Programming Agency: A Three-Day Workshop with Sarah Oppenheimer

Programming Agency is a three-day workshop open to the MIT community. The workshop is convened by artist Sarah Oppenheimer, who was selected to realize N-05001, a new percent-for-art commission in MIT’s Metropolitan Warehouse (Building W41). 

Using N-05001 as a case study, the session will investigate how dynamic shifts in the architectural environment shape perceptions of social agency.

N-05001 will be grafted onto the Met’s architecture. Traveling along structural beams and moving between floors, the piece migrates through the building’s envelope. A glass column rises and falls along a cantilevered glass beam while a stainless-steel counterweight balances this asymmetric configuration. Hardwired into the building’s control system, N-05001’s movement responds to real-time occupancy data. Distributed sensors within designated spatial zones register human motion, translating individual actions—walking, pausing, gathering—into data signals that shape the artwork's axial paths. To challenge the perception that architectural space is static, N-05001 moves with intentional slowness. Occupants’ influence is real but deferred. As micro-events accumulate, choreographies unfold beyond immediate perception. N-05001 invites reconsideration of control itself: rather than seeking instant feedback, it expands a field of delayed reciprocity. Cause and effect are stretched across time and space.

Through engagement with models, discussions, and performative simulations, the workshop will explore how the ability to influence and shape one's environment is experienced across divergent materials and timescales. We will investigate how spatial orientation and optical flow influence perceptions of environmental interconnection and how sensate causal relationships between bodies moving at different temporal rhythms can be constructed. Our experiments will examine correlations between sensor signals and directional movement, with a specific focus on input from occupancy sensors hardwired into building infrastructure. By manipulating temporal and spatial feedback, we will attempt to uncover new forms of perceived interaction.

Experiments conducted in MIT’s motion capture studio will test our developed hypotheses on the relationship between sensing and cause and effect. The results will inform how the relationship between the building’s occupants and N-05001 is ultimately encoded.

Programming Agency is cohosted by the Met Commons at the MIT School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P), the MIT List Visual Arts Center, and the Art, Culture, and Technology (ACT) program at MIT.

Agenda

Thursday, January 29

5:00 pm / ACT Cube—Sarah Oppenheimer Lecture (40min + Q+A)

Friday, January 30 

9:00–11:30am / ACT Cube—Inquiry and methods

• Met Warehouse Movement Analysis
• Introduction to computational methods: Simon Jeger
• Introduction to methodology. Simulation, perception of the sense of agency and temporal constraints: William Warren

12:00–1:00pm / Met Warehouse—Site tour for workshop participants
(walkthrough of sculpture location and placement of occupancy sensors)

1:00–2:00pm / Lunch Break 

2:00–6:00pm / ACT Cube—Measurable variables

• Orientation and awareness of spatial change
• Change of environment position / Rate of change
• Change of viewing position / Rate of change

2:30–4:30pm / Design and review of analog / embodied “simulations"

4:30–6:00pm / Design of digital / Motion Capture “simulations”

Saturday, January 31

9:00am–1:00pm / Motion Capture Simulations Immersion Lab—Virtual Simulations

1:00–2:00pm / Lunch Break

2:00–5:00pm / ACT Cube—final session: assessing observations, articulating conclusions

About the Artist

Sarah Oppenheimer (b. 1972, Austin, TX) operates at the intersection of architecture and art, creating work that reconfigure spatial boundaries. Her projects examine the dynamic relationships between bodies, structures, and systems, drawing attention to the ways environments shape human and nonhuman presence. Oppenheimer’s solo exhibitions include N-03X (EPFL Pavilions, Lausanne, Switzerland; 2023), Sensitive Machine (Wellin Museum of Art, Clinton, NY; 2021), N-01 (Kunstmuseum Thun, Switzerland; 2020), S-337473 (MASS MoCA; North Adams, MA; 2019), S-337473 (Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH; 2017), S-281913 (Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL; 2016), S-399390 (MUDAM Luxembourg; 2016), and 33-D (Kunsthaus Baselland, Switzerland; 2014). Oppenheimer’s work has also been exhibited at ZKM, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Andy Warhol Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Art Unlimited at Art Basel, the Mattress Factory, the Drawing Center, and SculptureCenter. Oppenheimer is a Professor in the Practice at Yale University School of Art and lives and works in New York and Rotterdam.