Theodore Koterwas is an artist working with data, physical phenomena and the human body to make things resonate. He seeks to draw critical attention to aspects of daily experience that often go unnoticed but profoundly impact on how we understand each other, technology and the environment.
He received his MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute. Early installations included projecting the reflection of the head of a single pin onto the heads of 45,000 others, attempting to shatter glass with amplified water drops, and filling an intimate interior space with the live sound of approaching footsteps. At the Exploratorium in San Francisco he collaborated with scientists to create digital installations exploring the science of perception. He has since produced work for the University of Oxford, the University of Edinburgh, Aberdeen Performing Arts, artist and musician David Byrne and the Edinburgh Science Festival. His commission for the 2022 Science Festival saw an AI trained on the handwriting of astronomers scrawl near-realtime astronomical data on a large wall of carbon. My AI generated video installation The Nth Wave was shortlisted for the 2021 Lumen Prize for Art and Technology. Currently he is focused on physical interactions with data and Artificial Intelligence. Somewhere In The Universe It Rains Diamonds (Aether) utilised computer vision to detect cosmic rays so you could feel them in your bones. When Do You Give Yourself Away? captured your pulse and galvanic skin response to generate a multisensory experience unique to you. As Creative AI Artist in Residence for Inspace at the University of Edinburgh He investigated AI through the human body, haptics and gesture culminating in an Installation for the 2023 Edinburgh Science Festival in which an AI interacted with you through tactile vibrations. He extended this investigation for the 2023 Articulating Data Symposium by repurposing the voice models underlying virtual assistants for embodied interaction based on empathy rather than servitude. All the boys ate a fish, commissioned for The Sounds of Deep Fake as part of the 2023 Edinburgh Art Festival brings the human body back into contact with voice clones to explore how feeling them vibrate through us changes our experience of them and creates an exquisite corpse from living bodies.