The 33-inch original model of the ‘Starship Enterprise,’ from the 1960s “Star Trek” series, will be on display at the MIT Museum from Sept. 30 to March 28, writes reporter Mark Feeney for The Boston Globe. “We are thrilled to have the opportunity to show this unique model,” says MIT Museum Director Michael John Gorman. The model “is not merely a prop; it’s a time capsule of human aspiration.”
Members of MassLive’s “25 Most Influential Innovators of 2026” list, which includes President Sally Kornbluth and a number of other MIT faculty and alumni, gathered at the MIT Museum to “discuss the forces shaping the future of innovation in Massachusetts,” writes reporter Tréa Lavery. “MIT Provost Anantha Chandrakasan said about half of undergraduate students at the school are studying some form of computing, and enrollment in those courses has gone up in recent years, prompting professors and administrators to rethink how they incorporate AI into their teaching,” writes Lavery.
MIT’s inaugural Future Fest, a new festival exploring the future of science, technology, art, and design will be held across the MIT campus from Sept. 30 to Oct. 4, writes Mark Feeney for The Boston Globe. “More than 50 events looking at art, design, science, technology, and their interactions will be held on the MIT campus,” the staff write. “Those events held at the museum will be free throughout the festival, which concludes on Oct. 4 with the Cambridge Science Carnival.”
MassLive’s Joshua Macht explains how the MIT Museum is a “fitting” setting to host the honorees of MassLive’s “Most Influential Innovators” list, which includes President Sally Kornbluth and a number of other MIT faculty and alumni. “The museum welcomes all to participate in MIT’s unique culture of problem solving and playful creativity,” writes Macht. “It is also producing the inaugural MIT Future Fest, a new, annual festival exploring the future of science, technology, art and design.”
Boston Art Review’s Kim Córdova spotlights coverage of the MIT Museum’s “No Recombination Without Representation,” an immersive theatrical reenactment honoring the fiftieth anniversary of a little-known Cambridge City Council meeting that has had major historical impact beyond the local community.
Writing for the Observer, Michael John Gorman, director of the MIT Museum, points to the 1976 Cambridge Experimentation Review Board, a group of citizens tasked with weighing the risks and benefits of DNA splicing technology, as a solution to modern debates over AI. “The dominant assumption in the AI debate is that there are only two options: reckless acceleration or fearful prohibition,” writes Gorman. “Cambridge in 1976 proved there is a third path, and that it runs through the public rather than around it.”
The archive of the renowned architect and alumnus I.M. Pei ’40 - including 1,500 rolls of architectural drawings, 50 models, and 1,000 linear feet of manuscripts – will be coming to the MIT Museum, reports Mark Feeney for The Boston Globe. “This landmark donation marks the homecoming of I.M. Pei to MIT,” says MIT Museum Director Michael John Gorman. “The MIT Museum is thrilled to steward his legacy and, together with MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, establish a global hub for the study of I.M. Pei.”
Fast Company reporter Nate Berg spotlights how the full archive of architect and alumnus I.M. Pei ‘40 will be housed at the MIT Museum, noting that the collection will be the largest single repository of works by Pei. “I think there’s something really fascinating about architectural projects that are not necessarily burdened by the realities of building,” says Jonathan Duval, assistant curator of architecture and design at the MIT Museum. “Those are moments where you can really see what an architect’s priorities and intentions might have been.”
Designboom reporter Kat Barandy spotlights how a new video “traces the technical process behind ‘Remembering the Future,’ the woven work by Janet Echelman at the MIT Museum.” The piece, which was developed during Echelman’s MIT Center for Art, Science and Technology (CAST) residency in collaboration with Prof. Caitlin Mueller, “uses braided fibers to translate climate data into a suspended artwork.” The MIT Museum operates, in the words of Museum Director Michael John Gorman, as “a playground for ideas, as a living lab.”
Florencia Pierri, associate curator of Science and Technology at the MIT Museum, speaks with NPR’s All Things Considered host Andrea Shea about the 150th anniversary of the world’s first telephone call. Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, “didn’t set out to create a telephone,” explains Pierri. “He set out to create a better telegraph. But still had this idea of, like, ‘wouldn’t it be cool if I could talk to somebody, even if I wasn’t right there in the room with them?’”
Vogue editor Lisa Wong Macabasco spotlights “Lighten Up! On Biology and Time,” a new exhibit at the MIT Museum that “traces the rhythms of life itself: circadian patterns, light’s command over the body, and the delicate architecture of alertness and rest.” The exhibit features “18 works that blend science and art, from immersive soundscapes to visualizations of circadian patterns and reflective spaces where you observe your own heartbeat and alertness in new ways,” explains Macabasco.
Boston Globe reporter Annie Sarlin spotlights the MIT Museum’s digital collection “dedicated to the life and work of Harold ‘Doc’ Edgerton.” The collection is available for viewing online and “includes digitized copies of his notebooks, historical photographs, and informational text and videos about his industry-shaping role in the evolution of high-speed, flash photography,” explains Sarlin.
Boston Globe reporters Patricia Harris and David Lyon highlight their recent visits to the MIT Museum, List Visual Arts Center, and the Hart Nautical Gallery. “We always feel at least marginally smarter after a day in the galleries at MIT,” they write. “Setting aside high-school anxieties about an upcoming science lab, it turns out that many of the exhibits are engagingly interactive and — dare we say it — even fun.”
“In Event of Moon Disaster,” a short deepfake film on display at the MIT Museum’s “AI: Mind the Gap” exhibit depicts an alternate reality where the Apollo 11 mission ended in disaster, reports Mark Feeney for The Boston Globe. The “unnervingly realistic deepfake” depicts President Richard Nixon addressing the nation regarding the failed mission. The film “manages to be both frightening, in showing how convincing deepfakes can be, and, however paradoxically, inspiring,” writes Feeney.
Aesthetica Magazine reporter Eleanor Sutherland spotlights “Freezing Time,” a new exhibit at the MIT Museum featuring the work of Harold “Doc” Edgerton, a “pioneer of high-speed imaging who made it possible to see what the human eye cannot.” This is “the first exhibition to really interrogate Edgerton’s experimental journey in developing his innovative image-making processes,” says Michael John Gorman, director of the MIT Museum.