Camille Utterback, Untitled 5 (installation view) |
In a 1999 interviewon www.girlgeeks.org, new-media artist Camille Utterback revealed that her “love and/or obsession with computers” began when her parents bought their first Apple computer — she was around 10 years old. She was never good at computer games, so she started teaching herself to program, writing programs in BASIC that would do her math homework for her. Utterback’s interest in the relationship between our selves and our technology has led her to create interactive works that engage viewers’ bodies as well as their eyes and minds. In her work with Romy Achituv, Text Rain, participants use their bodies to play with virtual letters that seem to fall like snow or rain on a screen. “Camille Utterback: Animated Gestures” opens at Art Interactive March 9 with three new interactive drawing installations by this accomplished artist.
Interactive sound and video are also components of “Hans Tutschku: Tell Me! . . . A Secret . . . ,” which opens in the Carpenter Center’s Main Gallery March 8. Tutschku, who studied electroacoustic composition in Europe and toured with composer Karlheinz Stockhausen to study sound diffusion between 1989 and 1991, will create one installation in which viewers’ movements are used to control sound and video transformations in the space and another in which you can contribute to a multimedia installation by whispering your own secrets into a small microphone.
Victor Burgin is considered one of the originators of Conceptual art and was one of the first to use photography and text. An installation of his much-praised recent video “The Little House,” which brings together a book (a story of seduction interwoven with a guide to interior decoration) and a building (a “cooperative dwelling” built in West Hollywood by architect Rudolph Schindler in the early 1920s), opens in Harvard’s Sert Gallery March 8, and Burgin will speak about his work and the question of political engagement in “The Responsibility of the Artist” at the Carpenter Center that same evening.
A powerful political consciousness energizes performance and video artist Coco Fusco’s work, which often focuses on the social impact of globalization on disenfranchised peoples. Fusco is giving two talks at MIT this month: on March 12 she speaks on “What You Don’t Know Can Kill You: The Art of Coco Fusco,” and on March 14 she discusses “Gender, Sexuality and the Performance of Interrogation.”
“Camille Utterback: Animated Gestures” at Art Interactive, 130 Bishop Allen Drive, Cambridge | March 9–May 13 | 617.498.0100 | “Hans Tutschku: Tell Me! . . . A Secret . . . ” at Carpenter Center, Main Gallery, 24 Quincy St, Cambridge | March 8–April 13 | 617.495.3251 | Victor Burgin speaks at Carpenter Center March 8 at 6 pm | “The Little House” at Sert Gallery, third floor, 24 Quincy St | March 8–April 13) | 617.495.3251 | Coco Fusco speaks at MIT’s Kirsch Auditorium, Room 32-123, 32 Vassar St, Cambridge (March 12 at 8 pm) & MIT’s Room 6-120, enter at 77 Mass Avenue (March 14, 8 pm) | 617.253.2787
On the Web
Art Interactive: www.artinteractive.org
Carpenter Center: www.ves.fas.harvard.edu
MIT’s Kirsch Auditorium: http://web.mit.edu/arts
