Interview Tamiko Theil

Credits

• Rhonda Holberton, Lead Researcher
• Soodie Sarooie, Interviewer
• Tiffany Chow, Post Production
• Benjamin Norman,Text Editor
• Robert Chavez, Web Editor
• Web Design: Sarai Mateo, Cristy Aguilar, Anna Huynh, Rosa Salangsang, Richer Fang, Vanessa Rivera, EJ Gandia, Cameron Chung

Abstract

This article, Interview: Joel Slayton is just that, an interview with CADRE Founder Joel Slayton.

Bio

Tamiko Thiel (b. 1957) is a digital artist who works with an array of New Media techniques including AR, VR, video installation, net art and digital 2D and 3Dprint. She is fascinated by the interplay of space, place, the body and cultural identity. After completing her Bachelor’s studies in Product Design Engineering, Thiel initially worked as a design engineer at HP, before returning to study Mechanical Engineering Design at MIT. During her time there, she spent much of her time in precursors to the Media Lab, exploring new visual techniques that blend Digital Art, technology and design. In the late 1980s, she achieved acclaim for her role as Lead Product Designer on supercomputers Connection Machine CM-1/CM-2. She relocated to Germany in 1985 to complete a degree in Studio Art at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, developing her practice as a New Media artist.

Her career has spanned three decades, using the possibilities of Digital Art in inventive and inspiring ways. Notable projects include a collaboration with Steven Spielberg, Starbright World, AR interventions at the MoMA and Venice Biennale and Unexpected Growth, a digital installation, commissioned by the Whitney Museum in 2018 and is now in its collection.

Article Body

Soodie Sarooie 00:00

So, okay, all right. Sounds good. Why don't why don't you introduce yourself to us and our audience.

Tamiko Thiel 00:11

My name is Tamika Thiele, I'm an American media artist of mixed Japanese and German extraction. I grew up partially in, in Seattle and partially in Kamakura, Japan. And then when I was an adult, I moved at the age of 27 to Germany and have been based there ever since. And I started out as a package, design engineer, product design engineer, with a degree from Stanford product design, in 1979, worked for a couple of years at Hewlett Packard doing pack, computer terminal packaging design back in the days when there were computer terminals, attached to mainframes, and those were the only types of computers available, brought two products to market. And then went on to MIT, where I got a degree a master's in mechanical engineering. But after the first year where I satisfied my mechanical engineering requirements, I discovered what became the Media Lab after I graduated, and decided really on the spot that I wanted to be come a media artist.

And then I got sidetracked when my friend Danny Hillis, who was getting his PhD under Marvin Minsky at the AI Lab, then, three days after graduation asked me to lead the product design effort for his thesis projects, the Connection Machine, which became the first commercial AI supercomputer built at the company Thinking Machines corporation. So I ran that effort for the two years that it took to get the design set. And then I said, I'm out of here, moved to Europe and ended up landing in Munich, where I got another degree in art degree at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, and finished up with a video piece video installation that I just showed in my retrospective at the Kunstverein was spoke in Germany. But that was basically my path to becoming a media artist.

And then I was working in video for the 90s. While at the same time in 1994, I was hired by worlds incorporated in San Francisco to work with Steven Spielberg, the filmmaker, on what became the first Metaverse for children Starbrite world, an online interactive avatar driven 3d virtual world connecting five hospitals nationwide, where seriously ill children could meet with each other from the play rooms in hospitals. And of course, they would keep an eye out to see if they could see eg because they knew that Steven Spielberg was always behind at all. I had been working in video art and was had moved to San Francisco, just because it seemed like a nice place to live. And I met up with Brewster kale and his wife, Mary Austin, who have a digital salon. And they were everyone that the meal was talking about the web. It's calling like, what's the web? My husband Peter graph says, Oh, don't you know the web is going to transform the whole world. And I meant sure I've heard that before. But it was true.

And that was September of 1994. And two weeks later, I talked with David Marvin, who, together with his brother Macklin. Marvin had started the company worlds incorporated out of the Knowledge Adventure company that was doing I think the CD ROM games. And the idea of worlds Incorporated was to create what is now being called the metaverse what we call cyberspace at that point, online, virtual multiuser worlds where you're represented by an avatar, and you could talk through text chat, because that was about what you could get through the ISDN lines that people would have at home. So the project that they hired me to do is called Starbrite world Ever since the brainchild of Steven Spielberg, who was, at that time, the chairman of the sovereign Foundation, a foundation founded, I think out of Hollywood, essentially, to bring together Hollywood people, and high tech people, games, industry, people and the medical profession, to create digital content for children who are seriously in chronically ill, and help them to either deal with their, their, their diseases, their conditions, or to, for instance, distract them when they were getting painful treatments.

And it was Steven Spielberg's idea to sit because he had heard of this new technology, which by the way, had only existed for a couple of years, when in 1992, Silicon Graphics had had gotten people together to create the open source, open GL standard for interactive real time 3d computer graphics. And Spielberg had heard that it's now possible to do these online virtual worlds and said, Hey, let's build Starbright world for these kids who can't leave the hospital so that they can meet other kids who have their same the same conditions, and trade information, talk with them. And you know, these kids who can't get out of the hospital, we'll provide them with virtual worlds where they can run around and play with each other, communicate with each other.

So at that point, in 1994, there were a lot of people who had a lot of expertise in combining Arts and Technology. Of course, there had been an number of people, but not a whole lot. And so, for me, for me, really the kind of winning card was that I had just recently spearheaded, the product design development of connection machines. So this was a job where combining the visual, the graphic, the aesthetic, and the highly technical aspect of the world's first commercial AI supercomputer really was a job that showed that I could do this sort of mixture of art and technology. So I was hired as a producer having not really done anything, except dabbling with computer graphics a little bit in the architecture machine group at the end, during my graduate studies at MIT, as a mechanical engineer, so we worked with Steven Spielberg, Spielberg, we had a team of two artists, and Parker, down, what was his last name Paco Moore, and like, we had a team of two graphic artists, Parker Moore, and Mike's Divac. And we had a team of two programmers, Keith, Rosa, and Michael, I'm forgetting his last name. And basically, they had to write everything from scratch, develop everything from scratch, and create this world Starbrite world which had several different spaces.

And and kids could go between those spaces, and basically see each other run around together, chat with each other, and explore things. And it was actually Steven Spielberg's idea that some of the things you would need to have another person to, for instance, open a door, it would only open if there were two of you there. So So you would have to collaborate. And we're station is used to of course, just spouting out ideas a mile a minute as he can and does, and having people run off and implement them in his films. And it must have been a bit frustrating for him to work with a new technology where, you know, the programmers we bring Wait, hey, we're programming as fast as we can. And it's going to take some time and it's going to be unstable because this is a new technology. So we had we had several different spaces all interconnected. Desert Oasis and sky world and an underground cave system, and then a build your own zone, where kids could also create their own buildings and create their own activities. They built a race track and held races there. This ran from 1995 to 1997, between five hospitals that were linked nationwide. And the kids loved it. I mean, it pulled them out of their, their their beds to see this new technology that No one else had at that time really? Almost no one had it, and certainly no kids.

And, of course, they were also excited to look for ET, who was Steven Spielberg's avatar? You know, we, at some point, we said, we got to build an avatar for Stevens, and what should it be? And he said, Well, you know, we should ask him, we all kind of had an idea. But when we put the question to him, he immediately said, Oh, he of course, which probably tells you a lot about Steven Spielberg. But it's depute with this live. You know, we had dropped five hospitals live nationwide, camera teams live nationwide at five different locations. And after that, I said, I'd never want to do an internet event. Again, the stress was incredible. But went off wonderfully. One of the machines went down, I think Steven Spielberg's machine had town, but we had a tech person, right next to him. And he did it before the camera went back to Steven. So. So that was really a wonderful chance to, to involve kids in that sort of technology.

I left for various reasons, in January of 1996, and one thing that I implemented before I left was to say, let's take kids drawings, and make the kids drawings, avatars in the world, and see what that leads to, because Steven Spielberg had donated his top animators who were supposed to work on a new film, but because of contractual delays, they were sitting around for a couple of months with nothing to do. So Stephen said, Well, you know, you can use my animators they'll make, they'll, they'll draw the, the avatars. For you. These are not 3d avatars, they were actually 2d avatars, where depending on the angle that you've looked at the avatar, you present different sides of that avatar, but they were animated in the old fashioned technique of making different you know, a series of drawings that showed the, the the avatar walking from front and side and back, etc. So the kids drawings that we put into the space were not animated, it was just a single sprite of single, non animated image.

But we started getting stories back about how kids would look at those avatars, because you could choose which avatar you wanted to use, and say, Hey, this is a kid string, that means that I could create my own world, I could create this space, too. It's not just like being handed down from, you know, the world's top animation avatars, and Steven Spielberg, and they build your own zone that we had, where everything was like a series of blocks, and you could build together buildings out of blocks, you could, like I said, they put together a race track and they had races, also foster this idea of this is something you can build yourself. It's not a black box, where you have no idea how it works. So those were really key ideas that I loved about Starbrite world. And then, of course, got realized, a decade later in Second Life, and the technology was better. I mean, people had ADSL connections at home, the computers were more powerful. And so more people could run this sort of the sort of virtual world on their computers. Whereas 9594 to 97, you basically had to have like a $5,000 PC donated to us by Intel, and the T one and T two lines that were used to connect the hospitals together nationwide. And if you didn't have that, you really couldn't run the space on it. So that was that was the, for me the beginning of of working with virtual reality for stairs producer and essentially Creative Director for this project. And then I took us version of that technology V RML. And started making my own artworks starting with beyond dance and art. But that's the second story maybe,

Soodie Sarooie 14:41

yeah, maybe about that. That's a great journey that it was a beginning of the new era, actually that what happened in the early 999. And you talked about the transition from the packaging design into digital art. Was that an An intentional transition for you What inspired you to expand your practice from engineering and design into digital art using AR VR mediums.

Tamiko Thiel 15:15

The reason that I decided to become a media artist was in some ways, because I worked on the Connection Machine. Ai supercomputer. So I had always wondered, do I want to go into art do I want to go into the sciences. And as a freshman at Stanford, I was taking I was in a, in a high energy physics seminar, called the ultimate nature of matter. They had just discovered quarks, and thought they had the smallest building blocks of, of the universe. Turns out, of course, that's wasn't true. But that's what we thought at the time. So I was working as a work student, my advisor had given me a job at the Stanford Linear Accelerator, through a center, I was in this heady atmosphere of, you know, we think we found the secrets of the universe. And I was also taking art classes in the same year as a freshman.

But art at that point, and we're talking 1974 was very much art for art's sake. So for instance, in the painting class, the entire discourse, let's say, was that the teacher set up a still life, and said, paint this. And then she set up a different still life and said, paint this. And that was about it. I mean, maybe she talked a little bit more about origin, what art is, and what, why, why, why we would want to do art, but I don't remember anything. And compare it to physics, where I was understanding the way the world works, not from a sort of societal viewpoint, but from a physical viewpoint, heart seemed really boring and disconnected from life. And then, when I graduated from Stanford, that email, I ended up going into product design, because it allowed me to fuse together the the art and design sides and engineering sides of my nature. At that point, the Stanford Product Design program in the mid late 70s, was one of the very few programs in the world that allowed you to take classes in art, in design, and in, in this case, mechanical engineering. So that for me was really bringing together all my interests in the first time, I felt like I really found some place where, where, where I felt at home, and where the different facets of my interests, my personality, and my abilities, really found a field that I could work in.

So I worked for Hewlett Packard for a couple years as a product design engineer, brought a couple of products on to market during that time. But you know, working in the packaging design field was not quite as exciting as being a design student where you're free to ideate come up with your own ideas, think about how would you want to address the problems of the world in a design project. So I felt like I was lacking something I'm not wasn't sure what. So I went to MIT for grad school in mechanical engineering. And then after getting my first use requirements out of the way, was thumbing through the paper card catalog and stumbled upon the visual language workshop courses and the architecture machine group courses in the architecture department of MIT. Now, these became the Media Lab, but only several years after I already graduated. So at that point, you know, I didn't know about this concept of the Media Lab coming up. They were probably already planning it, but I started taking courses. I took a course in computer graphics, but what you could do at that point really was programming at a very basic level. And so it would take months in order to be able to visualize you know, a spinning cube. And this didn't really tap into my artistic interests either.

But the other courses words images, graphic tools from Peter Twiga. Oh opened up my my eyes to how you can use visual design visual art. I chose to address all of society, all of culture. And, and so really, at that moment, something to that card catalog, I said, this is what I want to do. I want to become a media artist. So I had to finish up my degree, but I could take classes in, in whatever graduate level courses there were. And so half of my time at MIT was taking courses in the architecture machine group and visceral language workshop. And then I was going to look for art schools. And I was thinking, Should I move to New York, and then I got derailed when Danny Hillis doing his PhD under Marvin Minsky at the MIT AI Lab. Who was a good Danny was a good friend of mine, I hung out with him a lot, and at Marvin Minsky is helps a lot. And he asked me to join his new startup thinking machines to lead the packaging design mechanical engineering effort to build his thesis, the Connection Machine, which became the first commercial AI supercomputer. So at thinking machines, you know, and the way the wave had Danny won me over was saying, if you do get to work with Richard Fineman, the Nobel Prize physicist, I went, where do I sign up? Because of course, as a former physics graduate, I was totally in love with the Richard Fineman Lectures on Physics, and he was a totally cool character. And it turned out he was like that in real life. So yeah, so that's a whole, that's another hour lecture, Richard Feynman was designing the router and, and that became an integral part of the design of the package, because it was a 12 Dimensional Boolean n cube. But like I said, that's a that's an hour lecture.

So, so basically, I had two years at thinking machines were, the only criterion was, this has got to work. And it's got to be knocked in. Gorgeous, because we're a young company, you know, I was 26, Danny was 26. Most of the a lot of the engineers were younger. And we had to convince people that when they walked into the room, that this was a machine like they've never seen before in their life. And if it looked like a refrigerator, then we would have lost. So the design did have that visual aspect. It was a, it was a cube of cubes, a black cube of cubes, as large as I am with transparent doors, where you can see the lights connected to each of the chips blinking, and talking about what the machine was thinking about.

And so I had two years, just thinking about why. Why are we making this machine? What does this machine mean to us? What are the ways that humans have dealt with the concept of artificial intelligence, of creating intelligence, over 1000s of years of human history in many different cultures around the world? How is it expressed in film in science fiction images? And you can imagine after two years of this freedom, where they told me like, don't worry about what it costs, that machine's gonna cost three to $5 million, anyway, the packaging will be such a small portion of it doesn't matter. You can imagine after two years of this freedom, what is it like to say, Okay, now you have to like design a plastic part that snaps into place and requires only one screw? And I said, No, I'm out of here. I'm going to pursue my dream of becoming an artist because as an artist, you can go wherever you want, you can address whatever interests you. You can use your art projects, to be explorations of your relationship to this question, to the world, to the universe, to society to art history, whatever you want. Exactly. And that's the freedom of art.

Soodie Sarooie 24:39

or freedom of expression of art, or however you want to frame it. Now, we're going to go ahead and get into the talk of the Beyond Manzanar. I actually that's the piece that really interests I was interested in knowing and you know, asking more about it. If you can do ascribe for our readers, and discuss your inspiration, and collaboration with our Hirshman.

Tamiko Thiel 25:08

So while I was working at Worlds Incorporated, I had met through friends, Zara Hirshman, who had had even at that point in 1994, an incredibly rich background, not only as a poet and a theater director, but also had, you know, created multimedia presentations on different ethnic groups in Iran. She's half Iranian half European extraction and was living in San Francisco at that time. And I told her, I just got this job at this incredible company world's Incorporated. And said "By the way, they're looking for producers, who have backgrounds working with art and technology, why don't you talk to them?", so she became a producer, also at Worlds Incorporated. And as two of the people with very strong art backgrounds at that company, we started talking a lot about, Well, how could you use this sort of technology, this interactive real-time, computer graphic virtual reality technology to create art. And we became very close friends.

In 1995, if you recall, there was the Oklahoma City bombing. And in the first couple of days, after the bombing people were going, Oh, maybe it's Islamic terrorists, because two years before 1993 had been an attack on the World Trade Center. And it was bye bye, is make terrorists. And it turns out that after a couple of days, they found out Oh, it's homegrown, white American, you know, fascists, who, you know, we're quite happy to kill a couple 100 people, including a whole kindergarten class by bombing this building in Oklahoma City, and talking with Zara after that, it turns out that she had gone to a retreat in the High Sierras. And right before she entered this retreat, where she was going to be cut off from any news for a week, she had heard about the bombing. And her first thoughts were also Oh, my God, what if this really is, you know, what if it's people connected to Iran, will all people of Iranian nationality, all people with Iranian heritage be thrown into internment camps, like happened to Japanese Americans in World War Two? And it turns out that the retreat she was at was very close to the man's and our site, were the first of these incarceration camps was built in World War Two. And you might know there were over 10 of these incarceration centers.

They housed men, women, children, you know, kids with only partial Japanese ancestries were pulled out of orphanages, because drop of Japanese blood made you a threat to the, you know, the security of the United States. You know, people who are old people were brought out literally brought out of hospitals on stretchers and sent in sealed trains into the desert destination unknown, because, you know, a dying elderly Japanese American is a threat to the security of the country. Well, it turned out of course, in the 80s, when the Freedom of Information Act was able to force open all of these, all of the documents that we found out that the Justice Department's has lied to the Supreme Court, saying that we have information that is so top secret that not even the Supreme Court justices can see it, but this top secret, invisible evidence shows that all Japanese down to a drop of Japanese blood are a threat to the security. Well of course, Freedom of Information Act show You know, that was a bald faced lie from the Justice Department during World War Two. And that actually, six different studies from different parts of the government and the US military all said, No. If there were any Japanese or Japanese Americans who are a threat, we got them the first night after Pearl Harbor, put them in FBI concentration camps, and the remaining 120,000. Men, women, children, elderly are not a threat to America, this information was suppressed. And then the lie that said exactly the opposite was used to justify divesting these people of their lives, their livelihood, their freedom, and putting them in prison camps for the duration of Second World War. That was the historical backgrounds.

And the thing is when Zara came back from visiting Manzanar, and I hadn't been to Manzanar yet, at that point, she said, you know, the scary thing is I visited that sight, thinking that if this bombing in Oklahoma City, had some connection to Iran, I might be imprisoned here for the rest of my life. But you know what, it is so beautiful there. I've everything I've read from the Japanese Americans said, it's a it's a death of hell, it's dry, it's barren. But you know what it looks like the landscapes of Iran. It's a high desert plateau, at the foot of a towering snow covered mountain mount Williamson. And the runoff, the snowmelt creates a small oasis called Man's dinar, at the foot of these beautiful mountains in the middle of the desert. And in fact, as I walk, I'm paraphrasing her, her own words will be slightly different. But she told me that as she walked around the site, you know, the only things left at that point were this grid of partially tared roads. And she said, even this geometric grid in the desert, reminded her of the grids of Iranian paradise gardens that had been abandoned and taken aback by the desert. And then she showed me sketches and drawings and photographs of Iranian paradise gardens and how the geometry of the gardens expresses that perfection of paradise. And when she started talking about gardens in the middle of the desert, it triggered a memory of what I had heard at family gatherings.

In Seattle, as a child among my Japanese American relatives, I remember the adult saying something like, the Japanese is so crazy, you know, after they got put into the camps, in the middle of the desert, they started planting flowers. And so I went online. And this remember, this is 1995. So there wasn't a lot online. But there was a little bit of stuff online. And the first thing that came up when I Googled Madison, our garden desert was a photograph from Ansel Adams, of one of the gardens, in Metzner. And I looked at that photograph, and I said, this is a Paradise Garden, a Japanese Paradise Garden, because it has a rock that looks like a crane and a rock that looks like a turtle. And those are symbols of paradise used in Japanese paradise gardens. And Sara and I looked at each other and said, Oh, my God, this art project. told me later that she thought, yes, it's an art project. I'm going to write a poem about it. And I went, this is an art project and you know what? It has to be done in virtual reality.

Soodie Sarooie 34:21

Because the moment of inspiration for you to vote of you, yeah, right to say

Tamiko Thiel 34:26

not only we would like to make a work of art in virtual reality, but this is a subject that makes it perfect for the medium especially when I read the book farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki. Who used she talked about how as a as a child, she was maybe eight or nine or so. At a time when she was first imprisoned in men's night. She wrote about how she would go to one of the gardens and would sit down carefully choosing, choosing her viewpoint. So she could not see any barracks, or barbed wire, or guard towers, she don't see only see this beautiful garden. And as long as she did not move, she could pretend she was in paradise of our own free will. And as she moved, she saw the prison camp, and fell back in from Paradise back into the prison camp. And I told Zara, this is the moment that virtual reality can provide for you, you are moving under your own free will through the spaces, and your own free will your own movement takes you from Paradise back into prison.

This is something that this agency that you have, as a user of virtual reality, can give you an emotional shock in a way that no passive medium like film, or like a painting, or sorry, even a poem can give to you. So that for me was really the driving force. And so Zara and I went through a long series, it took us five years to build the project, we finished it in 2000. And we went through a long series of, of, sort of intercultural education, where she told me about Iranian culture. And I told her about Japanese culture. And we talked about experiences of being the diaspora Japanese, the diaspora Iranians and how, you know, the, the real Japanese and the real Iranians think you're not real anymore. And, and the Americans think you're also not real anymore.

Soodie Sarooie 36:49

I know the feeling exactly. So yes, that was wonderful. And I have this one last question. If you could, just given your experience with influencing the current artwork, and digital mediums, what is your vision for the future regarding emerging artists, artists roles and impact of the next generation?

Tamiko Thiel 37:18

Well, you know, I talked about in the Starbrite world how, how I was interested in in enabling the kids to feel like they could make their own content, even if, even if we had to do the work of putting it into the world. And then second life, you know, a decade later made that more possible. But the whole, the whole problem for these decades, where people were experimenting around with virtual worlds was the problem with making 3d content, it's a lot of work. And it's, and it requires less skills now than it did then you can, for instance, go into tilt, brush and draw things freehand. But that's still requires a fair amount of hardware. So what I see the richness that I see, you know, young people, either of their own accord or coming out of art schools and learning all of these tools, and having all of these possibilities from making things themselves so much easier than then we could then in the, in the mid 90s, is that it's, it really becomes democra democratizing influence, you know, smartphones, made it possible for anyone to make photographs and videos by pulling this thing out of their pocket, you know, and there's so many trips that I went on, where I thought, Well, shall I take my big single lens reflex camera with me, and I don't know, it's, it's a lot of weights. It's, it's fragile, but everyone walks around with this thing in their pocket that has so much power. And you can use it to digitize things in 3d now. And you can put those in virtual worlds.

So you know, that there's an explosion happening now of content made by all sorts of people, not just so to speak the, the upper, you know, 1% who has access to, you know, hundreds of 1000s of dollars worth of equipment, and the you know, hundreds of 1000s of dollars worth of of training that that it takes to use them so that's the freedom that I see happening now and in the stories that are bursting out from all sorts of quote unquote underserved communities that didn't have the chance to tell their stories before you know for for Zara and me working on on beyond Nance know this was a way to hold a dialogue between the the experience about the experience of being scapegoated, by your own country, your own government, for instance, in 1979 and 80, when, when, during the Iranian hostage crisis. You know, Iranians were being threatened by internment, quote unquote, just like we did to the Japanese. So for us, young man snore was a way of telling our story saying, like, look, this has happened in the past, and guess what it can happen in the future. And a year later, 911 hits. And guess what, you know, young Muslim men were being dragged in young Iranian men were being dragged in for questioning, including, like, Iranian Jews are going like, Wait a minute. Do you know anything about anything? Why are you questioning me me about about an Islamic attack?

So stories are coming out from all sorts of people, you know, whether Native Americans, African Americans, whether you know, young women in Iran, who are really tired of living under someone else's rules I can do with their bodies. It's happening right now. All these stories are coming out and the world is a richer place. It's a so much richer place than if you have just a tiny, tiny fraction of a percent of people who have the sole ability to tell all the stories about all the world and all the history of the world. That's the richness that we have now.

Soodie Sarooie 41:41

Wow. Wow. This was wonderful. Thank you so much Tamiko. It was wonderful meeting you in person. Listening to all you had to talk about and all the history and experiences. This was really wonderful. And I'm glad that I had this opportunity to be part of this interview with you.

Tamiko Thiel 42:03

Well, thank you for all your questions and for this opportunity to tell the story again, thank you.

References:

The Starbright World team at Worlds, Inc. was:

Executive Producer: David Marvit

Program Manager: Kevin Ugarte

Creative Director and Producer: Tamiko Thiel

Artists:

- Parker Moore: Art Direction and World Design

- Mike Sivak: Avatar Design and User Interface

- Wolf Schmidt: Sound Design

Programmers:

- Keith Rosema: Lead Programmer (Phase 1) and Client Design

- Ed Nanale: Lead Programmer (Phase 2)

- Michael Spencer

Network implementation and support:

- Manager: Kevin Ugarte

Media

Video Recording of the Interview with Tamiko Thiel, Conducted December 10th, 2022

Kewords

AI technology, Web, Multimedia art/world, Metaverse, Creative freedom, 3D, Online interactive avatar