Tamiko Thiel
Tamiko Thiel has been creating politically and socially critical media artworks for over 35 years that explore place, space, the body and cultural identity. She was lead product designer on Danny Hillis’ Connection Machines CM-1/CM-2 (1986/1987) at the MIT AI Lab startup Thinking Machines Corporation These were the first commercial artificial intelligence supercomputers and in 1989 a CM-2 won the Gordon Bell Prize as the fastest supercomputer in the world. These machines influenced Google’s AI technology, inspired Steve Jobs‘ designs, and are in the collections of MoMA NY and the Smithsonian Institution. Her own AI artworks include Lend Me Your Face! (2020, with /p) deepfake video installation, and Lend Me Your Face: Go Fake Yourself! (2021, /p), The Photographer’s Gallery London commission for an online net art version, and I am Sound (2016, with Christoph Reiserer) a generative audio visual selfie installation.
Her first VR was as producer/creative director of Starbright World (1994-1997), the first Metaverse for children, in collaboration with Steven Spielberg. Her own VR artwork Beyond Manzanar (2000, with Zara Houshmand), an interactive large screen VR projection installation, was the first VR artwork collected by a US art museum (San Jose Museum of Art, 2002). Subsequent artworks created in this media include The Travels of Mariko Horo (2006, with music by Ping Jin), funded by a Japan Foundation fellowship and an MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies fellowship, and Virtuelle Mauer/ReConstructing the Wall (2008, T+T (Tamiko Thiel and Teresa Reuter)), funded by a Berlin Capital City Cultural Funds grant and winner of the IBM Innovation Award for Art and Technology at the 2009 Boston Cyberarts Festival. Using more recent VR technology she created Land of Cloud (2017) as GoogleVR Tilt Brush Artist in Residence, which won the audience award at the inaugural VRHAM Festival in 2018. She created the VR artwork Atmos Sphaerae (2021) for the exhibition „Dis/Location,“ curated by Whitney Museum media art curator Christiane Paul for ONX member Alfredo Salazar-Caro’s DiMoDA 4.0 VR virtual museum platform, which was shown in 2023 at ONX Studio.
Her first augmented reality artwork was ARt Critic Face Matrix (2010), in the path-breaking intervention into MoMA NY "We AR in MoMA," organized by Mark Skwarek and Sander Veenhof. She then curated and led the Manifest.AR artist group's intervention into the 2011 Venice Biennial, including her AR artwork Shades of Absence. Many invitational AR shows and commissions followed: Biomer Skelters (2013, with Will Pappenheimer) from FACT Liverpool, Brush the Sky (2015, with Midori Kono Thiel) from Wing Luke Museum of the Asian-Pacific Experience, Gardens of the Anthropocene (2016) from Seattle Art Museum, Unexpected Growth (2018, with /p) from the Whitney Museum (the 1st edition is in the collection and the 2nd edition was auctioned as a NFT at Christie's NY), ReWildAR (2021, with /p) for the 175th anniversary of the Smithsonian Institution, ARpothecary’s Garden (2022, commissioned by and for the Roche Art Collection Basel), What You Sow (2023, with /p), commissioned for the AR Biennial of the NRW-Forum Düsseldorf, and Vera Plastica (2023, with /p), commissioned for the BROICH Digital Art Museum collection by DAM Projects Berlin.
Tamiko was awarded the iX Visionary Pioneer Award by SAT Montreal in 2018 for her life's work. In 2024 she was one of the inaugural inductees into AWE’s XR Hall of Fame, and received the SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art.