Photo of Camille Utterback

Computer & electronics hardware

Camille Utterback


Year Honored
2002

Organization
New York University

Region
Global

"Media artist Camille Utterback’s award-winning video tracking exhibits create spaces where computers follow and interact with a person’s entire body. InText Rain, ademonstration based on patent-pending software created by Utterback and artist Romy Achituv, participants see themselves projected in real time on a wall while letters from the lines of a poem rain on their bodies. As the people move, the letters adjust accordingly. In Crossing, what appears to be an abstract painting on the wall is really a projection that ripples in response to a viewer’s movements. Utterback’s goal, both as an artist and an assistant professor at New York University and the Parsons School of Design, is to “help people realize that when technology systems are designed well, they are really fun.” Utterback, who in November 2000 started her own company, Creative Nerve, is a rare example of a computer programmer trained in the fine arts. Carl Goodman, curator of digital media at the American Museum of the Moving Image, says Utterback excels at following her curiosity and that her work “will stand up to scrutiny in the future, when the technology she’s using will no longer be novel.”"