[-empyre-] Tamiko Thiel bio for empyre

[Tamiko Thiel]

Hi all,

I've been lurking so long without participating that I feel guilty for 
sending this, but since others seem to be in the same situation I will 
send it none the less!

Thanks to all for many years of wonderful discussions - and hopefully 
many years yet to come!

take care, Tamiko


Tamiko Thiel is a visual artist developing the dramatic and poetic 
capabilities of various forms of virtual and augmented realities as 
vehicles for exploring social and cultural issues.

She was creative director and producer of Starbright World (1996), an 
award-winning multi-user 3D online virtual playspace for seriously ill 
children in collaboration with then Starbright Foundation chairman 
Steven Spielberg. Her interactive 3D installation Beyond Manzanar 
(2000), reflecting on scapegoating of minorities in times of crisis, was 
awarded WIRED Magazine’s prize for media art in 1998 and is in the 
permanent collection of the San Jose Museum of Art in Silicon Valley, 
California, USA.

Her interactive 3D installation The Travels of Mariko Horo (2006) draws 
on Dante, Byzantine and Buddhist imagery to create a reverse Marco Polo 
fantasy of the exotic West seen from a Buddhist viewpoint. It was 
produced with a Japan Foundation Fellowship in 2003 and a fellowship at 
the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies in Cambridge, MA in 2004.

In 2007 she was awarded a major grant from the Hauptstadtkulturfonds 
(Berlin Capital City Cultural Funds) to create an interactive 3D 
installation on the Berlin Wall, Virtuelle Mauer/ReConstructing the 
Wall. This artwork won the IBM Innovation Award for Artistic Creation in 
Art and Technology at the 2009 Boston Cyberarts Festival. It was shown 
extensively in 2009 for the 20th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin 
Wall in Europe, and was sent on tour by the Goethe-Institut in the USA 
and India. The Goethe-Institut also engaged her as Second Life Artist in 
Residence for 2011/2012.

A founding member of the cyberartist group Manifest.AR, she participated 
in the pathbreaking augmented reality (AR) intervention “We AR in MoMA,” 
an uninvited guerilla takeover of MoMA New York. In 2011 she led the 
Manifest.AR Venice Biennial AR Intervention, placing her works in the 
Venice Giardini and in the German National Pavilion. This led to an 
invitation to participate in the ISEA UNCONTAINABLE official parallel 
program to the 2011 Istanbul Biennial, and to various other commissions 
such as for the 2012 Zero1 Biennial in Silicon Valley,

In 2013 she was a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, the USA’s oldest 
artist residency, where she worked on augmented reality commissions for 
FACT Liverpool’s 10th anniversary exhibition, and for the Corcoran 
Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.

She has taught and lectured internationally at institutions such as 
Carnegie Mellon University, the MIT Media Lab, the Bauhaus-University in 
Weimar, Germany, the University of Southern California School of 
Cinema-Television and Berlin University of the Arts in Germany. In 2014 
she will be a guest professor at the Nanyang Technical University in 
Singapore.