Text Rain by Camille Utterback and Romy Achituv, the new digital installation in the Center for Information Technology lobby, is not just entertaining - it challenges the language of art criticism.
Viewers are invited to stand in front of a large, projected, black and white mirror image of themselves and the space behind them. This image is combined with falling letters or a rain of text. The falling text lands on any dark object on the screen and falls again when that object is removed.
Although the letters seem random, they are in fact excerpted from the poem "For You" by Evan Zimroth. The words of the poem are sometimes visible if enough letters are collected along the outline of a viewer's body, but the whole poem is never revealed at one time.
The installation explores the relationship between language and the human body, Utterback told The Herald. "I am very interested in how memory and language are grounded in the body. We tend to forget about this relationship," she said.
Utterback received a B.A. from Williams in 1992 and an M.A. from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in 1999. Her work has been shown at galleries, festivals and museums, including the New Museum of Contemporary Art, The American Museum of the Moving Image, New York, The Seoul Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Netherlands Institute For Media Art, to name a few. She created "Text Rain" in collaboration with Brooklyn-based Israeli artist Romy Achituv. Achituv has exhibited work around the globe recently, including the Ars Electronica Center in Austria, the NTT Intercommunication Center in Tokyo and the Digital Art Lab in Israel.
Text Rain is an accessible work of art because of how playful and interactive it is, Utterback said. "You don't have to know anything about art to have a good time with this piece," she said.
At the same time, trying to collect enough of the text on your body for the words and letters to make sense is an exercise in gymnastics that is not very rewarding. Instead, literary research, in addition to physical maneuvering, is necessary to get a good sense of the poem and its meaning.
The work also makes technology enjoyable to a broad audience, Utterback said. "People tend to have such frustrating encounters with technology and digital art. In experiencing this piece, people can feel so free instead of confused that they actually have fun."
In fact, "Text Rain" is deceptively simple, in contrast to most other digital media art, Utterback said. "A lot of digital work is not elegant in that it takes on the aesthetic of a contraption. What appeals to me in this piece is that it feels so transparent and unencumbered," she said.
Professor Roberto Simanowski of the Department of German Studies organized the installation as part of his Wayland Colloquium Grant seminar for faculty and graduate students about digital media. The seminar focuses on critical ways of reading digital literature and art, Simanowski said.
This particular work piqued his interest in the use of text in digital media, he said. "I like this piece from a visual and conceptual point of view. You have to do some research to discover the text to understand the work in all its dimensions," he said.
Simanowski proposed his seminar and brought "Text Rain" to campus because he believes in the importance of developing a critical way of looking at the digital medium, he said. "We must discuss all aspects of social life in terms of this medium. It must be covered to the same extent that we cover painting, literature and other more established forms of artistic expression," he said.
Utterback agrees that there is "a pathetic lack of interesting criticism" of digital works of art. In reviews of her own work, critics have focused on explaining the technical elements without critically examining her artistic expression, she said. "Critics seem to be suffering from a lack of confidence in discussing the digital medium. The technology confuses them," she said.
"Text Rain" illuminates this critical gap, creating both a sense of awe at the capabilities of digital technology as well as a unique way to view text in relation to the human body.
Both its message and delivery method deserve a sound critical response which, to date, it has not quite received.
