Camille Utterback (born 1970 in Bloomington, Indiana) is an interactive installation artist. Initially trained as a painter, her work is at the intersection of
painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface (called the "matrix" or "support"). The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, and a ...
and
interactive art
Interactive art is a form of art that involves the spectator in a way that allows the art to achieve its purpose. Some interactive art installations achieve this by letting the observer walk through, over or around them; others ask the artist ...
. One of her most well-known installations is the work ''Text Rain'' (1999).
Biography
Utterback received her undergraduate degree from
Williams College
Williams College is a private liberal arts college in Williamstown, Massachusetts. It was established as a men's college in 1793 with funds from the estate of Ephraim Williams, a colonist from the Province of Massachusetts Bay who was kille ...
and her master's degree from the
Interactive Telecommunications Program
The New York University Tisch School of the Arts (commonly referred to as Tisch) is the performing, cinematic and media arts school of New York University.
Founded on August 17, 1965, Tisch is a training ground for artists, scholars of the ar ...
at
New York University
New York University (NYU) is a private research university in New York City. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded by a group of New Yorkers led by then- Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin.
In 1832, th ...
's
Tisch School of the Arts
The New York University Tisch School of the Arts (commonly referred to as Tisch) is the performing, cinematic and media arts school of New York University.
Founded on August 17, 1965, Tisch is a training ground for artists, scholars of the a ...
. She is currently an Assistant Professor of the Art and Art History Department at
Stanford University
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is conside ...
and lives in
San Francisco, California.
Artwork
Examples of her work include ''Text Rain'' (1999), created in collaboration with
Romy Achituv, in which participants use their bodies to lift and play with falling letters projected on a wall, and ''Shifting Times'' (2007), a public installation in San Jose, California that creates interactive projects based on the movements of pedestrians. Helen Lessick describes the latter as a "blending screens of twentieth and twenty-first century San José" in which the "images split and weave, shift between color and black and white, invoking loss and possibility, site and memory."
Utterback's other works include media sculptures and public artworks such as ''Aurora Organ''.
Utterback says that she is interested in getting people to “think about the difference between something conceptual and something physical” and to “make a hypothesis, and then test it with their bodies.”
Her work has been exhibited at galleries, festivals, and museums internationally including
New Museum of Contemporary Art
The New Museum of Contemporary Art, founded in 1977 by Marcia Tucker, is a museum in New York City at 235 Bowery, on Manhattan's Lower East Side.
History
The museum originally opened in a space in the Graduate Center of the then-named New Sch ...
(New York), the
Museum of the Moving Image (New York),
Smithsonian American Art Museum
The Smithsonian American Art Museum (commonly known as SAAM, and formerly the National Museum of American Art) is a museum in Washington, D.C., part of the Smithsonian Institution. Together with its branch museum, the Renwick Gallery, SAAM holds ...
(Washington, D.C.)
GAFFTA (San Francisco), the
Frist Art Museum (Nashville, TN), the
Ars Electronica Center
Ars Electronica Linz GmbH is an Austrian cultural, educational and scientific institute active in the field of new media art, founded in Linz in 1979. It is based at the Ars Electronica Center (AEC), which houses the Museum of the Future, in the ...
(Linz, Austria) and the
NTT InterCommunication Center
NTT InterCommunication Center (ICC) is a media art gallery in Tokyo Opera City Tower in Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan
Tokyo (; ja, 東京, , ), officially the Tokyo Metropolis ( ja, 東京都, label=none, ), is the capital and largest city of Ja ...
(Tokyo, Japan).
Utterback created an installation called ''Precarious'' for the
National Portrait Gallery exhibition Black Out: Silhouettes Then and Now, which opened in May, 2018.
Awards
She has received several grants and awards including the
Rockefeller Foundation
The Rockefeller Foundation is an American private foundation and philanthropy, philanthropic medical research and arts funding organization based at 420 Fifth Avenue, New York City. The second-oldest major philanthropic institution in America, aft ...
New Media Fellowship, the
MacArthur Foundation
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is a private foundation that makes grants and impact investments to support non-profit organizations in approximately 50 countries around the world. It has an endowment of $7.0 billion and p ...
Fellowship, the
Transmediale
Transmediale, stylised as transmediale is an annual festival for art and digital culture in Berlin, usually held over five days at the end of January and the beginning of February. Transmediale takes the form of a conference (sometimes called ...
International Media Art Festival Award,
an IBM Innovation Merit Award for her solo show ''Animated Gestures''
in the
Boston Cyberarts Festival
The Boston Cyberarts Festival used to be the largest festival of digital art, performance and film created using new technology in the USA. Around 22,000 people attended the festival in 2007 where they witnessed the work of over 200 artists fro ...
, and, in 2009, a
"genius award" from the
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is a private foundation that makes grants and impact investments to support non-profit organizations in approximately 50 countries around the world. It has an endowment of $7.0 billion and ...
.
Utterback has taught media art at
Parsons School of Design
Parsons School of Design, known colloquially as Parsons, is a private art and design college located in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. Founded in 1896 after a group of progressive artists broke away from established Manhatt ...
,
and the
Interactive Telecommunications Program
The New York University Tisch School of the Arts (commonly referred to as Tisch) is the performing, cinematic and media arts school of New York University.
Founded on August 17, 1965, Tisch is a training ground for artists, scholars of the ar ...
at
New York University
New York University (NYU) is a private research university in New York City. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded by a group of New Yorkers led by then- Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin.
In 1832, th ...
.
See also
*
Interactive art
Interactive art is a form of art that involves the spectator in a way that allows the art to achieve its purpose. Some interactive art installations achieve this by letting the observer walk through, over or around them; others ask the artist ...
*
Surveillance art
* ''
!Women Art Revolution
''!Women Art Revolution'' is a 2010 documentary film directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson and distributed by Zeitgeist Films. It tracks the feminist art movement over 40 years through interviews with artists, curators, critics, and historians.
Synop ...
'' - Utterback, among others, was interviewed for this film
References
Sources
*
Christiane Paul (2003). ''Digital Art'' (World of Art series). London: Thames & Hudson. .
* Jeffrey Shaw and
Peter Weibel, eds. (2003). "Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary After Film" MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. .
External links
KQED ''Forum'' Radio interview with Camille Utterback, airdate August 9, 2005
{{DEFAULTSORT:Utterback, Camille
American women installation artists
Living people
New media artists
Interactive art
1970 births
MacArthur Fellows
Williams College alumni
Tisch School of the Arts alumni
People from Bloomington, Indiana
American installation artists
Artists from Indiana
20th-century American women artists
20th-century American artists
21st-century American women artists
21st-century American artists
Electronic literature writers