See all in Museum And Gallery

Time after time

Museum And Gallery

Conversations wanted

CENOTAPH: Steve Hollinger creates silent dramas.

Just what is cyberarts? Well you might ask. Is it art that draws on the latest technological advances in software-driven interactive imagery? Yes. Is it art that reconnects with primitive mechanics like those reminiscent of 19th-century circus sideshows? That too. Could it be digitally manipulated film stills enlarged to the size of hotel windows? You guessed. Now in its eighth year and fifth incarnation, the Boston Cyberarts Festival is a bi-annual spring ritual of diverse performing- and visual-arts events and exhibits hosted by area galleries, museums, theaters, universities, and public spaces. Perhaps cyberarts might best be defined by what it isn’t: it isn’t painting, it isn’t sculpture, and it prefers to move or at least to have moved. Here’s a sampling of this year’s fest.

For those looking to feast their eyes on the cutting edge of technology and art — a dangerously mixed metaphor, I know — a trip to Art Interactive is in order. There, Camille Utterback’s three installations, which visibly consist of two separate and one pair of white movie screens suspended high above even the tallest viewers’ heads, at first look like big abstract paintings. One is made up of multi-colored dots; the others sport all sorts of colorful shapes and daubs, and on the floor below each screen appears a corresponding panel of projected light. Only when you begin to walk on the lighted floor area (whose tiles shift slightly with your steps) do you notice that your movement radically reconfigures the shapes on the screen. Sometimes you’re an inadvertent eraser, wiping away whole networks of design. Other times you’re an inadvertent painter, leaving in the wake of your movements huge swaths of unpredictable imagery. In either case, your motions get picked up by a sensor that translates your body’s activity into a cloud-like force that’s continually re-creating what you see. It’s fun.

There’s no denying the intelligence and the precision of Utterback’s art, or its tongue-in-cheek majesty. Few artists in any medium warrant such scale or offer such variety. A fleeting thought came to me as I watched my moving around leave a new canvas behind: I should have been on drugs. A good hallucinogen hit would have heightened the effects of her shape-shifting projections, and that thought may point to the artist’s achievement but also to her achievement’s limit. For all that Utterback’s art is highly interactive, it is not in the least way personal: one’s own particular shape is not reflected on any of her screens. Instead, every body becomes the same amorphous, rounded force field. Further, the graphic content of her ephemeral creations — the painterly brush strokes, the line drawings, the smears of projected pigment — reflect exclusively the artist’s hand, not the viewer’s. Before her immersion in interactive technology, Utterback made works on canvas that look a lot like her sophisticated etch-a-sketches. For art to be truly interactive, it needs to operate like a conversation: both parties get to set the terms.

• Share:
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•