*Clearly I need to be paying more attention to these guys.
June2017
StaffNewsRendering of The Shed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Rockwell Group
Alex Poots, Founding Artistic Director and CEO of The Shed, is pleased to announce that Kevin Slavin has joined the senior staff as its Chief Science and Technology Officer. Slavin brings a remarkable depth of experience in technology, the arts, and academia, most recently running a research lab at the MIT Media Lab, where he will remain a Research Affiliate.
Driven by experimentation, innovation, and collaboration, The Shed will be a center for artistic invention bringing together leading artists working in every art form with leading minds in the humanities and sciences. Its unique and flexible building is designed to integrate the most advanced contemporary technologies—not just as part of the physical structure but in the art that will be produced within it.
Fostered by Slavin, artists will work with emerging developments in science and technology, including augmented and virtual reality, AI, synthetic biology, materials science, and locative media, to express the ideas and imagery of our time. The building aims to provide the most flexible infrastructure, ready to evolve as new technologies and experiences emerge.
About Kevin Slavin
As an entrepreneur, Slavin co-founded Area/Code in 2004, early pioneers of forms of entertainment and engagement that are only now becoming mainstream: location-based games in 2004 (which prefigured Pokémon Go), second-screen entertainment in 2007, and some of the earliest breakout games on Facebook and the iPhone. The company was acquired to become the New York office of Zynga in 2011.
Slavin trained as an artist at The Cooper Union, where he now serves as Vice Chair of the Board of Trustees, and worked as a visual designer before transitioning to include an emphasis on emerging technologies. His work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, the Design Museum of London, the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt/Main, and the Palazzo Mora in the context of the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale. His 2011 TED talk on the role of algorithms in everyday life has been viewed over five million times.
As faculty at the MIT Media Lab, Slavin was drawn to the anti-disciplinary nature of the institution, which seeks to synthesize art, engineering, science, and design. While there, he spent two years focused on the emerging field of Urban Metagenomics, together with the Mason Lab for Computational Biomedicine at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York.
Slavin was drawn to The Shed because it takes the very same anti-disciplinary approach as he found at the Media Lab, just starting from a different position—the arts. Where his goal at the Media Lab was to bring culture to science and engineering concerns, at The Shed his mandate is to infuse science and engineering into the artistic fabric of the institution.
About The Shed
The Shed, opening in spring 2019, will be New York’s first multi-arts center designed to commission, produce, and present all types of performing arts, visual arts, and popular culture. Driven by experimentation, innovation, and collaboration, The Shed will be a center for artistic invention bringing together leading artists working in every art form with leading minds in the humanities and sciences. The program will be international, created with co-commissioning partners around the globe, and local, with early-career artists in residence in The Shed’s creative lab.
Located on the west side of Manhattan where the High Line meets Hudson Yards, the unique and flexible building can physically transform to support artists’ visions and the work they create—from hip hop to classical music, visual art to literature, film to theater and dance—with collaborations across these disciplines and beyond, all under one roof. For more information, visit theshed.org.
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The Shed (Opening 2019)
30th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues
Offices:
423 West 55th Street, New York, NY 10019
info@theshed.org
