Ken Goldberg Artist Bio
Artist Ken Goldberg uses new technologies to express the contrasts between what is natural and what is artificial – the liminal spaces between reality and representation. His artworks include a live garden tended by a robot that was controlled by more than 100,000 people via the internet, a 1-millionth scale silicon model of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, installations generated by live seismic data, an award-winning ballet and short documentary films. Goldberg's art has been exhibited in over 70 exhibitions including at the Whitney Biennial, the Venice Biennale, Pompidou Center, Walker Art Center, Ars Electronica (Linz Austria), ZKM (Karlsruhe), ICC Biennale (Tokyo), Kwangju Biennale (Seoul), Artists Space, and The Kitchen. His work is in the permanent collections of the Berkeley Art Museum, the Nevada Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Goldberg is Professor of Engineering and Art Practice at UC Berkeley and Founding Director of Berkeley's Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium. He is represented by the Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco. For more details please see: http://goldberg.berkeley.edu/art/
Recent works include a collaboration with dancer Catie Cuan on Breathless, an eight-hour performance with an industrial robot, alluding to the lifting, cleaning, caring, and maintaining motions performed by essential workers each day. Breathless was presented by the National Sawdust Theater in Brooklyn in 2023 and at the Exploratorium in San Francisco in 2024. Also in 2024, Ken collaborated with artist Tiffany Shlain to create Ancient Wisdom for a Future Ecology, an invited exhibition for PST.Art: Art & Science Collide: Getty Museum Pacific Standard Time (PST) Initiative in Los Angeles, drawing inspiration from the LA landscape, the science of tree dating, and artificial intelligence. The di Rosa San Francisco Museum presented an extended version of this exhibition in 2026. In 2026, Ken’s earthwork ReBloom: Reno will be presented at the Nevada Museum of Art and his surveillance installation Demonstrate will be presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
In addition to his work as an artist, Goldberg is Founding Director of Berkeley's Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium, and Professor of Engineering and Art Practice at
UC Berkeley. Goldberg is represented by the Catharine Clark Gallery in
San Francisco. For more details please see: http://goldberg.berkeley.edu/art/
Headshot by Chris Michel. high resolution version.
Represented by:
248 Utah Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
+1 (415) 399-1439
Artist's Statement
I’m fascinated by the intersections between art, technology, and culture. As an artist and roboticist, I use new technologies to express the contrasts between what is natural and what is artificial – the liminal spaces between reality and representation. Although the word telepistemology never caught on, I continue to be curious about the ways that distance in scale and time can influence perception and knowledge. Working with Tiffany Shlain on Ancient Wisdom brought out our complementary skills as artists and our shared perspectives on AI, history, and not taking ourselves too seriously.