Golan Levin

@golanlevin

Golan Levin (he/him, b. 1972) is an artist, engineer, researcher and educator interested in new intersections of machine code, visual culture, and critical making. His work combines equal measures of the whimsical, the provocative, and the sublime in an eclectic variety of online, installation and performance media. Through responsive artifacts, virtual environments, and media provocations, Levin applies creative twists to digital technologies that highlight our relationship with machines, expand the vocabulary of human action, and awaken participants to their potential as creative actors. His projects have engaged themes and materials such as generative animation, interactive gestural robotics, the tactical potential of personal digital fabrication, new aesthetics of nonverbal interaction, and information visualization as a mode of critical inquiry. Levin has spent more than 30 years as an artist embedded within technological research environments, including the MIT Media Laboratory, Ars Electronica Futurelab, Interval Research Corporation, and the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology. His work is included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), has appeared in the Whitney Biennial, and has been recognized with grants from Creative Capital, the Rockefeller MAP Fund, and others. A two-time TED speaker, Levin was named one of “50 Designers Shaping the Future” by Fast Company magazine. He has exhibited widely in Europe, America and Asia. Levin is a Professor of new media art in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University, where his pedagogy is concerned with reclaiming computation as a medium of personal expression. He teaches courses on themes like interactive art, generative form, critical making, and audiovisual performance. With Tega Brain, Levin is co-author of “Code as Creative Medium” (MIT Press, 2021), an essential guide to creative coding for software arts educators. Levin writes: “I am interested in the medium of response, and in the conditions that enable people to experience creative feedback with reactive systems. I am drawn to the critical and revelatory potential of visualization—whether brought to bear on a single participant, or the world of data we inhabit. I am engaged in the use of generative computation to divine both new and timeless principles of expressive form. And I am fascinated by how abstraction can connect us to a reality beyond language, and the ways in which our gestures and traces, thus abstracted, can reveal the unique signatures of our spirits.”