Ian Callender

I am a New York City-based artist and designer exploring the intersection of the built environment and digital technologies.

As I was growing up, Central Park was my backyard and the city my playground. I developed loves for architecture and urbanism early, as well as a critical engagement with the issues that underly them. Simultaneously, through computer science, I became fascinated by the active and responsive manipulation of virtual space. Through physical computing I learned I could merge the two: the playground, so to speak, became of my own derivation. Its logic was easy to adjust and explore, and working in the physical domain, to me, meant working in grounded and veritably human experience.

In an inversion of this premise, since then, it has become increasingly clear that those situated human experiences are incresingly dominated and defined by the digital. In pushing against this through my work, there is little distinction between provocation, prototype, and installation. Drawing from art, a sketch (in whatever medium) is a valid and sufficient expression of an idea; drawing from architecture, the resolution of that idea must carry across all scales.

Ian holds a Bachelor of Arts in architectural history from Brown University and is currently pursuing a Master of Architecture at Columbia University GSAPP. He has also conducted coursework at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL and at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, as well as held professional positions in experience/exhibition design and real estate development. His work has been presented at the Venice Biennale of Architecture (2023) as well as the International Symposium on Electronic Art (2022) and the Media Architecture Biennale (2021); recognized by the Architizer A+ Awards, the SEGD Global Design Awards, and the ADC Awards; and published in ArchDaily, Hyperallergic, and MIT's Thresholds. He is a co-editor of the volume Provocations on Media Architecture (Set Margins Press, 2023).

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