Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Installation, Video, Film, Digital art
Website: naimark.net
Michael Naimark was born in 1952 in Detroit, Michigan. He studied at the University of Michigan, where he created an independent major in cybernetic systems and graduated with a B.S. in 1974, and then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning an M.S. in visual studies and environmental art in 1979. At MIT he worked in the Architecture Machine Group — the predecessor of the MIT Media Lab — where he was part of the team behind the Aspen Moviemap (1978–79), a laserdisc-driven interactive drive through Aspen, Colorado that is now widely cited as an ancestor of Google Street View. He was also a research fellow at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies under Gyorgy Kepes, and was on the original design team for the MIT Media Laboratory in 1980.
Naimark moved his practice to the Bay Area in the early 1980s and has been based there ever since, working today as an independent producer and consultant from Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope building in downtown San Francisco. His career has run along the seam between art institutions and research laboratories: he was a founding member of the Atari Research Lab (1982), the Apple Multimedia Lab (1987), and Lucasfilm Interactive (1989), and was among the first fifteen employees of Interval Research Corporation in Palo Alto, where he worked from 1992 to 2001. He taught in the New Genres department at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1989 and 1990 and in the School of Creative Arts at San Francisco State University in the 1980s, and has since held appointments at the University of Southern California, New York University, the MIT Media Lab, NYU Shanghai, and UC Berkeley’s Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation. In 2015 he was appointed Google’s first resident artist in its VR division.
His awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Media Arts Fellowship (1980), a First Award in the SECA “Film as Art” program at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1984), an Artist Fellowship Program grant in New Genres from the California Arts Council (1992), a Rockefeller Foundation Creativity & Culture grant (2002), and the World Technology Award for the Arts (2002). He has been granted sixteen patents relating to cameras, displays, haptics, and live video, and his work has appeared in more than 300 exhibitions, festivals, and presentations worldwide. His installations are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, the ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, and the Exploratorium in San Francisco. He serves on the advisory board of the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts in San Francisco.
Naimark describes the through-line of his work as “place representation” — the problem of recording a location and giving it back to a viewer somewhere else. The resulting pieces are usually apparatus as much as image: a projector aimed at a living room painted entirely white so that a filmed scene falls back onto the furniture it was shot in; a hand-cranked kinetoscope cabinet holding stereoscopic films of Banff; a rotating floor and 3-D projection carrying viewers to UNESCO World Heritage sites in Jerusalem, Dubrovnik, Timbuktu, and Angkor. He has made interactive “moviemaps” of Aspen from the street, Paris from the sidewalk, San Francisco from the air, Karlsruhe from the tram, and Banff from its hiking trails, generally by building the camera rig himself before building the work.
The practice pairs technical invention with a persistent skepticism about what the technology does once it leaves the studio. Alongside the immersive installations sit projects such as a counter-surveillance Camera Zapper and writings questioning virtual travel, tourism, and the corporate mapping of the planet — an unusual combination of enthusiasm and criticality that has given his projects a habit of anticipating mass-market technologies, sometimes by decades. The work looks deliberately low-gloss and physical: visible cranks, pedestals, consoles, and projected light, with the mechanism left legible rather than hidden behind a screen.
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