Artistic explorations of society via new media technology

15. März 2016, 11.15 Uhr Interface Culture Lecture Room, Kollegiumgasse 2, 3.OG

Gastvortrag von Tamiko Thiel im Rahmen der Interface Cultures Lectures Series.

For Tamiko Thiel, artmaking is a way to learn and understand more about the world, and to explore social and cultural issues. Coming from a technical background but in love with the visual experience, she explores new media technologies not so much to comment on their role in society, but rather to discover their poetic potential as new forms of narrative media. In this talk she will describe the explorations that drove a number of her works in disparate media over her past 30+ years as an artist.

Tamiko Thiel
is a visual artist exploring the interplay of place, space, the body and cultural memory. She was responsible for the visual design of the Connection Machine CM-1/CM-2, in 1989 the fastest supercomputer in the world, as a massive black "cube of cubes" electronic brain . She is an internationally acknowledged pioneer in developing the dramatic and poetic capabilities of virtual and augmented realities (VR and AR) to create spaces of memory for exploring social and cultural issues. Her first VR work was "Starbright World," an online multi-user 3D virtual world for seriously ill children done in collaboration with Steven Spielberg. Subsequent virtual world artworks dealt with scapegoating of ethnic groups in times of crisis, an occidentalist fantasy of Europe, and the experience of the Berlin Wall. A founding member of AR artist group Manifest.AR, she participated in their path-breaking guerrilla augmented reality intervention at MoMA NY in 2010, and was main curator and organizer of their uninvited intervention at the Venice Biennial in 2011. Her newest work, "I am Sound" (with musician/composer Christoph Reiserer), is a interactive image/sound installation (using Max MSP) that scans the visitor's face as a Cubist image, using the data to generate a personal music composition.