From Technological to Virtual Art
For over thirty years Rebecca Allen has investigated a variety of technological forms of expression including 3-D computer graphic animation, music videos, TV logo production, video games, large-scale performance works, artificial life, multisensory interfaces, interactive installations, and virtual reality. Allen is not interested in technology for its own sake, however. Rather, she is interested in a technoculture which humanizes technology even while maintaining a critical stance towards it. Or perhaps one can even say that it is her critical approach towards technology that helps humanize it.
Allen demonstrates this critical approach with her concern with artistic quality and the conceptual integrity of her work - a conceptual integrity that stresses the effect on the mind of the viewer. Indeed her main concern appears to be the investigation of the perceptual and cognitive processes of the viewer in conjunction with the technological apparatus with which she is engaged. Her approach is based on a belief in technology, but technology as a means of expanding human potential by provoking people to become smarter. Not just intellectually smarter, but smarter about their own emotional reactions to technology. Thus she approaches technology from an almost expressionistic angle, where human feeling and emotional reaction predominate the art.
Such an approach is taken in an attempt to help people today live with the overload of information which we are exposed to on a regular basis. Her work strives to demonstrate how the technological landscape (which we cannot escape) can be paradoxically dominated by human needs. By the viewer/participant experiencing a space where digital and physical realities merge and by interacting with her intricate digital characters, Allen exposes her audiences to experiences where our carnal bodies and virtual data bodies coexist and interact comfortably. This is Allen's long-standing vision; a vision which acknowledges that we cannot escape the realm of the technological, but we need to take control of it, adjusting it to our needs as humans. By exploring advanced electronic tools Allen helps us understand where technology is most active in our lives.
Allen began her exploration of the relationship between art and technology as an art student at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in the early 1970's where Allen's prime influences were the art and technology movements of the early twentieth century: the Bauhaus, the Futurists and the Constructivists, primarily. Using a state of the art computer system called Vector General, and an early program that could interpolate 2D drawings, Allen realized her first computer animation in 1974.
After RISD, Allen worked as a graphic designer for a furniture design company. However she found this work tedious, and so kept looking for other avenues of expression involving art and technology for her creative expression. In due course she was accepted as a special student to MIT where she enrolled in a course on computer graphics taught by Nicholas Negroponte. In 1978 Allen became a graduate student at MIT and began her work with the Architecture Machine Group, an experience of immersion into interactive media that opened her resourceful mind to the possibilities of digital technology. Through this exposure to high technology and advanced rendering processes in 3D space she was able to realize a number of projects that have become classics, above all the Aspen Movie Map and Personalized Movies, also known as Movie Manuals.
Allen then decided to follow her interest in computer animation because she wanted to realize a quality of color, detail and resolution that interactive images could not yet make available. She therefore joined the Computer Graphics Laboratory at New York Institute of Technology, one of the leading centers for advanced 3-D computer graphics by the late 1970s. The NYIT Computer Graphics Lab had superb computational facilities, and this technological potential was coupled to no specific utilitarian market agenda. Thus the pairing of freedom with technological potential served to stimulate and formulate Allen's art in a constructive fashion - one that she continues to draw strength from to this day.
There were no requirements to create software packages for the market at NYIT Computer Graphics Lab - the focus was on the free exploration of computer graphics and animation. However, at the lab, Allen created some much commended commercial work, including her EMMY-award-winning opening sequence for CBS's Walter Cronkite's Universe. She also began to create her own computer-animated artworks, including Steps (1982), which was inspired by Oscar Schlemmer and the Bauhaus theater. Allen also realized a computer-animated figure of St. Catherine for the film version of Twyla Tharp's performance piece The Catherine Wheel (1982). This animated figure was the first computer generated human to appear on television.
At NYIT Computer Graphics Lab, Allen created some of the earliest music videos that utilized computer animation - for example, her Adventures in Success (1983) and Smile (1983) for Will Powers at Island Records. She also achieved acclaim for the music video Musique Non Stop for Kraftwerk in 1986. These music videos contained original, and very arduous, computer animation sequences, especially rotating 3-D faces and subtle facial expressions that became the best known characteristics of Allen's work. This Kraftwerk video Musique Non Stop is considered today to be one of the icons of technoculture. Its imagery has been cited in a myriad of techno contexts, including posters and flyers for techno raves to Nam June Paik's multi-screen video installations.
Following her experience at the NYIT Computer Graphics Lab, Allen moved to Los Angeles to teach at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). Allen was shortly thereafter invited to Spain to bring to fruition several projects, including installation works, computer animations for the World Expo in Seville, the city of Barcelona and the TV series El Arte del Video. She also received a commission from the Art Futura festival in Barcelona to work on performance projects with the legendary Spanish performance group La Fura dels Baus.
Given her interest in creating real-time high-resolution 3-D virtual worlds, Allen shortly thereafter joined Virgin Interactive Entertainment, a video game company, as creative director, executive producer and 3-D visionary. Allen worked on a number of games, including Demolition Man, based on the action movie. Following this experience, she accepted a position as founding chair of a new department of Design/Media Arts at the University of California Los Angeles.
Recently Allen has created a series of multiparticipant, artificial life, immersive projects called The Bush Soul where visitors may enter and experience lush networked worlds. The title The Bush Soul is based on a West African principle that a person has more than one soul and that there is a style of soul called the "bush soul" that exists within an untamed animal in the bush. In The Bush Soul, avatars amalgamate artificial life tendencies with those of the human participant through the use of gesture - as the a-life forms respond using tactile feedback. This is consistent with Allen's earlier work in that her work has always concentrated on inserting the presence of the human into the activity of the machine, a concern she dealt with by slotting human attendance into the computer by requiring the human to interact with The Bush Soul.
To create The Bush Soul, Allen received a grant from Intel Corporation which allowed her to put together a team of computer science and design students whose goal it was to create a game engine system (called Emergence) based on artificial life technology. Allen then used the Emergence engine to formulate a complex virtual world populated by odd, abstract creatures with unanticipated behaviors. The first piece was called The Bush Soul, but the title became a general term for a series of three related, but different installations.
In The Bush Soul a participant's "soul" - which is represented as a bubble of pulsing liveliness - enters a virtual bush world that appears to be animate and responsive to the participant's actions. Through a-life programming, a Bush Soul character can be endowed with apparent "feelings" towards any object in The Bush Soul world - feelings that compel a character's movements and influence its reactions. As a participant explores the environment of The Bush Soul, his or her "soul" may be said to dwell in the body of certain artificial life forms. Although the participant's experiences within The Bush Soul are perceptibly influenced by video game formats, unlike with typical video games, Bush Soul contains no conclusion or finality, only continual exploration and pleasure.
(excerpt) by Frank Popper
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