The Eye of Sauron at MIT

MIT is famous for having… unusual works of art on its campus. They’ve recently managed to surprise even jaded old me.

“Gaze to the Stars”

There’s lots of art around the MIT campus, some of which comes in for hilarious criticism from the undergrads.

Louise Nevelson’s “Transparent Horizon” was a particular favorite target of theirs, back in the day:

• I’ve seen it bombed with paint balloons.
• I’ve seen it with chairs welded to it.
• I’ve even seen it buried in snow, which is remarkable given it’s over 20 feet tall. (I wondered, that winter, if they’d go under the snow with cutting torches and take it out piece by piece… until the spring melt revealed it was gone. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed. Well… that one time, anyway.)

So it was with some interest that I noted an article from WBUR, a local NPR station, on MIT art projects ^[1] with an arresting opening sentence:

It’s not everyday that you look up and see a 75-foot eye.

Umm… yes, that’s true; not that I thought I’d ever need to be told that.

But it turns out that Behnaz Farahi, the director of MIT Media Lab’s Critical Matter Group, and a group of 11 students have taken video of eyes and projected them onto the Great Dome. This is a giant dome in Building 10, at one end of the Great Court that abuts Memorial Drive. The project is called “Gaze to the Stars”. Apparently when people volunteered to get video taken of their eyes, they were supposed to whisper secrets to an AI. (Which, to my mind, ups the creepiness factor immensely.)

I’m kind of surprised a 75 foot eye on the Great Dome hasn’t caused traffic accidents on Memorial Drive, where traffic is ordinarily frighteningly fast! Gawking while driving would not be a good idea.

The Weekend Conclusion

Oh, no. No-no-no-no. This does not resemble the Eye of Sauron. Not in any way, shape or form. Nuh-uh. No, sir/ma’am/nonbinary. Not in the least bit.

In fact, we MIT folk do not believe in making rings of power, let alone giving them to fascists. We’re just little techno-hobbitses, we are. Trying to make the world better, one tikkun olam step at a time.

Now, for some kinds of powerful rings, we can do stuff for you. Want a proton synchrotron with a $p\bar{p}$ storage ring? Hook you right up.

As long as you’re not some demonic whatsit from another dimension.

(Ceterum censeo, Trump incarcerandam esse.)

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Notes & References

1: M Browning, “MIT’s ‘Gaze to the Stars’ is all in the eyes”, WBUR (a Boston NPR station), 2025-Mar-12. The project itself can be found here, active 2025-Mar-12,13,14. ↩