Greg Niemeyer

Website: http://www.gregniemeyer.com

Bio: "Greg Niemeyer is a data artist and Professor of Media Innovation in the Department of Art Practice at UC Berkeley. He's the former director and co-founder of the Berkeley Center for New Media. He started out with studies in Classics and Photography in Switzerland and switched to new media when he moved to the Bay Area in 1992. Greg received his MFA from Stanford University in New Genres in 1997. Since childhood, Niemeyer has been fascinated with making mirrors, and he still makes mirrors: media which allow us to see things from a new point of view, a point of view that is not our own, revealing both things we want to see and things we don't want to see. We need such mirrors, he urges, to make better decisions about our lives in context with other humans and with the fragile environments we depend on. His practice bridges the gap between the creative arts and data sciences, because he is equally interested in creating new media and leveraging the new opportunities for analysis these media offer. Niemeyer exhibited around the world at ZKM, SFMOMA, San Jose, Amsterdam, Cairo, Zurich, New York and received grants from the MacArthur Foundation, NEA, Intel, Pro Helvetia and many others. Notable works include icecorwalk.org, Tsar Bell, Oxygen Flute, Network Paradox, Quantopia and the Synchronicity data visualization for Salesforce Tower in San Francisco. "

Statement: Data is but a shadow of the present, and yet it casts the bright light of accountability into the past and the bright light of experience into the future. Data brings us knowledge from beyond where our senses can reach, because it makes things accessible that are too fast, too vast, too fine or too dense for us to see. Data art is concerned with data as such, helping us understand its full risk and potential, because it can creatively and freely explore all that data can be, beyond the practical constraints of science, technology and business.