Tamiko Thiel & /p
Artists @ www.tamikothiel.com
In 2024 Tamiko Thiel (US/DE) 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.
She was lead product designer of Danny Hillis‘ Connection Machines CM-1/CM-2, the first commercial AI supercomputers (1986/1987 at Thinking Machines Corp., collection MoMA NY), which influenced Google’s technology and Steve Jobs’ designs. Her artworks in AI include I am Sound (2016, with Christoph Reiserer) and Lend Me Your Face! (2020, with /p).
Her works in virtual reality (VR) began with Starbright World, the first VR metaverse for children (1994-1997 at Worlds, Inc. with Steven Spielberg) and Beyond Manzanar (2000, with Zara Houshmand), which was perhaps the first VR artwork acquired by a US art museum (by San Jose Museum of Art in 2002).
Her works in augmented reality (AR) began with the ARt Critic Face Matrix, as part of an AR intervention into MoMA NY (2010). Notable AR commissions include Unexpected Growth for the Whitney Museum New York (2018, with /p, in the collection), ReWildAR for Smithsonian Institution‘s 175th anniversary (2021, with /p), ARpothecary’s Garden (2022, collection Kunstsammlung Roche Basel) and Vera Plastica (2023, with /p), collection BROICH Digital Art Museum, Germany.
/p (DE) is a German media artist with a degree in Computer Science. /p has been working on web based projects and virtual reality since 1994. Since the Whitney Museum commission for Unexpected Growth in 2018 /p has been collaborating on media artworks with Tamiko Thiel. In 2024 Current, /p’s AR sound experience in collaboration with Anne Wichmann and Anke Schiemann, won the New Realities Award 2024 presented by the Bavarian Minister for Digital Media at the 1E9 Festival of the Future, Munich. /p is gender neutral and uses no pronouns!