Kurt Bigenho was born in San Pedro, California, and currently resides in Brooklyn. For a incomplete sampling of his work, visit his website unfinished.com, which he began in 1996 with the premise that the site would keep growing and changing while he kept working. The site, therefore, quite literally, would remain ‘unfinished’.

He is the co-founder (along with Christina Ray of Glowlab) of The Organizers, a collaborative group responsible for the project The Sams at Art Basel 2006. He is also the co-founder of the participatory group Angry Waiter 4am (2005-) which invents pop cultural products which use (and misuse) technology. The group is working with entertainment, flim, and tv companies in Los Angeles, bringing participatory ideas to a wider audience. In 2004 he developed MPPS: The Mobile Phone Photo Show, which was the world’s first formal exhibit of mobile phone photography. During the project, 500+ participants from 50+ countries contributed 2500+ images, a ‘metasnapshot’ of global life at that time. He is currently developing an enhanced version of this project called Metamob, which will travel from city to city around the world. He is deeply involved in the field of participatory art, a genre in which the normal lines of distinction between audience and artist are blurred. From 1998-2000, he was the co-founder of the SF-based interventionist troupe VAINGLORIOUS, which developed performances for many clients and worked with museums, avant-garde dance troupes, poets, visual artists, perfomers, djs and more. A notable project developed by VAINGLORIOUS was the Bureau of Systematic Extraction, a pseudo-bureacratic ‘experience’ in which a troupe of uniformed workers (The Bureau) processed the audience in a myriad of odd, absurd, ridiculous ways. Bigenho is also a visual artist; an ongoing project is The Dept of Shape Research, a database of sculptural forms, organized according to a very elaborate custom classification system. Some 2000 shapes exist in the database, and more are added from time to time (as they are ‘discovered’). The project is multigenre, existing as sculpture, archival prints and video (upcoming). During 2004, his curatorial project Multiverse, which promoted “genre-bending” work (i.e., work that resists easy categorization) was in residency at San Francisco’s Rx Gallery, a key West Coast incubator for the art/technology scene.

He will be having a solo show in spring 2008 at p|m gallery in Toronto.

He has shown work nationally and internationally, at Mexico Arte Contemporaneo (MACO), Fountain Miami, The Lab, Showa Konen Park, Tokyo, The Santa Monica Museum of Art, New Langton Arts, Southern Exposure, four walls, Somarts, the Webbys, Rx Gallery, and the Oakland Museum of Art. He has received coverage in many national and international publications, including NPR, Communication Arts, Wired News, New York Times Syndicate, Slashdot, PC Magazine, Artweek, NME, Iconoculture, SF Chronicle, as well as in countless blogs. He has a degree in architecture from UC Berkeley and consults as a brand, experience, and information strategist for a wide range of clients from toys (Leapfrog) to wine (Mondavi) to technology (Savi) to biotechnology (Edison, Galileo) to business consulting (Towers Perrrin, Accovion) to fine arts (Glowlab, YOO Projects) to mobile media (Winksite, Engagelogic) to film (Back 40 Films, Maverick) to financial services (VISA).

Artist website: http://www.unfinished.com