James Powderly

Last updated
James Powderly
James powderly.jpg
Born1976 (age 4748)
Education New York University, Interactive Telecommunications Program
Known for Street Art, Robotics, and Internet Art
Notable work L.A.S.E.R. Tag, LED Throwies
Awards2010 Japan New Media Art Festival Excellence Prize, 2010 Ars Electronica Golden Nica in Interactive Art, 2010 Design Museum Brit Insurance Design of the Year in Interactive Art, 2010 Future Everything Award, 2006-2007 Eyebeam OpenLab Senior Fellowship, 2006 Ars Electronica Award of Distinction, 2006, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Off the Record Commission, 2005-2006 Eyebeam OpenLab Fellowship, 2005 Eyebeam Artist in Residence

James Powderly (born 1976 in Chattanooga, Tennessee) is an American artist, designer and engineer whose work has focused on creating tools for graffiti artists and political activists, designing robots and augmented reality platforms, [1] and promoting open source culture.

Contents

Biography

Powderly studied music composition at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. After college, he received a master's degree from New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program. James worked at Honeybee Robotics and was part of the team that worked on the Mars Exploration Rovers Rock Abrasion Tool. As the collaborative team Robot Clothes, Powderly and artist Michelle Kempner, received an artist residency at Eyebeam for its project, Automated Biography. The project used small robots to tell the "personal story about a sick person and their partner". [2]

In 2005, Powderly became a Research and Development Fellow at Eyebeam where he began collaborating with Evan Roth. Working as the Graffiti Research Lab, Roth and Powderly developed open source tools for graffiti writers and activists, such as LED Throwies and L.A.S.E.R. Tag. [3] Together, they also founded the Free Art and Technology Lab (F.A.T. Lab). Most recently,[ when? ] Powderly has won awards for his work on the EyeWriter project, including the 2009 Design of the Year in Interactive Art from the Design Museum, London, the 2010 Prix Ars Electronica, [4] the 2010 FutureEverything Award [5] and featured on NPR [6] and TED. [7]

Exhibitions

Selected exhibitions, screenings and performances include:

Detention in China

In June 2008, before the 2008 Summer Olympics, Powderly was contacted by Students for a Free Tibet who wanted to use his laser stencil invention, which can laser project simple stencils up to 2 km away, to project the words "Free Tibet" on a Beijing landmark, without acquiring any permission from the local authority. He said, "My understanding of the Tibetan issue was not in depth," but that he wanted to make "a general statement about freedom of speech". After practicing his message projection out of an apartment, [22] he and two other protesters were arrested, [23] interrogated, and detained at Chongwen Detention Center and given 10 days for "disrupting public order", which is unusual for American activists detained in China. [22] He was released on the closing day of the Olympics, on August 24.[ citation needed ]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ubermorgen</span> Swiss-Austrian-American artist duo

UBERMORGEN.COM is a Swiss-Austrian-American artist duo founded in 1995 and consisting of lizvlx and Luzius Bernhard. They live and work in Basel, S-chanf near St. Moritz and in Vienna, where both are professors at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Graffiti Research Lab</span> American artist group

Graffiti Research Lab is an art project founded by Evan Roth and James Powderly and run from Eyebeam OpenLab, a non-profit technology and art center where the two are fellows. The two experiment with LEDs, magnets, and conductive paint to augment street art and post instructions on their website. They pioneered "no mess" graffiti using LEDs.

Eyebeam is a not-for-profit art and technology center in New York City, founded by John Seward Johnson III with co-founders David S. Johnson and Roderic R. Richardson.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Evan Roth</span> American artist

Evan Roth is an American artist who applies a hacker philosophy to an art practice that visualizes transient moments in public space, online and in popular culture.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Golan Levin</span> American artist

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

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Theo Watson</span> British artist and programmer

Theo Watson is a British artist and programmer. His art work includes interactive video, large-scale public projections, computer vision projects, and interactive sound recordings which have featured in museums and galleries across the world including Museum of Modern Art, New York Hall of Science, Tate Modern amongst others. Watson is a partner at Design I/O, a Cambridge-based interactive design firm known for cutting edge, immersive installations. He is also co-founder of the programming toolkit openFrameworks, co-creator of the EyeWriter and a virtual fellow at Free Art and Technology Lab.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zachary Lieberman</span>

Zachary Lieberman is an American new media artist, designer, computer programmer, and educator.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Steve Lambert</span> American artist (born 1976)

Steve Lambert is an American artist who works with issues of advertising and the use of public space. He is a founder of the Anti-Advertising Agency, an artist-run initiative which critiques advertising through artistic interventions, and of the Budget Gallery which creates exhibitions by painting over outdoor advertisements and hanging submitted art in its place. Lambert's artistic practice includes drawing, performance, intervention, culture jamming, public art, video, and internet art. He has worked with the Graffiti Research Lab, Glowlab, and as a senior fellow at Eyebeam.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aaron Koblin</span> American digital media artist

Aaron Koblin is an American digital media artist and entrepreneur best known for his use of data visualization and his work in crowdsourcing, virtual reality, and interactive film. He is co-founder and president of virtual reality company Within, founded with Chris Milk. The company created the popular virtual reality fitness app Supernatural, which was acquired by Meta in 2023. Formerly he created and lead the Data Arts Team at Google in San Francisco, California from 2008 to 2015.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Free Art and Technology Lab</span> Digital art collective

The Free Art and Technology Lab a.k.a. F.A.T. Lab was a collective of artists, engineers, scientists, lawyers, and musicians, dedicated to the merging of popular culture with open source technology. F.A.T. Lab was known for producing artwork critical of traditional Intellectual Property Law in the realm of new media art and technology. F.A.T. Lab has historically created work intended for the public domain, but has also released work under various open licenses. Their commitment is to support "open values and the public domain through the use of emerging open licenses, support for open entrepreneurship and the admonishment of secrecy, copyright monopolies and patents. F.A.T. Lab's mission has been approached through various methods of placing open ideals into the mainstream popular culture, including work with the New York Times, MTV, the front page of YouTube and in the Museum of Modern Art permanent collection."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Becky Stern</span>

Becky Stern is a DIY expert based in New York City. Her work combines basic electronics, textile crafts, and fashion.

The EyeWriter is a low-cost eye tracking system originally designed for paralyzed graffiti artist Tempt1. The EyeWriter system uses inexpensive cameras and open-source computer vision software to track the wearer's eye movements.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ayah Bdeir</span> Lebanese-Canadian entrepreneur, inventor, and interactive artist

Ayah Bdeir is a Canadian entrepreneur, inventor, and interactive artist of Syrian descent. She is the founder and CEO of littleBits. She is also the co-founder of Daleel Thawra, a directory of protests, initiatives, donations in Lebanon.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">KATSU</span> Graffiti artist

KATSU is a graffiti artist who is active in New York City. He works with technology and public intervention to comment on commercialism, privacy and digital culture. As a result, his work includes traditional graffiti, digital media, and conceptual artwork.

Sabine Seymour is a designer, author, entrepreneur, and researcher, known for her work in fashionable technology and design. She is the director of the Fashionable Technology Lab and Assistant Professor of Fashionable Technology at Parsons the New School for Design. Seymour is the founder of Moondial Inc., a consulting company specializing in the integration of technology and fabrics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ars Electronica</span> Austrian cultural, educational and scientific institute

Ars Electronica Linz GmbH is an Austrian cultural, educational and scientific institute active in the field of new media art, founded in Linz in 1979. It is based at the Ars Electronica Center (AEC), which houses the Museum of the Future, in the city of Linz. Ars Electronica's activities focus on the interlinkages between art, technology and society. It runs an annual festival, and manages a multidisciplinary media arts R&D facility known as the Futurelab. It also confers the Prix Ars Electronica awards.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lindsay Howard</span> American curator

Lindsay Howard is an American curator, writer, and new media scholar based in New York City whose work explores how the internet is shaping art and culture.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Addie Wagenknecht</span> American artist (born 1981)

Addie Wagenknecht is an American artist and researcher living in New York City and Liechtenstein. Her work deals primarily with pop culture, feminist theory, new media and open source software and hardware. She frequently works in collectives, which have included Nortd Labs, F.A.T. lab, and Deep Lab. She has received fellowships and residencies from Eyebeam, Mozilla, The Studio for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University and CERN.

Geraldine Juárez is a Mexican and Swedish visual artist. She lives in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Alexander Reben is an American artist, researcher and roboticist. He is best known for his artworks created in collaboration with artificial intelligence, and his research in robotics. Reben's work has been exhibited widely in the United States and Western Europe, including the Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna and the Charlie James Gallery. His work is included in permanent collection of the MIT Museum. He currently serves as Director of Technology and Research at Stochastic Labs, a Berkeley, California-based nonprofit incubator for artists, scientists and engineers.

References

  1. "Learn | Magic Leap". creator.magicleap.com. Retrieved 2019-06-29.
  2. "Robot Clothes". Archived from the original on October 1, 2006. Retrieved January 25, 2008.
  3. Dayal, Geeta (June 25, 2006). "High-Tech Graffiti: Spray Paint Is So 20th Century". New York Times . Retrieved January 25, 2008.
  4. "Prixars". Archived from the original on October 25, 2010.
  5. "The Eyewriter". FutureEverything. Archived from the original on October 6, 2011. Retrieved November 4, 2011.
  6. "Paralyzed Graffiti Artist Draws With His Eyes". NPR. March 21, 2010. Retrieved November 4, 2011.
  7. "Mick Ebeling: The invention that unlocked a locked-in artist". TED. Retrieved November 4, 2011.
  8. "ArtBots". Archived from the original on 2008-10-06. Retrieved 2009-10-06.
  9. Graffiti Research Lab, Sundance Archived 2008-03-14 at the Wayback Machine
  10. OpenPlay, 2nd Digital Arts Festival
  11. Luminous Echo, Microwave Festival
  12. Artbots, Esther M Klein Gallery Archived 2010-07-09 at the Wayback Machine
  13. Open City, Graffiti Research Lab
  14. Beyond a Memorable Fancy, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts
  15. Rough Cut: Design Takes a Sharp Edge, Museum of Modern Art
  16. Design and the Elastic Mind Archived 2008-03-23 at the Wayback Machine , Museum of Modern Art
  17. Street Art, Tate Modern
  18. "Steal From Work". Archived from the original on 2016-03-03. Retrieved 2009-10-06.
  19. "EyeWriter", Museum of Modern Art
  20. "Artist-in-Residence: James Powderly & Eun-Jung Son", Društvo LJUDMILA
  21. F.A.T. GOLD, Eyebeam
  22. 1 2 "Artist Tells all about Time in Chinese Jail". ArtNet. August 27, 2012. Retrieved September 2, 2008.
  23. "Beijing: Artist James Powderly, Detained". Freetibet2008. August 19, 2008. Archived from the original on September 2, 2008. Retrieved September 2, 2008.
    - Elsa Wenzel (August 30, 2008). "How to get thrown into a Chinese prison". Cnet. Retrieved August 30, 2008.