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Kyle McDonald
Kyle McDonald is a programmer and artist from Brooklyn, NY, a frequent collaborator with similar creative Lauren McCarthy, and a resident at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon. His work most often challenges, subverts and plays with new technologies and their existing conventions– much of his work provides a new fresh take in addressing online communication & social media, surveillance, and virtual reality. Kyle also describes himself as a public, process-oriented artist who’s work often explores glitches and reverses anything from personal identity to work habits. What I personally most identify with in his work is that the pieces on his website and presented during his lecture are very consistent yet very very broad in their aims. Some of his projects can be categorized as social experiments or commentary on the way technology influences our communication styles (i.e. Going Public, us+, Face Substitution Research) while many other of his projects just seem to be experimentation with new and developing technologies such as artificial intelligence and face/body tracking (DIY 3d scanning, Nandhopper, Shadowplay). As well what I found interesting about his performance was his anecdote of how he came across labelling himself as an “artist”; his entire portfolio of work seems to be very technically based and really experimental with different areas of new media, however he describes the aspect of his projects being interactive which place them more in a category of art than simply technical presentations. He does not speak a lot on what type of social commentary or discussion his pieces may spark, but rather objectively details how they work and how the idea came about. I generally admire Kyle not only for the versatility and wide variety in the projects he works on, but also the humbleness and detachment with which he speaks about his work.
Eyeo 2016 – Kyle McDonald from Eyeo Festival // INSTINT on Vimeo.