In the male-dominated field of technology, since the early 1970s Rebecca Allen has stood as a pioneer with her research into the encounters of art and computing. Her works are on display at DAM projects in Berlin.
Often excluded from the academic discourse, women have been experimenting in the liminal and transdisciplinary field ahead of time. Many of them redirected their interest towards the intersection of art and technology way before this was a mainstream field, even before computers became a thing. This is the case with pioneer Rebecca Allen, an American artist who approached new media art back in the early 1970s: during her career, which covers more than forty years of artistic investigation, she has experimented with various techniques and media; from video to performance, to installations in virtual or augmented reality. Allen is particularly fascinated by the meaning that the definition of “human” comes to take as technology redefines how we perceive reality. And this is why the virtual reality medium and its philosophical implications prove to be an extremely fertile ground for her experiments.
REBECCA ALLEN AND COMPUTERS AS ARTISTIC TOOLS
As a young student at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Allen was inspired by the artistic movements of the early 20th century – in particular, Constructivism, Futurism and Dada, and the Bauhaus. What fascinates her about these trends is the artists’ sensitivity to the technologies of their century – such as those of the industrial revolution – not just as artistic tools, but as means to interpret the present times and the social evolution determined by the interaction with machines. At the same time, Allen is passionate about the very first developments of the computer: the artist was interested, for some studies outside university, in the first pioneering work in computer animation that they were doing at Brown University (just minutes from RISD). Thus, in a short time, Allen identified the potential of the computer as the fulcrum of the electronic era that was emerging; a new technological revolution which was similar to the industrial one that had influenced the great artists of the 19th century.
DIGITAL ART PIONEER REBECCA ALLEN AWARDED WITH THE DAM DIGITAL ART AWARD
Allen was recently awarded with the DAM Digital Art Award, hailed by the Jury “for her significant contributions to the fields of digital art and computer animation over the past fifty years”. Moreover, “she asserted the importance of the human body as a subject for technical development and as a means to humanise (and politicise) an art form that was at the time largely devoted to abstraction”.
REBECCA ALLEN EXHIBITION AT DAM PROJECTS IN BERLIN
On this occasion, the solo retrospective 1974 – now!, Rebecca Allen, hosted by DAM projects in Berlin, retraces the most relevant pieces of her production. One of these is the computer animation Girl Lifts Skirt (1974) made with punch cards that addressed sexism in the art field. As curator and art critic Domenico Quaranta claimed in his laudatio, this work “was not just one of the earliest computer animated artworks: it was the 13 seconds animation of a faceless woman who sensually lifts her skirt to show her garter belt. An unrecognised pop art masterpiece, a proto-gif, a sarcastic, feminist work, an affirmation of autonomy, and a slap in the face as much to the conservative, technophobic academy as to the technofetishist, male-dominated world of technology”.
WHAT HAPPENS TO THE BODY IN THE DIGITAL REALM?
In the 1980s, Allen worked on one of the most iconic music videos of all time (Musique Non-Stop by Kraftwerk, with a ground-breaking facial expression tracking technology). In the early 1990s she explored the potential of gaming technologies for interactive art, and later she experimented with augmented and virtual reality, in cutting-edge projects such as Life Without Matter (2018). In this work, the user wears a headset and finds themselves in front of a mirror, which in this case is a tool of attribution of consciousness. By moving their arm, the viewer finds that the reflection of their avatar, in a female form, makes synchronous movements. This process is repeated in the likeness of a man and an animal. Thanks to the visuomotor correlation, in a few seconds you get used to having those looks, you recognize them as your own, since you build a proper body agency. Then suddenly the movements go out of sync, causing in the viewer a deep feeling of discouragement, a disturbing feeling that comes from the impression of not being alone, that the viewer’s reflection is alive and other-than-us. As claimed by the DAM jury, “these works thereby reflect on the medium itself and address the question central to Allen’s practice: ‘as we spend more and more time in virtual worlds, what happens to the body? Where is the body within technology?’ By foregrounding the body in her digital work, Allen has engaged with issues of gender, identity and humanity’s relationship with nature, laying the technical and conceptual groundwork for other artists.“
LINK
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