• Lizentiat in Art History and Archeology from the University of Zürich,
• Electrical Engineering at the University of Colorado
• Art and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University
  

Artist-engineer Marc Böhlen / RealTechSupport is trained as a stonemason. After receiving his Lizentiat in Art History and Archeology from the University of Zürich, he worked as a farm hand in British Columbia, Canada before studying Electrical Engineering at the University of Colorado and then Art and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. Parallel to university-based education, Böhlen worked in industry as technical staff at IBM Research Labs in Switzerland for several years.

Böhlen is the recipient of the 2004 Artificial Life/VIDA award and the 2014 Vilcek Digital Art Prize. His works have been exhibited in Germany, Switzerland, France, Austria, Spain, Croatia, Canada, US, Japan, Singapore, Indonesia, Norway, and the UK. In 2010, Böhlen received a multi-year research grant from Intel Corp to study the impact of biosensing technologies on everyday life. Since 2020 his research has been supported in part by grants from the ‘AI for Earth’ Initiative (Microsoft Research) and the ‘Climate Innovation Challenge’ (Google Research). Böhlen has authored over 50 peer reviewed publications and was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Mellon Fellowship in 2023. Böhlen’s  new book, “On the Logics of Planetary Computing. Artificial Intelligence and Geography in the Alas Mertajati” is now available here.

• Automation at the End of Life
  https://realtechsupport.org/projects/robots4lastdays.html
• Machine Learning in the Wild
  https://realtechsupport.org/projects/return2bali.html 
• On the Logics of Planetary Computing: https://realtechsupport.org/projects/logicsplanetarycomputing.html