Transcript: Mézu Ofoegbu on “Consider This Next with Kacie Luaders | June 28, 2025

On this “Consider This Next” audio episode, Kacie Luaders talks with Atlanta-based artist, technologist and founder of Infinity Village Lab, Mézu Ofoegbu. Below is the raw transcript:

Kacie: Welcome to Consider this Next on CivicSciTV Radio. I’m your host, Kacie Luaders. Here on the show, we connect with diverse voices across the civic science landscape, scholars, practitioners and leaders shaping the intersections of science within our society. Our mission to uncover lessons from their work and translate them into actionable insights, like all programs from the Civic Science Media Lab, whether on video, radio or digital print, consider this next is here to keep decision makers, from researchers and practitioners to local community members, informed, inspired and equipped with the latest insights. Today, we’re stepping into the world of civic science communication through art with Mézu, an artist and technologist who’s redefining how we engage with data. Mézu is the creative force behind Infinity Village Lab, where they create what they call art interventions, participatory actions, where people themselves become the medium for the artwork. From their background in sociology and forensic psychology to their realization that bar graphs don’t make you cry, Mézu has developed a unique approach they call creative cross analysis, transforming data into culturally relevant, emotionally resonant experiences. We’ll explore how they’ve taken everything from literary analysis to environmental data and created interactive installations that don’t just inform but truly engage people’s core cultural identities. So today we have an incredible guest, someone who is doing some really innovative things in the space of civic science, communication, data collection. I would actually love for them to tell you more about it, if you wouldn’t mind introducing yourself and telling the folks a little bit more about what you do.

Mézu: First of all, thank you for having me. I really appreciate you Kacie. My name is Mézu. My pronouns are they them. I’m an artist and a technologist. What I do, put simply, I create art interventions, and what that means is participatory actions that individuals can take and in them, taking that action that itself makes the artwork complete. So as opposed to paint and paint being the medium, people are the medium. It’s not until the work interacts or engages with a person that does the actual art happen. So yeah, doing that towards social change, social transformation, civic innovation, civic engagement and those things.

Kacie: So I would love to know how this became, what you started doing, what you became interested in? Were there any particular events or a class that you took and you were like, well, I could merge these things. How did this become an interest?

Mézu: Yeah, so I actually studied sociology at the graduate level. I also studied in undergrad as well, but my major was criminal justice in undergrad, specifically, I was studying forensic psychology. I was just interested in understanding the thought process, the meaning making, process of criminology, but the legal system in this country, it just wasn’t a place that I could ever see myself working and feeling authentic in my bones. I had literally one day as an NYPD Cadet like orientation. They gave us a break for lunch, and I didn’t come back. So I realized, even though I was interested in studying criminology and this meaning making process, I was interested in understanding how that helped us build institutions, places and social constructs. How did this become this? Right? I ended up learning SPSS, which is Excel on steroids, if anybody is not familiar, that taught me Social Science and Social Research and how to be a data analyst and a data visualizer. And I was doing like independent contracting for a couple of schools and things like that. Once I graduated, just doing independent evaluation and assessment for their programs. Like you say, your program does this. What ways are you evaluating and assessing that? I will build evaluations and assessments, run those for their programs just out of grad school, trying to make some money, and then COVID He had lost all the contracts before that happened. I was at one client, and she was so frustrated that the bar graphs weren’t motivating people to action, whether that was a donor or whatever the case may be. And I remember saying to her in the conversation, and it’s a bar graph, it’s not going to make you cry. And in that sentence, a life. All just went off in my head, like, Oh, wow. Like, bar graphs just aren’t even designed to make you cry. And I purposed to do that, and the pace of innovation is a reflection of that, like, when the information doesn’t inspire you, that comes at a cost. Up until that point, I had been a practicing like artists, writing plays, shooting protests and that kind of thing, more, very much more Docu style, if you hadn’t moved into the abstract intellectual work yet, until I got here, at this junction, this crossroad, where I had all these social research skills, but they weren’t reaching anyone’s heart in that conversation, I gave myself permission to use all of my artistic talent, inherited skill, to bring data to life. And that’s how that was the seed thought that ended up becoming all of us work we do at the lab now.

Kacie: the ways that you have taken qualitative research, social research, and tied them together is really fascinating, and I would love to know more about specifically I labs. Was this sort of like the culmination of all of these things, your art, your social work. How did that come to be?

Mézu: Yeah, I love this story, actually. So just welcome in, everybody, myself included, iLab started, and it’s I lab, of course, is short for Infinity village lab. Now, I lab started because there was this creative cross disciplinary process that I had uncovered through creating my own fine artistic work, there’s this body of work that I’ve been working on for a while now. I’m […] years now, and it’s called Breakthrough, the first artwork in the body of work. I took four books, literary books, and synthesized these books and gave visual representation to the synthesized analysis of the four books taken together. So I took Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. James Baldwin’s a Fire Next Time. Frederick Douglass is my bond, my bondage, my freedom. His autobiography. Now this is 300 or so years of lived and imagined experiences across African and African American history. And so the goal was to conduct a content analysis of these words as data points, and synthesize these four books to uncover what they were saying as one source across all of that space and time, black people taken together, we were describing an embodied separation from themselves and an enduring connection to themselves across 300 years of lived and imagined experiences. Now to give visual representation to this, and I know this is connected to I lab, I promise to give visual representation I engage the glass prism, because using a glass prism, you can cause natural light to undergo a process of separation. When you do that, it will reveal this rainbow, right? This endured connection with hues, and it just seemed such a befitting medium did to bring visual representation to what these authors were saying. Taken together, that piece is what rainbow baby is. I built that a piece of artwork, right? I ended up commissioning two muses, and I saw a very stark vision in my head of what these authors were saying across space and time, if they could say it without words. Ended up creating that sold that for just under $40,000 and more importantly, I built the relationship with the collector. Because for me, I’m like, I understand why this is of value to me, right? Because of the time, the research and the work and the analysis, etc, etc, the production value. But I was like, help me understand why this wasn’t valuable to you, because I can replicate that, right? And this creative cross analysis process, the fact that you started with books and you were able to go from books to this culturally relevant, emotionally resonant, ultra contemporary visualization. See that creative cross analysis process solves a major problem for organizations, you should probably figure out what problem that solves? It’ll change the trajectory of your impact. You bought the piece for $40,000 and that was the seed investment into iLab. And so I just looked back in the rear view. Okay, what did I do with those with the books? And I realized what I did with. Those books I could do with any sort of information, any sort of data, because I learned those skills already, ocean data, air quality data, soil data, then it just became okay. What data is the most important data to do this with, and that kind of brought me to environmental data, social impact data, and helping individuals understand how connected the two are.

Kacie: so with iLab, walk us through how this current process works. Do you take on one project at a time? Are you working with multiple clients or doing multiple independent projects? Do you choose the type of data that undergoes the creative cross analysis.

Mézu: process? Yes, it’s such an excellent question. No one’s ever asked that question before. So thank you. As far as how we choose the data that works in part for more one of two ways. The first way is the client right? For example, we have one client of black sustainability, let’s shout them out. They are an amazing organization. They’ve created the state of black sustainability report. It’s 85 page PDF report that highlights the state of black sustainability and its solutions. What I lab has done as them as our client, has translated that report into 12 animated, augmented reality experiences that will tour across 12 states in the southeast. That’s an example, right? They already have the report, which is the data. Take that report, and that report undergoes a creative cross analysis process to birth the 12 augmented reality animations. The other case is, which is more of my favorite is what we feel needs to be done in the world. I’m an artist and I lab is an artist led organization. We make that distinction all the time. As an artist, I do what I must do, primarily, and then everything else can happen after that. So for the sake of answering your question, we need to do that work. For example, I really want to highlight the field to act project, which we did last year as a second example. Here we were just like, we have so much data about the problem, very little data about the solution. How are people sensing what the solution is? Community is resilient. We’ve been here for so long. With that project, we asked individuals to demonstrate with their bodies the solution to a local challenge. As researching artists, I mirrored what they demonstrated with their bodies, and our production crew captured the exchange in between the embodied demonstration, we would ask them, Can you interpret what you just said with your body? And now we have the qualitative data as well as the photo and video data what they said with their bodies. Our tech team has become feeding this data into our own learning language model to describe how cities are shaping solutions to local challenges. We brought this intervention to Stockholm last year, to Nairobi, Kenya and to New York, and now we’ll be here in Atlanta over the next couple of months.

Kacie: So much of your research involves participation from folks lived experiences, folks participating in some sort of activity. So of course, with your research, you’re tracking that and you’re taking that data and analyzing it, but I would love to know, how do those interactions help to shape your work? What are you learning from the people who are participating in these research scenarios that you’re curating.

Mézu: Yeah, I love the questions you asked. Truly. You had such great questions. I have to preface this by saying I have been wearing black exclusively for the better part of two years now. Every day, in doing so, I would be intentionally absorbing the light in the energy around me. So I have to ground the answer there, because there’s so much that I’ve absorbed over these past two years, simply from this dedicated practice. And then on top of that, specifically with the field to act project. I think one of the things that I think is most interesting is it we make a really large assumption that this, nodding your head up and down, shaking your head yes and no, raising your shoulders, shoving your shoulders, that’s the extent to which we engage in embodied communication as adults like on a day to day. I think the thing that I learned, and was most fascinating to learn, was watching individuals realize, oh, I have something to say, and I know I’m saying something. It took about maybe between four and six seconds for an individual to go for. Like, really shaky and sure, I don’t know, two really demonstrative, like really big steps, but trusting that explorative process and how that neural pathway opens up not just empathy, but space to create a new lived experience for your body to pull from later to understand someone else’s lived experience.

Kacie: Tell us about any upcoming projects that you’re particularly proud of that folks should check out.

Mézu: Yes, I’m smiling hard right now. We sneak peeked to the world an art installation we built at the lab called public comment. First shout out to curls, an amazing local Atlanta artist. She’s a ceramic artist, a sculptor. We built a sculpture angled the microphone inside the sculpture so the sculpture can hear you when it’s on the clock, working right, not at all times, because we’re not here for surveillance, but it can hear you. What our tech team did is build a speech to text learning language model that allows what is spoken to the sculpture to be converted into text and submitted as public comment. Now for those of you who may not know, and I’m sure you probably are asking, What do you mean here in Georgia, the Public Service Commission [PSC] is the only publicly elected body that sits above Georgia Power and investor owned utility provider, and so in their hearing process, where they have to decide whether to approve or deny where Georgia Power presents, there is a portion in which the public can make comment. Now people don’t even know what the PSC is, let alone can take off in the middle of the day to go down to City Hall and make public comment. And so by building this tool, we’ve allowed hundreds of people come to any of the galleries in the city or any of the places that will take this over the next year and a half as this PSC hearing cycle is happening to make public comment. So yeah, we built this installation to do what artists are called to do, to ensure that people are really making meaning of their experiences and asking themselves questions about what it means to engage in this thing we call humanity.

Kacie: That’s a great point to wrap us up, almost going back to the beginning of our discussion where you said you told someone, bar graphs don’t make people cry. Right now, a lot of folks in research spaces, even journalism spaces, are trying to figure out, how can I make facts data things that are hopefully going to help people. There’s so much noise, there’s so much other things that people are paying attention to. Is there any advice for folks? Of course, everyone’s not going to be able to do wide scale interactive art installations, but for folks who are tapping into, how do I make this data speak to a wider audience? Do you have any advice for them?

Mézu: Yeah, for sure. I think the first step is recognizing, if it’s trapped behind a screen, then it’s trapped behind a screen. Not to say that means that it couldn’t be attention-grabbing, because we know that a screen can grab attention, but to engage a core cultural identity. I think the advice might be, when you look at your data visualization plan or your plan to communicate whatever data it is to whatever stakeholder, let’s take that audience, let’s ask ourselves, does this existing communication plan or this existing engagement plan engage this individual’s core cultural identity? If it doesn’t engage their core cultural identity, we can’t move the information lower than the brain. We can’t move it to a place that it can be felt. The bar graph won’t make you cry.

Kacie: Thank you, and for anyone else who’s listening, who is interested in learning more about the work that you do, the work that you’ve done, potentially even looking at frameworks for some of the innovative ways that you’ve collected data. How can they find you?

Mézu: Infinityvillagelab.org, and you can subscribe to our mailing list there. We do our best at keeping folks at least once a month engaged, but I will say we are artists. We are here when we are here. We are not when we are not, and that is by design. Yeah. So, yeah, that’s a pretty good place to start though the mailing list.

Kacie: You. Now that we’ve heard from Mezu about their approach to civic science communication through art interventions when it comes to making data and research accessible and actionable for public engagement, consider this next how might moving beyond the screen engage deeper cultural identities, as Mezu pointed out, if information is trapped behind a screen, it often stays trapped at the level of theory rather than reaching the heart. What would it look like to create physical, embodied experiences around your research or data? Are you designing for participation rather than consumption? Mezu’s art interventions require people to act, to demonstrate, to speak, to move in order for the artwork to be complete. How might your science communication move from passive consumption to active participation? And lastly, does your communication plan engage your audience’s core cultural identity. This was Mezu’s key insight, information that doesn’t connect to who people are, culturally and personally, can’t move lower than the brain to a place where it can be truly felt and acted upon. What cultural touchstones, values and identities does your audience hold? Before we sign off, I’d like to offer a big thank you to you our listeners for tuning in and engaging with these crucial topics. If you found value in this podcast, please don’t forget to subscribe. Rate and review. Your support helps us continue to bring you insightful conversations like this one, until next time, keep nurturing your curiosity and stay connected to the science all around you. This is Kacie Luaders, signing off from Consider this Next on CivicSciTV Radio. Stay Curious. 

Audio Studio

Audio programs on the CSM Network feature in-depth interviews with diverse experts who share actionable insights from their work on topical issues in civic science from multiple perspectives. The audio format provides guests with an additional way to share new insights, creating a synergistic effect with other programs on the network, on video and digital print.