDale Bishop is the inaugural recipient of the MIT & Black Public Media Fellowship, hosted by MIT Open Documentary Lab (ODL) and sponsored...
Each year, ODL hosts a limited number of distinguished artists, creative technologists, journalists, and scholars who want to engage deeply with new documentary storytelling techniques and technologies in a collaborative and...
The MIT Open Documentary Lab brings storytellers, technologists, and scholars together to explore documentary forms and processes with a particular focus on collaborative, interactive, and immersive storytelling using emerging technologies. Join the...
By Katerina Cizek | Originally posted on the Co-Creation Studio blog | August 20, 2019 Deepfakes first arrived on the scene in the form of celebrity pornographic videos, revenge porn, fake news, hoaxes, and financial fraud. Now, artists, documentarians...
July 23rd, 2020 Can you recognize a digitally manipulated video when you see one? It's harder than most people realize. As the technology to produce realistic "deepfakes" becomes more easily available,...
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this spring we transitioned our lectures and workshops online and deepened our focus on our online resources Immerse and DocuBase. Here are a few of...
By Amelia Winger-Bearskin, Mozilla Fellow at Co-Creation Studio Wampum.codes is my new podcast. It’s named after wampum, the craft of weaving beads into patterns that represent contracts and other agreements, and was...
Due to new MIT policies in response to COVID-19 and our desire to keep our community safe and healthy, MIT Open Documentary Lab (ODL) has a couple of announcements: All...
UPDATE: This event has been postponed for Fall 2020. MIT’s Open Documentary Lab (ODL) and the Co-Creation Studio will host the Massachusetts premiere of We Tell: Fifty Years of Participatory Community...
[caption id="attachment_18863" align="alignleft" width="290"] Chomsky Vs. Chomsky[/caption] MIT Open Documentary Lab (ODL) and the Co-Creation Studio were heavily represented at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Fellows, grad students, affiliated faculty, and...
The MIT Open Documentary Lab brings storytellers, technologists, and scholars together to explore documentary forms and processes with a particular focus on collaborative, interactive, and immersive storytelling using emerging technologies. Join the...
January 23rd, 2020 Artificial Intelligence (AI) is everywhere – from the photo enhancer in your smartphone to Alexa, the virtual assistant in your kitchen. But what is AI? Aside from the...
Call for Expressions of Interest — Indigenous Digital and Media Creators, Researchers and Scholars Indigenous Screen Office (ISO) Collaborating with MIT’s Co-Creation Studio to Host Indigenous Digital Delegation in Spring 2020 Deadline for...
November 22nd, 2019 In Event of Moon Disaster, an immersive installation that reimagines the story of the moon landing co-created by Halsey Burgund and Francesca Panetta, is having its worldwide premiere...
ODL Fellow Rashin Fahandej’s project “A Father’s Lullaby” is currently featured in the 2019 installment of the ICA biennial James and Audrew Foster Prize exhibition highlighting the work of...
September 25, 2019 Renowned artist/technologist Amelia Winger-Bearskin (Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma) is the new Mozilla Fellow hosted at the Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab. [caption id="attachment_18472" align="alignleft" width="612"] Amelia Winger-Bearskin,...
September 23, 2019 Like many of you, we at the MIT Open Documentary Lab and Co-Creation Studio are closely following the shocking revelations unfolding at our neighbors, the MIT Media Lab,...
Each year, the MIT Open Documentary Lab hosts a limited number of distinguished artists, creative technologists, and scholars who want to engage deeply with the new documentary storytelling techniques and...
Cambridge, Mass. (Aug. 21 2019) — At the 76th Venice International Film Festival, the Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab will celebrate the festival launch of its ground-breaking field...
MIT Open Documentary Lab Publishes First Major Analysis of Collective Media Creation, Including AI, Launches Co-Creation Studio CAMBRIDGE, Mass., June 11 — The Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab is publishing Collective...
by Kat Cizek CAMBRIDGE Mass., May 29 — A women-led Quechuan team from Bolivia brought their Neo-Andean Devil story robot to MIT last week. Storyteller Violeta Ayala and roboticist Camila Claros, supported...
On Friday, May 31st at the 2019 Augmented World Expo, ODL Fellows Kathy Bisbee and Charity Everett were announced as this year’s Nextant prize winners by the Virtual World Society. The...
[caption id="attachment_18012" align="alignleft" width="321"] Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica Winners[/caption] Manic VR, a virtual reality documentary on mental illness and bipolar disorder produced and co-directed by MIT Open Documentary Lab Fellow...
In this issue of Immerse, we launch Immerse’s new research section! It will feature academic and artistic research on immersive media. We’ll include case studies from our new research collaboration...
We have a great line up of speakers this Spring including many XR experts who are part of our Hacking XR speaker series: Noon Lecture Series Spring 2019 2-12-2019 Kenneth Bailey, Design Studio for Social...
The time between semesters is an opportunity to reach out and engage with MIT and local communities. The lab ran a session with Innovators for Purpose on Saturday, February 3rd. Innovators for...
Videos are now available from our symposium, Collective Wisdom: Co-creating with communities, across disciplines, and with non-humans. Field Study ready in February. MANIC VR, co-directed and produced by ODL fellow Sandra...
Summers are busy times at OpenDocLab. No rest for the weary. We’ve been hard at work on our forthcoming co-creation field study and symposium. The symposium, Collective Wisdom, will be livestreamed...
Originally posted on MIT News: School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences Publication Date: May 31, 2018 One of the newest makerspaces on MIT’s campus exists in virtual reality — where students are pioneering a...
ODL fellow Callum Cooper’s latest installation ‘Vavilov: The Correct Planting of Cabbage Seedlings’ is on view at HOME in Manchester for 14 weeks as a part of the show The Return of...
“Snow and Ice Data” experimental film screening curated by ODL Fellow Joe Stele will take place on October 23 at Spektrum, Berlin. The event is a part of LaborBerlin’s colloquium Film in...
ODL Fellow Heidi Boisvert received a grant of $30,000 from The Pop Culture Collaborative for her project futurePerfect Lab – “a boutique creative agency that designs playful and imaginative digital projects exclusively...
OpenDocLab fellow Halsey Burgund led the development of the Access App which improves access to museums for blind and low-vision visitors. Access App is designed and modeled on Roundware, an audio augmented reality tool...
This week, ODL Director Sarah Wolozin and Co-Creation Studio (ODL) Artistic Director Kat Cizek will speak at panels at the Double Exposure Investigative Film Festival in Washington D.C.. Double Exposure...
The Enemy by Open Doc Lab alumnus Karim Ben Khelifa, a groundbreaking interactive Virtual Reality (VR) exhibition and immersive experience, makes its North American premiere at the MIT Museum. Through 360-degree...
We are proud to announce our fellow Anandana Kapur’s outstanding achievements at The Reality Virtually Hackathon hosted by the MIT Media Lab. Anandana was awarded the Leader Award for leading...
Open Doc Lab fellow Callum Cooper was selected to participate in Sundance Institute’s New Frontier Story Lab with his work-in-progress project Porton Down. We interviewed him about his experience. OpenDocLab: Can you tell me...
For the detailed description of each talk, please follow the weekly announcements on our website or visit our Facebook page....
The MIT Open Documentary Lab joins our friends and colleagues in public media, the arts and sciences, and the humanities in urging people to speak out and take action against...
A one-day conference curated by the MIT Open Documentary Lab and Phi, in collaboration with IDFA DocLab and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. Purchase a ticket here. Unstable platforms, rapidly...
Codes & Modes: ReFraming Reality, Virtuality & Non-Fiction Media aims to create an intervention into the uncritical excitement about virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence and machine learning to establish...
Offered in Spring 2017 in conjunction with the MIT class Hacking VR, Hacking VR Speaker Series is presented by the MIT Open Documentary Lab and the MIT Center for Art,...
This coming semester, Open Documentary Lab's William Uricchio, Sandra Rodriguez and Deniz Tortum will be teaching the Hacking VR course at the Comparative Media Studies department. Course Description Mens et manus ...
Open Documentary Lab alum Deniz Tortum's team 'Virtual Collaboration Research' is selected for DesignX, the entrepreneurship accelerator from MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning(SA+P). Virtual Collaboration Research is developing Mediate, an...
Our recent conference brought together scholars, technologists, and artists from around the globe to discuss the language, implications, and future of virtual reality and documentary. VR is capturing the imagination of documentary...
Guy Maddin and his partners are communing with the spirits of long-lost movies. In a conversation with William Uricchio, Maddin will discuss why we should bother digging up filmic and...
COME/IN/DOC - Collaborative Meta Interactive Documentary - is a transmedia meta-documentary that reflects on the interactive documentary. It consists of 3 interconnected parts: a documentary series, a multimedia platform and...
Originally published in Confessions of an Aca-Fan, the original Weblog of Henry Jenkins. Charting Documentary’s Futures: An Interview with William Uricchio [Part Four] The report’s focus on immersion as a dimension of...
Originally published in Confessions of an Aca-Fan, the original Weblog of Henry Jenkins. On the documentary side, the American public has probably never had access to as many different documentaries as...
Originally published in Confessions of an Aca-Fan, the original Weblog of Henry Jenkins. You argue that the story should dictate the form, yet many aspects of the form of American journalism...
Profile: William Uricchio of MIT's Open Documentary Lab from Submarine Channel on Vimeo. Originally published in Confessions of an Aca-Fan, the original Weblog of Henry Jenkins. For the better part of a...
Supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The MIT Open Documentary Lab conducted an eight-month research project mapping and assessing the dynamics of an ongoing convergence between...
OpenDocLAb Fellow, Lara Baladi will take part in Anxious to Act, part of Conversation Piece Transmediale Berlin this February. On Saturday, February 6, Baladi will participate with her project Vox Populi, Archiving a Revolution in the Digital Age,...
The MIT Open Documentary Lab received a grant this Fall for $175k from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to map and assess the intersection of new documentary...
On October 10, 2014, under the auspices of the MacArthur Foundation, the OpenDocLab invited more than 50 journalists, documentarians, and academics to MIT to discuss the challenges and potentials of integrating new documentary...
The final major project to emerge from the National Film Board of Canada's HIGHRISE, DIGITAL CITIZENSHIP is a documentary and academic collaborative study investigating the invisible digital lives and stories...
During the #Jan25 revolution—the hashtag used by online activists during the 2011 Egyptian uprising—the world watched as Egyptians toppled their president, Hosni Mubarak, transforming Tahrir Square into a vibrant place for...
MIT's School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences profiles the OpenDocLab: "The documentary field now is like looking at the first five to eight years of television...
OpenDocLab Artist-in-Residence Suvi Helminen talks with Principal Investigator William Uricchio in this Dox Magazine profile of the lab and the history of documentary's relationship with new media technology: From a technological...
The MIT Open Documentary Lab is pleased to announce its new fellows for the academic year 2014-2015. This distinguished group of documentary storytellers and experts will be in residence at...
While working on his master's thesis at the MIT Media Lab, OpenDocLab Research Affiliate Alexander Reben began developing his question-asking robot, BlabDroid. In an article for Fast Company titled "This Artist...
Filmmaker Magazine features The MIT Open Documentary Lab's DocuBase in "MIT Open Documentary Lab Launches _docubase," an article by Sarah Salovaara. “As a consumer of new media – to say nothing of its makers – how does one...
Laura Almo surveys the MIT OpenDocLab in her article "New Models in Documentary Education: Labs at MIT and Harvard Move the Form Forward," published in the International Documentary Foundation's Documentary Magazine. "The MIT Open Documentary Lab,...
With support from the Fledgling Fund, the MIT Open Documentary Lab is partnering with the Tribeca Film Institute to bring together leading social impact assessment researchers and practitioners to...
In 2013 and 2014, OpenDocLab graduate students attended the Sundance Film Festival as part of the Creating Critics program, a joint initiative between MIT and Sundance. The students focus specifically...
The MIT Open Documentary Lab is pleased to announce its artist and research affiliates for the academic year 2013-2014. By participating in Lab activities, this inaugural group of artists, journalists,...
The MIT Open Documentary Lab is a recipient of an Art Works grant from the National Endowment for the Arts! The grant will help the lab build a curated online...
Open Documentary Lab Director Sarah Wolozin was featured in Indiewire's Movie Lovers We Love column. In the interview, Wolozin talked about the MIT OpenDocLab and the interactive documentary field at...
How can filmmakers and technologists collaborate? The MIT Open Documentary Lab and Filmmaker magazine are tackling this key question through a new 12-part blog series. OpenDocLab Director Sarah Wolozin explains the...
The Tribeca Film Institute's Social Justice Impact Assessment Project, created together with the MIT OpenDocLab, is a Fledgling Fund grantee! MIT is one of the organizations partnering with Tribeca to create...
We've had an exciting month here at the MIT Open Documentary Lab. In addition to braving the blizzard of the decade (it's been a week since Nemo, and we're still...
OpenDocLab Research Affiliate Alexander Reben's robot filmmaker Boxie will be appearing in the Tribeca Film Institute's upcoming Storyscapes exhibition as "Robots in Residence." According to the New York Observer, A considerably...
Angelica Das recapped the MIT OpenDocLab's panel at the Sundance Film Festival for American University's Center for Social Media. Each year at the Sundance Film Festival I try to answer a...
The Submarine Channel recently profiled OpenDocLab Principal Investigator William Uricchio. In addition to his work at the OpenDocLab, Uricchio is the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and...
Mandy Rose, Senior Research Fellow at the Digital Cultures Research Centre, University of the West of England, and the force behind the CollabDocs blog profiled Moments of Innovation in her...
Julia Scott-Stevenson reviews Moments of Innovation for Seven Billion Stories and Counting in "Everything Old is Innovative": Interactive documentary gets meta with newest contribution to the form Moments of Innovation. An...
Albert Lee of the Los Angeles Times named MIT OpenDocLab and IDFA DocLab's Moments of Innovation as the best of the web. According to Lee, The MIT Open Documentary Lab and...
Sara Archambault recaps the MIT OpenDocLab event "The People Formerly Known as the Subjects," given by Katerina Cizek and Gerry Flahive of the National Film Board of Canada's HIGHRISE project...
Work with Katerina Cizek and Gerry Flahive, the Emmy award-winning team behind HIGHRISE, a multi-year, many-media collaborative documentary experiment at the National Film Board of Canada. TUESDAY, OCTOBER 23 9am-12pm MIT Bld E15,...
Christine Walley and Chris Boebel are working on an online interactive documentary as part of the transmedia Exit Zero Project. The project also includes an award-winning book Exit Zero: Family and Class in...
Lauren Landry of Bostinno.com profiles the MIT OpenDocLab following the 2012 New Arts of Documentary symposium. In "With Cell Phones, Everyone’s a Filmmaker: How MIT’s Open Documentary Lab is Exploring...
The Neiman Journalism Lab's Andrew Phelps interviewed OpenDocLab Director Sarah Wolozin and Principal Investigator William Uricchio following the 2012 New Arts of Documentary symposium at MIT. The talk focused on...
The New Arts of Documentary is an invitation-only daylong summit hosted by MIT Comparative Media Studies on March 20th, 2012. The event is about collaboration. It will privilege conversation over presentation....
Bengali Harlem is an ongoing project by filmmaker and scholar Vivek Bald using different media – web, print, and video – to document the histories of two little-known groups of...