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Biographical information of laser artist Mike Gould

About the Mike Gould, Laser Artist

Download Mike's CV (MikeGouldCV2024.pdf - Includes links to interviews and video)

Photons float afield
A movement of line and form
Light writ large: Lasers!

A victim of his own artistic tendencies, Mike Gould is a Michigan-based laser, graphics, video, and electronics artist. Mike has been gleefully working with lasers, wacky electro-optic gizmos, assorted digital arts, and odd industrial design since 1972. He is still trying to get it right.

In previous lives, he has been a writer, photographer, Mac consultant, and web worker - he designed and coded this site.

He also was the leader of a rock and roll band that played mostly his compositions. You can hear his 45 single Clones All Think Alike b/w All Messed Up (and Nowhere To Go) online.

In his spent youth, he was a Boy Scout, Methodist Altar Boy, fresh water biologist, lab tech for the UM departments of cytology, pathology, and psychopharmacology, waterbed salesman, woofer tester for Time Window speakers, shipping/receiving clerk for a store selling Radio Shack TRS-80 computers, warehouse manager/shipper/schlepper/mixer-fixer/rack-stacker/snake-maker/truck driver for a now-defunct pro audio store, computer repairman, and is now In Charge, MondoDyne.

Mike has been working with electronics, lasers, electro-optic components, and industrial design for most of his life. His first experience with laser light in an artistic setting was a Son et Lumière presentation at the University of Michigan School of Education in 1972.

More recently, along with his Illuminatus Lightshow troupe, Mike has designed, created, and presented laser art for thousands of people attending events at leading Michigan hotels. These include the Detroit Marriott Troy, the Hyatt Regency Dearborn, and the Marriott Renaissance Center in Detroit. Most recently (9/24-25 2021), Illuminatus performed at DLECTRICITY, a renowned nighttime art event in Detroit. At that show, interactive laser art was performed on the walls of the Michigan Science Center.

As principal designer/builder/artist with Illuminatus, Mike has assembled, inspired and motivated an experienced team with talent in electrical engineering, video editing, machining, software, lawyering, business, and optics.

Illuminatus is a familiar sight at Detroit and other Maker Faires, where the artist and crew demonstrate and explain laser technology.

He has exhibited at Art Prize 2012, where he won his first ILDA award for Most Innovative Application in the Artistic Award category at the 2013 ILDA Conference, held in Aalen, Germany. ILDA is the International Laser Display Association, the organization that supports the laser entertainment industry. He has since won a total of four ILDA awards, three for creativity and one for technical achievement.

In 2013 he presented a 3-month exhibition of his art at the Alden B. Dow Museum of Science and Art. Entitled L is for Laser, the exhibit consisted of five major pieces, one of them interactive. That piece, A as in interActive, allowed visitors to control the laser projection by moving their bodies in front of a Kinect system.

The Hands-On Museum in Ann Arbor, Michigan, hosted L is for Laser during the late summer of 2014. In 2019, the museum hosted Dances With Lasers for their Tech Twilight program.

In 2015 he completed a music video which won his second ILDA Award in 2016. The video is visible here. He won his third ILDA award for a laser photo in 2016, and a fourth ILDA Fenning Award for technical achievement in 2019.

In 2018 he presented new piece called Lasing Nang Talung at the Olbrich Botanical Gardens in Madison WI, as part of their GLEAM Event.

He exhibited Soleri, So Laser at the Canal Convergence light festival in Scottsdale AZ in November of 2019, Lunchboxing with Lasers at the Napa Lighted Arts Festival in 2020,and Legend of Sleepy Howell in Howell, MI in Oct. 2020.