Lecture
Location
Abby and Howard Milstein Auditorium
Milstein Hall
Contact
Department of Design Tech
Abstract
This lecture explores creative practice as a site of Productive Error. Rather than treating scientific and technological tools as stable or neutral, it focuses on what happens when they are deliberately pushed, misused, or stretched beyond their intended purpose to generate new forms of artistic inquiry. Drawing on work ranging from stage performances and interactive installations to Microsoft Excel (!), George Adamopoulos examines how glitches, constraints, and unintended behaviors often become productive design forces. Positioned between rigorous art-making and playful computation, Runtime Error proposes creative misuse as a critical methodology for contemporary design practice, one that embraces failure, negotiation, and play as essential components of innovation.
This lecture is part of the Design Tech Public Lecture Series.
Biography
George Adamopoulos
George Adamopoulos is an artist and programmer with a background in architecture, engineering, and computational design. He specializes in computational geometry and real-time computer graphics, with an emphasis on GPU-driven simulations of natural phenomena, interactive artworks, and immersive large-scale installations.
Born in Athens in 1990 and shaped early on through the practice of street art and sequential art, he developed an early sensitivity to public space as a site of spatial negotiation, sequencing, and storytelling. These concerns were later articulated through computational tools for the analysis and participatory design of public space. He graduated with distinction from the NTUA School of Architecture and Engineering.
In 2020, he cofounded Uncharted Limbo, a collective of creative coders and New Media artists, grounded in the concept embodied by the Greek word techne: the inseparability of artistic expression and technical craft.
Uncharted Limbo’s genre-defying work has received international recognition, with presentations at institutions including the BFI Film Festival, Sadler’s Wells Theatre, the Victoria & Albert Museum, SAT Montreal, and the Onassis Stegi. As recipients of the S+T+ARTS AIR European grant, the collective explores the intersection of performing arts and artificial neural networks. Their project Spreadbeats -the first music video coded and experienced entirely in Excel- became the most awarded project in advertising over the past three years, contributing to the collective being named second in D&AD’s Top Production Company ranking. In 2025, their work “Living Portrait” received a Red Dot Design Award.
Before cofounding Uncharted Limbo, George worked as a senior software developer within the research team at AKT II, contributing to the development of computational tools for climate and structural engineering and leading the development of Carbon.AKT, an award-winning interactive 3D tool for calculating embodied carbon.
Prior to this, he was a senior computational designer at the award-winning Jason Bruges Studio, where he designed and programmed large-scale interactive art installations. His work has been presented at institutions including London’s Natural History Museum (Life in the Dark, 2018), the Barbican (Brutalist Tapestry, 2018), Google’s DeepMind headquarters (Lux Automata, 2020), and the Onassis Cultural Centre (Acrophobia, ADHOCRACY, 2015).
Alongside professional practice, he was actively involved in academic teaching from 2014 to 2025, most recently as a lecturer at the UCL Bartlett School of Architecture, where he taught game development in the M.Arch. Design for Performance and Interaction (DfPI), encouraging students to connect technical skills with cultural context, philosophy, and DIY / hacker ethics. He continues to engage with academia through lectures, workshops, and research-driven practice.
