Interaction Design

Lecture: Michael Naimark
"They are Different! VR Art Work at Google Silicon Valley and at NYU Shanghai"
Wednesday 15.05.10, 18.30-20.00
Zurich University of the Arts
Toni Areal, Hörsaal 1

Abstract

In 2015, shortly after Google launched its VR division, Michael Naimark was brought in by its head, who proposed that he’d be Google’s first-ever “VR Resident Artist.” Though the proposed project was discontinued, in 2016 Naimark published the “VR cinematography studies” made during his residency. In 2017, he accepted a visiting faculty position in the Interactive Media Arts program at NYU Shanghai, an undergraduate satellite campus of NYU New York, then in its fifth year. In this presentation, Naimark will show work produced with colleagues at Google and with students in Shanghai, and use them as a basis to explore larger, deeper issues - around art and invention, control and compromise, ownership and profit, and culture and ideology.

Bio

Michael Naimark spent several decades mindfully circulating as a media artist inside corporate, art center, and academic circles. His bio in Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (Hachette, 2018) reads “a Silicon Valley–based artist and inventor, with the distinction of having worked in most of the most interesting R&D labs and creative shops in the Valley: Atari Research, the Apple Multimedia Lab, Lucasfilm’s interactive division, Interval Research, and Google’s VR division.” He’s had artist residencies at the Exploratorium, the ZKM, the Banff Centre for the Arts, IAMAS, Ars Electronica, and was a founding board member of Zero1 San Jose. Michael has held several faculty positions including, over the past decade, at USC Cinema’s Interactive Media Division, the MIT Media Lab, and NYU Shanghai, where he’s currently Visiting Associate Arts Professor.