Solo Exhibition 1974 - now!, Rebecca Allen
Rebecca Allen is the fifth winner of the DAM Digital Art Award, which is presented by DAM Projects. The DDAA honours important pioneers in the field of digital art and recognises their life's work. Allen is featured this year in exhibitions at LACMA, Los Angeles, Tate Modern, London, MUDAM, Luxembourg und MoMA, New York.
The jury's statement on the 2023/24 laureate:
"Rebecca Allen is the recipient of the 2023/24 DAM Digital Art Award. We, the jury, selected Allen for her significant contributions to the fields of digital art and computer animation over the past fifty years. Allen has been a digital innovator since the mid-1970s, when as one of the few women working in computer animation, she asserted the importance of the human body as a subject for technical development and as a means to humanize (and politicize) an art form that was at the time largely devoted to abstraction.
Among her earliest innovative works were Girl Lifts Skirt (1974), a short animation made with punch cards that addressed sexism in the field, and the landmark Swimmer (1981), one of the first three-dimensional computer animations of a human body in motion. Bodies in motion were the focus of her critically-acclaimed collaborative videos of the 1980s, such as those made with choreographer Twyla Tharp and musician David Byrne (The Catherine Wheel, 1982) and electronic band Kraftwerk (Musique Non-Stop, 1986). These technologically groundbreaking projects also demonstrated Allen’s openness to working across mediums and genres, proving her intuition for the expansive cultural impact of digital art.
In the early 1990s, Allen was one of the first to explore the potential of gaming technologies for interactive art, leading to the development of the Emergence software with her research team at UCLA, where she worked for more than thirty years (1986-2019) in various roles, including Professor, Chair of the Department of Design | Media Arts, and Founding Co-Director of the UCLA Center for the Digital Arts (CDA). With Emergence, Allen created a series of art installations called The Bush Soul (1997-99) that allowed viewers (via avatars) to maneuver through a virtual world based on feelings by using a joystick. Her commitment to interactivity continued with VR works like The Tangle of Life and Matter (2017) that explore consciousness and reality.
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."
Newspaper, taz, Berlin, October 15, 2024: Link
Installation view
Works
