Golan Levin 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 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 currently professor of electronic 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 “studio courses in computer science” 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 holds additional appointments at CMU’s School of Design, School of Architecture, Computer Science Department, and Entertainment Technology Center. Since 2009, Levin has also served as director or co-director of CMU's Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, a laboratory for atypical and antidisciplinary research across the arts, science, technology, and culture.
