After leaving Reed College in 1988,[citation needed] Csíkszentmihályi earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SIAC) and an MFA from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) in 1998.
[6] In addition to MIT and at Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute, he has served as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Art and Design Research at Parsons The New School for Design, was a 2005 Rockefeller New Media Fellow, a 2007–2008 fellow at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and has taught at the University of California at San Diego, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the Art Center College of Design, and Turku University.
[8] These artwork/technologies include, but are not limited to: Other, more traditional artworks include 2005's Skin/Control, parallel installations that explore the tenuous nature of human influence over technology;[21] and 2007's First Airborne, an installation consisting of hanging maple seedlings the size of the United States Air Force's Joint Direct Attack Munition bombs.
[22] With Jude Mukundane, he is the co-founder of RootIO,[23] a civic media project developing wide-reaching, small-scale, peer-oriented radio networks, currently operating in Uganda.
By turning cell phones into standalone radio stations with village-sized catchment areas, RootIO provides a platform for localized media that requires little in terms of physical infrastructure and user literacy.