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 was Hirshon Artist/Director in residence, New School for Social Research in Media Studies 2014/15. She has received numerous grants and awards including support from the Rockefeller Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts. She received the Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts from M.I.T. And a lifetime achievement award from I.D.M.A.a. Dove was appointed to the 2000/2003 Government Advisory Committee on Information Technology and Creativity, National Research Council, USA. She was Artist in Residence at Bell Labs E.A.T. Program 2020, Pioneerworks Immersive Lab 2019, and Integrated Digital Media, Tandon, NYU, ongoing. Her current project uses motion and machine learning to animate responsive characters in a narrative and is a collaboration with Yale CCAM, Brown CRCI and The Fralin Museum at UVA.

KIM WHITENER is an independent creative producer, working in the contemporary opera-theatre, music-theatre, and other multi-genre landscapes through her company, KiWi Productions. From early 2007 to late 2018, she was the Producing/Executive Director at HERE in NYC, and was a founding co-director of the PROTOTYPE opera-theatre festival, along with partners at Beth Morrison Project, collectively directing eight festivals through January 2020. Prior to joining HERE, Ms. Whitener spent six years as an independent producer with KiWi Productions, working with a range of US artists in the contemporary theatre, opera- & music-theatre, dance-theatre, and multimedia worlds, including The Builders Association, Big Dance Theater, Toni Dove, Martha Clarke, Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater, 33 Fainting Spells, among others. She was Managing Director of The Wooster Group for four years, and held other theatre management and producing positions in NY, Boston, and Philadelphia with a specialty in new music-theatre. She has served on many grant panels and taught seminars nationally and internationally on production, management, and development of projects for touring.

MATTHEW McLENDON, PhD an art historian and curator of modern and contemporary art, became the director and chief curator of The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia on January 9, 2017. An energetic and influential leader, McLendon is widely recognized for his cross-disciplinary curatorial practice, an emphasis on community engagement and education, and activating marginalized voices in the museum setting. In 2010, McLendon was recruited by The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art to revive its dormant modern and contemporary program. In 2011, Joseph’s Coat, the largest Skyspace to date by artist James Turrell was opened under McLendon’s leadership and his original exhibitions began drawing increasing regional and national audiences. McLendon inaugurated and co-directed the Art of Our Time initiative, focused on living visual and performing artists, beginning in 2011. This cross-disciplinary programming series helped lead the way in The Ringling setting new records in attendance, membership, and support. Other high profile major exhibitions included the first museum survey of artist, composer, and performer R. Luke DuBois and an examination of living artists working with found objects, in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp, in Re:Purposed. McLendon’s survey of interactive cinema and live-mix performance pioneer Toni Dove was scheduled to premiere at The Ringling in February 2018.