Golan Levin is an artist, researcher, educator, and instigator whose work explores computation as a cultural material. Through interactive systems, open-source tools, and media provocations, Levin applies creative twists to digital technologies that highlight our relationship with machines, expand the vocabulary of human action, and awaken participants to their own potential as creative actors.
Levin is Professor of Computational Art in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University, where he also holds affiliate appointments in the School of Architecture, School of Design, and Computer Science Department. His pedagogy is concerned with reclaiming computation as a medium of personal expression; he teaches “studio art courses in computer science” on themes like creative coding, generative AI, computational photography, machine perception, critical information visualization, experimental fabrication, and drawing with machines. Levin is co-author, with Tega Brain, of Code as Creative Medium (MIT Press, 2021), a widely adopted guide to creative coding for software arts educators. He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from the MIT Media Laboratory, where he studied in the Aesthetics and Computation Group.
Levin has spent more than 30 years as an artist working within high-technology research environments, including the MIT Media Laboratory, Interval Research Corporation, Ars Electronica Futurelab, and Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology. From 2009–2022 he served as Director of Carnegie Mellon’s Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, a laboratory dedicated to experimental research at the intersection of art, science, technology, and culture. During his thirteen-year tenure he expanded the STUDIO as a platform for interdisciplinary artistic research, overseeing grants supporting more than 500 projects, hosting over 70 artists-in-residence, organizing hundreds of public events, and raising more than $2.5 million to support artist-led research initiatives. As Director, he established the STUDIO’s Frank-Ratchye Further Fund, Steiner Lecture Series, and Art && Code conference series; renovated the STUDIO into a flexible interdisciplinary production space; and supported numerous arts investigations that received major international awards, premiered at leading museums and festivals, and helped shape emerging fields of interdisciplinary art.
Levin also develops open-source software, educational resources, and creative tools to make advanced computational techniques more accessible to artists, students, and researchers. In early 2010s, Levin participated as a member of the international Free Art & Technology (F.A.T) Lab artist collective, through which he released projects like the Free Universal Construction Kit. More recent examples of Levin’s open-source work include PEmbroider (a computational embroidery library for Processing) and p5.plotSvg, a library for exporting plotter-friendly design files from p5.js. Currently, Levin is developing tools for machine perception, creative AI, experimental computer vision, and the recovery and documentation of obsolete creative technologies, treating reverse engineering as a mode of both creative practice and cultural stewardship.
Levin’s artworks investigate the expressive possibilities of computation through interactive installations, generative systems, computational imaging, and participatory software. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA); the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; and the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany, and has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Whitney Biennial, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, Design Museum London, and the NTT InterCommunication Center (ICC) in Tokyo, among many others. His work has been recognized with awards from Prix Ars Electronica, TR100, Webby Awards, Core77 Design Awards, and ID Magazine’s Interactive Media Review, and has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Creative Capital, the Rockefeller MAP Fund, and numerous public and private foundations. A two-time TED speaker, Levin was named one of Fast Company’s “50 Designers Shaping the Future.”