Toni Dove

"The Future of Cinema?" -- Quebec Micro

Lucid Possession is a schizoid duet between a woman with a head like a radio receiver and her own avatar. The uncanny manifestation of a virtual multiple personality plagued by ghosts from the past, this automated video pop-up book forges an entirely new form: let's call it cinematic bunraku. Live performers animate video bringing characters to life through motion, voice, and robotics. On-stage, Toni Dove and composer and violinist Mari Kimura control the physical and virtual movements of video and robotic entities. Performer, Hai-Ting Chinn sings and speaks through the Avatar, alongside songs and musical interludes by Elliott Sharp and Mari Kimura. Software designer R.Luke DuBois and roboticist Leif Krinkle control additional layers of light, sound and movement.

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 Listen to Toni Dove discussing her work Lucid Possession

 

 

 

 

Help Support Lucid Possession

Addiitonal residency support from EMPAC; co-commissioned by "Connections", a group of European co-producers and presenters.,Shown as work-in progress at Republique and Spielart Festival, Munich, Nov 2009.

My work exists in a Bermuda triangle between games, theater and film. Sometimes I feel like I’m making buildings out of movies -- allowing my viewers to navigate the space of stories -- or I’m an automaton creator or puppeteer -- making characters that are inhabitable and responsive.  I have always had the desire to spatialize cinema -- to make it dimensional in a way that tugs against the linearity of sequential story time and allows for a more immersive experience. My engines help me to analyze and re-construct time, memory and story-- to keep it constantly fluid and unfixed. They have a slipperiness that seems to offer me the ability to travel somewhere new and always undiscovered -- they surprise me into re-imagining time.

Toni Dove has produced works since the early 1990s that redefine the form of traditional narrative using interactive components. Her pieces are embodied hybrids of film, installation art, and experimental theater where performers or installation participants interact with an unfolding narrative movie, using transparent interface technologies such as motion sensing or a video laser harp to allow users to "perform" their on-screen avatars. Her work has been presented in the United States, Europe and Canada as well as in print and on radio and television.  An interactive movie installation, Artificial Changelings, debuted at the Rotterdam Film Festival, 1998.  Her current project, Spectropia, premiered at the Wexner Center for the Arts Nov 1-3, 2007, and showed at REDCAT, LA Nov 2007.  It is currently touring. Dove served by appointment on the 2000/2003 Government Advisory Committee on Information Technology and Creativity, Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council, USA. Dove has received numerous grants and awards including support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, the Langlois Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, The LEF Foundation, and the Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts from M.I.T.