Miguel Novelo

Instagram: @xmiguelnovelo

Website: http://miguelnovelo.com

Bio: Novelo, focuses on emerging media and community organizing—currently working on algorithmic movies ☄️, technoshammanic installations 👻, thermodynamic hypnotism, and friendly computer viruses🫠. Novelo earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2018, followed by a Master of Fine Arts from Stanford University in 2022. His work has been exhibited at various institutions, including the de Young Museum, the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) in Mexico City, and numerous international film festivals. Currently a lecturer at Stanford Art and Art History Department and San Jose State University.

Statement: My art is technoshamanic, combining emerging technologies and indigenous knowledge—translating matter/energy/ghost/machine into access to the non-human perspective. I make systems/rituals/myths. I embrace mistranslations, uncertainty, simulations, and novelty. I depict systems, ins and outs. I create scenarios in which avatars and characters reimagine our perception of the world. Preach, listen, and invoke change. I utilize world-building, emerging media, and humor to generate myth, dialogue, and experience. I long for status-quo earthquakes, work with the unexpected, dance with data, feel ecological grief, and become non-human. In my work, I make machines that allow me to move like a bat, be judged by a pelican, and confess to an asteroid. Using humor, serious play, and absurd interactions as communication tools, I invite the audience to engage in non-human perspectives and speculative futures through nonsense possibilities. I ask the audience to multi-state sights, to challenge static perspectives. I practice interdisciplinary, research-based art through time-based new media, generative digital art, game engines, expanded cinema, participatory performance, interactive sculptures, and poetry. I focus on the intersection of geopolitical and cybernetic spaces—creating bridges between characters, landscape, and experience. My work is inspired by eco-horror storytelling/video game development, biofeedback user interfaces / object-oriented ontologies, geology studies, animal communication, and computer science. I want to become an active shaker in media ecology, create my own language, and make machines that give us access to alternative realities; I strive to make living art, an ever-changing, never-done process.