Guestlecture Tamiko Thiel

29. April 2025, 13.00 Uhr Kunsthalle Wien, Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Wien

The Long Arc: 1980s - 2020s

Media art is subject to fads, just like any other field of human endeavor. It took about 100 years before photography was accepted as an art form, so I guess we should be grateful that it took "only" 60 years for media art to be accepted. As there was no way to make money off of the work, artists who pursued media art often formed a much stronger - if sparse and widely dispersed - community than the more competitive circles of painters. Access to the institutions and technology needed to make high end media artwork was heavily gated however, and the interests of the person in charge defined what was considered worthy technology, content and artistic approaches. I will talk about my own personal path through this maze, with some insights from what I have seen from colleagues of mine through the decades.

In 2024 Tamiko Thiel was awarded the SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Lifetime Achievement Award in Digital Arts and inducted into the inaugural cohort of AWE XR Hall of Fame for her politically and socially critical media artworks exploring place, space, the body and cultural identity. Earlier awards include the 2018 SAT Montreal Visionary Pioneer Award and the 2009 IBM Innovation Award in Art and Technology. Her art practice ranges from the design of the visual form for the first AI supercomputer (1983-1986) to virtual reality (VR, since 1994), augmented reality (AR, since 2010), large immersive installations, videos, digital prints and ceramics. She has major works in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art New York, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., Roche Basel Art Collection in Switzerland, Broich Digital Art Museum in Frankfurt, and in the private collections of new media pioneers Lynn Hershman Leeson and Eduardo Kac.