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| Abundance Camille Utterback, 2007 |
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| Abundance is a temporary public installation commissioned for the City of San Jose, California by ZER01 – the Art and Technology Network. At night, Abundace transforms the city hall plaza into an interactive social space. A video camera mounted on the City Hall captures the movements of people in the plaza below. A dynamic animation generated in response to this movement is projected onto the 3-story cylindrical rotunda. Utterback’s colorful, fluid and delicate imagery creates a subtle subversion of the bold geometry of architect Richard Meier’s building – warming and humanizing its surface. | ||
| Alluvial Camille Utterback, 2007 |
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| Alluvial is a dual-channel interactive installation commissioned for a private home. Two overhead video cameras track people’s movements in the entryway below while Utterback’s software outputs two dynamic animations to the projection screens. A person’s body adds visual information to one screen, while subtracting from the other, and this interplay of positive and negative, additive and subtractive qualities builds as more and more people enter the space. This process of simultaneous accumulation and disintegration creates a temporary beauty, where the buildup of delicate grains of sand (or points of light), can easily be disturbed by the bolder graphics indicating another person’s presence in the space. |
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| Untitled 6 Camille Utterback, 2005 |
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| Untitled 6 is the sixth piece in Utterback’s External Measures Series. The series began with Utterback’s attempts to create interactive paintings, and has evolved as she continues to experiment with the possibilities for hinging digital aesthetic systems to human movement. Utterback’s installations are generated by a set of software rules she writes. These rules react visually to movement in the installation space, and interact with each other to create dynamic live animations. While Utterback’s work is computer generated and detects movement in the space via a video camera, it shares a lineage with analog works like mobiles and kinetic sculptures, where artists create a framework for various possibilities to occur through the physical relationships between parts of the sculpture. | ||
| Untitled 5 Camille Utterback, 2004 |
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| Untitled 5 is the fifth interactive installation in the External Measures Series, which Utterback has been developing since 2001. The goal of these works is to create an aesthetic system which responds fluidly and intriguingly to physical movement in the exhibit space. The installations respond to their environment via input from an overhead video camera. Custom video tracking and drawing software outputs a changing wall projection in response to the activities in the space. The existence, positions, and behaviors of various parts of the projected image depend entirely on people's presence and movement in the exhibit area. | ||
| Potent Objects Camille Utterback, 2003 |
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| Potent Objects playfully examines they way we ascribe emotion to inanimate technologies. Potent Objects parallels current research in 'affective computing,' in which the capability of sensing and conveying emotion is built into computing devices. The work suggests that, though our machines may seem to be becoming more like us, the truth could be just the opposite. Potent Objects examines the tropes of interactivity as metaphors for human emotion. This project was funded by a 2002 Rockefeller Fellowship in New Media. | ||
| External Measures, 2003 Camille Utterback, 2003 |
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| External Measures, 2003 is the third piece in a series of interactive installations which hinge the parameters of dynamic compositions to human motion in the gallery space. This piece creates a hypnotic tension between presence and absence, mark making and erasing, human gesture and algorithmic drawing. | ||
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Liquid Time Series Camille Utterback, 2001-2002 |
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| The Liquid Time Series explores how the concept of 'point of view' is predicated on embodied existence. Initially, the piece was an attempt to create an interactive installation where users' physical positions in the gallery (tracked by an overhead camera) controlled different 'perspectives' in a collage-like projection. The result of this exploration, however, is a series of pieces in which imagery of time, as well as space, is disrupted by users' motions. | ||
| linescape.cpp Camille Utterback, 2002 |
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| linescape.cpp is a piece of software created for the CODeDOC project on the Whitney Museum's Artport site. Twelve artists were commissioned by Christiana Paul to code a specific assignment—to 'connect and move three points in space'. The main code was not to exceed 8KB. All the artists then exchanged works and commented on each other's code. The goal of CODeDOC was to "take a reverse look at 'software art' projects by focusing on and comparing the 'back end' of the code that drives the artwork's 'front end'". |
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| Crossing Camille Utterback, 2001 |
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| In the Crossing installation participants encounter a still video projection of abstract black lines on a blue background. Moving into an area tracked by an overhead camera causes the image fragment and ripple in front of one's body. As participants move back and forth they may eventually cross a perceptual threshold - recognizing the warped and curving lines as the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge. | ||
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External Measures, 2001 Camille Utterback, 2001 |
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| This interactive installation explores the possibilities of an projected kinetic sculpture that responds to people's positions and movements using video tracking. The kinetic sculpture is a projected image, but the positions, velocity, and existence of various parts of the sculpture image depend on people's positions and motions in the space in front of the projection. Some responses are direct and immediate, other types of sculptural momentum develop over time based on the overall flow of people in the space. | ||
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see/saw Camille Utterback & Adam Chapman, 2001 |
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| see/saw is an interactive installation in which visitors' manipulations of a real see-saw control the fluctuation of power and emotion in the story of an intimate relationship. A pair of words are projected on the walls behind the people on the see-saw—one word from each pair on the wall behind each person. As visitors see-saw up and down, new pairs fade in and out based on the angle of the see-saw. Participants' motion also causes an audio track heard through speakers embedded in the see-saw to advance. When participants stop moving, the audio fragments into an 'up' and 'down' segment heard by the 'up' and 'down' participant respectively. The audio clips relate to the projected word that each person can see, and the 'up' or 'down' position in the narrated relationship. This piece, along with Come to Pieces—an interactive video portrait, were created during Chapman and UtterbackÕs month long residency at Grand Central Art Center in 2001. | ||
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Come to Pieces Camille Utterback & Adam Chapman, 2001 |
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| Come to Pieces is an interactive video installation in which a fragmented video portrait of gallery visitors is generated in real time from four different live camera feeds. Imagine seeing yourself from four different angles at once. Four views are contained within the single image of yourself—a sort of Cubist mirror. Come to Pieces is a single mirror folding in upon itself to contain multiple perspectives, mapping different points of view on one fluid image. This piece along with see/saw was developed by Chapman and Utterback during a month long residency at Grand Central Art Center in 2001. | ||
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Drawing From Life Camille Utterback, 2001 |
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| Drawing from Life is a unique interactive experience for museum visitors - offering them a immediate self-reflective experience at the end of an exhibit packed with information and difficult social issues. The Drawing from Life interactive installation uses custom video processing software to turn a live video of museum viewers into a life size projected image in which viewers are composed completely of the letters that represent DNA. Flickering 'A's 'T's 'G's and 'C's dance on a dark background mirroring viewer's motions and gestures in real time. The letters are color coded to match colors that scientists represent them with, but vary in saturation to match the light levels in the incoming video. Physical characteristics of individual viewers are abstracted, but recognizable. The interaction is transparent and fluid as viewers recognize and play with their transformed images. | ||
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Arc Tangent Camille Utterback, 2001 |
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| Arc Tangent is an interactive installation that activates the physical space between people by creating visual consequences to their bodies' locations. As people approach a circular floor projection, dynamic real-time drawings are created based on people's positions and movements around the circle. The piece cycles through a set of drawing modes that reflect various spatial relationships. One mode connects all the participants with modulating lines. In another, users' physical positions take on strategic importance as their locations correspond to a 'pong' paddle in a circular version of the popular arcade game. | ||
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Luminous Flux Camille Utterback, 2001 |
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| The Luminous Flux installation represents moving vertical edges in an incoming video signal in one color, and moving horizontal edges in another. As participants interact with the piece in real time, the visual accumulation of their motions is output to a monitor or projection screen. A magical and fleeting effect is created as abstract traces of time are captured and then fade slowly away. Everyday trajectories of limbs and bodies are frozen for a moment—allowing us to briefly glimpse their beauty. Alternatively, if a participant stands still, her image will disappear, dissolving in a ghostly fashion. Motion becomes presence, and stillness absence. | ||
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Visual Resolve Camille Utterback, 2000 |
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| In the Visual Resolve installation, live video of participants is recreated out of a series of small icons or images loaded into the installation. Participants encounter a live but abstracted version of themselves on a projection screen. The reconstructed imagery reads on two levels—the level of the icons, and the level of the overall image. This translation contains both less and more visual resolution than the original video. It is easy to load new icons into the program, so many variations of Visual Resolve are possible. The piece becomes a tool for artistic exploration. | ||
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Written Forms Camille Utterback, 2000 |
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| Written Forms maps three separate texts, one each, into the dark, medium and light areas of a live video. When viewed from a distance this collage of words melts into the recognizable image of people in the installation space. By moving their bodies to reveal different parts of the text, participants can actually decipher words and meaning in the various layers. Noise in the incoming video signal causes characters at the edges of color boundaries to flicker—creating new words and new meanings at the boundaries of the texts. The three texts used refer to dark internal spaces, muddled boundary spaces, and external ethereal spaces. | ||
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Composition Camille Utterback, 2000 |
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| Composition installation turns live video of participants in an installation space into imagery completely composed of text. Participants in the installation interact with a live projected version of themselves where a real-time video image of themselves is literally 'composed' out of text characters. Composition examines how areas of an image can carry multiple weights—their symbolic value as text characters, and their light or dark value as part of the overall composition. | ||
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Text Rain Camille Utterback & Romy Achituv, 1999 |
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| Text Rain is a playful interactive installation that blurs the boundary between the familiar and the magical. Participants in the Text Rain installation use the familiar instrument of their bodies, to do what seems magical - to lift and play with falling letters that do not really exist. In the Text Rain installation participants stand or move in front of a large projection screen. On the screen they see a mirrored video projection of themselves in black and white, combined with a color animation of falling text. Like rain or snow, the text appears to land on participants' heads and arms. The text responds to the participants' motions and can be caught, lifted, and then let fall again. The falling text will land on anything darker than a certain threshold, and "fall" whenever that obstacle is removed. | ||
