About the Artist

Camille Utterback is a pioneering artist and programmer in the field of interactive installation. Her work has been exhibited internationally at festivals and galleries including New Langton Arts Gallery, San Francisco; Caren Golden Fine Arts, Cynthia Broan Gallery, and Postmasters Gallery New York; The NTT InterCommunication Center, Tokyo; The Seoul Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Netherlands Institute for Media Art; The Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art; The Center for Contemporary Art, Kiev, Ukraine; the Ars Electronica Center, Austria; and SIGGRAPH Art Gallery 2000. Utterback has been awarded a Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellowship for a project to be completed in 2003. She won The OLB Media Art prize at the European Media Art Festival (2000), and was selected by Res Magazine as artist pick of the year for their "Annual Res 10 - Ten people who are making a difference in their field" (2000). New York University has filed for a patent on an interactive system Utterback developed while working as an Interval Research Fellow there (2000). Through her company "Creative Nerve, Inc." Utterback develops robust, engaging installations for commercial and museum settings. Creative Nerve has developed commissioned installations for Herman Miller, Shiseido, and The American Museum of Natural History, and is currently creating a new piece for the Pittsburgh Children's Museum. Utterback holds a BA in Art from Williams College, and a Masters degree from The Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. In addition to her artistic and commercial work, Utterback also teaches as an adjunct professor at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, and at the Masters of Fine Arts in Design and Technology Program at Parsons School of Design.

Engaging Space: Works by Camille Utterback

February 8 - August 19, 2002

Engaging Space features four video works by Camille Utterback, a pioneering artist and programmer in the field of interactive video art. Utterback is a graduate of Williams College and the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. Utterback was recently awarded a Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellowship. She lives and works in New York City.

In Camille Utterback's installations, video images are projected on screens or walls. Simply by moving or gesturing in the space in front of these images, participants can change them, altering their colors, patterns, shapes, and - in one work - even fragmenting time by activating a stored video clip.

This link between viewer and image is realized not by touch, but by a video camera, which transmits signals of the viewer's movement to a computer. From these signals, software programs written by Utterback extract information about the direction and frequency of the participant's motions and use this information to modify the video imagery.

In Utterback's installations, technical equipment is largely kept out of view (as opposed to some artists who use the equipment itself like sculptural elements within the installation). Our engagement with Utterback's work is directly with the image, rather than with the apparatus that make the images appear. The nature of our interaction with Utterback's works is, thus, fluid, intuitive, and seemingly unmediated, encouraging our exploration of the rich colors, fluctuating compositions, and intriguing subject matter of the images themselves.

Activity for Kids

Make two landscape paintings-one using values of black and one using primary colors. You will need black, red, blue, yellow and white acrylic or tempera paint, brushes, and paper. For the first painting, use only values of black, meaning different shades of the color from light grey to midnight black. For the second landscape painting, use only primary colors: red, blue and yellow. The painting composition should be exactly the same as the first painting, except in this one you use color. Compare the two paintings when you are done to see how color and value changes your perception of a landscape.