Tamiko Thiel is internationally renowned for her impressive and politically-engaged virtual and augmented reality installations. She visualizes thoughts and dream worlds with digital means in a sensitive way and combines it with real world places, objects and settings. This approach allows her to provide a non-western perspective on western culture, to reminds us of historical events right in the places where they happened or shows us how our neighborhoods could look like in the future.

MATTHEW WILSON SMITH

“Like her creation Mariko Horo,[...] Tamiko Thiel is a border-crosser and an explorer of virtual space. […] It recalls Thiel’s work in showing how the concrete and the virtual, the bounded and the streaming, the grid and the fold are now not only inseparable, but mutually reinforcing”

OLIVER GRAU

"Art that connects innovatively and playfully contemporary digital culture with social, societal and ecological issues is developed by Tamiko Thiel in the last 20 years. Particularly internationally renowned is her Memorial Art, that impressively recalls the Berlin Wall or the Californian internment camps in an unprecedented way."

CHRISTIANE PAUL

“Beyond Manzanar (2000) [...] illustrates a chasm of cultural identity, contrasting a dream world of cultural heritage with a reality of political injustice." The Archive of Digital art provides the most extensive documentation on Thiel's Oeuvre containing works like “Shades of Absence: Outside Inside” (2011), which gave a voice to artists who have been threatened with arrest or physical violence by visualizing their silhouettes and names with AR technology at Venice Biennale, or “Invisible Istanbul” (2011) using smartphone augmented reality to overlay virtual artworks onto physical spaces of specific sites in Istanbul, creating surrealistic and poetic juxtapositions between real and virtual within the context of the hidden urban dynamics of the places, is also documented. Her works also recall historical incidents by the means of immersive 3-D Virtual Reality installations: “Beyond Manzanar“ (2000) recollects the suffering of Japanese Americans in the internment camps during World War II and ”ReConstructing the Wall” (2008) gives people, who did not experience the Berlin Wall, an idea of the political, sociological and territorial division in former East and West Germany."