Richard Lowenberg
Richard Lowenberg (born in Haifa in 1946), is an artist, planner/designer and eco-cultural activist. He has dedicated his creative life to understandings and creative realization of works exploring and setting examples for an "ecology of the information environment", and via art/science/society collaborations, demonstrating emergent opportunities for development of a "cultural economy". Richard founded 1st-Mile Institute in 2006, its New Mexico "Broadband for All" Initiative, and SARC (Scientists/Artists Research Collaborations) programs.
Living on an organic farm in Jacona, NM, he serves on the Board of Parallel Studios’ CURRENTS: New Media Festival. He co-organized Internet Society's Indigenous Connectivity Summit, held in Santa Fe, Nov. 2017. Richard studied design and taught at Pratt Institute, initiating its Electronic Media Arts program in 1971, and was one of the founding team of the Kitchen in NYC that year. He was founding Programs Director of the Telluride Institute from 1984-1996 and led its InfoZone rural Internet project. From 1996-2006, Richard directed the Davis Community Network, taught TechnoCulture Studies and was Artist-in-Bioregional Residence at UC Davis.
Based between New York and San Francisco in the 1970s and ’80s, Lowenberg cultivated a rich artistic practice that strung together the biological sciences, cybernetics, and networked ecologies within his performance, moving image, and computer art practice. Establishing his own Bio-Arts Laboratory in San Francisco in the ’70s, Lowenberg engaged artists and scientists to collaborate within an experimental field that would later be termed “bio-sensing” art. Throughout the span of his fifty-year practice, Lowenberg dug deep into the intellectual and multisensory properties that connect humans with other lifeforms, from orcas to tropical plants, asking many of the same questions — and conjuring the same provocations — raised by contemporary speculations on cross-species collaboration, non-human agency, and machine learning and artificial intelligence in the era of the Anthropocene.
Richard was involved in a number of early telecommunication-arts projects, and has integrated networking with rural community eco-planning across the U.S., as well as in Japan, Europe and South America. He prepared and led New Mexico’s statewide broadband initiative, 2008-2012. Personal interdisciplinary design, media arts, installation, performance and art/science works have involved collaborations with Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories, UNM, Santa Fe Institute, NASA, Gorilla Foundation, military labs, intelligence agencies, numerous high-tech companies and research institutions. Artworks have been presented internationally at the Kitchen, Whitney Museum, San Francisco MoMA, Kunstmuseum Dusseldorf, NTT-ICC, Tokyo, Santa Fe CCA, 1986 Venice Biennale, MIT List Center and ISEA2012. Grants/support awarded by NEA, State Arts Councils (CO, CA, NM), SECA, Art Matters, National Space Society, IBM, Apple, CPB, NTIA, GRiD, JVC, Lightwork, McCune Charitable Trust and Thoma Foundation.