Exhibition

In John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), scientists uncover a creature that mutates, mimics, and terrifies. But what if it wasn’t alien—what if the Thing is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

AI is an assemblage of us—our language, our images, our fears—reshaped into something uncanny and unpredictable. Like a frozen organism thawed from the ice, it mirrors humanity while gesturing toward an unknowable future.

Join MFA Visual Narrative and faculty member Shar Simpson, founder of Thing Lab, and for a speculative design workshop that reimagines The Thing as a lens for our entanglement with AI. Together, we will watch a screening of The Thing, create our own mutating things, and interrogate this strange organism to ask: what does AI want from us—and how might it change us?

Why Join?

Creature creation: leave with a one-of-a-kind design—half human invention, half machine mutation.

Flip the script: see The Thing not just as horror, but as a design prompt about technology and survival.

Hands-on experience: play with co-creation methods that merge human imagination with AI experimentation.

Shape what’s next: exorcise your fear of the unknown into strange, funny, and fascinating new ideas

Shar Simpson is an adjunct assistant professor at the School of Visual Arts and Columbia University.