- Tangible Media
Cyrus Clarke’s work starts from a simple question: what happens when intelligence leaves the screen and enters the physical world?
He is an award-winning designer, technologist and researcher at the MIT Media Lab’s Tangible Media Group. His thesis centres on the vision of AIsthetic Machines: intelligence that is embodied, sensory, and expressive. His research gives generative intelligence a material language, exploring machines that have a body, can sense the world, remember and become something we encounter rather than simply operate. His work spans physical AI, olfactory interfaces, synthetic biology and regenerative computing.
His research has been published at NeurIPS and CHI, exhibited at Ars Electronica, ZKM, BOZAR, MIT Museum and World Expo 2020, and his viral videos on AI embodiment have reached more than 15 million people. His wider practice includes work with the UN, LVMH, Mercedes-Benz and IKEA. He led HARD MODE, MIT’s first Hardware × AI hackathon, and prior to MIT, founded Grow Your Own Cloud, a pioneering research platform for regenerative data infrastructure using DNA data storage, recognised by EU S+T+ARTS and named a Falling Walls Science Breakthrough of the Year.
Cyrus lectures and gives keynotes internationally on AI, embodiment and design. Across research, design and culture, he asks what intelligence can become and builds the forms through which it can enter the world.