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Camille Utterback's Series External Measures by Lisa Dorin
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 Camille Utterback: Untitled 5 (2004) Despite the seeming
effortlessness of this very direct relationship of physical
movement to projected action, the algorithms required to
successfully render the desired effects are anything but
simple. The development of such software commands tremendous
computational and analytic prowess. But by limiting the
scope of each project to a finite range of exceedingly
well-structured parameters, Utterback does not let the
technology overshadow the aesthetic quality and intellectual
content of the work. Beautifully multifaceted abstract
imagery creates and sustains visual interest prompting
questions about what the limits of the piece are and how the
system functions. These installations reveal their
complexities over time. Prolonged engagement encourages a
larger examination of the expectations and desires we have
of our own bodies as they relate to technology. The fact that she was
trained in traditional media informs Utterback's
technology-based work. Her early oil paintings, such as
Pink Galaxy (1995) display a comparable affinity for
the abstract gestures, particular color combinations, and
characteristic mark making that appear throughout
External Measures. The palette of organic marks she
employs in Untitled 5 and 6, resembles a
variety of traditional drawing media-thick oil pastel or
felt pen smears, delicate watercolor spots, chalky
conté-crayon scribbles, and subtle pen and ink dots
and lines-that are reflective of the artist's own hand.
(Indeed some of the elements in both Untitled 5 and
6, for instance the "popcorn" shaped watercolor
blotches were painted by hand and then scanned into the
program.) Often discussed solely in
terms of its pioneering approach to interactivity,
Utterback's project also lays claim to a rich art-historical
lineage of nonobjective painting, abstract animation, and
avant-garde film. Her current series calls to mind the
notions of synaesthesia shared by Vasily Kandinsky and other
early twentieth-century artists who, no longer content with
representing the physical world, championed abstract over
figurative painting. For these artists the subjective
experience of pure non-representational color on canvas
would ideally resonate in much the same way enveloping
quality of music. The desire to emulate sublime aural
experience through visual means is surpassed in Utterback's
case by a consummate ability to locate the sensation and
meaning of the work within one's entire body. Such an
interest in participatory artworks that draw attention to
the body, also predates her involvement with new media
technologies, as exemplified by Preserves (1992), an
installation in which viewers were invited to pick up and
investigate a set of sealed canning jars filled with
combinations of food and female beauty products. No matter
how acute the artist's mastery of the technology, her
background in low-tech media and attendant sensitivity to
surface textures and the physicality of objects facilitates
the creation of fundamentally aesthetic and user-friendly
interfaces. Utterback's innovative
fusion of visual and physical, hand crafted and
technological, is closely aligned with the early experiments
of Oskar Fischinger, Hans Richter, and Walter Ruttman who,
armed with new moving-image technologies, abandoned static
painting and looked instead to animation or "living
abstraction." With their reliance on bodily participation as
an integral element, Untitled 5 and 6 comprise
a brand of "living abstraction" surely never imagined by her
predecessors. Dominating the view from the gallery entrance,
these vibrant painterly compositions are static until
someone enters the rectangle of light on the floor in front
of each projection wall and triggers the on-screen activity.
Suspended cameras capture live video and a computer program,
written by the artist, deduces shapes, trajectories,
movement, or lack thereof, and translates the information
into one of a series of corresponding marks, erasures, or
animated actions. In order to get there we must first walk
through the combined zones of interactivity positioned
between the two 8x10 ft suspended screens of
Alluvial. Quieter, less immediately eye-catching, the
initial imagery is made up of white and yellow points of
light in a deep gray field. But rather than remaining fixed
when not in use, the light specks twinkle star-like in a
come hither gesture. As the title aptly suggests, we push
some elements away and leave others--in the form of
spiraling lines and coagulated deposits of dots--in our
wake. In an exercise of deflected expectations, the
movements that take place in the zone nearest to one screen
have the most visual impact in the farther composition, and
vice versa. The overall effect of this piece is calming,
meditative, sublime; one is inclined to slow way down, to
think more consciously about the implications of every
movement. Utterback and the other
artists of her generation producing cutting edge digital
time-based work find roots in the experimental spirit, if
not the particular material and conceptual concerns, of mid-
twentieth century filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage and his
contemporaries. The earlier artists' investigations in pure
light and color rejected the traditional narrative and
aesthetic structures of Hollywood film and pushed the
physical characteristics of film to extremes. Unlike her
avant-garde forbears, Utterback rejects nothing. She adds to
the rich lineage of abstract imagery by drawing upon these
prior modes for how they inform the current techniques she
embraces. Intimately tied to human bodies, her installations
take on an entirely distinct set of issues, forming a hybrid
space in which meticulously encoded software meets, and
responds to, the arbitrary behaviors of viewers. Camille
Utterback's singular artistic vision and seamless execution
inverts the typical effects of contemporary technology,
which she uses to draw us into (rather than away from) our
own perceptions and physicality. The result is wholly
infectious. *** Lisa Dorin is Assistant
Curator of Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago,
where she organizes focus, a series of one-person
exhibitions by international contemporary artists, and is
currently producing a catalogue of the museum's timebased
media collection.
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