Sherrie Rabinowitz (1950–2013) was an American video artist and a pioneer in satellite-based telecommunications art. She worked exclusively with Kit Galloway under the moniker Mobile Image from 1977 onwards. She co-founded the Electronic Café International (ECI), a performance space and real café housed in the

18th Street Arts Center 18th Street Arts Center is a nonprofit arts center in Santa Monica, California. It was founded in 1988 and is the longest running artist residency center in Southern California. 18th Street Arts Center’s residency program hosts 60 or more Ameri ...

in Santa Monica, California, with Galloway. She died in 2013, from complications due to

multiple sclerosis Multiple (cerebral) sclerosis (MS), also known as encephalomyelitis disseminata or disseminated sclerosis, is the most common demyelinating disease, in which the insulating covers of nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord are damaged. This d ...

Career

Optic Nerve

She studied at University of California Berkeley and was involved in the collective Optic Nerve, which created underground video and guerrilla television. Optic Nerve was one of the few San Francisco video collectives with women members in the 1970s. As part of Optic Nerve she collaborated with the architecture and performance collective Ant Farm which was also based out of San Francisco. These projects include: ''Media Burn'' (1975), ''The Eternal Frame'' (1975), and ''Pier 40 Fire Clean Up'' (1978).

Mobile Image

From the mid-1970s onwards,

Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz Kit Galloway (born 1948) and Sherrie Rabinowitz (1950–2013) met in 1975 and worked collaboratively under the name Mobile Image. They co-founded the Electronic Café International (ECI), a cafe, networking centre, performance and workshop space a ...

created numerous art works which could be categorized as

communication aesthetics Communication Aesthetics is a theory devised by Mario Costa (philosopher), Mario Costa and Fred Forest at Mercato San Severino in Italy in 1983. It is a theory of aesthetics calling for artistic practice engaging with and working through the develo ...

, telecollaborative art, telematic art, cyber art, and

digital theatre Strictly, digital theatre is a hybrid art form, gaining strength from theatre's ability to facilitate the imagination and create human connections and digital technology's ability to extend the reach of communication and visualization. (However, ...

. One example of their work is the 1977 ''Satellite Arts Project: A Space with No Boundaries'', which created composite images of two dancers in California and two dancers in Maryland, and was supported by NASA. Another example is their 1980 satellite relay project ''Hole-in-Space'' which connected public spaces in New York and Los Angeles with live audio and life-sized video. Rabinowitz coined the phrase "We must create at the same scale that we can destroy" which would become the headline of Mobile Image's manifesto for their ''Electronic Cafe Network Project'' (1984) commissioned for the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics Art Festival.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Rabinowitz, Sherrie American new media artists American women video artists American video artists 1950 births 2013 deaths People from Santa Monica, California University of California, Berkeley alumni Neurological disease deaths in the United States Deaths from multiple sclerosis People with multiple sclerosis 20th-century American women artists