Motion as Sentience and the Pygmalion Complex

Considered an innovator in the field of interactive and immersive narrative, New York-based artist TONI DOVE creates hybrid performance, installation and screen-based art that fuses film, game or instrument-based interaction with experimental theater. In her work, performers and participants interact with an unfolding narrative, using technologies such as motion sensing or machine learning to connect with on-screen characters.
Projects include Spectropia: feature length live-mix movie performance: premiered: Wexner Center for the Arts; REDCAT, LA Nov 2007; EMPAC, Troy NY, 2008, the Kitchen, NYC, 2010, Roulette, NY, 2012. Lucid Possession, a live mix music cinema performance, a co-production with Issue Project Room, Roulette and HERE, premiered in NYC in 2013 after a preview show at Center for the Arts at Virginia Tech. An interactive cinema and robotics installation ‘The Dress That Eats Souls’, premiered in a survey of 20 years of Dove’s interactive work “Embodied Machines” at The Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida, 2018.
Dove

Otto Peine’s Light Ballet

ANN McCOY is a New York-based sculptor, painter, and art critic, and Editor at Large for the Brooklyn Rail. She was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2019. She taught art history, the in the graduate design section of the Yale School of Drama until May 2020, and the Art History Department at Barnard College from 1980 through 2000.

Ann McCoy’ work is included in the following collections: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Australia, the Roy L. Neuberger Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. Ann McCoy has received the following awards: the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Asian Cultural Council, the Pollock Krasner Foundation, the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Award, the Award in the Visual Arts, the Prix de Rome,

Using low-tech tools like homemade projectors and a camera obscura, TED VICTORIA creates illusory images and installations known for their lifelike qualities. For example, with Infestation(2009), Victoria transformed a museum facade into an aquarium brimming with sharks; it was actually projections of brine shrimp swimming around in small aquariums on the inside of every window. Likewise, in a series of intricate projections mimicking boxed displays, Victoria questioned perceptions of reality: what appeared to be framed objects (a ring, a feather, a pair of pliers) in motion were actually reflections of the objects’ image created on glass, made possible by a hidden construction of lights, timed motors, lenses, and mirrors. The effect is that the isolated objects—truly seeming as if they were contained in the boxes—come across as simultaneously disconnected from reality and very real.

KRISTIN JONES maintains both studio and public practices, working collaboratively across disciplines to create site-specific, time-based projects that frame natural phenomena against the built environment.  With a deep commitment to public projects and the belief that art is a powerful vehicle for urban renewal and environmental awareness, Jones has spent her career creating large-scale collaborative works for the public domain. Jones was a member of the ‘Dream Team’ for the master plan for Hudson River Park. She has devoted more than 16 years to the founding of the Rome-based non-profit TEVERETERNO. By partnering with a treasury of artists, colleagues and the City of Rome to raise awareness of the Tiber River, Jones directed and facilitated programs for its protection and revitalization. Her installations, works on and paper and time-lapse photography have been exhibited internationally.  Jones holds a BFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the Yale School of Art and Architecture. She is

JAMES WINES is the founder and president of SITE, an environmental art and architecture organization chartered in New York City in 1970. He is the former Chairman of Environmental  Design at Parsons School of Design and a Professor of Architecture at Penn State University.  His architecture, landscape and public space projects are based on a site-specific response to surrounding contexts. Prof. Wines’ educational philosophy advocates ‘integrative thinking,’ as  a means of including multi-disciplinary ideas from outside the design profesions. He has  written seven books on art and design, including ON SITE-ON ENERGY – Scribners & Sons  1974, DE-ARCHITECTURE – Rizzoli International 1987 and GREEN ARCHITECTURE – Taschen Verlag 2000. He has designed more than one hundred and fifty buildings and  environmental art works for private and municipal clients in eleven countries. He is the  recipient of the Smithsonian Institution’s 2013 National Design Award for Lifetime  Achievement, the ANCE Annual Award for an International Architect (Italy 2011) and the  Chrysler Award

SALLY WEBER is an independent light artist based in Oakland, California. Weber grew up in the Northeast, earning her Master of Science in Visual Studies from the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She trained with Otto Piene, Director of the Center and a founder of Group Zero, and Harriet Casdin-Silver, a pioneer artist in the development and artistic uses of optical holography.

Weber’s interest in light inspires her work using optical and digital holography, video, dimensional photography, and laser installations. Her work focuses on revealing the immediacy of the essential natural forces underlying life and the patterns that interconnect them. She has produced numerous public art installations and private commissions and has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally including the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, OH, The McNay Museum, San Antonio, TX, the Museo of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal, the Kunsthalle, Budapest, Hungary, and the Osthaus Museum, Hagen, Germany.

Sally Weber in conversation with Victoria

JOHN HOOD is a non-objective painter of meditative forms on highly textured, mixed-media surfaces, heavily inspired by his lifelong affair with the sea. Raised in Los Angeles, his artistic journey began after he moved to the mid-west in the early 1980s, where academic studies initially took him in the direction of experimental filmmaking.

Over the past seven years, Hood has developed an intimate knowledge of the David Bermant Foundation Collection leading more than 150 tours. His personal observations of the viewers’ reactions to experiencing the artwork brings a deep insight into to the richness of the collection and its relevance to the art world.

ANNE NIEMETZ has been video-documenting the David Bermant Collection since 2004, and has created most of the visual documentation materials found on the Bermant website.

Operating in the field of New Media Art and Design, Anne’s creative work focuses on the convergence of design, technology, art and science. Her work is intentionally collaborative and interdisciplinary, manifesting itself in forms of interactive and non-interactive audio-visual installations, videos, wearable technology designs and electronic art.

Anne holds a Media Arts degree from the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe (HfG), Germany, with a focus in digital media and interactive sound installation. She continued her studies at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) where she received an MFA in Design and Media Arts in 2004. In 2007 she moved to New Zealand, where she holds the position of Senior Lecturer in Media Design at Victoria University of Wellington (VUW). Currently Anne is the programme director of the Bachelor of Design Innovation at VUW.

Christiane Paul will be discussing an essay she wrote while in residence at the David Bermant Foundation in May 2014 entitle, Virtual Volumes and Electric Choreographies, which looks specifically at kinetics and optics and abstract imagery within the David Bermant collection.

Christiane Paul is Chief Curator / Director of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center and Professor in the School of Media Studies at The New School, as well as Adjunct Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is the recipient of the Thoma Foundation’s 2016 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, and her books are A Companion to Digital Art (Blackwell-Wiley, May 2016); Digital Art (Thames and Hudson, 2003, 2008, 2015); Context Providers – Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts (Intellect, 2011; Chinese edition, 2012); and New Media in the White Cube and Beyond (UC Press, 2008). At the Whitney Museum she curated exhibitions including Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art 1965 –