LO 11 – A Focus on Women Practitioners

When looking at the list of women in new media arts, I came across Camille Utterback and was intrigued by her project Text Rain (1990), which I remembered seeing last year at the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum. It is an interactive installation where participants use physical movement to play with digital falling letters. Participants stand in front of a large projection screen where they see a mirrored video projection of themselves, combined with an animation of falling letters. Similar to rain and snow, the falling letters land/accumulate on participant’s heads and arms as well as respond to their motions. I find it fascinating how this hybrid installation transforms the museum experience, inviting visitors to engage with the work in an immersive, thoughtful way.

Camille Utterback’s work explores the aesthetic and experiential potential of connecting computational systems to human movement. Utterback combines sensing and display technologies with the custom software she writes to produce her work. Architectural-scale projections, custom LED lighting, and intimate sculptures with embedded screens are just a few examples of the broad range of media which Utterback works with. Camille Utterback holds a BA in Art from Williams College, and a Masters from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

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