Pedestrian crowd at Downtown Crossing, Boston, 2010s. Footage from Keith N. Hampton.
Design: Jingrong Zhang.
Free and open to all!
Take a break from your busy day, enjoy a delicious Elmendorf cookie (on us, while supplies last!), and watch a short film, Presence, exploring how public life has been staged, recorded, and remembered on screen.
Presence is a film installation by Jingrong Zhang, supported by the Council for the Arts at MIT (CAMIT). Drawing on archival and cinematic footage across cultures and historical periods, the work assembles a "global supercut" of public gatherings: moments of solitude, chance encounters, street life, and collective assembly. As the montage builds from isolated figures to dense crowds, it invites viewers to consider how strangers come together in public space, and how those moments of shared presence have been captured on screen across a century of image-making. Every crowd on screen was once as present as we are now. The film will be shown repeatedly from 11:30am-2pm.
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Jingrong Zhang is a researcher and creative practitioner working across urbanism, complex systems, data, and art. At MIT, she used AI, computer vision, and visualization to study social behavior in public space, urban equity, and the relationship between cities and nature. Her work spans research and installation, from geospatial modeling to exhibitions at the Venice Biennale, exploring how data can function as both evidence and cultural expression.
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With any questions, email us at openspace@mit.edu.
