Tamiko Thiel was awarded the 2018 SAT Montreal Visionary Pioneer Award for now over 35 years of politically and socially critical media artworks exploring place, space, the body and cultural identity. She was lead project designer of the Connection Machine CM1/CM2 AI supercomputers (1986/1987), which influenced Google’s AI technology and Steve Jobs‘ designs. In 1989 a CM-2 was the fastest computer in the world; one is now in the design collection of MoMA NY. Her first virtual reality (VR) work was as producer/creative director on Starbright World, the first metaverse for children, in collaboration with Steven Spielberg. Her own VR large projection installation Beyond Manzanar was probably the very first VR artwork acquired by a US art museum when it was bought in 2002 by the San Jose Museum of Art. Her second VR artwork Travels of Mariko Horo was supported by the Japan Foundation, the Kyoto Art Center and MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies, and the more recent VR Land of Cloud (2017) was created as Google Tilt Brush artist in residence. She began working in augmented reality (AR) art as part of the pathbreaking AR intervention into MoMA NY „We AR in MoMA“ in 2010, and led the Manifest.AR artist group’s intervention into the Venice Biennial in 2011. Her AR art commissions include Unexpected Growth in 2018 for the Whitney Museum New York (now in the collection), ReWildAR for the Smithsonian Institution’s 175th anniversary in 2021, ARpothecary’s Garden (2021) for the collection of the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche Basel, and Vera Plastica (2023) for the collection of the BROICH Digital Art Museum in Germany.