History
Eyebeam was founded by John S. Johnson III, a filmmaker and philanthropist who also conceived and founded the Filmmakers Collaborative film fund, the Screenwriters Colony, and May68. Johnson’s inspiration for Eyebeam came from the sculpture atelier of his father, John Seward Johnson II and the Experiments in Art and Technology collective; after observing new media as a growing genre, he was motivated to create a similar studio. As an independent filmmaker, Johnson recognized a need to provide artists and digital film artists access to new technology and a shared workspace. The atelier was named “Eyebeam” after the architectural I-beam, as a metaphor for the support of artistic visions offered by the organization.
In addition to offering resources for new media artists, Johnson saw a need to provide middle and high school students with educational and artistic opportunities. Digital Day Camp, the first youth program which catered to new media education, was founded in 1998; in the pilot program, New York-based high school students learned web development and design. Future sessions included project-based learning around themes of bioart, urban interventionism, game design, and wearable technology.
Eyebeam’s first forum, “Interaction,” took place online in the summer of 1998 and was curated by UCSD professor Jordan Crandall. The forum, an email list called
In addition to funding artistic research, Johnson hoped to develop Eyebeam as a space that would also function as a museum devoted to new media works. In 2000, Eyebeam announced an international architectural competition to construct a space devoted to the dialog between art and technology, with the design firm Diller + Scofidio’s “Olympic class” design named the winner of the competition. Ultimately, plans to build a new museum were shelved in favor of supporting individual programming and development.
In 2001, Eyebeam developed two lab programs for the research and production of new media projects in film and programming. The Moving Image Studio, originally located in DUMBO functioned as an atelier workshop where post-grad production artists, emerging artists in residence, and mid-career commissioned and research artists collaborated. The studio commissioned new work and provided a range of resources, including hardware, software and technical expertise, to support artists’ projects, including work by Christian Marclay, Fred Wilson, and Mariko Mori. Visiting artists including Gregory Crewdson, Tommy Pallotta, Pierre Huyghe, Paul Pfeiffer, and Mike Figgis gave lectures in conjunction with the studio.
Eyebeam also launched the Research & Development (R&D) Lab for the exploration and creation of open source, open content, and open networked technologies. Courses, apprenticeships, and special events gave students, professionals, and the general public direct access to the R&D process. R&D Lab members covered topics including social network theory and viral media, rapid prototyping, the history and future of art production environments, and new models for learning. Specific projects and collaborations produced at the Lab included surveillance technology, electronic music production, physical/virtual interfaces, responsive video, wireless networks, displays, biological art, miniaturization, and telepresence.
Eyebeam held its first open studios for artists in residence and fellows in 2002. Alex Galloway, G. H. Hovagimyan, Peter Sinclair, Tony Martin, Yael Kanarek, MTAA, John Klima, Jem Cohen, Cory Arcangel, and Michael Bell-Smith were among the inaugural exhibitors. Among the projects on display was Galloway’s Carnivore, a Processing library that allowed for the creative misuse of data surveillance created in tandem with other members of Radical Software Group. Carnivore takes its name and function from DCS1000, a surveillance system used by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigations. Carnivore was awarded the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica the same year.
The fellows and artists in residence associated with the Eyebeam R&D Lab produced many significant works in art and technology. Yury Gitman and Carlos Gomez de Llarena's Noderunner, a scavenger hunt based on wifi sharing, received the 2003 Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica. Fundrace.org, a site which allows visitors to track campaign contributions through geocoding, was developed by Jonah Peretti, then-director of Research and Development at Eyebeam, and later adapted into a permanent feature on the Huffington Post. Peretti, together with Alexander Galloway, collaborated on ReBlog, one of the first blogging platform which allows users to filter and publish content from many RSS feeds. Beginning in 2005, the Eyebeam ReBlog began to feature the Eyebeam Journal, a series of in-depth writings and interviews with resident artists, research fellows, and guest contributors. During their R&D Fellowships, Theo Watson and Zachary Lieberman continued to develop openFrameworks, a C/C++ library originally created at Parsons. Together with Processing, openFrameworks became one of the most popular platforms for creative coding.
In addition to producing innovative programs and web platforms, the Eyebeam OpenLab, a successor to the R&D Lab, served as the birthplace of the Graffiti Research Lab. Founded by James Powderly and Evan Roth during their OpenLab fellowships in 2005, the GRL was envisioned as a nonprofit design studio for creating experimental technologies with street art applications. While at Eyebeam, Powderly and Roth developed a method for creating graffiti messages in individual LED lights and a system for projecting shapes drawn with a handheld laser in real time. Powderly and Roth later founded the F.A.T. (Free Art and Technology) Lab, a collective dedicated to the merging of open source technology and popular culture, with Theo Watson, Chris Sugrue, and others.
Eyebeam expanded its programmatic lineup of exhibitions and workshops with MIXER, a series dedicated to showcasing leading performance artists in the field of live video and audio, in late 2007. The inaugural event, “Brother Islands (Places to Lose People),” was focused around an immersive experimental documentary of North Brother Island and Wards Island by experimental filmmaker Benton-C Bainbridge. MIXER events were organized around themes as disparate as the World's Fair, the 2010 Winter Olympics, and New York City’s underground and featured interactive installations alongside performances by musicians and performance artists including DāM-FunK, Extreme Animals, Ryder Ripps, CHERYL, and D-Fuse AV. That same year, fellows and resident artists began organizing mobile workshops and talks as a way to bring creative technology to venues outside of New York. The Eyebeam Roadshow has since visited colleges, universities, and other academic spaces in the United States, United Kingdom, and South Korea, in addition to participating in the 2010 01SJ Biennial in San Jose, California.
In 2011, several Eyebeam residents, fellows, and alumni participated in Talk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Eyebeam Fellow Ayah Bdeir’s littleBits, a DIY kit of open source pre-assembled circuits, was among the projects displayed and was acquired by the MoMA as part of their permanent collection.
Read more about this topic: Eyebeam Art And Technology Center
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