Profile

Peggy Weil (SMVisS 1982, Arch Mac/Media Lab) is an artist, designer and an adjunct faculty member at the USC School of Cinematic Arts in Production.

Weil’s work as an artist and designer spans genres including digital urban signboards, VR, apps, and games. As an original member of the MIT Media Lab, she worked on pioneering interactive projects and has gone on to create award-winning titles including Immersive Journalism projects such as Gone Gitmo, a virtual installation of Guantánamo Prison and Wall Jumpers, a global visualization of political barriers. Weil founded HeadsUP!, a global competition challenging designers to create data visualization of urgent global issues for the public square. Weil’s work has been exhibited and presented at academic, industry, and art venues internationally, including LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, Gijón, Spain; Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow; and CURRENT:LA Public Art Biennial, Los Angeles.

Weil teaches regularly in art, film, and media programs including those at the University of Southern California, UCLA, and California College of the Arts. She also serves as an advisor to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Art + Technology Lab.

 

Recent Work:

88 Cores is a 4 1/2 hour video descent in one continuous pan down through the Greenland Ice Sheet; over two miles and 110,000 years. The piece underscores the critical role ice core science has played in humanity’s quest to understand Earth’s past—and future—climate. The variation and fragility of the excavated cores echo the vulnerability of polar ice as the earth warms. The pace and scale of the piece is a gesture towards the immense scale and gravity of climate change. The film was run continuously and was visible to the public from Fifth Avenue through the night. 

88 Cores is the fourth in a series of underlandscapes by Weil, projects treating solid ground as a canvas of critical processes and phenomena: HeadsUP2012, a data visualization of global groundwater from satellite data; UnderLA, an animated underground landscape of the Los Angeles Aquifer beneath the LA River; and Oscar-Zero, a virtual installation of a nuclear launch control center in North Dakota.

twitter: @peggyweil
instagram  @pweil111
website: pweilstudio.com