The Art of Rebecca Allen:
Inserting Human Presence into the Machine

"Very early on, when the computer still seemed such a foreign thing, I had an interest in inserting human presence into the computer — human motion, human behavior — so that the computer would have a human face and form." This recent statement sums up the long and prolific career of Rebecca Allen, a visionary artist who has been pushing the limits of artistic creativity by tirelessly exploring the unknown territories of new audiovisual technology. During a career that already spans three decades, Allen has tried her hand on a wide variety of forms: 3-D computer graphics and animation, music videos, logos for television, video games, large-scale performance works, artificial life systems, multi sensory interfaces, interactive installations, virtual reality and mixed reality.

Allen describes her relationship with innovative technology as "passionate": where there is something new, most likely there is Allen as well. In spite of her excitement with the newest of the new, she never falls for a certain technology just for its own sake. Yet it would be hard to deny that her classic works have helped to give technoculture "a face", becoming icons of postmodernity. However, far from being a "nerd" (a typical product of the 20th century's romance with technology), Allen's attitude towards new technology is critical. She is highly concerned about the artistic quality and the conceptual integrity of her creations. Although exploring cutting edge technologies is essential to her art, in the finished works technology itself is not the main focus. It has an auxiliary role, providing an impetus for the perceptual and cognitive processes happening in the viewer's / interactor's mind.

Allen is highly concerned about the role of the human in the turmoil of contemporary reality. "At this time, my primary interest is not in making computers smarter or emotional. I am interested in the ways that technology can make us smarter or more capable of understanding our emotions, to help us deal with the onslaught of information and to expand our human potential", she recently said. Whether creating complex digital characters, or setting up situations where digital realms and physical realities merge, or exposing audiences to experiences where carnal "meat bodies" and virtual "data bodies" co-exist and interact, Allen has been true to her vision. We cannot (and should not) escape the realm of the technological, but we need to take control of it, adjusting it to our needs as humans.

Allen has never been content with following already trodden paths. When things have become too familiar or obvious, she has repeatedly broken herself loose to face new challenges. Born in Detroit, she began to explore the relationship between art and technology as an art student at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in the early 1970's. She was influenced by the art and technology movements of the early twentieth century, the Bauhaus, the Futurists and the Constructivists. By exploring advanced electronic tools, she wanted to help society understand where technology was heading. She quickly realized that computers were in the process of becoming an important part of society. They were tools for artists as well. Allen was especially interested in exploring movement. She saw the computer as a tool that would allow her to do the entire animation process on her own without having to follow the industrial structure that had been established for animation. Using a state of the art computer system called Vector General and an early program that could interpolate 2D drawings, she realized her first computer animation in 1974.

After graduating with BFA honors, Allen worked for a while as a graphic designer for a furniture design company, but did not find it stimulating. She wanted to explore technology further, and was eventually accepted as a special student to MIT. She attended a course by Nicholas Negroponte, one of the only classes on computer graphics. In 1978 Allen became a graduate student at MIT, beginning to work with the famous Architecture Machine Group. She participated in the realization of a number of projects that have become classics, above all the Aspen Movie Map and Personalized Movies, also known as Movie Manuals. In spite of this early immersion into interactive media that opened her eyes to the possibilities of new technology, Allen however decided at first to pursue a career in computer animation. As a visual artist she wanted to achieve a quality of color, detail and resolution that interactive images could not yet provide.

Next, Allen moved to the Computer Graphics Laboratory at New York Institute of Technology. Under the patronage of Alexander Shure, the lab at NYIT had become one of the leading centers for advanced 3-D computer graphics by the late 1970s. The NYIT Computer Graphics Lab provided extraordinary opportunities - it was superbly equipped, and the researchers had no absolute agendas. There were no requirements to create software packages for the market - the focus was on the free exploration of computer graphics and animation. At NYIT, Allen created some acclaimed commercial work, including her EMMY award winning opening sequence for CBS's Walter Cronkite Universe. She also began to create her own computer animated artworks, including Steps (1982), which was inspired by Oscar Schlemmer and the Bauhaus theater. Allen also realized a computer-animated figure of St. Catherine for the film version of Twyla Tharp's performance piece The Catherine Wheel (1983), the first computer generated human to appear on television. For Allen this unprecedented task made sense: a saint was somewhere between human and superhuman - Allen felt that computers were often feared to be superhuman.

During her time at NYIT Allen also realized the works for which she is perhaps still best remembered in the popular memory - her music videos that have since become classics of the genre. Adventures in Success (1983) and Smile (1983) for Will Powers at Island Records and Musique Non Stop for Kraftwerk (1986) all contained innovative, laborious computer animation sequences, especially rotating 3-D faces and subtle facial expressions that became Allen's "trademark". Particularly the Kraftwerk video is now considered one of the icons of technoculture. Its imagery has been quoted in countless contexts, from flyers to techno raves to Nam June Paik's video installations. This appropriation has often taken place without permission from the artist, which in a way proves the cultural power of Allen's images - they have begun to live a life of their own. While working on these pieces Allen had a feeling that Music Television, founded in 1981, might become a new venue for artists working with the latest technologies. However, like a number of other experimental artists, she was disappointed, noticing that MTV was becoming more a marketing tool for the music industry than a ground for experimentation. It left little room for independent artists to realize their visions. Still, collaboration with musicians like Kraftwerk, Peter Gabriel, John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin), Mark Mothersbough (Devo), Thomas Dolby, Peter Bauman (Private Music, formerly Tangerine Dream), David Byrne, Carter Burwell, etc. has remained one of the guiding lines of her career.

In the mid 80s Allen decided to leave New York and move to Los Angeles, accepting a teaching position at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). Having grown up in Detroit, Los Angeles felt like a good choice; a big city with lots of cars. Of course, L.A. also offered interesting production possibilities for advanced computer graphics because of the presence of the film industry. Allen soon began to receive commissions, including one to create an HDTV piece. Working in collaboration with high profile companies like Symbolics Computer and Rebo High Definition Studio, Allen made BEHAVE (1987), an innovative piece that utilized flocking algorithms created by Craig Reynolds, Allen's former colleague from MIT. Beside providing an entry into the field of high definition graphics, BEHAVE also introduced Allen to the (then brand new) theme of artificial life, which became one of her main concerns some years later.

In the late 80s and early 90s, partly thanks to an invitation by the Art Futura festival (Barcelona), Allen came to realize several projects in Spain. These included installation works, computer animations for the World Expo in Seville, the Olympics in Barcelona and the TV series El Arte del Video and performance projects with the legendary Spanish performance group La Fura dels Baus. The primary result of the collaboration with La Fura was Mugra, in which Allen and the group tried to find a way to merge technology and media with a very raw and corporeal industrial age style of performing. Partly as an homage to Allen, the all male group dedicated the theme of this work to women. In the performance, Allen distributed seventy video monitors throughout the space, hanging just above the audience's heads, and utilized a unique system of LED displays. Her ephemeral, cerebral imagery provided a counterpoint to the aggressive, physical performance.

Allen's "Spanish Period" was highly productive, but it came to a sudden end, when cultural funding was dramatically cut after the Expo and the Olympics. Allen then made another surprising move and joined Virgin Interactive Entertainment, a video game company, as Creative Director, Executive Producer and 3-D Visionary. Although she had little experience with game playing herself, she was very interested in the idea of creating real-time high resolution 3-D virtual worlds. For Allen, the game industry was the place to learn more about them, yet it also aligned with her long-term interest in popular culture. Allen hoped that working with games could help her understand the interactive language of games and help her once again to push the boundaries of digital art. Allen worked on a number of games, including Demolition Man for 3DO. However, she eventually began to feel that the game industry did not fulfill her expectations, after all. She grew tired of the commercial imperatives that restricted her creativity and could not identify with the focus on violence. So when an opportunity came to get a head a new department of Design | Media Arts at UCLA, she decided it was time to return to the university and pursue new directions in art and research.

Soon after returning to UCLA Allen received a grant from Intel Corporation. It allowed her to put together a team of computer science and design students. Using PC computers the group developed a kind of game engine, a system called Emergence, profiting from Allen's two year experience in the game industry. Yet this time the goal was not to create games but new art by applying artificial life technology. Allen used the engine her group had created to envision a complex virtual world inhabited by mysterious creatures with unexpected behaviors. The work became known as The Bush Soul; this was an umbrella term for a series of three related, but always slightly different installations. In this work a person's "soul", represented as a sphere of pulsing energy, enters a virtual world (a virtual bush) that is alive and responsive. The world's inhabitants are brought to life through programs that define their behaviors and desires. A character can be endowed with "feelings" towards any object in the world. These feelings drive a character's movements and affect its reactions.

The title is based on a West African belief that a person has more than one soul and that there is a type of soul, called the "bush soul" that dwells within a wild animal of the bush. As you explore the environment your soul may inhabit the body of certain artificial life forms, and you may also be expelled from a creature's body if the creature so desires or through the push of a button. The basic modalities of the experience were obviously influenced by game structures. Yet unlike games, Bush Soul contains no ending or closure. Allen also tried to create a more artistic approach by merging a synthetic and a natural kind of look. She intentionally created landscapes and forms that were "organic" and curvy while colors were not natural, but synthetic and painterly.

To create the creatures' complex behaviors Allen used a custom-made behavior scripting language. Her artistic research proceeded by setting up behaviors and then observing how the characters reacted with each other. She tried things out, changing parameters, physics and attractions. By setting her characters to life, she discovered how changing just a few things would make the behaviors very different. The overall theme of Bush Soul is energy in its different manifestations. Influenced by Allen's readings of philosophy, parapsychology and cultural anthropology, the piece was influenced by the idea of sacred places that are believed to have a special energy. In the world of Bush Soul, the user discovers concentrations of energy, embodied in areas of the landscape and in the creatures and their behaviors. The user experiences all this as a physical sensation by means of a force-feedback joystick. Although haptic interfaces are frequently used in gaming, Allen's application was unique in that it was thematically intertwined with the work. In the spirited world of Bush Soul a soul can be pulled into the body of an artificial life creature. If the virtual body the user is "inhabiting" gets close to a creature it has an affinity with the user feels vibration. This informs the user about the creatures and their relationships in a way that clearly differs from just watching them visually.

Allen used the Emergence "game engine" developed for The Bush Soul also to create another work titled Coexistence. It was motivated by her interest in mobility and wearable computing, yet it also tied in to a bigger idea that is very current: the desire to live in simultaneous realities, as exemplified by cell phone communication and online virtual worlds. Having been observing cell phone usage, Allen concluded that many people today live parallel lives, talking on the phone while engaged in other activities, or being addicted to online games and living in both on-screen worlds and in their daily realities. Such observations inspired Allen to research the technology of mixed reality. Its basic idea is superimposing the physical world and the virtual world, so that they merge with each other. In Coexistence, two people are sitting facing each other at some distance, wearing head-mounted displays with video cameras attached to them. They see the surrounding physical environment and each other mediated by the cameras. The head-mounted displays also contain trackers, so it is possible to know to which direction one's head is looking. Because of this it becomes possible to combine virtual images with the perceived camera images, and to create a mixed reality.

To enable communication between the two participants, Allen designed a special hand-held haptic "gamepad" with a small microphone. The idea was to breathe into the microphone - the breath would be visualized as a stream of computer generated virtual particles. This was used to affect virtual objects by blowing towards them. Every time a user would blow, the person across from him/her would feel the breath through haptic feedback and also see it visualized. One sequence showed an animated "wall" that was obscuring the users' views of the real world. As they started blowing on the elements of the wall these would change color and eventually be blown away. Both participants could simultaneously take part in the action. Metaphorically the idea was to break down the wall separating the participants through a collaborative effort. In order to fully realize her idea Allen is waiting for the head-mounted displays to have higher resolution and to become more comfortable and lighter, like a pair of glasses. Tactility continues to be a key issue, connected with her long-time interest in the relationship between the body and new technology.

To date, Allen's most recent work is The Brain Stripped Bare, her return to multimedia performance. The basic spatial structure for this work is formed by five screens in a large circle (about 10.5 meters in diameter) that surrounds the audience. On the screens Allen projected a 360 degree panoramic video, shot with a new technology developed at the University of Southern California. On the video the audience sees two shaved, nude, androgynous performers (a group called osseus labyrint) performing extreme raw physical movements. As the performance continues, the same performers enter the audience space, challenging the spectators' safe vantage point. Actually, Allen had already questioned established viewing conditions by the panoramic video, which forces the audience to move around to witness the circular image in its entirety. Allen wanted to contrast the extreme physicality of the performers' movements with the technology and the projected image. The work metaphorically speculates on the disappearance of the body in cyberspace. If it really happens, what would be left? Only our brain, our consciousness, exposed and stripped bare. The Brain Stripped Bare was a metaphor Allen formulated as a wordplay to pay homage to Marcel Duchamp, the most cerebral of artists, and particularly his masterpiece The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.

Beside the 360 degree video, Allen used another cutting edge technology, the audio spotlight developed at MIT Media Lab by Ph.D. student Joseph Pompei. While typical speakers are omni-directional, Pompei's invention makes it possible to project a narrow beam of audio over a long distance. Allen used this technology to beam whispered words to the ears of unsuspecting audience members. She had a person hidden above the screens looking down on the audience and holding the audio spotlight. At one point the performers were hanging from the ceiling, doing their moves. With the audio spotlight sounds of their breathing could be focused at various people in the audience. Because of this, audience members would hear the performers breathing very intimately. For Allen this was related to the idea of remote presence. The audio spotlight was also used for different purposes. In another sequence the female performer walks through the audience. She comes very close to individual audience members and looks directly at them. As she stares at someone whispered phrases are projected into that person's ear. This gives the impression that one is reading the performer's mind. Again, the brain is stripped bare, the mind exposed. For Allen this evokes the notion of surveillance. "It appears that the last private space is our thoughts. As long as I don't verbalize or write down my thoughts, no one will know what I am thinking. But what if we can start reading minds with technology? That would strip away our last sense of privacy", she speculated in a recent interview.

The Brain Stripped Bare is the first work in which Allen did not use computer graphics at all, only digital video. Still, she does not see it as a radical change of direction. It feels to her more like an interlude. After working intensively with scientists and technicians for decades, she wanted to do something "simple" (which it hardly is by general standards), to take distance from technological experimentation. On the other hand, Allen also analyzes her career by referring to it as a pendulum that swings between more emphatically artistic and metaphorical works (like those realized in Spain) and those that foreground her technological explorations. The pendulum may next swing to the other extreme. Allen is currently very interested in biosensors and their possible application to art. Another issue that continues to occupy her mind is tactility - the creation of new interfaces for haptic and remote bodily communication at a distance. Partly inspired by her experiences with the audio spotlight and Coexistence, Allen is also researching things that have to do with whispering and breathing, the development of subtle quiet technologies. This stems from Allen's frustration with the amount of noise in contemporary society brought on by digital technology.

Although her artistic explorations have taken her far and wide in the territories of technoculture, Allen has not lost her original passion for computer animation. However, instead of linear animation, she is now more interested in the possibilities of real-time 3-D graphics. A field that has not been particularly suited yet to her goals as a media artist is the Internet. Although much of her research and development takes place in front of the computer, Allen is reluctant to reiterate the same situation in her finished artworks. Instead of making the participants just sit and stare at a screen, she wants to invent more varied and flexible ways of interfacing bodies and machines. Her interest in bodily multi-sensory interaction is one reason why she has created installations for public places and experimented with ideas like wearable displays. "The Internet is definitely of great interest to me, but instead of using it in the customary way, I would like to envision new situations in which the users would be connected to the Internet while moving around in the physical world. They would be interacting with other people that are physically present, but still be plugged into a network. This would make the interaction more complex and challenging", Allen explains.

"I have always been intrigued with the feeling that the computer is a partner of mine." This statement gets to the core of Allen's creative career, that has from the beginning coincided with the emergence of the computer as a tool and a medium. Allen is one of those pioneering artists who noticed the potential of the computer early on and have ever since helped to unleash its potential for creativity. Yet, in spite of her long and intimate relationship with it, Allen's attitude towards digital technology is not uncritical. The computer can be a wonderful possibility for creativity and for the efforts to improve the quality of life on earth. Yet it may also be a pitfall. "Digital technology has potential for causing a lot of damage in the wrong hands. We humans should really decide if we just want to keep on adding more gadgets to our lives. I think we should use the wonderful technology we have as an impetus for thinking about complexity and emergent systems, rather than just as mindless pastime. Our gadgets can do so much more than just provide a momentary escape - they can teach us the way the world, and also the human mind, works."

(By Erkki Huhtamo, based on interviews with Rebecca Allen, conducted in Los Angeles between 2000-2003.)

Biography
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Curriculum Vitae
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The Art of Rebecca Allen
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  » by Erkki Huhtamo (Short)
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