Greg Niemeyer

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.

He received his MFA from Stanford University in New Genres in 1997. Since childhood, Niemeyer was 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 maintains, to make better decisions about our lives in context with other humans and with the fragile environments we depend on.

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 most recent Water Panoramas.

Niemeyer's work is data-driven: Large datasets and data streams are raw materials for visual and sonic experiences. They act as mirrors, reflecting to us what we don't see about our essential resources (air, water, care) from novel points of view. These patterns hold the hope that we can learn something new about what is to come and that we can evolve from the impossible present to more possible futures.

Selected projects include Gravity (Cooper Union, NYC, 1997), PING (SFMOMA, 2001), Oxygen Flute (SJMA, 2002), Ping 2.0 (Paris, La Villette Numérique, 2004), Organum Playtest (BAMPFA 2005), Good Morning Flowers (SFIFF 2006, Townhouse Gallery, Cairo, Egypt, 2006), Maldives Pavillion (Venice Biennale, 2013), gnosisong (CCD Mexico City, 2015), //supraliminal (ZKM, Karlsruhe, 2017), Sonic Web (ZKM, Karlsruhe, 2018) blackcloud.org, sevenairs.org, polartide.org, gifcollider.com, tsarbell.com and radioflux.org.