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The project I chose for this week is Camille Utterback’s “Dances of the Sacred and Profane”, an hour-long dance and computer generated video collaborative work shown at the Cowell Theater in San Francisco. The project is inspired by the music and art of the impressionist period, and mimics timing, memory, and angles of dancers using a motion graphics projection and real-time particle system. Camille manipulates the dancers movements on screen using onstage cameras projected onto large screens behind the dancers. I think this project is ambitious and extremely successful because the projected and manipulated graphics aesthetically augment and play with the details of the reflected choreography. I really admire the pure viscerality in the concept and the artwork, and the painterly quality of the art. It really does a convincing job of bringing me back to the impressionist era. Camille is an incredibly successful and internationally acclaimed artist and pioneer in digital and interactive art. Her work explores the aesthetic and experimental possibilities of connecting computational systems to human bodies, and has been displayed in galleries, festivals, and museums internationally. She is currently an assistant professor in Art at Stanford University, and a co-director of the Stanford Graduate Design program. She has a BA in Art from Williams College, and a Masters from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Link to the work: http://camilleutterback.com/projects/dances-of-the-sacred-and-profane/

Dances of the Sacred & Profane from Camille Utterback on Vimeo.