Karyn Nakamura (b. 2001) is a Tokyo-born, New York-based artist and engineer whose work explores the technical infrastructures that shape communication and perception.,She entered MIT intending to study physics and history but graduated with a degree in Art and Design.She began her career dumpster diving for discarded CRT televisions at MIT, and later worked at a Soho TV repair shop that serviced the CRT-based work of Nam June Paik.
Before turning fully to art, she worked in visual forensics at a nonprofit, evaluating how AI computer vision models interpret video evidence, and she continues to work for academic labs and research studios alongside her own practice.,She has described her position between art and technology as one of infrastructure and mediation, helping restore early media art and build calibration systems for projection mapping while turning that same technical knowledge toward her own, stranger experiments.
Her 2025 installation Surface Tension is built around bright-field microscope footage of individual human neurons, physically manipulated on a glass slide and then reworked through color inversion and diffusion models. At SHOWStudio Gallery, the work spanned five screens, a projection wall, and a slide projector modified into a microscope, while a choreographed drone offered the only vantage point onto the full installation.Surface Tension was included in the Creative AI Track at NeurIPS 2025 alongside Memo Akten's Superradience, and was shortlisted for Luba Elliott's AI Art Gallery at CVPR 2025.,
Her series Spitballs, 100 animations built through intensive 3D modeling and simulation, renders luminous gobs of spit traveling across gridded fields that recall diagrams of how large language models relate words. The work is narrated by pseudoscientific lore about a parasitic virus that injects phrases into its hosts' saliva, framed, in the artist's words, as “this shadow channel of human communication”.Other installations include a 400-foot interactive projection on a college dorm façade and a 20-channel video organism in an abandoned pub designed by Frank Gehry. In 2024, she received the Steve Jobs Archive Fellowship.
