Tamiko Thiel (1957, Oakland, California) is known for digital media artworks exploring the relationship between space, body and cultural identity. She studied Product Design at Stanford University in 1979 and Mechanical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1983. From 1983 to 1985 she led the product design team at Thinking Machines Corporation, building Danny Hillis’ Connection Machines CM-1 (1986) and CM-2 (1987). The first commercial artificial intelligence supercomputers had 65,536 1-bit processors richly connected in a manner inspired by the human brain. Physicist Richard Feynman proposed a 12-dimensional hypercube as the structure of this internal network. Thiel visualised it as a repeating cube of cubes and implemented it in the traces and cables connecting the processor chips throughout the machine. Her T-shirt design, depicting ‘soft’ processors forming data connections independently of this ‘hard’ cube-of-cube wiring, inspired the form of the machine itself: a black cube-of-cubes, with 4,096 processor chip status lights visible through the translucent doors. Thiel explained: ‘The form of the machine was to express its function, but also the passions of its creators: the dream of producing a “Machina Sapiens”, a new genus of living, thinking machines.’ A selection of the artist’s preparatory drawings and photographs of the supercomputer prototype are presented here.