Michael Naimark
Michael Naimark is an independent media artist and researcher. He has over two decades of experience investigating "place representation" and has worked extensively with field cinematography, interactive systems, and immersive projection. He was instrumental in the founding of several research labs and his art projects exhibit internationally. Michael was on the original design team for the MIT Media Lab in 1980 and was a founding member of the Atari Research Lab (1982), the Apple Multimedia Lab (1987), and Lucasfilm Interactive (now Lucas Learning, 1989). He joined Interval Research Corporation, a long-term lab funded by Paul Allen, as it opened in 1992, and worked an additional year after it closed in 2000 on his webcam spinoff venture, Kundi.com. Several patents have been granted for Michael's work. Michael's art projects are in the permanent collections of the Exploratorium in San Francisco, the American Museum of the Moving Image in New York, and the Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe. His 3D interactive installation "Be Now Here," produced by Interval with the cooperation of the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, toured in the ZKM's "Future Cinema" exhibition. Michael is on the Board of Directors of the ZeroOne Foundation in Palo Alto; the Board of Advisors of the Media Lab Europe in Dublin; and the Editorial Boards of Leonardo Electronic Almanac and Presence journals, both from MIT Press. He has been a member of the Society for Visual Anthropology since 1984. Michael was the 2002 recipient of the World Technology Award for the Arts. He recently directed a feasibility study for a unique, financially sustainable Arts Lab with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. Michael is adjunct faculty and currently teaching at both at NYU and USC.