Kevin Sweet is a multimedia artist and Assistant Professor of Design and Interactive Arts at the University of Texas at Dallas. He holds a Phd in Emergent Technologies and Media Art Practices from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and an MFA in Film/Video from Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
An avid collaborator, he works across the sciences, philosophy, arts-based community organizing and education. From developing sonic planetaria to XR community practices in ancestral resilience, his creative practice and research centers around the potential for narrative refiguration through embodied forms of creative play. Recently this has taken the form of partnering with History Colorado and community stakeholders to build a local media lab and develop a critical digital arts curriculum for the school district in San Luis, Colorado, with the goal of helping highschool-aged students become authors of their community’s history.
He is currently the working board president of Denver Digerati, a Colorado-based nonprofit organization dedicated to the support and amplification of digital motion art and animation. There he collaborates with the Digerati team in the strategic planning and structural development for the organization, leads the development of educational programs focusing on underserved populations, and co-facilitates the artist residency program. Prior to joining the Denver Digerati team, Kevin was the Director of Media at the international peacebuilding organization Guestbook Project, the Co-PI of astrophysics and art collaboration Sound Planetarium, served as the Head of Creative Development for a VR adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses entitled JoyceStick, and was appointed the first Artist in Residence for by the Institute of Liberal Arts at Boston College. He has additionally contributed as co-editor to peer-reviewed publications including Issue 02 of The Digital Review (TDR), (Digital) Performance.
His collaborative work has been exhibited internationally and across a range of academic and artistic contexts. Recently, he and multimedia artist Laura H. Kim have presented their post-disciplinary practice-based research project “Towards Pigeonology” in the form of performances, workshops, and exhibitions at Matters of Lives (Venice, IT), Udstillingsstedet M.I.S. (Aarhus, DK), and Future Forging: Mythos of the Cybernaut (Denver, USA). Their work engaging in questions around the enmeshing of human and (non)human protagonists and de-extinction was presented at The Art and Science of Species Revival Symposium at the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity, University of York, UK, and the 111th College Art Association Annual Conference in NY, USA. Prior exhibition includes Twinsome Minds: Recovering 1916 in Images and Story (2016), a multimedia performance with artist Sheila Gallagher and philosopher Richard Kearney. Through an interplay of storytelling, animations, music and poetry, Twinsome Minds mines what is often lost behind official historical accounts and acts of commemoration, and proposes a transformative work of interpreting Dublin’s 1916 Easter Rising. Twinsome Minds was commissioned by the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, funded by Culture Ireland, and toured fifteen cities across Europe, the US, and Canada as part of the Republic of Ireland’s 2016 Centenary Programme.
Seed Seekers a community-oriented art project with Laura Hyunjhee Kim
Twinsome Minds: Recovering 1916 in Images and Stories a multimedia performance with Sheila Gallagher and Richard Kearney
Joycestick a VR game based on Ulysses, as told through the objects that inhabit it.