Location

MIT Media Lab, E14-633

Description

Golan Levin is interested in the medium of response, and in the conditions that enable people to experience creative feedback with reactive systems. This presentation will discuss a wide range of his projects, with a particular attention to how the use of gestural interfaces, visual abstraction, and information visualization can support new modes of interaction, play, self-discovery, and critical inquiry. He introduces the term "speculative HCI" to frame a mode of inquiry in which novel interactions are proposed, implemented, and evaluated, not necessarily for their applicability to the solution of known problems, but for their inherent potential to pose new problems and thereby expand the vocabulary of human action.

Biographies

Golan Levin is an artist-engineer interested in developing new modes of interactive communication. Through performances, artifacts, visualizations, and virtual environments, Levin applies creative twists to digital technologies that highlight our relationship with machines, make visible our ways of interacting with each other, and explore the intersection of non-verbal communication and interactivity. As an educator, Levin's pedagogy is concerned with reclaiming computation as a medium of personal expression. He teaches “studio art courses in computer science,” on themes like interactive art, generative form, information visualization, digital fabrication, and audiovisual performance. At Carnegie Mellon University, Levin is currently an associate professor of electronic art, with courtesy appointments in computer science and design. Since 2009 he has also served as director of the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, a "meta-laboratory" within CMU dedicated to supporting atypical, interdisciplinary, and inter-institutional research projects at the intersection of arts, science, culture, and technology. Levin has spent half his life as an artist embedded within technological research environments, in places like the MIT Media Lab, the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology, the Ars Electronica Futurelab, and the former Interval Research Corporation in Palo Alto. Golan Levin has exhibited and performed widely in Europe, America, and Asia. His work has appeared in the TED conference and the Whitney Biennial, and has been recognized with five awards in the Prix Ars Electronica, a Webby Award, and grants from Creative Capital, the Rockefeller Multi-Arts Production Fund, the Langlois Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, Arts Council England, and others. In 2004, he was named to Technology Review's TR35 list of Top Young Innovators.