Forty Years at the Frontier: A Conversation with Joel Slayton
Forty Years at the Frontier: A Conversation with Joel Slayton
As SJSU’s CADRE Laboratory marks its 40th anniversary, we sat down with its founder — and longtime Leonardo board member — to reflect on a career built at the intersection of art, technology, and transdisciplinary practice.
About Joel Slayton
Joel Slayton is a pioneering artist, researcher, and curator with over four decades of experience working at the intersection of art and technology. He is Professor Emeritus at San José State University, where he founded the CADRE Laboratory for New Media in 1984 — one of the earliest new media labs in the United States. His work has been featured in over 100 exhibitions worldwide, and he served as Executive Director of ZERO1, curator of the LAST Festival at SLAC National Accelerator, and Sterling Visiting Scholar at Stanford University’s School of Medicine.
Joel’s relationship with Leonardo/ISAST spans nearly 40 years. He has served on the governing board and, during his tenure, led the founding of the Leonardo/MIT Press Book Series.
The Interview
You’ve been part of the Leonardo community for decades, as a board member and as the founder of the Leonardo/MIT Press Book Series. What has that long relationship meant to your practice and your thinking?
My association with Leonardo/ISAST stretches back nearly 40 years. Certain common values have and continue to sustain the relationship — specifically the embrace of transdisciplinary practice and the importance of international and transcultural engagement. I believe strongly that art is a form of knowledge production, and it is this capacity for art that Leonardo/ISAST has helped me better understand, shaping my work as an artist, researcher, and curator.
You founded CADRE at SJSU in 1984, making it one of the earliest new media labs in the country. As the lab celebrates its 40th anniversary with a symposium at the San José Museum of Art this April, what were you originally trying to build — and did it become what you imagined?
In the early 1980s I migrated from MIT to Silicon Valley with the specific intent of establishing a west coast media laboratory. The ambition was to establish an academic center where artists could research and experiment with emerging information technologies. I had in mind a highly interdisciplinary platform for students and faculty to shape a community of collaboration and to serve as a platform for critical and theoretical discourse. It has worked out pretty well as the CADRE Laboratory continues to be a prosperous environment for artistic production.
What are you working on now, and what are you most excited about?
I am deeply involved in a long-term initiative, The L&J Ranch. The initaitive serves as a platform for creative research, projects, and philanthropy focused on better understanding complex ecologies. Of particular focus is the development of a model, Eco-Plasticity, which provides insight into the complex adaptive processes and behaviors of complex ecologies. We just completed a five-year expedition of the Gila River in New Mexico and Arizona and one of the most endangered river ecologies in the United States. Our intent is to further explore the potentials of our Eco-Plasticity model.
The CADRE 40 symposium takes place April 10–11, 2026 at the San José Museum of Art. Learn more here.