Theo Watson and new media artist Emily Gobeille
Theo Watson’s resume is highly impressive for someone so young. He has comprised three pages of accomplishments, including, but not limited to: the British Design Museum’s Design of the Year award, the openFrameworks Award from Ars Electronica, shows at the MoMA in New York and the Tate in England, as well as the founding of two interactive studios Design I/O LLC and YesYesNo LLC. Born in Amsterdam,Watson grew up in London, attending Ibstock Place School, and then Latymer Upper School where he received almost straight A’s. His undergraduate degree was a BFA in Design and Technology from Parsons School of Design in New York, from which he graduated in Spring 2005. After a residency at Eyebeam in 2006, where he worked on projects for the Graffiti Research Lab and Preemptive Media’s Air, he began to create his own installations. Perhaps the most notable early work being Laser Tag with the Graffiti Research Lab. In the summer of 2007 he began working with Zachary Lieberman and Arturo Castro to develop openFrameworks, a freeware for writing creative code in C++. By that Autumn his works were being showed internationally—Ars Electronica exhibited his Laser Tag project, and one of his most famous installations, the Funky Forest, was shown at the Cinekid festival in Amsterdam. By 2008 his Laser Tag installation had been shown at the Tate Modern, the MoMa, and he began to travel to give presentations and workshops for his program openFrameworks. In the summer of 2009 Watson teamed up with paralyzed graffiti artist TEMPT 1 to develop an open source eye tracking controlled graffiti writer called the EyeWriter. This piece would go on to win the Design of the Year award from the British Design Museum and the Future Everything award. Watson has also done a number of less famous works. The studio Design I/O LLC is a collaboration between he and Emily Gobeille, another new media artist. The two of them and Lieberman also form the studio YesYesNo. Today he continues to develop openFrameworks and create interactive installations that “invite people to come play”. [*]