Camille Utterback
www.camilleutterback.com
camille@creativenerve.com

Camille Utterback is a pioneering artist and programmer in the field of interactive installation. While working as a research fellow at New York University, she developed a video tracking system for which the university has filed a U.S. patent. Widely recognized for her innovations and contributions to installation art, Utterback is currently developing her work as the recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellowship in New York City. She has taught at the Parsons School of Design and the Interactive Telecommunication Program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Utterback’s work has been exhibited internationally at festivals and galleries including the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the American Museum of the Moving Image in New York, the NTT InterCommunication Center in Tokyo, the Seoul Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Netherlands Institute for Media Art, the Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art, the Center for Contemporary Art in Kiev, Ukraine, and Ars Electronica Center, Austria.

Utterback was recently commissioned by the Whitney Museum for the CODeDOC project on their ArtPort website (2002). She was selected as a member of the “TR100 - the top 100 innovators of the year under 35” by MIT’s Technology Review (2002) and by Res Magazine as “Artist Pick of the Year” for their “Annual Res 10 — Ten people who are making a difference in their field”(2000).

Lecture:
Re-Imagining Interactivity
Wednesday, March 31 at 12:30 p.m. in Langford C105

Utterbeck will examine her pioneering video tracking installations.

Workshop:
Physical Modalities in Interactive Art

In this five-session workshop, students will explore computationally driven interactive art based on physical modalities. Categories to be explored include works responding to and referencing human activities such as breathing, looking, speaking, noisemaking, waving, jumping, pulling, throwing, walking (towards, away from, around), and touching, as well as works that mimic or recreate physical interaction with objects such as bicycles, mirrors, wells, trains, flashlights, cranks, and swing sets.

In each session, the artist will present documentation and lead discussion about a set of works based on a particular modality. Students will then engage in design exercises to create ideas for their own projects.

Over the course of the workshop students will develop a design matrix in which to situate works. For example, is the interaction in a particular work goal-oriented, or open-ended? Does the work create an illusionary space, or appear to exist within the participant’s physical space? Does it build on, or undermine previous experience of a certain gesture?

Additionally, the artist will provide resource lists, and occasionally demonstrate various sensing technology used in the works presented.

“The main goal of the workshop, says Utterback, “is to help students develop a critical context for their own interactive work, and to develop a wider vocabulary for discussing and creating physically based interactive pieces.”