About

Career Narrative — Mark Chavez

My career in experimental media began not in a traditional studio or classroom but in the world of large-scale spectacle. In the early 1980s, I joined LaserMedia, one of the first companies to explore laser light as a medium of visual storytelling. I was immediately drawn to the challenge of using technology to transform light into an experience of scale, presence, and wonder. My work included laser animations for concerts, theater, and civic events, from Neil Diamond and Earth, Wind & Fire’s world tours to the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. The most ambitious of these was a fifty-minute projection mapped onto the immense carved surface of Stone Mountain in Georgia, a project recognized in the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest animated projection of its time. For me, these projects were not only technical feats; they were formative lessons in how media art could occupy public space, create collective memory, and alter our sense of environment. They foreshadowed the trajectory of my career: to continually seek new ways of fusing technology, art, and cultural imagination in public and experimental forms.

From lasers I moved into the emerging video game industry, where new interactive technologies were beginning to shape not just how stories were told but how audiences could experience them. At Acclaim Entertainment, I served as CGI supervisor on Alien Trilogy for PlayStation, developing early pipelines for 3D modeling, level design, and motion capture. These systems required designing images that responded dynamically, adapting to player behavior rather than playing back in a fixed sequence. This shift from passive spectacle to interactive systems deeply influenced my later practice. It gave me an early appreciation of procedural form, interactivity, and live rendering—concepts that now underpin much of contemporary immersive media. At the time, though, these were radical experiments, and I became fascinated with the potential of real-time engines to reshape both animation and narrative design.

That fascination carried into my next chapter at DreamWorks Feature Animation, where I worked as a CGI animator and modeler on multiple feature films. The studio environment exposed me to the precision and scale of industrial animation pipelines, where hundreds of artists collaborated across vast technical infrastructures. I learned discipline and technical craft at the highest level of commercial production, but I also began to see the constraints of that environment. The emphasis on efficiency, spectacle, and profitability limited the kinds of stories that could be told, and I felt a growing need to carve out space for experimentation, research, and cultural engagement beyond Hollywood.

This realization led me to shift from industry to academia. In 2005, I relocated to Singapore to help launch the first university-based program in digital animation in Southeast Asia at Nanyang Technological University (NTU). As one of the founding faculty members, I developed new curricula, trained a generation of artists in animation and media design, and initiated research into emerging forms of real-time storytelling. The move was both professional and cultural: it gave me the opportunity to explore media art outside the gravitational pull of Hollywood and to connect with new audiences, contexts, and traditions in Asia.

At NTU I also co-founded Media Art Nexus, a 15×2 meter public art platform installed in a major transit hub, where generative animation and interactive design became part of the daily rhythm of civic life. This project, which continues to this day, embodies my long-standing interest in media architecture and the integration of art into public space. Supported by national research grants, I also pursued projects on adaptive cinema, AI-driven agents, and real-time animation systems. These works combined technical innovation with a commitment to social and cultural engagement, including projects with the Singapore prison system where inmates created animated works as part of their rehabilitation.

Parallel to this academic and institutional work, my personal artistic practice has grown into a transdisciplinary exploration of decolonial aesthetics, Indigenous cosmologies, and quantum theory. This turn reflects my own cultural background as a Chicano artist and my longstanding interest in non-Western epistemologies. Through works such as Quantum LOGOS (Vision Serpent), Moirai, Thread of Life, Nocturne, and Echoes, Whispers and Memories, I have sought to create visual languages that bring together physics and philosophy, science and myth, computation and ritual. These works have been presented at Ars Electronica’s Deep Space 8K theater, SIGGRAPH Asia, and across monumental LED installations in China, Singapore, and Los Angeles. They investigate entropy, uncertainty, and entanglement not simply as scientific concepts but as aesthetic and cultural principles, resonant with both Mesoamerican traditions and contemporary media theory.

Recognition for these works has come in the form of major awards and invitations. Moirai, Thread of Life received Best of Show at SIGGRAPH Asia 2023, one of the highest honors in the field of animation and computer graphics. Earlier projects won Lumiere Awards from the Advanced Imaging Society, and my films have been screened at festivals across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. I have presented keynote talks at international symposia, contributed to scholarly publications, and served as chair, juror, and mentor for conferences such as SIGGRAPH, ISEA, and others. These roles have allowed me to shape discourse as well as practice, helping to define how animation, media art, and research intersect on a global scale.

Today I describe my work as Quantum–Decolonial Aesthetics: a framework that brings together quantum physics, Indigenous cosmologies, and computational media to rethink the terms of aesthetic experience. Quantum theory teaches us that the world is indeterminate, relational, and entangled. Indigenous philosophies remind us that knowledge is embodied, ecological, and collective. Together, these perspectives challenge the colonial binaries of Western thought—subject/object, nature/culture, art/science—and open new pathways for artistic exploration. My installations and films aim to make these unseen forces perceptible: the entropy of cities, the memory of landscapes, the quantum uncertainties that underlie reality itself.

Looking back, I see my trajectory less as a series of career shifts than as a continuous thread of inquiry. From laser light projected on stone, to motion capture for early game consoles, to global animation studios, to public art in Asia, to contemporary explorations of quantum media, my path has been defined by a consistent question: how can emerging technologies be used not only to create spectacle, but to reframe culture, reimagine history, and open new futures? It is this question that now drives my Guggenheim Fellowship proposal.