Golan Levin

Golan Levin (born 1972) is an American new media artist, composer, performer and engineer interested in developing artifacts and events which explore supple new modes of reactive expression.

Levin received a self-designed Bachelor's degree in Art and Design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1994, and a Master's degree in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab in 2000, as a student in John Maeda's Aesthetics and Computation Group (ACG).

Between degrees, Levin worked as an interface designer at Paul Allen's Interval Research Corporation, where he was introduced to the field of interactive new media art by Michael Naimark, Brenda Laurel, and Scott Snibbe, among others.

Levin was an Eyebeam resident in 2002 and 2003.

From 2002–2007, Levin and Zachary Lieberman collaborated on a variety of projects together, using the name Tmema to represent their collective work.

After his graduate work at MIT, Levin taught computational design in various schools in New York City, including Columbia University, Cooper Union, and Parsons School of Design before accepting a position at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in 2004.

Levin is currently Associate Professor of Electronic Time Based Art in the CMU School of Art, with courtesy appointments in the CMU School of Computer Science, School of Design, School of Architecture, and Entertainment Technology Center.

There he teaches computation arts and researches new intersections of machine code and visual culture.

Since 2009, Levin has also held the position of Director of the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at CMU, an interdisciplinary research unit dedicated to supporting projects at the intersection of arts and technology.

Golan Levin's artwork focuses on the design of systems for the creation, manipulation and performance of simultaneous image and sound, as part of a more general inquiry into formal languages of interactivity and of nonverbal communication in cybernetic systems.

Through performances, digital artifacts, and virtual environments, often created with a variety of collaborators, Levin applies creative twists to digital technologies that highlight our relationship with machines, make visible our ways of interacting with each other, and explore the intersection of abstract communication and interactivity.

Levin's projects include the Free Universal Construction Kit (2012), a collection of 3D-printable adapters for popular toy construction systems, developed in collaboration with R. Shawn Sims, which is included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

Levin also led collaborations to develop Terrapattern (2016), an open-ended tool to support visual query-by-example in satellite imagery, and Augmented Hand Series (2014), a real-time interactive software system that presents playful, dreamlike, and uncanny transformations of its visitors’ hands.

Levin has exhibited, performed, and lectured widely in Europe, America and Asia.

His work has been shown at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, The Kitchen, the Neuberger Museum, and The Whitney Biennial, all in New York City; Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria; The Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipei, Taiwan; The NTT InterCommunication Center in Tokyo, Japan; the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe, Germany; and MoMA, among other venues.

His funding credits include grants from Creative Capital, The New York State Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Rockefeller MAP Fund, The Greenwall Foundation, the Langlois Foundation, Turbulence.org, and the Arts Council England.

Levin's work combines equal measures of the whimsical, the provocative, and the sublime in a wide variety of online, installation and performance media.

Levin's most recent work centers around interactive robotics, machine vision, and the theme of gaze as a primary new mode for human-machine communication.

Levin also did a Ted Talk discussing technology as art.