• The Borderless Collective

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    The Borderless Collective

    TeamLab was founded in 2001 by Toshiyuki Inoko and four friends from the University of Tokyo. Inoko was born in 1977 in Tokushima, Japan, and studied Mathematical Engineering and Information Physics. The founding members included Shunsuke Aoki, Sakai Daisuke, Tamura Tetsuya, and Yoshimura Joe, all with engineering backgrounds. They officially incorporated when Inoko graduated in

  • The Meme Classicist

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    The Meme Classicist

    Ksenia Buridanova enrolled at art school in Rostov-on-Don in 2001. She spent years copying works by classical masters from nature, training her hand and eye in the techniques of Vermeer, Bosch, and the Dutch Golden Age. In 2014, she graduated with honors from the Art College of M.B. Grekov, then continued her education at the

  • The Time Archaeologist

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    The Time Archaeologist

    Hiroshi Sugimoto was born in Tokyo in 1948. An elementary school teacher showed him how to make photograms using photosensitive paper and light. In high school, he photographed Audrey Hepburn’s face flickering on a movie screen, trying to capture light that was already disappearing. He studied politics and sociology at Rikkyo University, traveled through communist

  • The Conceptual Provocateur

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    The Conceptual Provocateur

    Damien Hirst was born in 1965 in Bristol, England. His mother worked for the Citizens Advice Bureau. He never met his biological father; his mother married his stepfather when Hirst was two, and the couple divorced 10 years later. He grew up drawing compulsively, shoplifting art supplies, and visiting morgues as a teenager. The bodies

  • The Machine Collaborator

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    The Machine Collaborator

    Mario Klingemann (a.k.a. Quasimondo) was born in 1970 in Laatzen, Germany. His father was an engineer who brought home the bleeding edge of 1970s technology: electronic chess computers, programmable calculators, the latest gadgets that blinked and computed. His mother painted. Klingemann existed between these two worlds from the beginning. At his father’s office, he watched

  • The Witness Painter

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    The Witness Painter

    David Kassan was born on February 25, 1977 in Little Rock, Arkansas. He grew up in the Philadelphia area, raised in a family haunted by stories that were never fully told. His grandfather Murray Kassan had escaped ethnic cleansing on the Ukrainian-Romanian border in 1917, fleeing the Cossacks to reach America. But when David’s father

  • The Heretic

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    The Heretic

    Odd Nerdrum was born in 1944 in Sweden to Norwegian resistance fighters fleeing German occupation. After the war, they returned to Norway. In 1950, his parents divorced. Decades later, he discovered the man who raised him wasn’t his biological father. He enrolled at Oslo’s National Academy of Art in 1961. The academy taught modernism and

  • The Cinematic Architect

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    The Cinematic Architect

    Gregory Crewdson was born on September 26, 1962 in Park Slope, Brooklyn. His father was a psychoanalyst who saw patients in their Park Slope home. As a child, Crewdson would lie in bed listening to muffled voices through the walls, imagining what stories were unfolding in his father’s office. He learned early that the most

  • The Dream Weaver

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    The Dream Weaver

    James Jean was born in 1979 in Taipei, Taiwan. His family moved to Parsippany, New Jersey when he was three years old, where he grew up between two worlds. As a child, he explored music first, learning piano and trumpet, spending hours practicing scales and melodies. But his hands always wandered back to drawing. Faces

  • The Data Sculptor

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    The Data Sculptor

    Refik Anadol was born in 1985 in Istanbul, Turkey. At eight years old, he taught himself to code on a Commodore 64. Computers spoke a language he understood instinctively. He studied photography and video at Istanbul Bilgi University, graduating with highest honors in 2009, then earned his MFA in visual communication design in 2011. As