“I love the paths of curiosity Miguel carves for himself, paths that lead to quirky, odd, and genuinely interesting places. He brings a playful directness to his use of technology, asking big questions about technoshamanism and technophobia alike and getting big, strange results back. I’m excited to see what this award allows him to build next.” – Trisha Lagaso Goldberg, Independent Curator and Director of Programming & Engagement, Anderson Collection
“Miguel Novelo’s use of found materials ranging from rocks to e-waste highlight the artist’s investment in today’s most pressing ecological questions. His work straddles various disciplines and knowledge systems to create interactive experiences that embody what the artist terms “techno-shamanism.” His investment in interrogating technology invites us to question how and if these tools are really serving us.” – Amara Antilla, Independent Curator
Working between his origins in the Yucatán Peninsula and the Bay Area, Miguel Novelo’s practice is technoshamanic—combining emerging technologies with Indigenous knowledge to create interactive installations, films, and sculptures. Using game engines and generative systems, he builds immersive rituals where audiences use serious play to inhabit non-human perspectives, whether moving like a bat or thinking at the scale of a meteorite. By making these speculative encounters accessible, his work invites viewers to slow down, embrace ecological grief, and intimately explore the continuous creation and destruction of the living.
Miguel Novelo is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher whose practices algorithmic cinema, game engines, and interaction design to explore non-human perspectives and world-building—creating systems where audiences engage with geological change, animal cognition, and the spaces between landscape and data. He holds an MFA from Stanford University (2022) and a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (2018), and his work has been presented at international film festivals, museums and galleries. Novelo currently teaches as a Lecturer in Experimental Media Arts at Stanford University and in the CADRE program at San José State University
