Page contents
Areas of Focus
Artists
Edited: July 21, 2023
Golan Levin
Pronouns
He/him
Date and place of birth
b. 1972, New York, NY
Current location
Pittsburgh, PA
Year(s) of residency and/or fellowship
2002–03, Project Resident
Member of
Golan Levin and Zach Lieberman

Golan Levin is an artist, engineer, researcher, and educator interested in new intersections of machine code, visual culture, and critical making. His work combines equal measures of the whimsical, the provocative, and the sublime in an eclectic variety of online, installation, and performance media. Through responsive artifacts, virtual environments, and media provocations, Levin applies creative twists to digital technologies that highlight our relationship with machines, expand the vocabulary of human action, and awaken participants to their own potential as creative actors. His projects have engaged themes and materials such as interactive gestural robotics; the tactical potential of personal digital fabrication; new aesthetics of nonverbal interaction; and information visualization as a mode of critical inquiry.

Levin is presently Professor of Electronic Art at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), where his pedagogy is concerned with the use of computation as a medium for critical inquiry and cultural innovation. He teaches code-oriented “studio courses in computer science” on themes like experimental interaction design, tactical media, generative form, and visualization. Levin holds courtesy appointments in CMU’s School of Design, School of Architecture, Computer Science Department, and Entertainment Technology Center. From 2009 to 2022, he has also served as Director of CMU’s Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, a laboratory dedicated to the support of atypical, anti-disciplinary, and inter-institutional research at the intersection of arts, science, technology, and culture.

Levin has spent over 30 years as an artist embedded within high-technology research environments, including the MIT Media Laboratory, Ars Electronica Futurelab, Interval Research Corporation, and Eyebeam. His work is included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), has appeared in the Whitney Biennial, and has been recognized with grants from Creative Capital, the Rockefeller MAP Fund, and others. A two-time TED speaker, Levin was named one of “50 Designers Shaping the Future” by Fast Company magazine in October 2012.

Eyebeam models a new approach to artist-led creation for the public good; we are a non-profit that provides significant professional support and money to exceptional artists for the realization of important ideas that wouldn’t exist otherwise. Nobody else is doing this.

Support Our Work