A practice across digital media
Aaron Koblin is an American digital media artist whose work includes data visualization, crowdsourcing, interactive film and virtual reality. He led Google’s Data Arts Team from 2008 to 2015 and co-founded the virtual reality company Within with Chris Milk.
Koblin was born in 1982 and holds an MFA from UCLA’s Design | Media Arts programme. Wikipedia says Within created the virtual reality fitness app Supernatural, which Meta acquired in 2023.
Projects and collaboration
His Flight Patterns project received a National Science Foundation visualization award in 2006. His work is represented in collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Museum of Modern Art and the Centre Pompidou. He received the National Design Award for Interactive Design in 2014.
Flight Patterns won the National Science Foundation’s first place award for science visualization. Wikipedia lists several other works: The Johnny Cash Project, a music video for Johnny Cash; This Exquisite Forest, displayed at Tate Modern in 2012 and 2013; the music video for Radiohead’s House of Cards, made with James Frost; The Wilderness Downtown, for Arcade Fire’s We Used to Wait; and Three Dreams of Black, for the track Black on the Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi album Rome. He has presented at TED and the World Economic Forum, and his work has been shown at festivals including Ars Electronica, SIGGRAPH and the Japan Media Arts Festival. He was an artist in residence at MIT in 2010 and at USC in 2013.
How to approach it
Begin with a single project and identify its inputs: data, individual contributions or recorded material. Then examine the choices that turn those inputs into an experience. What becomes visible, and what recedes? This approach keeps the design decisions available for inspection and avoids treating technical novelty or institutional recognition as a complete assessment of the work.
