Lorie Chen

I’m Lorie Chen—a creative technologist, artist, engineer, and occasional snowboarder. I investigate how computational technologies become creative media: not simply tools to use, but materials whose behavior, interfaces, and possibilities can be shaped.

My practice moves through a research loop: find an emerging technique, ask what it might let creative people do, prototype a workflow, then follow its successes and interesting failures. That has led to 3D Gaussian splats of preserved biology floating in glass jars, slit scans of ten-hour road trips turned into plotter drawings, command-line interfaces for navigating a bedroom's accumulated history. I'm drawn to techniques that fail interestingly — confocal stereo on translucent gemstones, photogrammetry on reflective surfaces, segmentation models pointed at snow.

At the Studio for Creative Inquiry, I explored agentic interfaces for generative AI tools. At Adobe Research, I prototyped ways for emerging AI video and 3D representations to become editable creative material. With CoFRIDA at CMU’s Robotics Institute, I investigated how artists might collaborate with robotic painting systems. Across them, engineering is how I make a question tangible enough to test with people.

I care about the product implications hiding inside experiments: who gains agency, how a workflow changes, and what a future creative tool should make editable. I’m also interested in modern art, cities that accumulate things, anything that reacts to light differently than expected, and making plotters do embarrassing amounts of work for small aesthetic payoffs.

Outside of work, I’m a Michigander who grew up consuming Sci-Fi (Dune, Tron, Star Trek, The Matrix, etc). I like stories, art, and music and am currently trying to learn more about retro cameras, circuit bending, and computational music; send me a recommendation!