Kyle McDonald is a Los Angeles–based multidisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator who creates participatory experiences with technology. Through installations, performances, interventions, websites, and open-source tools, he explores how technical systems shape relationships among people, communities, and the more-than-human world. Working with machine learning, computer vision, sound, surveillance, and communications technologies, he makes complex systems tangible—often playful, intimate, or unsettling—and asks how they might be used differently.
His projects encompass machine perception, artificial intelligence, social behavior, collective participation, environmental listening, and ecological responsibility. Recent work and field research across the Pacific—including journeys to Taumako, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, and Hawaiʻi—engage humpback whale song, navigation, te lapa, community infrastructure, and oceanic knowledge as part of this broader practice.
McDonald’s work has been commissioned, collected, and presented internationally by LACMA, the V&A, YCAM, NTT ICC, Ars Electronica, Sónar, Eyebeam, and others. Formerly an adjunct professor at NYU’s ITP, a member of F.A.T. Lab, and community manager for openFrameworks, he also leads workshops, develops tools for artists, and works through his studio IYOIYO as a creative and technical director.