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Zenka Caro

From EverybodyWiki Bios & Wiki


Zenka Caro
Zenka_Caro.jpg Zenka_Caro.jpg
BornJenny Lynn Carden
(1972-07-04) July 4, 1972 (age 54)
Fort Sam Houston, San Antonio, Texas, U.S.
Other namesZenka; Zenka 2038 Caro (legal name since 2021)
🏫 EducationNorthwestern University (B.S., Radio, Television and Film, 1994)
💼 Occupation
Known forCeramic raku sculptures of virtual reality headsets; augmented reality art; founder of LightNet; "White Mirror" event
👩 Spouse(s)Lucas Caro (m. 2008; div. 2026)
🌐 Websitezenka.org

Search Zenka Caro on Amazon.

Zenka Caro (born July 4, 1972), known professionally as Zenka, is an American artist, a futurist, and the founder of Wisdom Age Metaverse (LightNet), a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization focused on consciousness research and based in Sedona, Arizona. She is known for ceramic raku sculptures depicting the history of virtual reality headsets,[1] for augmented reality art installations, and for organizing the 2017 48-hour "White Mirror" event in Los Angeles, a counter-narrative to the Netflix series Black Mirror. Her augmented-reality linoprints received honorable mentions in the 2016 and 2017 juried Ink & Clay international competition at the W. Keith and Janet Kellogg University Art Gallery, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. She has worked extensively in Córdoba, Argentina since 2012, including a Before I Die public-art wall, a collective intervention as part of JR's Inside Out Project, and The Dream Machine, she founded as a program of LightNet. Caro's work is held in the permanent collection of the Delta terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and at The Tech Interactive museum in San Jose, as well as in the collections of Accenture Interactive in New York She delivered the 2016 TEDxJacksonHole talk on virtual and augmented reality and it's impact on the future.

Early life and education

Zenka was born Jenny Lynn Carden on July 4, 1972, at Fort Sam Houston army hospital in San Antonio, Texas, where her father, a U.S. Army anesthesiologist, was completing his residency.[2] She was the second of two daughters; her older sister, the blogger and writer Amy Suardi, was born in 1969.[3] The family left San Antonio when Caro was about one year old and settled in Terrace Park, Ohio, a suburb of Cincinnati, where she was raised.

The family spent extended weekends and summers at "Robertson Place," her mother's family homestead in Bourneville, Ross County, Ohio, a property that has passed through seven generations of the female line and dates to the late 18th-century settlement of the Paint Valley region.[4] Caro's mother, the visual artist Lynn Carden who has practiced and exhibited for more than four decades, including a solo retrospective at the Pump House Center for the Arts in Chillicothe in November 2023, later wrote and illustrated a family-history memoir of the homestead, The Women of Robertson Place (2018), drawing on more than two decades of research into the property's female ancestral line and the family's role in sheltering enslaved people on the Underground Railroad.[5][6]

Caro attended the School for Creative and Performing Arts (SCPA), a magnet arts high school in downtown Cincinnati, where she majored in both art and theatre, performed as a mime, and played the lead in the Greek tragedy Medea.[7]

In 1990, Caro matriculated at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, earning a Bachelor of Science in radio, Television and Film in 1994.[8] In her senior year she produced a 36-minute documentary, Telling Time, about her mother's family history at Robertson Place, edited from approximately 250 minutes of original footage.[9]

Technology career

After Northwestern, Caro worked in the technology industry. By 2001 she was based in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she led the streaming team at Akamai Technologies' San Mateo office.[10] under Akamai's co-founder and chief technology officer Daniel Lewin. In 2001, Caro relocated to Washington, D.C.[11]

Art career and exhibitions

2012: Before I Die wall, Córdoba

In May 2012, Caro credited under her birth name Jenny Carden organized and led a Before I Die public-art wall in Córdoba, Argentina as part of the international participatory project initiated by Candy Chang. Created on a previously graffitied surface in the city and completed in fewer than 26 hours of stenciling work, the wall filled to capacity with handwritten responses. Chang's 2013 book Before I Die (St. Martin's Press) features the Córdoba wall, quoting Caro at length and naming her nine collaborators.

2012: Inside Out, Córdoba

Later in 2012, Caro participated in a collective street-art intervention at the abandoned Mercado del Abasto in Córdoba, in which 24 independent artists transformed the building's exterior into a temporary urban art museum.[12] The Mercado del Abasto had previously been planned as a sister site to the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires. Each artist was assigned an 8-by-7-foot section of the exterior, while the building's ends were reserved for two oversized portraits in the style of JR. The action was registered as one of approximately 9,500 group actions worldwide in JR's Inside Out Project.[13]

2015: Presence, raku virtual reality headset sculptures

In March 2015, Caro opened Presence, a solo exhibition at the District Gallery in the Arts District, Los Angeles, featuring more than 20 life-sized ceramic raku "masks" depicting notable virtual and augmented reality head-mounted displays. The series chronicled the history of VR hardware from Ivan Sutherland's 1968 "Sword of Damocles" head-mounted display and NASA's 1980s Ames Research Center experiments through commercial-era devices including Sega VR (1993), Google Glass, the Oculus Rift developer kits, Samsung Gear VR, and Valve prototypes. Some sculptures bore the likenesses of recognizable figures, including Sergey Brin and Jeff Bridges.

Caro used the 16th-century Japanese raku firing technique, in which red-hot ceramic pieces are pulled from a kiln at approximately 1,750 °F (954 °C) and placed in metal containers with paper, producing the iridescent and matte-black surface effects characteristic of the method. Of the choice of technique, Caro said that raku's "rustic, crackle and iridescent glaze effects give my futuristic sculptures the feeling that they have been dug out of an architectural dig from the past."[14]

2016: TEDxJacksonHole

On October 2, 2016, Caro delivered a talk at TEDxJacksonHole, held under the theme "Passion" at the Jackson Hole Center for the Arts in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.[15] The talk surveyed what she described as the transition from the information age into a "knowledge age," using virtual and augmented reality as case studies of accelerating technological change.

2016–2017: Ink & Clay competition, Cal Poly Pomona

Caro's augmented-reality linoprints received honorable-mention awards in two consecutive editions of the juried Ink & Clay competition at the W. Keith and Janet Kellogg University Art Gallery, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. In Ink & Clay 42 (2016), her linoprint Coco and the River Dragon (2016) received a Curator's Choice Honorable Mention.[16] In Ink & Clay 43 (2017), her companion AR linoprint EEG Takes Flight (2016) received an Ink Juror's Choice Honorable Mention.[17] Both works later appeared in the 2022 FIG Bilbao print fair.[25]

2017: "White Mirror"

In April 2017, Caro conceived and organized a two-day "create-a-thon" titled #OnceUponAFuture: The #WhiteMirror Edition at the Upload LA co-working space in Marina del Rey, California.[18][19] The event invited filmmakers, developers, visual effects artists, and musicians to produce short films and virtual or augmented reality experiences depicting optimistic visions of future technology, in deliberate contrast to the dystopian themes of the Netflix series Black Mirror. Approximately 100 participants attended, producing nine projects over roughly 30 hours. Coverage appeared in VentureBeat and MediaShift.[20]

2017: The Art of VR, Sotheby's

On June 22, 2017, Caro was a panelist on The New Fine Arts Part I: Unlocking the Creative Potential of VR as a Medium at The Art of VR conference at Sotheby's in New York City, a two-day exhibition co-presented by Sotheby's, the VR Society, and AMD Radeon.[21] The panel, moderated by Nick Ochoa and Tony Parisi of Unity, also featured the Academy Award–winning visual-effects artist Kevin Mack.[22]

2017: Jackson Hole Futurist-in-Residence

In 2017, following her TEDxJacksonHole talk, Caro served as "Futurist-in-Residence" with the nonprofit Jackson Hole WILD (now Jackson Wild) in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Through the residency she taught augmented-reality workshops at Arapahoe Schools on the Wind River Indian Reservation, where students explored using AR to preserve the Arapaho language.[10]

2018–2019: Agency of Assets: Reality Augmented at ICA LA

From September 30, 2018, to January 6, 2019, Caro collaborated on Agency of Assets: Reality Augmented at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA) Annex.The exhibition presented portraits of high school and first-year college students from ICA LA's Agency of Assets fellowship program; working with Caro, each fellow created an augmented-reality overlay viewable on their portrait via mobile device using the HP Reveal application.[23]

2019: Convergence afterword

Caro contributed the afterword to Convergence: How the World Will Be Painted with Data (2019), an edited volume on augmented reality by Charlie Fink in which the book itself functioned as an AR-enabled object: readers could point a companion smartphone application at its pages to see augmented overlays.[24]

2021: Alive / The Dream Machine, Feria de Arte Córdoba

At the 2021 Feria de Arte Córdoba (FACba), held under the conceptual axis "Paisaje: producción y fantasía," Caro participated in the fair's digital segment "Paisajes Tecnopoéticos," curated around non-fungible token (NFT) art.[25] She participated in the framework of Alive, a project of The Dream Machine her digital-art initiative operated as a program of LightNet which presented NFT works by the Córdoban artist Mariquita Quiroga and supported artists Karen Palacio, Laureano Solís, RW0XY, and Agustín Blasco.[26]

2022: Nuestro estilo cordobés, Legislatura de la Provincia

In October 2022, Caro was among more than 20 artists included in Nuestro estilo cordobés, a large-format collective exhibition in the hall of the Legislatura de la Provincia de Córdoba mounted by Faro, the Asociación Civil de Galerías de Arte de Córdoba. Caro's work was shown by the Córdoba gallery imprint Nodo940 & The Dream Machine.[27]

2022: FIG Bilbao

In November 2022, five of Caro's augmented-reality linocut prints Coco And The River Dragon, EEG Takes Flight, HoloLens Hackathon, Seguir, and Stopping Time were exhibited at the twelfth edition of FIG Bilbao (Feria Internacional de Grabado y Arte sobre Papel de Bilbao) at the Euskalduna Conference Centre in Bilbao, Spain, presented by the Argentine gallery Nodo940 & The Dream Machine.[28]

Collections

Caro's work is held in the permanent collection of the Delta terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and at The Tech Interactive museum in San Jose, California, as well as in the collections of Accenture Interactive in New York and several technology companies in the United States and abroad.[23]

LightNet

Caro is the founder of Wisdom Age Metaverse (doing business as LightNet), a 501(c)(3) non-profit based in Sedona, Arizona, which she describes as a "collective intelligence think tank" focused on consciousness research.

The Dream Machine

The Dream Machine is an ongoing initiative founded by Caro and operated as a program of LightNet, using NFTs to fund and support creative projects.[29] It is the project under which the Alive program was presented at the 2021 Feria de Arte Córdoba[25][26] and under which Caro is represented in Argentina via the Córdoba gallery imprint Nodo940 & The Dream Machine.[27][28] The Dream Machine also serves as the umbrella under which Fashion Lab Sedona operates.

Fashion Lab Sedona

Fashion Lab Sedona is a LightNet program and sustainable-fashion initiative based in Sedona, Arizona. It centres on a multi-day "Create-a-thon" in which designers transform reclaimed fabrics and secondhand materials into wearable art, culminating in an annual runway showcase held at varying venues in the Sedona area.[29] The 2025 edition included a partnership with the Tempe-based fashion-incubator nonprofit FABRIC and an inaugural $1,000 Sustainable Fashion Design Award.[1]

Personal life

In 2004, Caro moved to South America and settled in Córdoba, Argentina, where she met Lucas Caro, an Argentine computer engineer. The couple married in 2008.[30] Their divorce was finalized on January 1, 2026. She began signing her artistic work under the single-name pseudonym Zenka in 2012. Caro legally changed her name to Zenka 2038 Caro on August 24, 2021. She and her former husband Lucas Caro have one son.[30] As of 2026 she is based in Sedona, Arizona.

References

  1. ↑ Charlie Fink (July 11, 2017). "Artists Show the Potential of VR". Forbes Magazine. Retrieved 2026-06-14. VR artist, sculptor and printmaker Zenka
  2. ↑ Carden, Lynn (2018). The Women of Robertson Place. Bourneville, Ohio: Self-published. pp. 365–366. Search this book on
  3. ↑ Brownlee, Amy Knueven (January 1, 2013). "Q&A: Amy Suardi, the Frugal Mama". Cincinnati Magazine. Retrieved May 22, 2026.
  4. ↑ Carden, Lynn (2018). The Women of Robertson Place. Bourneville, Ohio: Self-published. pp. i–iii. Search this book on
  5. ↑ Barnhart, Toria (December 8, 2019). "Novel 20 years in the making honors local and family histories". Chillicothe Gazette. Chillicothe, Ohio: Gannett.
  6. ↑ Reeves, Shelby (November 1, 2023). "Local woman to showcase lifetime of work at new art show". Chillicothe Gazette. Chillicothe, Ohio: Gannett.
  7. ↑ Carden, Lynn (2018). The Women of Robertson Place. Bourneville, Ohio: Self-published. pp. 381–382. Search this book on
  8. ↑ Carden, Lynn (2018). The Women of Robertson Place. Bourneville, Ohio: Self-published. pp. 383, 395. Search this book on
  9. ↑ Carden, Lynn (2018). The Women of Robertson Place. Bourneville, Ohio: Self-published. pp. ii–iii, 397, 460. Search this book on
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 Huntington, Rebecca (June 16, 2017). "Arapahoe School Takes Futuristic Leap". Wyoming Public Media. Retrieved May 17, 2026.
  11. ↑ Carden, Lynn (2018). The Women of Robertson Place. Bourneville, Ohio: Self-published. p. 411. Search this book on
  12. ↑ specialK (December 4, 2012). ""Inside Out" in Argentina". Clutter Magazine. Retrieved May 21, 2026.
  13. ↑ "Local y global: Museo de arte urbano en Córdoba". Escritos en la calle (in español). January 29, 2013. Retrieved May 21, 2026.
  14. ↑ Terndrup, Matthew (April 25, 2015). "These Brilliant Sculpture Masks Chart Virtual Reality's History". Road to VR. Retrieved May 17, 2026.
  15. ↑ "TEDxJacksonHole — Passion (October 2, 2016)". TED. Retrieved May 22, 2026.
  16. ↑ "Ink & Clay 42 — Awards". W. Keith and Janet Kellogg University Art Gallery, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Retrieved May 22, 2026.
  17. ↑ "Ink & Clay 43 — Awards". W. Keith and Janet Kellogg University Art Gallery, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Retrieved May 22, 2026.
  18. ↑ Walmsley, Julie (April 27, 2017). "L.A. Storytelling Futurists Use Augmented Reality to Turn Tables on 'Black Mirror'". MediaShift. Retrieved May 17, 2026.
  19. ↑ McCoy-Thompson, Matthias (April 26, 2017). "White Mirror: A Positive Vision for the Future of Technology". UploadVR. Retrieved May 17, 2026.
  20. ↑ Takahashi, Dean (April 13, 2017). "Futurists want to transform Black Mirror's dystopia into something better". VentureBeat. Retrieved May 17, 2026.
  21. ↑ "VR Society Presents: The Art of VR at Sotheby's". Sothebys.com. Sotheby's. June 13, 2017. Retrieved May 22, 2026.
  22. ↑ "The New Fine Arts Part I". The Art of VR (Sched). June 22, 2017. Retrieved May 22, 2026.
  23. ↑ 23.0 23.1 "Agency of Assets: Reality Augmented". Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Retrieved May 17, 2026.
  24. ↑ Zenka (2019). "Afterword". In Fink, Charlie. Convergence: How the World Will Be Painted with Data. Vienna, Virginia. Search this book on
  25. ↑ 25.0 25.1 Orosz, Demian (July 3, 2021). "Los NFT en la Feria de Arte Córdoba". La Voz del Interior (in español). Córdoba, Argentina. Retrieved May 21, 2026.
  26. ↑ 26.0 26.1 Orosz, Demian (September 15, 2021). "El arte en Córdoba vuelve a estar de feria". La Voz del Interior (in español). Córdoba, Argentina. Retrieved May 21, 2026.
  27. ↑ 27.0 27.1 Orosz, Demian (October 25, 2022). "Faro se muestra". La Voz del Interior (in español). Córdoba, Argentina. Retrieved May 21, 2026.
  28. ↑ 28.0 28.1 "Politena + NODO940 & The Dream Machine". FIG Bilbao Online Fair. Retrieved May 17, 2026.
  29. ↑ 29.0 29.1 Kudos (October–November 2025). "Create-a-thon: Fashion Lab Sedona 2025 — Redefining Style, Sustainability and Community". Kudos. Cottonwood, Arizona: Verde Valley Newspapers.
  30. ↑ 30.0 30.1 Carden, Lynn (2018). The Women of Robertson Place. Bourneville, Ohio: Self-published. pp. 419, 432–433, 437. Search this book on

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