'I don't want to rule the world, I just want to be a consultant.'
Michael Ricciardi is a published writer and experimental
poet, interdisciplinary artist/designer, and a “mostly retired” teacher of Arts
& Sciences living in Seattle, Washington, USA. He is also a retired illusionist/magician
– a former career which he began as a teenager.
In the mid-to-late 1980's, Michael was the recipient of several place ribbons (two 2nd place awards, two honorable mentions) for his color and black & white photography shown at various Southeastern Massachusetts art exhibitions and festivals
Since moving to Seattle in 1992 (and continuing steadily through 2005), Michael has presented over a hundred poetry readings and spoken word performances (often with live musical accompaniment and original video projections), under the performance name chaosmosis, at scores of venues throughout the Pacific Northwest.
In 2002 and 2003, Michael received financial support from
the Paul G. Allen Foundation for the Arts to produce a first-of-its-kind exhibition
of experimental poetry called ‘Future ForWORD’ (premiering at the
Seattle Poetry Festival 2002, and Bumbershoot Arts Festival 2003; see the exhibition mini-documentary at www.futureforword.org). The show
featured a one-of-a-kind, speech-controlled, VR/3D graphical, ‘visual poetry
machine’ called the Dynamic Visual Poetry Landscape System (DVPLS) which Michael designed and co-developed with Peter Oppenheimer.
In 2004, he was the first poet to be selected for the
annual Leonardo Workshop on Space and the Arts (held in its 7th year
in Noordvijk, NE) and presented a paper/lecture (
‘The Exquisite Cosmonaut – Towards a Collaborative Poetics in Space’)
on new poetic forms and space exploration.
In April of 2008, Michael was invited to premier his
original, short video documentary ‘My Name is HAM’ (an ‘imagined memoir’ of the
first chimp in space) – along with a two power points on ‘Animal Space Pioneers’
and ‘Space Junk Remediation’ – at the annual Yuri’s Night ‘World Party for
Space’ celebration at NASA Ames Research Center (Mountainview, CA).
Since 2012, Michael has found success as an open
innovation challenge solver with eight winning proposals (via InnoCentive.com,
OpenIDEO.com, HeroX.com, and XPrize.org platforms), one Honorable Mention, and 5 short-listed
(semi-finalist/finalist) proposals. His winning proposals have covered a broad
spectrum of challenge disciplines: Bio-Tech, Big Data, Audio-Visual & New
Communications Tech, Global Health, Climate Change, and Preventing Mass
Atrocities.
In 2015, Michael’s short length video poem ‘A Dream of
Space’ (featuring the ‘future of space travel’ vision of 9 year old Jack T.
Robertson) premiered on the Internet for the annual Yuri’s Night, Dallas, Texas 'Creative Disturbance' podcast (hosted by astro-physicist Roger Malina). The
short video (version 2.0) was later selected for public art inclusion aboard
NASA’s OSIRUS-REx spacecraft mission to asteroid Bennu.
As a designer of unique concepts and a fan of all things
space-related, Michael conceived and designed an original, live-action space
game called ‘Zero Gordian’ (based upon two-person, knot tying teams competing
in micro-gravity) which in 2018 made it to the ‘Sweet 16’, and, in 2019, to the
‘Final 5’ of space games competing in the #EqualSpace Space Games Challenge (sponsor:
Space Games Federation; competition yet to be concluded as of 2021)
Michael has been producing documentaries and short
video works since 1980s. In the late 1990s, Michael began creating short ‘video
poems’ with many being screened internationally – from Vancouver, British Columbia (Canada)
to Buenas Aires, Argentina, and, from San Francisco, USA to Athens, Greece.
