Emerson Urban Arts Welcomes Internationally Acclaimed Digital Artist

Artist and 2009 MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient Camille Utterback joined visitors to Emerson Urban Arts: Media Art Gallery for the opening of her interactive digital art installation, Entangled, on Friday, March 3.

On exhibit through April 22, Entangled uses a computer program to track the movement of viewers, which it transforms into a dynamic, abstract digital “painting.” The installation is an attempt to have viewers both interact with the program, but also create a two-sided transparent image by facing each other, according to the artist.

“Entangled refers to the merging of participants’ physical traces on scrims in the installation, and also our ongoing emotional entanglement with digital systems in our lived environment,” Utterback said in a statement.

A Boston native, Utterback combines sensing and display technologies with the custom software she writes. A professor at Stanford University, she also co-directs the Stanford Graduate Design Program. Her work has been exhibited at galleries, festivals, and museums around the world, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City.

Running concurrently with Entangled is Cybernetic Serendipity, a documentary exhibit celebrating one of the first attempts to demonstrate computer-aided art, poetry, music, and dance in a 1968 show curated by Jasia Reichardt at the ICA in London. The original exhibition included robots, poetry, music, and painting machines, as well as other works where chance was an important ingredient. The documentary exhibit is curated Reichardt from her archives of the original show. 

“Camille’s signature work in combination with Jasia Reichardt’s Cybernetic Serendipity documentary exhibition is a landmark event, highlighting two foremost figures of new media,” said Joseph Ketner, Emerson’s Henry and Lois Foster Chair in Contemporary Art and distinguished curator-in-residence in the Visual and Media Arts Department, and director of Emerson Urban Arts.

The Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, is open Wednesday through Saturday, 2:00-7:00 pm.