Jeanette Andrews

Jeanette Andrews defies the boundaries of creative expression and illusion, using magic as a medium for contemporary art and academic inquiry. As a CAST Visiting Artist, Andrews collaborates with faculty members Graham M. Jones and Arvind Satyanarayan to develop an original, interactive, site-specific public performance. 

Magic performers use carefully devised framing devices to produce experiences of the visually fantastical. If viewers receive different framing information, what might their responses to a magic performance reveal about the place of trust and belief in constructing experience? Might their metacognition be harnessed to actively explore how we arrive at knowledge in the face of uncertainty?

Upcoming Events

Anticipated in 2025, details forthcoming

Past Events

On Wonder
MIT Museum
September 2024

An evening featuring the Boston/MIT premiere of Andrews’ In Plain Listen, which uses a Morse-code-based musical notation system to create a musical score depicting the secret of one of the oldest pieces of magic in history purely in music form, performed in tandem with the original magic effect. MIT PhD student Valerie Chen accompanied on cello.

Following the performance, Jeanette Andrews was joined by MIT Professor of Anthropology Graham M. Jones and MIT Professor of Computer Science Arvind Satyanarayan in a conversation about magic, culture, and visual communication.

Co-produced by MIT Anthropology, MIT CSAIL, and Morningside Academy for Design. Supported by Amar G. Bose Research Grants. In Plain Listen was originally commissioned and funded by the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston.

More information

Graham M. Jones is a cultural and linguistic anthropologist who explores how people use language and other media to enact expertise in practice, performance, and interaction. He has written two books on magic: Trade of the Tricks: Inside the Magician’s Craft (University of California Press, 2011), which describes day-to-day life and everyday talk within the insular subculture of contemporary French illusionists; and Magic’s Reason: An Anthropology of Analogy (University of Chicago Press, 2017), which examines the meaning of magic in Western modernity, shuttling between the intellectual history of anthropology and the cultural history of popular entertainment. Jones is a Professor of Anthropology and Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow at MIT.   

Biography: MIT Anthropology

Arvind Satyanarayan is an associate professor (pre-tenure) of computer science at MIT, where he leads the Visualization Group at MIT CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory). The group’s research uses interactive data visualization as a petri dish to study intelligence augmentation, or how computational representations and software systems help amplify our cognition and creativity while respecting our agency.

Biography: Arvind Satyanarayan
Website: Visualization Group at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

Utilizing her decades-long technical training in sleight-of-hand magic, Jeanette Andrews creates interactive, surreal vignettes that explore the nature of perception and cognition. She invites audiences to co-create her illusory performances, which function as live thought experiments. Often utilizing refined yet common items, such as glassware, paper, plants, and fabric, her works investigate perceptual anomalies, expectation violation, and the nature of belief. She also works in sound, installation, film, and objects to bring her ideas about hidden worlds to life. Artnet says, “Andrews’s avant-garde approach to magic transforms it into performance art.”

Website: www.jeanetteandrewsstudio.com
Social: Instagram | YouTube