Tamiko Thiel

ISEA2024

Tamiko Thiel‘s life work creating politically and socially critical media artworks exploring place, space, the body and cultural identity has won the 2018 SAT Montreal iX Visionary Pioneer Award, in 2024 the SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Lifetime Achievement Award in Digital Art, and induction into the inaugural cohort of the AWE XR Hall of Fame. In 2024 CAI Magazine ranked her in the top 10 most famous digital artists in the world. Christoph Reiserer wrote the original music for Elemental Spaces. His prize-winning works include performance, video and electronic sound installations, as well as chamber operas.

Keynote Bio:

Tamiko Thiel Studio

Tamiko Thiel was awarded the 2018 SAT Montreal Visionary Pioneer Award for now over 35 years of polit- ically and socially critical media artworks exploring place, space, the body and cultural identity. She was lead project designer of the Connection Machine CM1/CM2 AI supercomputers (1986/1987), which in- fluenced Google’s AI technology and Steve Jobs‘ designs. In 1989 a CM-2 was the fastest computer in the world; one is now in the design collection of MoMA NY. Her first virtual reality (VR) work was as producer/ creative director on Starbright World, the first metaverse for children, in collaboration with Steven Spiel- berg. Her own VR large projection installation Beyond Manzanar was probably the very first VR artwork acquired by a US art museum when it was bought in 2002 by the San Jose Museum of Art. Her second VR artwork Travels of Mariko Horo was supported by the Japan Foundation, the Kyoto Art Center and MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies, and the more recent VR Land of Cloud (2017) was created as Google Tilt Brush artist in residence. She began working in augmented reality (AR) art as part of the pathbreaking AR intervention into MoMA NY „We AR in MoMA“ in 2010, and led the Manifest.AR artist group’s intervention into the Venice Biennial in 2011. Her AR art commissions include Unexpected Growth in 2018 for the Whit- ney Museum New York (now in the collection), ReWildAR for the Smithsonian Institution’s 175th anniversa- ry in 2021, ARpothecary’s Garden (2021) for the collection of the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche Basel, and Vera Plastica (2023) for the collection of the BROICH Digital Art Museum in Germany.

ISEA2014

Tamiko Thiel (1957, USA) is a visual artist exploring the interplay of place, space, the body and cultural identity. She works in a variety of media ranging from supercomputers to digital prints and videos to interactive 3d virtual reality worlds and augmented reality.

• Artist-Exhibiting