Lupe Fiasco, the Grammy-winning rapper and MIT visiting scholar, has created "GHOTIING MIT," an audio tour featuring seven tracks improvised and recorded on-site at public artworks around the MIT List Visual Arts Center campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Using an iPad, microphone, and solar panels, Fiasco responds to sculptures by Alexander Calder, Antony Gormley, Jacques Lipchitz, and Jaume Plensa, among others, blending rap with field recordings to capture the immediacy of each piece. He terms this spontaneous creative process "ghotiing" (pronounced "fishing"), likening it to the Impressionist practice of painting en plein air.
This project matters because it bridges hip-hop and visual art in a novel, site-specific way, expanding how audiences engage with public sculpture and institutional collections. By bringing his practice into MIT's classrooms and recording outdoors under real-world constraints, Fiasco challenges traditional boundaries between music, art, and academia, offering a model for interdisciplinary creativity that could inspire similar collaborations at other museums and universities.