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Edwin Schlossberg      

President & Principal Designer, ESI Design

Edwin Arthur Schlossberg, founder and principal of ESI Design, is an American designer, author and artist. Schlossberg specializes in designing interactive, participatory experiences, beginning in 1977 with the first hands-on learning environment in the US for the Brooklyn Children's Museum. He continues to work in the field and publishes frequently on the subject. He is the author of nine published books including "Einstein and Beckett", and "Interactive Excellence". His art work has been seen in many one man shows and museum exhibits. In 2011 he was appointed to the U.S Commission of Fine Arts by President Barack Obama.

Over the last 50 years, Schlossberg has used words and images to create visual and poetic worlds in his art, using various and unconventional media.

Schlossberg developed as an artist during the 1960s in New York, as a member of its dynamic art scene. While his contemporaries played with words as form, Schlossberg insisted on their meaning, creating poetry with a distinct visual style. Some of his earliest works were poems written on a typewriter on aluminum foil – he created a new application for this everyday material whose artistic value now seems obvious.

Schlossberg’s approach has always been inventive: he received Columbia University’s first combined doctorate (in Physics and English & American Literature), an accomplishment which has enabled him to write poetry and create art on subjects which might intimidate others: neuronal imaging, the earth from above, gravity, systems mapping and other subjects. By making them visual, he has made them legible outside of the technologic and scientific realm.

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