Consciousness · Nature · Technology
research and practice
AMIT RAPHAEL ZORAN
I research consciousness, perception, and our relationship with the living world through nature, first person contemplative and mystical practice, and the machines we build. Fifteen years of designing systems that share control with the human hand at MIT and the Hebrew University led me to ask what we must cultivate in ourselves as technology grows more capable.
FIRSTLIGHT
FirstLight brings together my work beyond the lab: an ongoing inquiry into consciousness, the living world, and technology, and the ways they shape one another. At its core is a question: how do we stay oriented when the maps we create begin to outpace the world they are meant to describe? The work takes shape through books, essays, courses, and sustained field practice.
Welcome,
I trained in computer engineering and design before completing my PhD at the MIT Media Lab. Today I am a professor of computer science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and head the Hybrid Design Lab.
My academic work explores hybrid forms of human machine collaboration across craft, digital fabrication, music, creativity and food, asking how computational systems can extend human capability while preserving skill, agency and authorship. Alongside this research, I write academic papers, essays, articles and books.
RESEARCH PROJECTS
"Hybrids" merge the advanced capabilities of computational technology with the depth of traditional craftsmanship. This approach dissolves the boundary between digital and artisanal worlds, blending the precision and efficiency of digital tools with the creativity and artistry of human craftsmanship. Our projects, presented here, exemplify this integration, conducted at the MIT Media Lab and the Hybrid Design Lab.
REFLECTIONS
Field notes. Long accounts of time spent in forests and with particular trees, from Yakushima and the Smoky Mountains to the oak woods of Gerês and the Judean hills. I write from personal observation, while reading these experiences alongside research on how humans and the living world have shaped one another over time. What returns again and again is how much of a landscape becomes visible only when you stop trying to get somewhere, and how that slower attention changes your sense of where you are and what you are part of.
CREATIONS
Making is how I think. This gallery brings together handcraft, digital fabrication, nature photography, AI generated work, and hybrids of all of these. Some pieces explore a question that runs through my research: where the hand should lead, where the machine should, and what becomes possible when neither takes over completely. Others emerge from time outdoors and are closer to records of attention than to made objects. What holds them together is the idea that making is a way of attending to something long enough to be changed by it, and that beauty can repair something in the person who encounters it.
