About

Golan Levin is a professor of Electronic Art at Carnegie Mellon University, where his pedagogy focuses on the use of computation as a medium for critical inquiry and cultural innovation. His work as an artist, engineer, researcher, and educator explores new intersections of machine code, visual culture, and critical making. Levin's projects combine whimsical, provocative, and sublime elements across online, installation, and performance media, utilizing responsive artifacts, virtual environments, and media provocations to highlight our relationship with machines, expand the vocabulary of human action, and inspire participants as creative actors. His artistic practice engages themes such as interactive gestural robotics, personal digital fabrication, nonverbal interaction aesthetics, and information visualization as a mode of critical inquiry. Levin has spent nearly 30 years embedded within high-technology research environments, including the MIT Media Laboratory, Ars Electronica Futurelab, Interval Research Corporation, and the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology. His work is part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), has been featured in the Whitney Biennial, and has received grants from notable organizations such as the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Creative Capital, and the Rockefeller MAP Fund. Levin has also served as Director and Co-Director of Carnegie Mellon’s Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, supporting interdisciplinary research at the intersection of arts, science, technology, and culture. Recognized as one of “50 Designers Shaping the Future” by Fast Company and a two-time TED speaker, Levin is dedicated to exploring the potential of digital technologies to foster creative feedback, reveal expressive forms, and connect us to realities beyond language.

Research topics

• Computer Science

Selected publications

• Making Mobile Connections

  Routledge eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science

  Klare Lanson interviews Golan Levin, who in 2001, developed and performed Dialtones at Ars Electronica. Dialtones is, up to this day, considered one of the first attempts to use mobile phones as interfaces for artmaking with a focus on sonic and visual patterning. Levin is an artist, composer, performer and engineer with an interest in new modes of reactive expression. He focusses on the design of systems for the creation, manipulation and performance of audiovisual works, as part of his interest in formal languages of interactivity and nonverbal communication in cybernetic systems. Levin presents a critical view of his early work and looks forward, contemplating future directions for the field.

  PublisherDOI

• Interactive fabrication

  2010-01-22 · 214 citations

  article

  We present a series of prototype devices that use real-time input to fabricate physical form: Interactive Fabrication. Our work maps out the problem space of real-time control for digital fabrication devices, and examines where alternative interfaces for digital fabrication are relevant. We conclude by reflecting upon the potential of interactive fabrication and outline a number of considerations for future research in this area.

  PublisherDOI

• Messa di Voce: A state-of-the-art multimedia event combining extreme vocalizations with dynamically-generated visualizations and audio processing Concert reviewed in The New York Times

  2009-01-01

  articleSenior author

• Still Images of Prior Works (1999-2004)

  eCommons (Cornell University) · 2007-02-23

  other1st authorCorresponding

  Still images from select performances and installations.

  Publisher

• Dialtones (A Telesymphony)

  eCommons (Cornell University) · 2007-02-23

  other1st authorCorresponding

  Dialtones is a large-scale concert performance whose sounds are wholly produced through the carefully choreographed dialing and ringing of the audience's own mobile phones. Because the exact location and tone of each participant's mobile phone can be known in advance, Dialtones affords a diverse range of unprecedented sonic phenomena and musically interesting structures. Moreover, by directing our attention to the unexplored musical potential of a ubiquitous modern appliance, Dialtones inverts our understandings of private sound, public space, electromagnetic etiquette, and the fabric of the communications network which connects us.

  Publisher

• Rockefeller New Media Foundation --Supplementary Material

  eCommons (Cornell University) · 2007-02-23

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Dialtones is a large-scale concert performance whose sounds are wholly produced
\nthrough the carefully choreographed dialing and ringing of the audience's
\nown mobile phones. Because the exact location and tone of each participant's
\nmobile phone can be known in advance, Dialtones affords a diverse range of
\nunprecedented sonic phenomena and musically interesting structures. Moreover,
\nby directing our attention to the unexplored musical potential of a ubiquitous
\nmodern appliance, Dialtones inverts our understandings of private sound, public
\nspace, electromagnetic etiquette, and the fabric of the communications network
\nwhich connects us.

  Publisher

• Messa di Voce

  eCommons (Cornell University) · 2007-02-23

  other1st authorCorresponding

  Messa di Voce (Ital., "placing the voice") is a concert performance in which the speech, shouts and songs produced by two abstract vocalists are radically augmented in real-time by custom interactive visualization software. The performance touches on themes of abstract communication, synaesthetic relationships, cartoon language, and writing and scoring systems, within the context of a sophisticated, playful, and virtuosic audiovisual narrative. In addition to the performance itself, a separate installation version of Messa di Voce makes select software modules available for public play and exploration.

  Publisher

• 2003 Rockefeller New Media Foundation Proposal

  eCommons (Cornell University) · 2006-11-20

  article1st authorCorresponding

  I propose a collection of conceptually-oriented interactive installations, called the Eye Contact Systems, which explore the potential of gaze as a primary new mode of human-machine communication. The project addresses the questions: What if artworks could know how we were looking at them? And, given this knowledge, what if they could look back at us? My proposed artworks investigate the aesthetics of interactive systems endowed with new perceptive capacities - the ability to know where we are looking - and new expressive means, through mechanical eyes that can return and address our gaze.

  Publisher

• The Table is The Score: An Augmented-Reality Interface for Real-Time, Tangible, Spectrographic Performance

  The Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association · 2006-01-01 · 25 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Real-time performance instruments for creating and sonifying spectrographic images have generally taken the form of stylus-based drawing interfaces, or camera-based systems which treat a live video image as a spectrogram. Drawing-based approaches afford great precision in specifying the temporal and pitch structures of spectral events, but can be cumbersome, as they only accept input from a single point; camera-based approaches offer quick flexibility in all-around image improvisation, but poor compositional precision because of inadequate visual feedback to the user. In this paper, I present a camera-based spectrographic performance instrument which affords both compositional precision and improvisatory flexibility. This is made possible through an augmented reality (AR) projection overlaid onto and carefully aligned with a dry-erase performance surface.

  Publisher

• Computer vision for artists and designers: pedagogic tools and techniques for novice programmers

  AI & Society · 2006-06-16 · 45 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Paul Yarin

  Quantum Design (United States)

  2 shared

• Scott S. Snibbe

  2 shared

• Zachary Lieberman

  Parsons School of Design

  2 shared

• Laurence Gartel

  1 shared

• Karl Owens

  University of Oregon

  1 shared

• Quimetta Perle

  1 shared

• Carol Sill

  1 shared

• Enrique Cabarcos

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Recognized with grants from the National Endowment for the A…
• Recognized with grants from the National Endowment for the H…
• Creative Capital grant
• Rockefeller MAP Fund grant
• Named one of “50 Designers Shaping the Future” by Fast Compa…