MetaLAB (at) Harvard

🎠⚜️🏹 Next week! Join us on June 23 for a virtual community meeting with and Fredrik Hellberg of Space Popular.

Archives, Virtuality, and the Built Environment 

In this talk Lara Lesmes and Fredrik Hellberg of Space Popular will trace the role of archival research across a series of their major projects, exploring the archive not merely as a repository, but as a generative tool for understanding history and imagining the future. From Freestyle, which drew on RIBA’s collections to examine 500 years of architectural style and its relationship to mass media, to The Portal Galleries — shown at the Sir John Soane’s Museum in London and the MAK in Vienna — which built a database of over 1,000 fictional portals to understand how the collective imagination has conceived of virtual travel, to Search History at MAXXI in Rome, which translated Aldo Rossi’s theories of urban experience into the virtual realm. Most recently, Space Popular completed the Collection Gallery at the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam — an interactive, hybrid installation offering a digital journey through the Nieuwe Instituut’s archive of architecture and design in the Netherlands. 

Space Popular is an architecture studio founded in Bangkok in 2013 that explores the relationships between media and the built environment through research, design, and artworks, directed by Lara Lesmes and Fredrik Hellberg. Both are Professors at the Institute of Architecture at the Angewandte in Vienna.

Join the meeting at the link in our bio. 🔗

🐈‍⬛ 🗃️ Join us next Wednesday, June 3 for a special work-share & mingle with metaLAB Principal and metaLAB visiting fellow !

Cryptocompetence (Ilan Manouach)
We have been taught to fear the black box, to demand that every system open itself to inspection, as though understanding were the price of legitimacy and transparency the cure for everything we cannot see. But the most consequential systems of our age, from protein folding to the markets to the cells that keep us alive, already produce results no one fully comprehends, and they have done so all along. This talk is an invitation to stay inside that condition rather than escape it: to treat the black box not as a fault to be fixed but as a space to think from, and to ask what accountability, traceability, and contestability might look like once we stop waiting for an explanation that may never come.

**

Segments (Kim Albrecht)
One way to understand reality is to divide it, slicing broad categories into ever finer pieces. Science has pursued this method for centuries, and so has commerce, where humans are turned into market segments. The shadowy industry of data brokers has refined this technique for decades, largely out of public view. This exploratory talk investigates the hidden structures of data brokerage through visualization, observing the observers and making the obscurity visible.

**

4:30-5:30 pm - Work-share discussion, 1st floor 
5:30-6:30 pm - Reception & mingle, 4th floor 
42 Kirkland Street, Cambridge

All are welcome (in-person only)
🔗 RSVP at the link in our bio

🧠✨ Tomorrow, April 25, metaLAB’s Director of Art & Education will be joining and ’s AI & Education Symposium as a keynote speaker and workshop lead!

📚 Keynote Panel: AI & the Future of Teaching & Learning (10 AM - 11:15 AM)

What role should AI play in the future of higher education? Join Sarah Newman (Director of Art & Education, metaLAB (at) Harvard), Dr. Seiji Isotani (Associate Professor, Faculty Director of AI & Learning Analytics, Penn GSE), Lydia Logan (VP of Social Impact, IBM Education), Gabriela Gambi (Education Specialist, Inter-American Development Bank), and Dr. Janice Gobert (Professor of Learning Sciences & Education Psychology, Rutgers GSE) for a keynote conversation on AI’s role in teaching and learning. Drawing on perspectives from academia and industry, the panel will examine both the opportunities and challenges AI presents for educators and institutions worldwide.

💡Breakout Session: Moving Beyond “Don’t Use AI”: AI Policies That Actually Work (11:30 AM - 12:30 PM)

In this hands-on workshop, Sarah Newman guides participants through the practical work of developing AI policies that are clear, adaptable, and grounded in pedagogical values. Attendees will leave with frameworks and strategies they can apply in their own classrooms and institutions.

📆 April 25, 2026
📍 Penn Graduate School of Education + online

Learn more at the link in our bio. 🔗