CAMBRIDGE, MASS.- The MIT Museum will present Sensing Oceans, on view from September 30, 2026, to February 21, 2027. Sensing Oceans joins Crochet Coral Reef as part of OCEANS, the MIT Museum’s thematic season dedicated to unlocking the mysteries of our ocean planet, and invites visitors into the rich, dynamic marine environment through the technology, research, and interpretation that expands our capacity to sense and understand the oceans. Sensing Oceans is a multifaceted exploration of an environment that covers three quarters of the planet and which, without technology, is largely beyond human reach.

Exhibiting works that range from autonomous vehicles and sonar images to immersive artistic installations and robots that mimic fish, Sensing Oceans presents pieces from the MIT Museum’s collections in conversation with contemporary scientific and artistic practices. Together, these works explore how our knowledge is assembled from the sensory data of sound, light, space, temperature, and pressure; and how extending our knowledge, via technology and attention to the natural world, better equips us to understand and preserve an ecosystem that is deeply symbiotic with our own.

Michael John Gorman, The Mark R. Epstein (Class of 1963) Director of the MIT Museum said: “Sensing Oceans asks what it means to know something we can never fully grasp. From the earliest sounding rods to today's underwater autonomous vehicles and bio-acoustic recordings, humans have built an extraordinary lineage of technologies to reach beyond our own senses and into the medium of the ocean. This exhibition brings that lineage into full view, showing how each instrument and artwork can measure the sea and transform our relationship to this magnificent realm.”

Among the exhibit’s centerpieces are the US premiere of two large-scale installations from experiential artist collective Marshmallow Laser Feast: Seeing Echoes in the Mind of the Whale and Plankton Temple. ​ Both works draw on current scientific research to create a multi-sensory experience of ocean life.

Ersin Han Ersin, Artist and Creative Director of Marshmallow Laser Feast said: "Through our work, we’re interested in how artistic inquiry can do more than help us visualize the world; it can help us inhabit perspectives beyond the limits of our own bodies and everyday perception. In Seeing Echoes in the Mind of the Whale, we explore the radically different ways cetaceans experience their surroundings, while Plankton Temple turns our attention towards the microscopic organisms that sustain life on a planetary scale. Bringing these works to MIT is a wonderful opportunity to invite audiences to consider the many visible and invisible systems we are part of, and inspire kinship with creatures we are just beginning to understand."

In addition, the exhibition presents artwork from contemporary artist Julius von Bismarck, the historic glass marine invertebrate models of Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, and deep sea photography by Harold Edgerton. ​ These complement pioneering ocean technology like RoboTuna, an MIT robot engineered to swim like a tuna, sonar systems that create an image of the ocean bottom using sound rather than optics, and the MIT Self-Assembly Lab's modular reef structures, which utilize natural waves and currents to regrow eroding coastlines.





EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS

Plankton Temple
​Marshmallow Laser Feast
​2024–2025

Plankton Temple is a kinetic sculpture of light, glass, and sound that honors plankton, tiny creatures whose daily movements up and down the water column tie ocean ecosystems together, sequester carbon from the atmosphere to the deep sea, and form the largest animal migration on earth. By translating this planet-spanning cycle into physical presence, Plankton Temple brings this invisible, but fundamental, ocean process to light.

RoboTuna II
​Michael Triantafyllou, David Barrett, Michael Sachinis, and David Beal, MIT
​2000

Vortices from RoboTuna
​Sam Ogden, photographer
​c. 1994

RoboTuna, a groundbreaking biomimetic robot that swims like a tuna, was developed at MIT to study how fish can swim so much faster and more efficiently than human-designed vehicles. The answer is captured in the elegant swirls of red dye caught in RoboTuna’s wake: tuna can time their movements to derive forward thrust from the water displaced by their own passage.

Marine Invertebrate Models: Soft Coral, Common Green Sea Anemone
​Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka
​1863–1890

Before Leopold and Rudolf Blascka made Harvard’s famous glass flowers, they produced glass models of marine invertebrates for scientific collections. Fragile, intricate, and captivating, these models capture the fluid, transient grace of ocean creatures in their natural habitats. They invite us to consider the form and sensation of a world supported and sustained by water.





Seeing Echoes in the Mind of the Whale
​Marshmallow Laser Feast
​2024–2025

Seeing Echoes in the Mind of the Whale is a multi-channel audio and video installation that follows a bottlenose dolphin, a humpback whale, and a sperm whale on their underwater journeys. Hydrophone recordings of whale vocalizations sync with speculative imagery to recreate echolocation, the sense whales use to ‘see’ through sound. Developed in collaboration with marine biologists and bioacousticians, the piece offers visitors a brief glimpse into the whales' own sensory experience of the ocean.

Video Clips from Mesobot
​Ocean Twilight Zone Project, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
​2019–2024

Mesobot is a robot designed by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to study deep sea creatures without disturbing them. Recent video footage captured by Mesobot shows an ecosystem of animals that organize their lives around avoiding light. This survival strategy helps them evade predators, but also makes them notoriously hard for humans to observe. Mesobot utilizes red-light cameras, whose wavelengths dissipate quickly underwater. As such, most deep-sea animals never evolved the ability to see them, allowing the robot to capture footage undetected.