Our Team
Jason Edward Lewis
Primary Investigator
University Research Chair in Computational Media and the Indigenous Future Imaginary & Professor of Computation Arts
Jason E. Lewis is Assistant Professor of Digital Image/Sound and the Fine Arts, Department of Design Art, Concordia University. He studied computer science (B.S. Symbolic Systems) and philosophy (B.A. German Studies) as a Stanford undergraduate, and received an M.Phil. in Design from the Royal College of Art. Lewis maintains a thriving art practice as well as a research practice, both of which are founded on computational approaches to digital media. His research interests include the history of visual language, novel software architectures and applications for interactive, dynamic and performative text and typography, computation as a creative material, interaction analysis, emergent media theory and history, and methodologies for conducting art-led technology research. His work has been featured at the Ars Electronica, SIGGRAPH, and UIST, among others, and funded by the English Arts Council, the Banff Centre for the Arts, Arts Alliance, and Hexagram.
He is currently a member of Hexagram’s Interactive Performance and Sound research axis. Prior to entering academia he spent over fifteen years in industry developing computational media technology at US West Advanced Technologies, the Institute for Research on Learning, and Interval Research. In 1999 he founded and subsequently directed for three years Arts Alliance Laboratory, an art-led technology research studio in San Francisco which won acclaim for its creative technology research program, a residencies program which invited visiting artists from around the world to San Francisco to develop their technologically-mediated projects, and a lecture series that broke new ground in bringing digital media artists together with an interdisciplinary set of commentators to provide feedback on works-on-progress. He currently resides in Montreal and San Francisco.