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Jeffrey Shaw (born 1944 in Melbourne) is a visual artist known for being a leading figure in new media art. In a prolific career of widely exhibited and critically acclaimed work, he has pioneered the creative use of digital media technologies in the fields of expanded cinema, interactive art, virtual, augmented and mixed reality, immersive visualization environments, navigable cinematic systems and interactive narrative. Shaw was co-designer of Algie the inflatable pig, which was photographed above Battersea Power Station for the 1977 Pink Floyd album, Animals.[1]
Shaw's numerous internationally exhibited and critically acclaimed artworks are milestones of technological and cultural innovation that have had a seminal impact on the theory, design, and application of digital media in art, society, and industry, and his artistic achievements are amongst the most cited in new media literature. During his career, his works have been presented at leading public galleries museums including the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Centre Georges Pompidou Paris, Kunsthalle Bern, Guggenheim Museum New York, ZKM Karlsruhe, Hayward Gallery London and Power Station of Art Shanghai. Shaw's career is also distinguished by his collaborations with fellow artists including Tjebbe van Tijen, Theo Botschuijver, Dirk Groeneveld, Peter Gabriel/Genesis, Agnes Hegedüs, David Pledger, The Wooster Group, William Forsythe, Dennis Del Favero, Peter Weibel, Jean Michel Bruyere, Bernd Lintermann, Harry de Wit, John Latham and Sarah Kenderdine.
Without Shaw’s output we would be unaware of the full range of electronic media art.
— Peter Weibel (Director and CEO, ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe)
Jeffrey Shaw’s symbolic structures provide both meaning and mystery to pathways through the unsignposted space of virtuality.
— Anne-Marie Duguet (Professor, Pantheon-Sorbonne University), Jeffrey Shaw: From Expanded Cinema to Virtual Reality [2]
The son of Polish immigrants, Shaw was born in 1944 in Melbourne[3] and studied at Melbourne High School and the University of Melbourne. Shaw left Australia in 1965 after two years of university studies in architecture and art history, and for the next 25 years, he resided in Milan, London and Amsterdam. Shaw studied sculpture at Brera Academy, Milan and Central Saint Martins, London.
Shaw was a founding member of Artist Placement Group in London (1966–1989) and of the Eventstructure Research Group in Amsterdam (1969–1979). On Heinrich Klotz’s invitation, he moved to Germany in 1991 to take the position of the founding director of the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. For the next 11 years, he initiated and led a seminal artistic research, production and exhibition program at the ZKM that included residencies and the creation of new works by many of the most notable media artists of his time. He also curated ground breaking new media art exhibitions such as Bitte berühren,[4] Newfoundland,[5] Future Cinema[6] and the ArtIntAct series of digital publications.[7] In 1995, Shaw was appointed Professor of Media Art at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HfG), Germany.
Shaw was awarded an Australian Research Council Federation Fellowship in 2003, and returned to Australia to co-found and direct the UNSW iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research in Sydney. At iCinema he led a research program in immersive interactive post-narrative systems, which produced pioneering artistic and research works such as T Visionarium shown at the Biennial of Seville in 2008.
In 2009 Shaw joined the City University of Hong Kong as Chair Professor of Media Art and until 2015 he was also Dean of the School of Creative Media. In 2010, together with Professor Sarah Kenderdine, he established the CityU Applied Laboratory for Interactive Visualization and Embodiment (ALiVE) at the Hong Kong Science Park, a next-generation platform for interdisciplinary applications in digital cultural heritage that included Pure Land – Inside the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang shown at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Washington in 2012. Over the last years, this research trajectory includes projects relating to Chinese martial arts (with Mr. Hing Chao) and the Confucian Rites (with Professor Peng Lin and Mr. Johnson Chang).
Currently Shaw is Yeung Kin Man Chair Professor of Media Art at City University Hong Kong, Director of the CityU Centre for Applied Computing and Interactive Media (Hong Kong and Chengdu), Visiting Professor at Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, Honorary Professor at the Danube University Krems, Austria, University Distinguished Professor at UNSW Australia, Visiting Professor at the Institute of Global Health Innovation, Imperial College London, and Visiting Professor at the Laboratory for Experimental Museology at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL).[8]
Shaw's awards and honours include: Immagine Elettronica Prize, Ferrara, Italy, 1990; Oribe Award, Gifu, Japan 2005; Honorary Doctorate in Creative Media, Multimedia University, Malaysia, 2012; Lifetime Achievement Award, Society of Art and Technology, Montreal, Canada, 2014;[9] Ars Electronica Golden Nica for Visionary Pioneer of Media Art, Linz, Austria, 2015.[10]
