Constructing the Unknown World: Limits and Freedom of the Imagination

The Travels of Mariko Horo

Tamiko Thiel is interested in developing the dramatic and narrative capabilities of interactive 3D virtual reality as a medium for addressing social and cultural issues.

She received her B.S. from Stanford University in Product Design Engineering, her M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), and a Diploma in Applied Graphics from the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.

Past works include the virtual reality installation "Beyond Manzanar" (in the permanent collection of the San Jose Museum of Art, CA,) dealing with media scapegoating of minorities in times of crisis, and "Starbright World," an online virtual playspace for seriously ill children she designed in collaboration with film director Steven Spielberg. She exhibits her work internationally in venues such as Siggraph, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and the ICA/London.

She has taught and lectured internationally at institutions such as the MIT Media Lab, the Bauhaus-University/Weimar, Carnegie Mellon, the USC film school in Los Angeles and the Babelsberg film school in Germany. In 2003 she was a Japan Foundation Fellow at the Kyoto Art Center and in 2004-5 she was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA.