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 ai ...

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 arts, performing, cinematic and New media art, media arts school of New York University. Founded on August 17, 1965, Tisch is a training ground ...

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, ...

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 and lives in San Francisco, California.

Artwork

Examples of her work include ''Text Rain'' (1999), created in collaboration with

Romy Achituv Romy Achituv (Hebrew: רומי אחיטוב; born 1958) is an Israelis, Israeli experimental Multimedia, multimedia artist whose work engages issues of representation, language, time, and memory. Ahituv, Achituv is known for "Text Rain" which he co ...

, 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 The Museum of the Moving Image is a media museum located in a former building of the historic Astoria Studios (now Kaufman Astoria Studios), in the Astoria neighborhood in Queens, New York City. The museum originally opened in 1988 as the Amer ...

(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 The Frist Art Museum, formerly known as the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, is an art exhibition hall in Nashville, Tennessee, housed in the city's historic United States Postal Service, U.S. Post Office building, which is listed on the National ...

(Nashville, TN), the Ars Electronica Center (Linz, Austria) and the NTT InterCommunication Center (Tokyo, Japan). Utterback created an installation called ''Precarious'' for the

National Portrait Gallery National Portrait Gallery may refer to: *National Portrait Gallery (Australia), in Canberra *National Portrait Gallery (Sweden), in Mariefred *National Portrait Gallery (United States), in Washington, D.C. *National Portrait Gallery, London, with s ...

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 philanthropic medical research and arts funding organization based at 420 Fifth Avenue, New York City. The second-oldest major philanthropic institution in America, after the Ca ...

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 ...

Fellowship, the Transmediale International Media Art Festival Award, an IBM Innovation Merit Award for her solo show ''Animated Gestures'' in the Boston Cyberarts Festival, 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 p ...

. 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

References

Sources

* Christiane Paul (2003). ''Digital Art'' (World of Art series). London: Thames & Hudson. . * Jeffrey Shaw and

Peter Weibel Peter Weibel (; born 5 March 1944 in Odessa, USSR) is an internationally known Austrian post-conceptual artist, curator and new media theoretician. He started out in 1964 as a visual poet but soon jumped from the page to the screen within the se ...

, eds. (2003). "Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary After Film" MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. .

External links