By Whitney Bauck

What do the people of the United States sound like? Census language data would give you one kind of answer. But numbers don’t capture all the factors in play—assimilation, the past and present of language, whose voices are prioritized. It’s this gap that multidisciplinary artist Ekene Ijeoma, who runs the Poetic Justice Group at the MIT Media Lab, are exploring in the ongoing participatory project “A Counting.”

“We were thinking about what it means to count and be counted, and how the Census has historically undercounted and underrepresented marginalized communities,” says Ijeoma. “And we were thinking what a poetic response would be.”