Category: People

Dr. Elizabeth Hénaff is a computational biologist and designer. Her academic trajectory started with a Bachelors in Computer Science, followed by a Master’s in Plant Biology (both from UT Austin) and a PhD in Bioinformatics from the The University of Barcelona.

At the center of her research is a fascination with the way living beings interact with their environment. This inquiry has produced a body of work that ranges from scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals to projects with landscape architects, to working as an artist in environments from SVA to the MIT Media Lab. She has made contributions to understanding how plants respond to the force of gravity, how genome structure changes in response to stress, and most recently has turned her attention to the ubiquitous and invisible microbial component of our environment. Some recent highlights include the design for the bioremediation of a local toxic Superfund site which won a design competition, had a gallery exhibit, and a scientific publication. Her work with the MIT Media Lab led to the development of a novel approach to urban microbiome sampling using honeybees, an exhibit at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, and a curriculum for international workshops. She has consistently made the tools – software, wetware, hardware – needed to answer her research questions.

She currently holds an Assistant Professor position in the Integrated Digital Media department at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering in New York
City.

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Tega Brain is an artist, researcher, and educator whose work spans critical art, computational design, and environmental engineering. Through practice-led research, she creates experimental systems and technologies that probe data practices and their politics, and that provoke new ways to imagine and design our ecology. Tega Brain is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator whose work spans critical art, computational design, and environmental engineering. She develops experimental systems that embody and probe alternative visions for ecology – what she calls ‘eccentric engineering’. Her recent work focuses on feminist data practices that include environmental sensing and modeling, artificial and natural intelligence, and low carbon digital design. Brain is the co-author of the book Code as Creative Medium (MIT Press 2020) which is a handbook for teaching and learning creative practice in the medium of software. Her work as an educator focuses on computation as a medium for teaching art and design, as well as art and design as a means and context for teaching computation. She also contributes to open-source programming tool kits for the arts.

(MA, Queensland University of Technology)
Assistant Industry Professor, Integrated Digital Media
Technology, Culture and Society
brain@nyu.edu

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http://www.markskwarek.com/
http://mobilearlab.bxmc.poly.edu/

(MFA, Rhode Island School of Design)
Lecturer, Integrated Digital Media
Technology, Culture and Society
mls386@nyu.edu
646.997.3768

Mark Skwarek is an artist working to bridge the gap between virtual and physical world with augmented reality. His art explores the translation our everyday digital experience into the physical world using mobile augmented reality. Skwarek earned his M.F.A. from Rhode Island School of Design’s Digital Media Department. He is full time faculty at New York University’s School of Engineering, the CEO of Semblance Augmented Reality and the director of NYU’s Mobile Augmented Reality Lab. He teaches 3D Graphics and the Augmented Reality Grad Class. He organized the augmented reality artist group manifest.AR, the arOCCUPYWALLSTREET movement, and co-organized We AR in MoMA. Skwarek’s practice is also largely based in art activism with emerging technologies. He has a long record of international augmented reality work, ranging from “erasing” the DMZ battlements between North and South Korea (a piece he did on site), to the virtual elimination of the barricades between Palestine and Israel, at the Gaza Strip. He has created political work and symbols in a variety of locations across the United States, including pieces at Wall St., U.S. Mexico Border and the White House to name a few. His artwork has been written about by the New York Times, Art in America, Boing Boing, WIRED, the Boston Globe, The Huffington Post, NPR, BBC, the Discovery Channel, Leonardo, and Creative Capital. Skwarek has exhibited in various venues, including: the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; ISEA; Dumbo Arts Festival, UCLA Digital Grad Gallery; the CyberArts Festival; the Sunshine International Art Museum, Beijing; and the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois, FACT in Liverpool England, Siggraph 2013, The 2013 Augmented World Expo, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Kasa Galeri, and Contemporary Istanbul.