Color, Light, Motion by Toni Dove – 2nd Event

At the opening of the webinar, Toni Dove introduced herself as the instrument builder by using the human body. Her uses perception and proprioception to engage with media and robotics. She creates a sense of narrative density by using these senses and via the layered accumulation of references and images. She focuses on building an active relationship between the viewer and the audience - and she does an excellent job doing that. Without deconstructing or sacrificing the meaning and coherence of the story she is presenting; her installations remove the audience from their passive role of being a spectator of a conventional film devices. In fact, all work shown in her talk were filmed using cell phones and no special nor professional camera. According to Fondation Langlois, Toni Dove lives and works in New York. Since the early 1990s, she has produced unique and highly imaginative embodied hybrids of film, installation and performance. In her work, performers and participants interact with an unfolding narrative, using interface technologies such as motion sensing to “perform” on-screen avatars.

Of her famous art work pieces, my favorites that she presented are "Lucid Possession" and "the Dress that Eats the Soul". According to Bustlelamp, Lucid Possession is a multimedia performance, premiered at Roulette in Brooklyn, and combines musicians, VJ mashing, and stage-controlled robotic projection screens to present a contemporary ghost story - a poetic musing on managing the mass of information. Dove created this piece by sketching and constructing the robot herself. The robot is presented as a young artist who illustrates ghosts that haunt virtual reality. The structure of the robots was innovatively created using LEDs. She successfully mirrored the truth of our rapidly-changing emotional and cognitive landscape from this art work. Moving on to my second favorite art piece of hers "the Dress that Eats the Soul", interestingly, the dress talks back to whoever was seeing or mimicking it. Toni Dove describes the reason behind choosing a dress for this piece by stating: "It was also a response to the current explosion of wearable technologies that I find both enhancing and colonizing in a disturbing mix." Overall, her talk demonstrates how Toni Dove enjoys incorporating color, lights, and motion into her pieces. It is amazing how she is able to bring virtual characters to reality and how talented she is to use robotics and modern technology in her work.

Her bibliography online describes her as the following: "considered a pioneer of interactive cinema, Toni Dove creates hybrid performance and installation art fusing film, game and performance. Performers or viewers activate unfolding narratives using proprietary embodied interface instruments that incorporate technologies such as motion sensing or machine learning to connect with on-screen characters". I would like to add that her passion for the work she does is brilliant and supreme. I personally enjoy the theater and movies production, but this type of production is novel and very unique. It stands out. 

 

References

“Bio.” @Bustlelamp | Tonidove.comhttps://tonidove.com/bio/

Dove, Toni. “The Dress That Eats Souls: A Robot in Progress.” Tonidove.com, 1 May 2016, https://tonidove.com/the-dress-that-eats-souls-a-robot-in-progress/

Hamilton, Kathryn. “Biotechnology: Humanity's Highest Art Form.” Medium, Bioeconomy.XYZ, 22 Dec. 2021, https://medium.com/bioeconomy-xyz/biotechnology-humanitys-highest-art-form-8d539cdde11a

“Interactive Cinema.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 17 May 2022, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_cinema.

“Toni Dove's Lucid Possession.” Roulette, https://roulette.org/event/toni-dove-lucid-possession-3/.