Introduction
Garnet Hertz (born 1973) is a Canadian artist and academic. Hertz is known for his electronic artworks and for his research in the area of critical making.
Work
Hertz is known for robotic artworks that are a synthesis of living insects and electronic machinery. His Cockroach Controlled Mobile Robot (2007) uses a giant Madagascan cockroach to control a robot that moves through the gallery space. In his 2001 work Fly with Implanted Web Server, viewers of a specific URL browsed web pages served from inside a biological organism.
Several of his works involve the repurposing of obsolete media technologies. His work Outrun turned a video game cabinet into a street-driveable vehicle. As the vehicle is driven, it converts the a camera view of the real street into an 8-bit video screen view that the driver uses to navigate.
Academic career
Hertz is the Canada Research Chair in Design + Media Arts at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Hertz was previously Research Scientist and Artist in Residence in the Department of Informatics at the University of California Irvine and was also Faculty in the Media Design Program at the Art Center College of Design.
Awards
In 2008, Hertz won the Oscar Signorini prize for robotic art. In 2003, Hertz won a Canada-U.S. Fulbright Award to pursue graduate studies at the University of California Irvine in an interdisciplinary program in art, computing and
electrical engineering.