The MIT List Visual Arts Center is known for its unusual contemporary art exhibits. One of its recent projects, “GHOTIING MIT: Public Art,” boldly combines rap, jazz, field recordings, and site-specific reactions to artworks spanning the university’s public art collection. The most pivotal figure in this ambitious endeavor, MIT visiting scholar and Grammy Award-winning emcee Lupe Fiasco, created nine original compositions using ghotiing, a term of his own invention, which proves that rap is a reactive form of expression: It pushes artists outside of their comfort zone by abandoning the traditional recording studio format. Instead, whatever environment they’re in becomes their studio.
Fiasco, a Chicago native, is scheduled to perform on May 2 with the MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble at the school’s Kresge Auditorium. The concert will serve as the conclusion of MIT’s Artfinity festival, which started in February to celebrate both creativity and community. Artfinity showcases the work of MIT faculty, students, staff, and alumni, as well as guest artists from the Greater Boston area and around the world.
All 80 of Artfinity’s events, including Fiasco’s upcoming show, are free and open to the public. This includes dozens of concerts and performances as well as films, installations, exhibitions, and augmented reality experiences. Fiasco tells The Boston Globe that “GHOTIING MIT: Public Art” is a site-specific experience that challenges the traditional approach to rap creation.
“I don’t teach hip-hop explicitly — I teach Rap Theory and Practice. Hip-hop is more of a cultural studies thing, and I focus solely on teaching the techniques and the background of rap. I base it in a fine arts program using en plein air,” Fiasco explains. En plein air is a technique where painters immerse themselves in a setting to capture its essence in real time.
Ghotiing (pronounced “fishing”) encourages students to engross themselves in different art forms and environments to devise original work. According to Fiasco, inspiration is taken from appreciating the landscape and outdoor painting as opposed to a recording studio. The result is usually music that feels deeper and more organic. “Ghotiing is a mix of en plein air painting and field recording and rap,” he says. “So it’s like, go outside, get out of the studio, take your recording equipment with you … don’t bring any raps with you.
“Find a subject out there in the world and sit on site with the subject and write and record in that moment and capture all of the sounds and the things that are happening. It’s really up to the artist to choose what they want to leave in and leave out. For some people, it might be purely biographical. It opens you up to a wider kind of perspective and understanding of the things that are in your community.”
Fiasco and his students engage directly with the sculptures, murals, and installations all over campus, using their forms, histories, and surroundings as creative sparks. By recognizing ambient sounds and writing lyrics in response to each piece, the project turns public art into a living sonic experience. Fiasco, who has been in the music industry for more than two decades, has interests that extend far beyond music, with a focus on organizations that uplift communities, including the Society of Spoken Art, We Are M.U.R.A.L, The Neighborhood Start-Up Fund, and his cross-cultural content venture, Studio SV.
He has also done work with Yale University. For Fiasco, being a lover of the culture never stops — even as it pertains to his work outside of academia.
“I’m constantly doing things like the Society of Spoken Art, which is about exploring all of these other possibilities with rap … the cognitive side, the computational side. I’m always exploring all of the different ways that rap can be rapped,” he says. “So for me, it’s just part of my grander creative approach and process. With ghotiing, you definitely develop new kinds of skill sets or things that you wouldn’t normally have to use if you were just in the studio. You get a different relationship with the piece.”
Fiasco’s imminent future extends far beyond MIT, as he’ll be touring this summer with Cypress Hill, Atmosphere, and The Pharcyde. He takes pride in the work he has done in higher education and rap pedagogy as a whole. He also respects what other institutions are doing as well. “I think it’s great to see rap in the academic space … it has been in the academic space for a while. My brother Dee-1 is over at Tufts, Harvard has the Hip Hop Archive.
“There’s all of these things that I want to see rap doing and it’s like … I have to make it happen. This isn’t a natural thing — rap proved itself. Johns Hopkins is starting a hip-hop degree program with Professor Wendel Patrick, which I’m a part of. Just to see rap spread and expand and be taken with a certain level of seriousness, not only by the students but also by the people teaching it, has been very fulfilling.”
Fiasco ultimately wants his hard work to live on for years to come. “It really took years of practice to just build a curriculum and work through what a rap curriculum looks like to sit on the same level as a quantum physics curriculum at MIT, a drama class at Yale, or a law class at Harvard. Hopefully, this is something that we can canonize and pass on to the next generation of rap academics and professors.”
LUPE FIASCO, MIT FESTIVAL JAZZ ENSEMBLE, FRED HARRIS
At Kresge Auditorium, MIT, on Friday, May 2. 8 p.m. Free.
