Jeffrey Shaw

Jeffrey Shaw was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1944. He studied architecture and art history at the University of Melbourne before leaving for Europe to pursue sculpture at the Brera Academy in Milan and St. Martin’s School of Art in London. In 1968 he became a founding member of the Artist Placement Group in London, and the following year he moved to Amsterdam. Over the course of his career he has also held academic and leadership positions, serving as founding director of the ZKM Institute for Visual Media in Karlsruhe, co-founding the iCinema Research Centre at UNSW Sydney, and later directing laboratories at City University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong Baptist University.

In 1969 Shaw co-founded the Eventstructure Research Group in Amsterdam and began staging pneumatic happenings that transformed public squares, canals, and transport systems into spaces of collective play. Works like Pneutube and Waterwalk replaced static objects with temporary environments that could be entered, climbed, or carried across water, emphasizing art as an event shaped by direct participation. In the 1970s he carried this interest into expanded cinema, creating environments where projected images spilled into the audience and the cinematic experience became a live situation. With the arrival of computer graphics in the 1980s he began designing systems that gave viewers direct agency within virtual space. Points of View allowed audiences to steer their own path through a simulated stage of signs and sounds, while Legible City turned the act of cycling through typographic streets into a process of reading and meaning-making. In the 1990s his attention turned to large-scale immersive installations, from the 360-degree projection environment of EVE to early explorations of augmented reality in Golden Calf, where holding and moving a screen revealed a virtual sculpture. Across these shifts the aim remained to transform spectators into participants and to explore how technology could expand the ways in which images are embodied, navigated, and experienced.

Shaw’s body of work spans more than five decades, with landmark projects including conFiguring the CAVE, PLACE-Hampi, T_Visionarium, and Pure Land. His installations have been shown internationally at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Kunsthalle Bern, Guggenheim Museum in New York, and Hayward Gallery in London, and his writings and projects are among the most cited in new media literature. His distinctions include the Immagine Elettronica Prize in Ferrara in 1990, the Oribe Award in Gifu in 2005, the Ars Electronica Golden Nica for Visionary Pioneer of Media Art in Linz in 2015, and the ACM SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art in 2020. Further recognition includes the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Society of Art and Technology in Montreal in 2014, the Gold Muse Award of the American Alliance of Museums in 2019, and honorary doctorates from institutions including Multimedia University in Malaysia.