Camille Utterback
Stanford University
From Falling Text to Custom Glass - Adventures in Interactive Art

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Artist Camille Utterback's interactive installations combine innovative technology, elegant design, and surprising situations to reconnect us to our physicality, and to the world around us.

For many years, Utterback has created work using live camera data and software code, exploring the intersection of physical gestures and computational systems. In Text Rain (1999), her landmark video tracking work, participants use their bodies to catch and play with projected lines of a poem. More recently, Utterback has integrated her work into architectural infrastructures -- activating sites such as hand railings and elevator call buttons to shift people's temporal experience of a shared physical site. Her newest work explores the potential for display surfaces that address the subtleties of our depth perception and shift as we move in physical relation to them.

In this talk, Utterback will show documentation of her interactive installations and discuss both her artistic and technical processes. She will muse on the continuing interplay between time and materiality in her work, and discuss the role of contemporary art practice in our shared future.

Camille Utterback is an internationally acclaimed artist whose extensive exhibit history includes more than fifty shows on four continents. Awards include a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2009), a Transmediale International Media Art Festival Award (2005), a Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellowship (2002), a Whitney Museum commission for their ArtPort website (2002), and a US Patent (2001). Her work is in the collections of The Orange County Museum of Art, The La Caixa Foundation (Spain), Itau Cultural (Brazil), 21C Museum (Louisvillle, KY), Hewlett Packard, The Pittsburgh Children's Museum, and other private collectors. Recently completed commissions include works for the City of St. Louis Park, Minnesota (2009), the City of San Jose, California (2010), the Sacramento Airport, California (2011), Mercedes House, New York, NY (2012), and Liberty Mutual Group, Boston, MA (2013). Utterback holds a BA in Art from Williams College, and a Masters degree from The Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. She is an Assistant Professor in the Art & Art History Department at Stanford University, and lives in San Francisco.