Ian Pollock Faculty Profile

Ian  Pollock

Associate Professor of Art, Coordinator, M.A. Interaction Design and Interactive Art, Coordinator, Undergraduate Interaction and Game Design Option

Department of Art

Ian Pollock holds a Master of Fine Art degree in New Media Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Bachelor of Fine Art in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute. He has worked as an educator in fine and applied media art in the United States, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates. Currently, he serves as an Assistant Professor of Art and the Director of the Graduate Program for Interaction Design and Interactive Art at California State University, East Bay.

Prior to his career in education, Pollock worked in television, launching the San Francisco Government Access Channel Citywatch, as well as in advertising and on the web. He was also a curator for the Southern Exposure Gallery in the 1990s and served as curator and director for Secession Gallery in San Francisco, a project gallery without walls.

Ian Pollock's creative work with communications technologies, the web, and telephones in public spaces has been featured in several anthologies of digital media art. He is a Digital Media Artist whose work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, as well as online. His recent projects continue to explore the politics of public space, including the activist street project GuerrillaGrafters, which involves grafting fruiting branches onto sterile city street trees, and the online project BiasMap, which crowd-maps prejudice.

In addition to his creative work, Pollock is involved in transdisciplinary research and collaborations, including game jams, hackathons, playable media, neuroscience, computer science, and afro-futurism, across traditional academic boundaries. He reviews academic and scholarly articles for the Leonardo Journal and for SIGSCE and ITICSCE conferences.

Professor Pollock's creative and professional focus lies in transdisciplinary New Media art, interaction design for social justice and sustainability, creative use of public space, and collaboration in game jams, hackathons, playable media, neuroscience, computer science, and foresight and afro-futurism, as well as social capacity and social capital building.