Nina Sobell is a contemporary sculptor, videographer, and performance artist. She began creating web-based artworks in the early 1990s.

Early life and education

Sobell was born in

Patchogue, New York Patchogue (, ) is a Administrative divisions of New York#Village, village in Suffolk County, New York. The population was 11,798 at the time of the 2010 census. Patchogue is part of the Town (New York), town of Brookhaven, New York, Brookhaven, on ...

in 1947.Phillips, Glenn. "Nina Sobell", ''California Video: Artists and Histories'', Getty Publications, 2008, p. 206. In 1969, she earned a B.F.A. at

Tyler School of Art The Tyler School of Art and Architecture is based at Temple University, a large, urban, public research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Tyler currently enrolls about 1,350 undergraduate students and about 200 graduate students in a wid ...

, Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and an in 1971 she earned an M.F.A. at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. She taught at UCLA in the Design Media in the Arts, Film, TV and Digital Media Department in 1982 and 1983, the School of Visual Arts, New York, and served as a visiting lecturer at Goldsmiths College, University of London, in 2005 and 2006. Sobell has lectured and participated on panel discussions at many academic institutions, includin
Ars Electronica

Career

As a digital artist focusing on experimental forms of interaction and performance, Sobell uses tools such as wireless EEG headbands, MIDI sound, webcasts, and closed-circuit video surveillance. She was part of the feminist video performance movement of the 1970s with works such as ''Chicken on Foot'' (1974) and ''Hey! Baby, Chicky!!'' (1978), but she is best known for her work with Emily Hartzell on ''ParkBench'' and ''ArTisTheater'' (1993). Her many other collaborators have included Billy Kluver,

Anne Bean Anne Bean (born 1950) is a London-based artist who works in installation, large-scale sculpture, sound art, and performance art. She was born in Livingstone in Northern Rhodesia (now Maramba, Zambia). She lives in Limehouse in the East End of Lo ...

Norman White Norman White (born January 7, 1938, San Antonio Texas) Canadian New Media artist considered to be a pioneer in the use of electronic technology and robotics in art. Life White was born in San Antonio Texas in 1938. He grew up in and around Bosto ...

, Sonya Allin, David Bacon, Per Biorn, John Dubberstein,

Karen Finley Karen Finley (born 1956) is an American performance artist, musician and poet. Her performance art, recordings, and books are used as forms of activism. Her work frequently uses nudity and profanity. Finley incorporates depictions of sexuality, ...

, RJ Fleck, Jesse Gilbert, Marek Kulbacki, Julie Martin, Anders Mansson, Aaron Michaelson, Stacy Pershall, Anatole Shaw, Jeremy Slater, and Yuqing Sun. Her work appears in the collections of the Blanton Museum, Austin;

Banff Centre for the Arts Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, formerly known as The Banff Centre (and previously The Banff Centre for Continuing Education), located in Banff, Alberta, was established in 1933 as the Banff School of Drama. It was granted full autonomy as ...

; Cornell University, the Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Manchester Gallery of Art; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; the Zentrum fur Kunst und Medien Technologie (ZKM), Karlsruhe; the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Dia Art Foundation, and many other institutions and private collections. In the early 1970s, Sobell worked with closed-circuit video to explore the relationship between artist and audience. Sobell was married to performance and sound artist Brian Routh aka "Harry Kipper of the Kipper Kids" between 1975 and 1981, and the couple collaborated on many performance video pieces, including ''Interactive Electroencephalographic Video Drawings.'' In 1973, with the series ''Brainwave Drawing'', Sobell set up a system in which two participants could see their brainwaves changing in real time as they simultaneously watched their images on closed-circuit video, creating an improvisational feedback loop as they silently attempted to communicate with each other. In 1993, Nina Sobell and Emily Hartzell collaborated on the ''ParkBench Kiosk'' as artists-in-residence at New York University Center for Advanced Technology. The piece was a network of kiosks that used the internet to bring different communities and neighborhoods together, through methods such as videoconferencing and a collaborative drawing space. The locations of the kiosks were in art museums, restaurants, parks, shops, bars, subway stations, and clubs. The piece won Art & Science Collaborations' Digital99 Award and was a 1999 Webby Award Nominee and Yahoo's Pick of the Week for January 1999. With the introduction that same year of Mosaic, the first graphical browser, Sobell and Hartzell created a "ParkBench" interface for the web and named this version of the project ''ArTisTheater''. They turned their studio into a realtime public web installation by linking it to the web with a 24-hour webcam feed. Their goal was to explore the nature of video, performance, and surveillance on the internet, and they invited artists to use their setup on a weekly basis to create live webcast performances of various kinds.Lovejoy, Margot. ''Digital Currents: Art in the Electronic Age''. New York: Routledge, 2004. p. 245. Sobell and Hartzell's first performance for ArTisTheater has been called "the first live interactive performance in the history of the World Wide Web" using a telerobotic camera operated remotely by participants.Carr, Cynthia. "A Brief History of Outrage: The 51 (or So) Greatest Avant-Garde Moments", ''Village Voice'', Sept. 22, 1998. Some 80 performances are now archived in the ArTisTheater Performance Archive, and the roster of those who participated includes Martha Wilson,

Margot Lovejoy Margot Lovejoy (21 October 1930 – 1 August 2019) ...

, Diane Ludin, Prema Murthy, and

Adrianne Wortzel Adrianne Wortzel (born 1941) is an American contemporary artist who utilizes robotics in her installations and performances. She has also created many online works. Early life and education Wortzel was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1941. She atte ...

''Alice Sat Here'' (1995) was a very early

drone Drone most commonly refers to: * Drone (bee), a male bee, from an unfertilized egg * Unmanned aerial vehicle * Unmanned surface vehicle, watercraft * Unmanned underwater vehicle or underwater drone Drone, drones or The Drones may also refer to: ...

mobile data collection and surveillance project, made in collaboration with engineers and system analysts from the Center for Advanced Technology at New York University, which enabled Web visitors or passersby to personally view the interior of the CODE show curated by

Roz Dimon Roz can refer to: People Given name Roz, short for Rosalyn, Rosa, Rosalind, and many other forms, is a first name which can refer to: * Roz Abrams (born 1949), American television journalist * Roz Bell, Canadian singer-songwriter * Roz Chast (bor ...

at the Ricco Maresca Gallery. Its key component was a telerobotic camera mounted on a wireless rolling chair. Sobell took the camera to the streets in one of the earliest tethered drones in the interactive installation ''Alice Sat Here''. Web participants or passersby ran the camera via touch pads that appeared in the display window of the CODE show at the Ricco Maresca Gallery (1995) and later, at the ACM CHI conference as VirtuAlice (1997). The touch pads surrounded a closed circuit monitor with a camera at the top and fed back passerby’s images, dissolving them over the interior of the gallery so they could virtually feel a part of the show. The video images captured were made available to web viewers in real time. Web participants could also point the camera at a rear-view mirror on the handle bars, that identified the face of anyone riding the chair, to web viewers. Sobell and Hartzell described the piece as "a passage between physical and cyber space. We converge from web-side and street-side, explore parallel spaces separated by glass, and peer through the membrane at each other's representations.” The name Alice is "reminiscent of Lewis Carroll's ''Wonderland'', in which visitors from different dimensions can meet and interact with one another." ''VirtuaAlice 1997'' was a sturdier redesign of the early ''Drone Alice Sat Here 1995'' and interacted with at CHI 97, the Computer-Human Interaction Conference in Atlanta, equipped with GUI line formation software for the Web participants. ''Barterama'' (1995) was an early piece exploring the internet's many-to-many connectivity for its potential to enable a barter economy. It was essentially a proof-of-concept project, with a small website listing a dozen categories in which Sobell and Hartzell were willing to make trades, with details of specific offers and a form for facilitating actual trading. Sobell's work is widely recognized. She was honored with a Franklin Furnace Fellowship in 2007 and is an Acker Award recipient for video (2021). She has received grants from the NEA, NYFA, and NYSCA, and was nominated for a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in 2003.

Partial list of exhibitions and presentations

*''Unseen Unheard'' Solo Installation at The Window Museum, Portugal - 2020 *''Unseen Unheard'' Video 6'08 at Three Colt Street Gallery, London - 2020 *''Nina Sobell, Hindsight is 2020'', Solo Exhibition at White Page Gallery, Valencia, Spain - 2020 (currently onlin
www.noemata.net/wpg/nina
*''Interactive Brain Wave Drawings Presentation'' LASER Leonardo Art and Science Forum, New York - 2018 *''Subliminal video, Estirando El Tiempo,'' curator, Elizabeth Ross, Museo de la Ciudad, Querétaro, Mexico - 2018 *''History of Interactive Brain Wave Drawings'' Panel presentation for the Brain On Art Conference, Valencia, Spain - 2017 *''Subliminal'' video in collaboration with Laura Ortman - music, commissioned by Leo Kuelbs collection. - 2016 *''WMAT, White Mountain Apache Tribe'' video in collaboration with Laura Ortman - music, commissioned by Leo Kuelbs collection - 2015 *''A Feast for the Eyes,'' curated by Heike Epildauer, Bank Austria Kunstforum, Vienna - 2010 *''L.E.S. Scene Then and Now'' curated by Shalom Neuman, Fusion Art Museum, NY - 2008 *''Making Love With a Chair'' (collaborative video for Reap) Anne Bean’s Show at Matt's Gallery, London - 2008 *''Apocalypse Show,'' sculptures, curated by Johnny Velardi, Garage Gallery, Brooklyn - 2008 *''Waves-The Art of the Electromagnetic Society,'' Hartware Kunstverein, Dortmund, Germany - 2008 *''California Video Show, videos Hey! Baby Chicky!!!'' and participatory Brain Wave Drawing Installation and documentation, curated by Glenn Phillips, Getty Museum, Los Angeles part of the

Paul McCarthy Paul McCarthy (born August 4, 1945) is a contemporary artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Life McCarthy was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1945. He studied art at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, and later continued ...

Film Series. *''Internal Message Search'' Solo Exhibition at Gallery Area 53, Vienna, Austria - 2008 *''Not About: Is'' Solo Exhibition Location One Gallery, NY - 2008 *''Alice Sat Here'', telerobotic installation w/Hartzell in CODE, curated by Roz Dimon, Ricco/Maresca Gallery, NYC - 2005 *''Synaesthesia, Thinking of You'', curated by Chloe Vaitsu interactive participatory installation of Brain Wave Drawings on the internet, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London UK - 2004 *''Brain Wave Drawings'' New York State Council on the Arts, Artist Fellowship - 2001 *''ParkBench'' Webby Award nominated internet interface with Emily Hartzell - 1999 *''Streaming: A Laboratory'', with E. Hartzell/ Sonya Allin, curated by John Tucker,W. Phillips Gallery, Banff - 1999 *''Sunshine & Noir: Art in Los Angeles 1960-1997'', curated by Paul McCarthy, at The Armand Hammer, Castello di Rivoli, Italy, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, and the Louisiana MOMA, Denmark - 1999 *''Interactive Installations'', 1974 - 1998, DAAD Studios, Berlin with Emily Hartzell - 1998 *''Ebb and Flow'', Web performance, Morton Studio, turbulence.org (J.Gilbert/S.Allin) - 1998 *''Art on the Web'' (ParkBench), Whitney Museum of American Art - 1996 *''Language and Disorder'': videotapes, New Langton Arts, San Francisco - 1996 *''LA Sampler 1970-1993, Hey, Baby Chicky!!!'' Paul McCarthy curator,

David Zwirner Gallery David Zwirner Gallery is an American contemporary art gallery owned by David Zwirner. It has four gallery spaces in New York City and one each in London, Hong Kong, and Paris. History The Zwirner Gallery opened in 1993 on the ground floor of ...

, NYC

References

External links

Official Nina Sobell Website
By Cristina Albu ''MA Journal'' 2021. *[https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article-abstract/35/1%20(103)/39/164224/Intimate-ConnectionsAlternative-Communication?redirectedFrom=PDF "Intimate Connections: Alternative Communication Threads in Nina Sobell’s Video Performances and Installations (1974-1983)"] By Cristina Albu ''Camera Obscura: Journal of Feminism, Culture and Media Studies,'' Duke University Press 35, no. 1 (Spring 2020): Pages 38–75. *
Brain Art: Brain-Computer Interfaces for Artistic Expression
' Anton Nijholt, Editor 2020.

Judy Malloy, Editor, MIT Press 2018. {{DEFAULTSORT:Sobell, Nina 1947 births Living people American artists American women artists Internet art Cornell University alumni Temple University Tyler School of Art alumni 21st-century American women Techspressionist artists