For the first time in its history, The MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology welcomes a magician, Jeanette Andrews, as its visiting artist.
The yearlong residency and grant program, which began in 2011, gives artists the chance to collaborate with professors across multiple disciplines, bridging science, technology and the arts.
Andrews describes herself as a magician, artist and speaker who uses sleight-of-hand to create “interactive, surreal vignettes that explore the nature of perception and cognition.” Her shows, which have been commissioned by private companies and organizations from Rolex to the Federal Reserve, invite participants to engage with the “impossible.”
Andrews’ goal is to recontextualize magic’s role in society. In the 19th century, magic was perceived as culturally prestigious – attending a show was on par with seeing an opera or a ballet. As it evolved to include kitschy mass marketing, however, it’s become perceived as something that’s “easy to do,” all sequins and sparkles, she said.
That “easiness” minimizes the form’s legitimate psychological and scientific grounding. In her collaborations with museums and cultural institutions – and now Cast at MIT – Andrews hopes to reestablish its intellectual and artistic glory.
“My life’s purpose for almost 20 years has been to have magic be viewed as a serious artistic discipline and as a kind of a live thought experiment, and as a means for reflection, academic inquiry of public thought and public discourse. This MIT opportunity is the ultimate triangulation of two decades of work,” Andrews said.
Andrews will collaborate on a magic project with her nominators: anthropology professor Graham Jones, who has published two books on magic, and associate professor of computer science Arvind Satyanarayan, who leads the data visualization group at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Jones and Satyanarayan have worked together since the Covid pandemic, a seemingly unlikely pairing inspired by Satyanarayan’s confusion over the emerging widespread mistrust and even hostility toward health data. Jones saw a connection with themes of disbelief he encountered in his anthropology.
He proposed that Satyanarayan think like a magician: Just as the audience at a magic show accepts they’re being deceived, Satyanarayan, like the illusionist, must accept that the public mistrusts his data.
“This wasn’t to suggest to Arvind, you should be more deceptive or you should be more manipulative, but it was rather to say you should be more reflexive. You should be more consciously aware of how the dynamics of trust and mistrust affect the way that the public responds to scientific communication, and you can build that awareness into the tools and the artifacts that you create,” he said.
That’s when Jones conjured up the idea of Andrews’ residency. “I thought to myself, why don’t I bring in a magician so that he can talk to a magician and see how she thinks, and also bring in a magician and show her what he’s trying to do, and see what she says about it?” Jones said.
While the details of the project are still to come, what Andrews produces will examine the boundaries between reality and illusion, she said. In a time pressing scientific issues such as climate change and public health are often clouded by misinformation, Jones hopes Andrews’ work will prompt audiences to reflect on why we believe what we believe.
Having practiced magic since she was 4, Andrews describes the residency as humbling and thrilling. “The gravity of this opportunity is just immense. Every morning I wake up, and I’m so deeply thankful for it,” she said.
Andrews expects to visit MIT’s campus during its January independent activities period, and her public program begins in October 2025.
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