Tamiko Thiel

Website

Expertise

Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality

Bio

Tamiko Thiel was awarded the iX Immersive Media “Visionary Pioneer” prize by the Society for Art and Technology (Montreal) for her 30+ years of work creating poetic objects and spaces of memory exploring social and cultural issues. In her first career she was lead product designer for the Connection Machine CM1/CM2 artificial intelligence supercomputer, in 1989 the fastest on earth and now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art NY.

 

She began working with virtual reality (VR) in 1994 as creative director/producer of “Starbright World,” an online virtual playspace for seriously ill children (with Steven Spielberg, Starbright Foundation chairman). Her latest VR work, “Land of Cloud,” was created as a GoogleVR Tilt Brush Artist in Residence and won the People’s Choice award at the 2018 VRHAM festival in Hamburg.

 

She is a founding member of augmented reality (AR) artist group Manifest.AR, participating in their path-breaking AR intervention at MoMA NY in 2010, and main curator and organizer of their intervention into the 2011 Venice Biennial. These interventions brought commissions for AR projects, most recently from the Seattle Art Museum for her dystopian climate change AR installation “Gardens of the Anthropocene” in 2016, and in 2018 from the Whitney Museum for her plastic waste coral reef AR installation “Unexpected Growth” (with /p).