Tamiko Thiel

Tamiko Thiel grew up in the University District in Seattle from 1962 - 1974, when she graduated from Roosevelt High School. Her father Philip Thiel was a professor at the University of Washington in Architecture and Urban Planning, and her mother Midori Kono Thiel is a Japanese arts expert, a major Japanese performing arts organizer and a prize-winning Japanese calligrapher. Tamiko received a B.S. in Product Design/General Engineering from Stanford in 1979, an M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT in 1983, and a Diploma in Applied Graphics from the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Germany. Her first appearance as an artist was at age 5, when the Seattle Times published a photo of her painting a Turkey in Mrs. Roberts' kindergarten class at University Heights Elementary School.

Tamiko has been creating politically and socially critical media artworks for over 40 years that explore place, space, the body and cultural identity. In 2018 she was awarded the iX Visionary Pioneer Award by SAT Montreal in 2018 for her life's work. In 2024 she was an inaugural inductee into AWE’s XR Hall of Fame, and received the 2024 ACM SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Lifetime Achievement Award in Digital Arts.

Tamiko was lead product designer on Danny Hillis’ Connection Machines CM-1/CM-2 (1986/1987) at the MIT AI Lab startup Thinking Machines Corporation. These were the first commercial artificial intelligence supercomputers and in 1989 won the Gordon Bell Prize as the fastest supercomputer in the world. These machines influenced Google’s AI technology, inspired Steve Jobs‘ designs, and are in the collections of MoMA NY and the Smithsonian Institution. Her own AI artworks include Lend Me Your Face! (2020, with /p) deepfake video installation, and Lend Me Your Face: Go Fake Yourself! (2021, /p), The Photographer’s Gallery London commission for an online net art version, and I am Sound (2016, with Christoph Reiserer) a generative audio visual selfie installation.

Her first VR was as producer/creative director of Starbright World (1994-1997), the first Metaverse for children, in collaboration with Steven Spielberg. Her own VR artwork Beyond Manzanar (2000, with Zara Houshmand), an interactive large screen VR projection installation, was probably the first VR artwork collected by a US art museum (San Jose Museum of Art in 2002). The work incorporates Japanese calligraphy and koto performance from her mother Midori Kono Thiel. Subsequent VR artworks include The Travels of Mariko Horo (2006, with music by Ping Jin), funded by fellowships from the Japan Foundation and the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies, and Virtuelle Mauer/ReConstructing the Wall (2008, T+T (Tamiko Thiel and Teresa Reuter)), funded by a Berlin Capital City Cultural Funds grant and winner of the IBM Innovation Award for Art and Technology at the 2009 Boston Cyberarts Festival. Using more recent VR technology she created Land of Cloud (2017) as GoogleVR Tilt Brush Artist in Residence, which won the audience award at the inaugural VRHAM Festival in 2018. She created the VR artwork Atmos Sphaerae (2021) for the exhibition „Dis/Location,“ curated by Christiane Paul for DiMoDA 4.0 VR virtual museum platform, and is working on an interactive mixed reality installation Elemental Spaces, on the elements necessary for life to arise on Earth, with support from an FFF Bavaria XR prototyping grant.

Her first augmented reality artwork was ARt Critic Face Matrix (2010), in the path-breaking intervention into MoMA NY "We AR in MoMA." She then curated and led the Manifest.AR artist group's intervention into the 2011 Venice Biennial, including her AR artwork Shades of Absence. Many invitational AR shows and commissions followed: Biomer Skelters (2013, with Will Pappenheimer) from FACT Liverpool, Brush the Sky (2015, an AR calligraphy collaboration with her mother Midori Kono Thiel, at 18 locations in Seattle that were important in their family history as Japanese Americans) from Wing Luke Museum of the Asian-Pacific Experience, Gardens of the Anthropocene (2016) from Seattle Art Museum, Unexpected Growth (2018, with /p) from the Whitney Museum (the 1st edition is in the collection and the 2nd edition was auctioned as a NFT at Christie's NY), ReWildAR (2021, with /p) for the 175th anniversary of the Smithsonian Institution, ARpothecary’s Garden (2022, for the Roche Art Collection Basel), What You Sow (2023, with /p), for the AR Biennial of the NRW-Forum Düsseldorf, and Vera Plastica (2023, with /p), commissioned for the BROICH Digital Art Museum collection by DAM Projects Berlin.