Theo Watson

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Theo Watson is a British artist and programmer from London. His work spans interactive video, large-scale public projections, computer vision projects, and interactive sound. His pieces have been shown in museums and galleries around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Tate Modern in London.

Watson is a partner at Design I/O, a Cambridge-based interactive design studio known for immersive installations. He co-founded openFrameworks, a free toolkit for creative coding, and helped create EyeWriter. He is a virtual fellow at the Free Art and Technology Lab (FAT Lab).

He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Design and Technology from Parsons School of Design. As a programmer, he worked with Zach Lieberman on openFrameworks, a C++ library for creative coding. He is a member of the Graffiti Research Lab and wrote the LASER Tag code in 2007. In 2006, he collaborated with director Michel Gondry on software for interactive installations in Gondry’s Science of Sleep exhibition in New York.

From 2006, Watson was a Production Fellow at Eyebeam and is a Virtual Fellow at FAT Lab. He creates site-specific installations that explore how people relate to spaces, often using physical computing.

Notable works include:
- Vinyl Workout (Rotterdam Electronic Music Festival, 2006): a large floor projection of a record where people’s movements control audio and video playback.
- Audio Space (2005): a GPS headset allows visitors to record messages and hear sounds left by others.
- Laser Tag (2007): a laser projector lets people write in light on a building; shown at MoMA and Tate Modern.
- Born out of Necessity: using eye-tracking to enable a graffiti artist with ALS to create virtual tags; in MoMA’s collection.
- Tate Muybridgizer: a Tate Modern commission with Emily Gobeille, a mobile app to create animations in the style of Muybridge’s Zoopraxiscope.

Watson has shown work at Eyebeam, Deitch Projects, the DUMBO Video Art Festival, Resfest, the Rotterdam festival, and Montevideo/Time Based Arts in Amsterdam.