Tamiko Thiel: part 2 - art at technology's edge
In the second part of our conversation, Tamiko Thiel discusses Beyond Manzanar, her collaboration with artist Zara Houshmand, where viewers confront the history of Japanese-American internment while drawing connections to contemporary persecution.
Today, the Spotlight again shines on media artist Tamiko Thiel , in the second of our two-part conversation.
In our first talk, we explored Tamiko's journey from designing the world's first AI supercomputer in the eighties to becoming a pioneering media artist. Today, we dive deeper into her groundbreaking work in virtual reality and other philosophical matters.
Tamiko's been creating immersive digital worlds since the mid-1990s when she worked with Steven Spielberg on a virtual space for seriously ill children. We'll talk about her project, Beyond Manzanar , which became the first VR artwork purchased by a major American museum, and how she uses emerging technologies to address political and environmental issues.
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Dig Deeper
- Visit Tamiko Thiel at tamikothiel.com
- Follow Tamiko Thiel on Bluesky , Instagram , and LinkedIn
- Beyond Manzanar
- Beyond Manzanar (demo)
- Starbright – VR Playscape For Hospitalized Kids
- Zara Houshmand
- Japanese Americans at Manzanar
- “Moving a Body through Space”: An Interview with Tamiko Thiel
- AI Causes Real Harm. Let’s Focus on That over the End-of-Humanity Hype
- Dig into this episode's complete show notes at spotlightonpodcast.com
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Tamiko Thiel
Media Artist
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 S… Read More
