News and Press
Felix Franz traveled to San Francisco to find out why the San Francisco Bay is so innovative and what trends are coming up in the coming years.
Gray Area Festival: Blockchain and Art Talk
April 2023 Featured by The San Francisco Standard around AI and Art. ‘Is AI Good or Evil? Bay Area Museums Want You To Decide’
April 2023 Discussing Art Intelligence: AI’s Impact on Creators as the panel moderator as part of the Art Market San Francisco
February 2023 Unattainable Landscapes series artwork featured in the group show, ‘Auto-Organics: Robots for a Living Earth’ presented at Grace Exhibition Space in NYC.
September 2022 Unattainable Landscapes artwork featured in the group show, ‘Machining the Ghost,’ an immersive audiovisual experience with AVClub in San Francisco.
August 2022 Discussing NFT art with Seerlight as part of the NFT San Francisco Conference. 🎧 Listen Here
July 2022 Discussing NFTs as activism with Laura Shin and Badiucao at Oslo Freedom Forum on the Unchained Podcast - 🎧 Listen Here
February 2022 Featured by NBC Now around NFT drop for Badiucao: Chinese Artist Uses NFT’S For Activism
January 2022 Featured by the San Francisco Examiner for NFT art and curation. ‘We don’t need to work anymore’: Local artists crack the code of NFTs'
January 2022 The Arts Tribune features my NFT Art and thought leadership, “Nobody gets mad at a photographer for selling prints, and nobody gets mad at a painter for selling a painting, so why are we so upset about a digital artist selling an mp4 or a JPEG?” she asks. “It’s not good or bad; it’s just another way to sell and collect art.”
December 2021 Curator, exhibit designer and speaker for Regenaissance: Art Inspiring a Regenerative Future a Miami Art Week event.
October 2021 NFT Workshop 🔗🖼: NFT DIY: Mint Your Art! for the 2021 Gray Area Festival
April 2020 - I co-presented an SEO for Creatives Workshop #onPatch via Gray Area with Sarah Vickers-Webb
December 2019 - 📍Apple Union Square, #SanFrancisco 📣 Exclusive: Soft Circuits Workshop with @nikistyxx of @GrayAreaorg 🗓️ December 5, 5:00pm 2019
September 2019 - Featured on German TV Show Y-Kollectiv at the 2019 Gray Area Festival, talking about why San Francisco is an epicenter of art and technology.
July 2019 - Curated symposium, conference and creative code workshops for the 2019 Gray Area Festival, an international art and technology festival themed around immersive art.
July 2019 - Emoji expert Niki Selken featured on CBS news show, Bay Area Focus.
February 2019 - Moderated XR Storytelling Panel at the SF Urban Film Festival: The Stories We Will Tell: Interactive Media and Placemaking.
October 2018 - Giving a Session Talk Thinking Outside The Bootcamp at Indiecade 2018, Santa Monica CA.
July 2018 - Intro to a Blockchain Opening Talk at the Gray Area Festival, San Francisco CA.
April 2018 - I am giving a soft circuits workshop, Handcrafting Soft Circuits and speaking on a panel at 2018 North Texas Digital Fabrication Symposium, Texas.
March 2018 - Nick Duska, host of the Right After Breakfast podcast interviews Emoji Foundation creator, Niki Selken 👩🏻💻🔮
September 2017 - I presented a soft circuits workshop, Making Crafts in the Digital Economy at Digitally Engaged Learning conference, London.
August 2017 - EmojiFlower VR 😀🌺 Demo at Google's VR Tilt Brush Happy Hour.
July 2017 - Nicky Campbell and Clare McDonnell on BBC Radio 5 interview for World Emoji Day.
July 2017 - BBC Radio London DriveTime Interview with Chris Rodgers for World Emoji Day.
April 2017 - Cultural Incubator Showcase at Grey Area of my VR game, EmojiFlower VR 😀🌺
May 2017 – CNET mentions Emoji Dictionary
May 2017 – Wired mentions Emoji Dictionary in THE EMOJI MOVIE MISSES THE POINT OF EMOJI
March 2017 – FOX News references Emoji Dictionary as a tool to understand Gang Member Emoji use.
January 2017 – ARTE, French TV Channel aired a short documentary featuring me and my Emoji art!
November 2016 - The Associated Press did a video interview about my VR game, EmojiFlower VR 😀🌺 and Buzzfeed covered my talk, Confessions of an Emoji Artist.
““I would argue that the new emoji are too detailed,” artist Niki Selken said during a talk that touched on, among other things, how the brain interprets alphabetic language differently from emojis. “Designers are upset.” In the back of the room, people spontaneously applauded.
November 2016 - Bay Area Bandwidth covers my VR game, 😀🌺 and my talk Confessions of an Emoji Artist.
October 2016 - I am speaking and presenting artwork at the first annual Emojicon.
September 2016 - I was selected for the Gray Area Foundation Arts + Tech Incubator with a nice Medium writeup.
June 2016 - I was selected for the Kill Screen Scholars Program presented by Intel to support women in game design.
September 2015 - The Brooklyn Rail mentions my Emoji theory in their article BIG TALK, SMALL TALK Why People Who Read Should Care About Emojis.
July 2015 - The One Show Magazine commissioned The Rise of Emoji article about the role of Emoji in Advertising.
May 2015 - Huffington Post UK Article mentions my Emoji work in What Do Fleek, Bae And FOMO Mean? 90% Of Parents Baffled By Text Speak.
May 2015 - Radio Interview with Kelly Higgins-Devine on ABC Radio National show Afternoons.
April 2015 - Radio Interview with Anthony Funnell on ABC Radio National show Future Tense.
April 2015 - Fusion Interview during the NASA Women in Data Bootcamp.
Panelist and 2014 Space App Challenge winner Niki Selken told me, “I come from San Francisco where it’s very locked down, you have all the tech giants there. It felt like there was a very high barrier to entry in terms of tech and gender.”
April 2015 - Microsoft interviewed me for their blog during the NASA Women in Data Bootcamp.
April 2015 - Parsons AMT blog covers The Emoji Dictionary as it debuts in Currents New Media Festival
January 2015 - The Super Hero Action Band I created with Annelie Koller is featured on Make Magazine in the web and print edition.
December 2014 - My Faerie Headdress inspired by the Rusalka myth was featured on Adafruit's blog for #WearableWednesday.
Niki loves Arduinos, fashion and design. Her work is often inspired by fantasy and literature, and this piece is no exception. In fact, it is part of her thesis, A Prayer for Rain, which uses folk objects and shrines to explore the issue of rain in California.
July 2014 - Adafruit and Parsons Paris feature the Wearable Sensorial Diary, a project I created with a group in a collaboration between Parsons, Audi and Numa co-working space in Paris.
June 2014 - Captivated by Her in NYC a Vice Magazine, Microsoft, and Warner Brothers documentary film about a design futures workshop I attended is playing on Vice.
May 2014 - Featured again on Adafruit's blog along with the launch of my co-founded wearable tech blog wearabytes.com for #WearableWednesday.
April 2014 - Senti8, the wearable tech project I co-created won New York NASA Space Apps and ranked as a global finalist. Senti8 was featured by Adafruit, Parsons, Trend Hunter, PSFK, Cover Stories, Tech n' Hints, Gajitz, and Creapills.
April 2014 - Yahoo Tech features my Emoji art and ideas.
Niki Selken, an emoji experimenter and co-founder of the World Translation Foundation at Emojifoundation.com, says this was a turning point, allowing Apple and Google to share the same set of characters. “Another factor is that we have a culture which is changing in the way people communicate,” Selken says. With more digital (as opposed to face-to-face) communication, subtext can get lost.
April 2014 - My Blinking Monkey Hat lands a review on Adafruit's blog for #WearableWednesday.
This tres adorable hat was recently created by Niki Selken and Annelie Koller. They were intrigued by 8×8 LED matrices (aren’t we all?), so they decided to work on a project that would imitate eyes. They were thinking about using some cheap glasses, but then fell in love with this hat.
July 2012 - I played techno-doctor and landed reviews in the Atlantic and the SF Bay Guardian.
October 2011 - NPR radio show, Snap Judgement features my ghost story: Old Pictures.
May 2011 - Rumpus writer, Seth Fischer, interviewed me about making lit readings more performative.
A couple days ago, I saw this short blog post in Publishers’ Weekly that asked whether writers could make more money by putting on literary performances than by selling books (short answer: no.) This dismissal seemed premature to me.. . . I was eating dinner with my friend Niki Selken, a playwright and performer, when I brought this up. She agreed with me, and then she proceeded to go on an ingenious rant about how the worlds of theater and literature could learn a lot from each other.
Awards
2014 - Ms. Foundation and PetLab Design Fellowship with ACT for Women and Girls in Visalia, CA
2014 - New York NASA Space Apps winner and global finalist for Senti8.
2004 - Readers Choice Award for Best Club DJ by the Metro Newspaper in Santa Cruz, CA