Camille Utterback

Instagram: camilleutterback

Website: http://www.camilleutterback.com

Bio: "Camille Utterback (www.camilleutterback.com) is a pioneer in the field of digital and interactive art. Her work ranges from interactive gallery installations, to intimate reactive sculptures, to architectural scale site-specific works. Historically, Camille’s work has explored the aesthetic and experiential possibilities of linking computational systems to human movement and physicality in visually layered ways. In addition to a newfound love of printmaking, her recent projects combine computer generated animations with custom glass panels or hand formed glass to explore the potential for display surfaces that address the subtleties and sensuality of our depth perception. Camille’s many awards include a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2009) and a US Patent (2001). Her extensive exhibit history includes more than fifty shows on four continents; highlights include the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, and a solo show at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art (2019). Camille’s Text Rain piece, created with Romy Achituv (1999), is an early digital interactive installation collected by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Her permanent, site-specific commission Fathom (https://arts.stanford.edu/for-visitors/public-art/fathom/) created for Stanford’s new Computing and Data Science building opened this spring. Camille is an associate professor of art in the Department of Art & Art History, and by courtesy, of Computer Science, at Stanford University. Her work is represented by Haines Gallery in San Francisco. "

Statement: "This series of four untitled monotypes depicts cracks in a sidewalk filtered through both digital and analog processes. My goal with these experiments is to embrace computational tools, while undermining the fantasy of digital images and information that are endlessly and perfectly reproducible, will never decay, fail, or be entangled with the world outside themselves. As I generate these prints, algorithmic simplifications and “errors” are introduced, and temporal and physical processes (and my lack of expertise as a printmaker!) impinge upon a perfect reproduction. My hope is that these images evoke a kind of humility and presence contrary to the hermeneutic slickness that is the default result of digital processes fundamentally designed to suppress “noise”. The iterative steps I use to create each print are: • photograph failure points in a concrete sidewalk • run the image pixels from the photographs through an edge-detection algorithm to simplify the edges of the cracks into a series of x,y points (vector lines) • trace these lines with a laser cutter, burning paper to create a positive and negative stencil • place the stencils on inked acrylic plates and run these in multiple passes through a traditional etching press – improvising the colors and placement of the stencils with each layer • include “ghost” prints as some layers – this process of reprinting a plate a second time creates darkened outlines of the stencils from residual ink left on the plate • re-run the edge-detection algorithm on the photographs at different resolutions, to create more simplified or “degraded” outlines of the cracks • print new layers with the different resolution stencils • continue to thin my ink until it “falls apart” leaving blotchy, imperfect areas of color that remind me of the deteriorating concrete "