Toni Dove lives and works in
New York
New York most commonly refers to:
* New York City, the most populous city in the United States, located in the state of New York
* New York (state), a state in the northeastern United States
New York may also refer to:
Film and television
* '' ...
. Since the early 1990s, she has produced unique and highly imaginative embodied hybrids of film, installation and performance. In her work, performers and participants interact with an unfolding narrative, using interface technologies such as motion sensing to “perform” on-screen avatars.
Career
Dove is considered one of the pioneers of
Interactive Cinema
Interactive cinema tries to give an audience an active role in the showing of movies.
Another newer definition of interactive cinema is a video game which is a hybrid between participation and viewing, giving the player – or viewer, as it were ...
[ and has shown work at ]ZKM
The ZKM , Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (until March 2016: ZKM Center for Art and Media Technology), a cultural institution, was founded in 1989. and since 1997 is located in a listed industrial building in Karlsruhe, Germany, a former muni ...
, the Banff Centre
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 ...
for the Arts, the Brooklyn Anchorage, and the Whitney Museum
The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District, Manhattan, Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude ...
of American Art. She has been affiliated with Creative Time
Creative Time is a New York-based nonprofit arts organization. It was founded in 1974 to support the creation of innovative, site-specific, socially engaged artworks in the public realm, particularly in vacant spaces of historical and architectura ...
and Harvestworks
Harvestworks is a not-for-profit arts organization located in New York City. It was founded in 1977 by artists supporting the creation and presentation of art works achieved through the use of new technologies. The Harvestworks TEAM Lab (Technology ...
, and a DVD version of scenes from her pieces has been distributed by Cycling '74
Cycling '74 (also known as "C74" and stylized as '74) is an American software development company founded in 1997 by David Zicarelli, headquartered in San Francisco, California and owned by Ableton. The company employs the digital signal processi ...
. She is the granddaughter of American abstract painter Arthur Dove
Arthur Garfield Dove (August 2, 1880 – November 23, 1946) was an American artist. An early American modernist, he is often considered the first American abstract painter.. Dove used a wide range of media, sometimes in unconventional combinati ...
.
Dove has been working with interactive narrative since 1990.[ Her work blends cinematic tropes typical of studio-age ]film noir
Film noir (; ) is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and motivations. The 1940s and 1950s are generally regarded as the "classic period" of American ' ...
with contemporary narrative trends in science fiction
Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel unive ...
, cybernetics
Cybernetics is a wide-ranging field concerned with circular causality, such as feedback, in regulatory and purposive systems. Cybernetics is named after an example of circular causal feedback, that of steering a ship, where the helmsperson m ...
, and new media
New media describes communication technologies that enable or enhance interaction between users as well as interaction between users and content. In the middle of the 1990s, the phrase "new media" became widely used as part of a sales pitch for ...
, often offering a feminist take on popular genres.[ Dove refers to her work as "cyber-theatre" because it relies on virtual performers (avatars) rather than human actors and because she gives her audience partial control over the performance through the use of interactive technologies.][ In these hybrids of ]film
A film also called a movie, motion picture, moving picture, picture, photoplay or (slang) flick is a work of visual art that simulates experiences and otherwise communicates ideas, stories, perceptions, feelings, beauty, or atmosphere ...
, installation art
Installation art is an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called ...
, and experimental theater
Experimental theatre (also known as avant-garde theatre), inspired largely by Wagner's concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, began in Western theatre in the late 19th century with Alfred Jarry and his Ubu plays as a rejection of both the age in particular ...
, the participants interact with an unfolding narrative movie, often using minimally invasive interface
Interface or interfacing may refer to:
Academic journals
* ''Interface'' (journal), by the Electrochemical Society
* ''Interface, Journal of Applied Linguistics'', now merged with ''ITL International Journal of Applied Linguistics''
* '' Inte ...
technologies such as speech recognition
Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers with the m ...
and computer vision
Computer vision is an interdisciplinary scientific field that deals with how computers can gain high-level understanding from digital images or videos. From the perspective of engineering, it seeks to understand and automate tasks that the hum ...
to control or 'perform' their on-screen avatar
Avatar (, ; ), is a concept within Hinduism that in Sanskrit literally means "descent". It signifies the material appearance or incarnation of a powerful deity, goddess or spirit on Earth. The relative verb to "alight, to make one's appearanc ...
s.[
Dove's 1994 piece entitled ''Casual Workers, Hallucinations and Appropriate Ghosts'' has been interpreted as belonging to the larger domain of radio because of its "aural evocation of high-tech street erotics".][ The piece tracks a metamorphosis from a choreography based on the gestures of Charcot's "theater" of hysteria to a choreography of the female heroines of martial arts. It is accompanied by a narrative about disturbances in the fabric of human intimacy followed by a three minute symphony constructed entirely of screams. The piece was situated at the end of a series of adult video stores and presented an alternative view of the subject matter at hand on 42nd street.]
In 2001 Toni Dove received funding from the Daniel Langlois Foundation to produce ''Spectropia: A Ghost Story on the Infinite Deferral of Desire'', the second part in a "trilogy of narrative, interactive installations begun in 1998".[ The first installment, ''Artificial Changelings'', dealt with "the emergence of compulsive consumerism in the 19th century" through a plotline centered on a heist. For this piece, Dove used floor mats as the basis for viewer interaction with the piece: moving around shifted the visitor's point of view among three options (first, second, and third person). Gestures made by visitors further affected how the piece was experienced.][ In the second installment, Dove continued her inquiry "into the subconscious at work in the capitalist society of the early 20th century".][
]
Notable works
* ''Lucid Possession'' (2009–present)
* ''Spectropia'' (2001–2010)
* ''Artificial Changelings'' (1995–2000)
* ''Casual Workers, Hallucinations and Appropriate Ghosts'' (1994)
* ''Archeology of a Mother Tongue'' (1993; in collaboration with Michael Mackenzie)
* ''The Blessed Abyss: A Tale of Unmanageable Ecstasies'' (1992)
* ''Mesmer: Secrets of the Human Frame'' (1990)
Publications
*"Haunting the Movie: Embodied Interface/Sensory Cinema." In Gavin Carver and Colin Beardon, ''New Visions in Performance: The Impact of Digital Technologies''. Routledge, 2012.
*"The Space Between: Telepresence, Re-Animation and the Re-Casting of the Invisible." In Martin Rieser and Andrea Zapp, ''New Screen Media: Cinema/Art/Narrative''. London: British Film Institute, 2002, pp. 208–220.
*"Theater Without Actors: Immersion and Response in Installation." In ''Leonardo'' (1994): 281-287.
* ''Mesmer: Secrets of the Human Frame''. Granary Books, 1990.
References
External links
Home Page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Dove, Toni
20th-century American sculptors
Living people
Mixed-media artists
21st-century American women sculptors
New media artists
21st-century American sculptors
1946 births