ABOUT
Self-portrait using Mac-a-Mug Pro (1986), 2020
Biography
Marc Da Costa (b. 1984, USA) is a multimedia artist and anthropologist whose work explores the interplay between archives, technology, and lived experience. His practice examines how technical infrastructures shape our attention and sense of the world.
Working across immersive installations, experimental documentaries, and collaborative research projects, Da Costa creates public encounters with emerging technologies. Recent installations include “The Golden Key” (2024), an immersive myth-making machine that explores collective narrative, and “Tulpamancer” (2023), a VR work that explores memory and intimacy through the lens of an alternative history of AI in 1980s East Germany.
His earlier works investigated surveillance infrastructures, including “The Border Line” (2023) and “Invisible Walls,” which documented and reflected on digital traces left along international borders. His anthropological scholarship explores placemaking in the Anthropocene, focusing on Antarctic research expeditions and critical cartography.
Da Costa’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Venice International Film Festival, Centre Phi Montreal, Lincoln Center, the Onassis Foundation, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. He has received the Lumen Prize, SXSW Jury Prize, and Columbia University’s Digital Storytelling Award (all 2024) and his work has been covered in The New York Times, The Financial Times and elsewhere.
Select Affiliations
- ONX Studio, Member - 2023-Present
- Enigma, Co-Founder & Board - 2011-Present
- Media Development Investment Fund, Board - 2021-Present
- Dial Magazine, Board - 2022-Present
- Council on Foreign Relations, Term Member — 2019-2024
- New York City Open Data Advisory Council, Member — 2019-2021
- NEW INC, New Museum, Mentor — 2019-2021
- Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing (ESC), University of Michigan, Advisory Board — 2019-Present