Transart institute for creative Research

REPRESENTATIVE FACULTY

Here is a small representative selection of our current Faculty and Advisors working at the intersection of art and Creative Technology.

Maggie Buxton is a transdisciplinary practitioner and place innovator. She has over thirty years of experience in facilitation, strategic development and cross-boundary collaboration and learning. The last fifteen years of her career have focussed on curating community-led creative innovation labs, interactive installations, capacity-building programmes and events. Key themes in her work are portals, alternative realities and parallel worlds, and she has expertise in using creative technologies such as augmented reality and locative mobile applications within her practice. Her projects have involved collaboration with indigenous organisations (iwi/tribal groups), senior/elder institutions, migrant groups, maker groups, activists, entrepreneurs and experimental artists.
http://maggiebuxton.com/ and http://www.awhiworld.com/

Geoff Cox is a Professor of Art and Computational Culture at London South Bank University (UK), where he is co-Director of Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (CSNI), and co-Leader of MA Curating Art and Public Programmes (with Whitechapel Gallery), also Adjunct in Digital Design and Information Studies at Aarhus University (DK).

With Jacob Lund, he is co-editor of The Contemporary Condition book series published by Sternberg Press (since 2016), and with Joasia Krysa, co-editor of the open access DATA browser book series published by Open Humanities Press (since 2018, earlier with Autonomedia).

With Christian Ulrik Andersen, he co-runs a yearly workshop/publication in collaboration with transmediale festival for art and digital culture in Berlin (since 2012), and is co-editor of the associated open access online journal APRJA, hosted by the Royal Danish Library.

He has published widely, most often in collaboration, including: with Alex McLean, Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression (MIT Press, 2013); with Jacob Lund, The Contemporary Condition: Introductory Thoughts on Contemporaneity and Contemporary Art (Sternberg Press, 2016); with Winnie Soon, Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies (Open Humanities Press, 2020); with Alan Blackwell, Emma Cocker, Thor Magnusson and Alex McLean, Live Coding: A User’s Manual (MIT Press, 2022); with Mitra Azar and Leonardo Impett, the co-edited special issue Ways of Machine Seeing, AI & Society (Springer-Nature, 2021), which relates to ongoing collaborative research on AI and visuality, e.g. "Learning experiments in computer vision and visual literacy", a project with Institute of Education and The Photographers' Gallery, and initially supported by The Alan Turing Institute. http://www.anti-thesis.net/geoff-cox/

Joasia Krysa holds a collaborative post between the Liverpool John Moores University and the Liverpool Biennial, where she is respectively Director of the Exhibition Research Center and Head of Research. Formerly she was Artistic Director of the Kunsthal Aarhus in Denmark and part of the curatorial team for dOCUMENTA 13.

She is co-editor of the DATA browser book series, advisor for the open access journal APRJA (Aarhus University and transmediale), and most recently co-edited Writing and Unwriting (Media) Art History (MIT Press, 2015) with Jussi Parikka. The Next Biennial Should Be Curated by a Machine is a series of machine learning experiments exploring the relationship between curating and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Making reference to the e-flux project ‘The Next Documenta Should Be Curated by an Artist” (2003) –– which questioned the structures of the art world and the privileged position of curators within it –– the project extends this question to AI. 

It asks how AI might offer new agential perspectives on curatorial practices. What would the next Biennial, or any large scale exhibition, look like if AI intervened in the curatorial process to make sense of the vast amount of art world data that far exceeds the capacity of the individual human curator alone? Under this overarching concept, a number of parallel experiments have been realised applying various machine learning techniques (a subset of AI) to work on (‘curate’) datasets derived from various biennial exhibitions.

The experiments include: B³(NSCAM) – a collaboration with artists Ubermorgen;  AI-TNB – with Eva Cetinić (experiment machine learning concept and implementation), MetaObjects (Ashley Lee Wong and Andrew Crowe) and Sui (web development and design), both released in the context of Liverpool Biennial 2021, the former commissioned with the Whitney Museum of American Art; and Newly Formed – a collaboration with artist Yehwan Song, Digital Visual Studies research project at the University of Zurich, and Helsinki Art Museum HAM, commissioned for Helsinki Biennial 2023. 
http://www.kurator.org/ai/

Gyungju Chyon is co-founder of little wonder. The interdisciplinary design studio explores alternative ways of considering ecological issues by focusing on the relationships between designed things, environments, and people. Through engaging natural phenomena and experimenting with materiality, Little Wonder is interested in delving beyond technological performance, seeking deeper and more meaningful connections with our world.

Interpolates between installations and product design, Little Wonder has collaborated with international companies such as Rosenthal (DEU), Interface (USA), Duravit (DEU), Emotis (FRA), and Lucifer Lighting (USA). The work has been internationally awarded, exhibited at various venues in Europe, America and Asia, and published in academic conferences, journals and books.

Gyungju Chyon is a lecturer in Design department at Monash University in Melbourne. Prior to Monash, she was an assistant professor of MFA Industrial Design and BFA Product and at Parsons School of Design in New York. She also taught industrial design at the School of Architecture and Design at RMIT University in Melbourne, industrial design at University of the Arts and furniture design at Moore College of Art, both in Philadelphia, and consulted in furniture design in Helsinki.

She earned a BA in industrial design from Hong-Ik University in Seoul, and a MA in furniture and interior architecture design from University of Art and Design Helsinki (Aalto University) in Finland. Since her masters degree, she has been involved in teaching, practicing and fostering young designers.

https://www.littlewonder.design/know

Ed Shanken writes and teaches about the entwinement of art, science, and technology with a focus on interdisciplinary practices involving new media. His recent scholarship addresses art-science collaboration, surveillance culture, sound art and ecology, systems theory, and bridging the gap between new media and contemporary art. Shanken edited Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology and Consciousness (California, 2003). His critically praised survey, Art and Electronic Media (Phaidon, 2009) has been expanded with a multimedia, multilingual Online Companion: www.artelectronicmedia.com. His most recent book is Systems (Whitechapel/MIT, 2015).
https://artexetra.wordpress.com,

Zeerak Ahmed is a US-based Pakistani musician, curator, acdemic. She produces voice-based sculptures, site-specific installations and uniquely fragile sound collages that explore notions of identity, memory and longing. Slowspin has a distinct sound practice grounded in Hindustaani classical vocal traditions, dream-folk, ambient and experimental electronic music. Poetry and melodies in her mother tongue(s)—Urdu, Farsi, Purbi and English—build new textural soundscapes.

She is presently archiving the sonic and intellectual histories of female folk music traditions from South Asia, drawing new  forms from the poetic and melodic records of her ancestors.

Exploring ways of listening, composing, and performing the sounding body, her work addresses critical immaterial art.  Her latest album, TALISMAN, opens a world of Slowspin's uncanny and heart-wrenching refrains, delivering a balm for the migrant's journey into the unknown: the abyss of love, loss and longing. TALISMAN hosts Slowspin alongside a stellar line up of NYC-based musicians including Grammy nominated artist Shahzad Ismaily (Executive Producer), Grey Mcmurray (Co-Producer), Aaron Roche and Greg Fox. 

By taking the thumri and recontextualizing it for contemporary music—ambient, dream pop, guitar-based folk—she is excavating this buried alternative history. These centuries-old songs and traditions send down fresh roots into new soil on TALISMAN, still aching for home but open to new possibilities for growth, new histories to write. Much like Ahmed herself, and millions of others in the South Asian diaspora. “They tell me not to plant things where they don’t belong,” Ahmed sings in understated defiance on the closing “Belong.” “What if that’s all I know?”  - Pitchfork
https://zeerakahmed.squarespace.com/

Juan Pablo Pacheco Bejarano is an artist, writer, and educator born and raised in Colombia. Through texts, audiovisual installations, and participatory workshops, his work explores the planetary relations between water ecologies and technological infrastructures. His projects weave poetic and mythical narratives based on deep historical research and post-extractive imaginaries, blurring the boundary between the technical and the magical. Juan Pablo has worked as a cultural programmer at Espacio Odeón and Plataforma Bogotá, and has been an adjunct professor at the Javeriana and Andes Universities in Bogotá (CO) and at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague (NL) and the University of the Danube (AT). His work has recently been exhibited at the Institute for Postnatural Studies, Madrid (2023); Neuer Kunstverein, Giessen (DE); Jan van Eyck academie, Maastricht (2023); Porto Design Biennial with TBA-21, Porto (2023); La MaMa, New York (2023); Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels (2022); International Symposium of Electronic Arts ISEA, Barcelona (2022); Festival Internacional de la Imagen, Manizales (2021); Galería Santa Fe, Bogotá (2020); Transmediale, Berlín (2020); Ural Biennial, Ekaterinburg (2020); Museo Carrillo Gil, Mexico (2019); among others.
https://www.juanpablopacheco.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Comprehensive-Portfolio_Juan-Pablo-Pacheco-Bejarano_eng.pdf

FIND ALL STUDENTS, Alumni and FACULTY HERE.