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Though aptly dubbed the "godfather of creative code" and "Geek Superstar" by techie art bloggers for his individual contributions to the digital arts, Golan Levin's work and interests have always had an inclusive and collaborative tone. So it will come as no surprise to his audiences that Levin's most recent projects reveal a more overt rebellion against software monopolization and the homogenizing tendencies of commercial visual culture.
Levin aims his myriad personal artistic projects precisely toward the current technological and cultural moment. His engineering and computer science savvy allows him to create work that responds just-in-time to the very latest digital impact on human life. Levin's work reflects our initial marvel at the devices of the day. While playful, the underlying exploration of digitally mediated gesture and human-machine interaction is thoughtprovoking and impeccably designed. His signature style has involved creating and coding a highly technical device toward a time-based and visually poetic audio-visual performance or artifact. A classic early example, Dialtones (A Telesymphony) (2001), involved orchestrating a program to systematically dial and ring the varied tones of the audience members' cell phones in a symphonic hall - not as the embarrassing interruption it was considered at the time, but rather as a musical recital. A composer's sensitivity to timing is also essential to the humor linking Levin's works, such as in Double-Taker (Snout) (2008), where a larger-than-life, one-eyed robotic creature mounted on the roof of an academic building reacts with simulated surprise as people approach the door.
As one of a number of prolific digital artists nurtured early in their careers by John Maeda's Aesthetics and Computational Group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Levin has already made a marked impact of his own in media education. He promotes a radical démystification of artistic coding and an insistence on the possibilities of universal skill access. From his students at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), where he is currently an associate professor of Electronic Time-Based Art, to the diverse attendees of the ongoing ART & CODE conferences he spearheads, Levin debunks the stereotype of data hoarding and academic infighting with the generous sharing of resources and knowledge. In the following Skype-mediated conversation from December 2011, Levin considers the impact of some of his latest collaborative projects and educational...