Mrinalini Singha

Mrinalini Singha is an artist and creative technologist currently pursuing her MS in Art, Culture, and Technology at MIT. Her work addresses socio-political, cultural and environmental urgencies across mediums such as film, installations, tangible interfaces and XR. She is currently engaging with counter-mapping, sensors and sensemaking, archives and forensics, cosmotechnics and worldings, speculative fictions and climate visions. Mrinalini has spent the past year conducting qualitative research into the emerging discourse around harnessing game engines to world climate futures and amplify decolonial perspectives and indigenous voices during her time as a research assistant on Worlding (a partnership between the MIT Open Documentary Lab and Unity Technologies). Her ongoing project, Stata Island, builds upon these ideas– exploring the terristories, indigenous histories and climate futures of MIT. She is now furthering this line of inquiry as a SERC Scholar (Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing Scholar) at the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing through the research group– Exploring the Intersections of Computing Education and Climate Justice.

Prior to her time at MIT, Mrinalini spent a year critically engaging with the state of misinformation and hate speech in the drastically changing media landscape of India as a design researcher at Alt News, the nation’s leading fact-checking organization. Continuing her work on misinformation at MIT, she has also co-developed A Mystery For You, a generative fact-checking game with a tangible interface that used a large language model (LLM) in order to generate multi-stage scenarios.These strands of work led to a solo exhibition at the MIT ACT Student Gallery on Forensic Artifacts of a Democracy in Crisis (2023).

Mrinalini received her B.Des from the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad. She also spent half a year at the Royal Academy of Art, the Hague (KABK) working with interactive media design. She completed her bachelor’s thesis as a Ford Foundation Fellow, during which she explored the Western Himalayan Region’s folklore. This led to her co-founding the Himalayan Folk Collective – an experimental archive and community of practice in the Western Himalayan Region.

She has been selected for MIT Design X (2023), Ars Electronica x IDSA Founding Lab (2023), the KC Mahindra Scholarship (2022) and the Ford Foundation Grant (2020-2021). Her films have been screened at venues including the MIT Museum (2023), Mumbai International Film Festival (2022) and Alpavirama Film Festival (2022).

Some of her prior work can be seen at mrinalini.xyz.