On Saturday, September 14, artist and precursor (see below) Rebecca Allen was awarded the DAM Digital Art Award 2023/24, and honored with a small retrospective exhibition at DAM Projects, Berlin. Wolf Lieser, founder and director of DAM, invited me to give a laudatory speech. You can read it below.
Good evening everybody, and thank you for being here. This is my first laudatio ever, and I am a little nervous about it. That’s why I wrote it down. I hope it will be short enough not to bore you, and long enough to do justice to the artist it is intended to celebrate.
By winning the DAM Digital Art Award 2023/24, Rebecca Allen joins a wonderful, small group of people that have been awarded the prize in previous years: the late Vera Molnar (2005), Manfred Mohr (2006), Norman White (2008) and Lynn Hershman Leeson (2010). I didn’t serve on the jury for the prize, but I was responsible for adding her name to the shortlist of nominees. The award “honors the most influential artists in the area of digital art for their life’s work or for an important series of works” and “is bestowed for exceptional achievements in the area of digital art.”
Rebecca Allen’s artistic life has been so intense, diverse, and rich that arguably the best laudatio would boil down to a plain walk through her biography. But I’ll do my best to offer you more than this, and focus on what makes her work relevant to me.
So, first of all, Rebecca is an artist. By saying this, I don’t want to state the obvious, but to stress the fact that the main motivation behind all her choices was finding the right tools and language for the artistic problems she wanted to investigate – up to eventually invent them; and that one of her greatest achievements has been keeping being an artist along all her career, despite a series of accidents that would have drawn anybody else to a different outcome. In the mid Seventies, when she was studying at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), her main subject of investigation was the human body, and – following the ethos of the avant-gardes and the Bauhaus – the possibility to animate it using the tools of her time: that is, as she intuitively understood, the computer. This was definitely not an easy task. She was very good at drawing, but had no experience with coding; the people around her, and the art world more broadly, were strongly against the use of computers in artmaking. Last but not least, computer graphics at the time were better fit for abstract aesthetics than for the human body. To make it short, the tools for what she wanted to make were not available.
Yet, despite all these technical challenges, what she ended up making using punch cards and handrawing in 1974 was not just one of the earliest computer animated artworks: it was the 13 seconds animation of a faceless woman who sensually lifts her skirt to show her garter belt. An unrecognized pop art masterpiece, a proto-gif, a sarcastic, feminist work, an affirmation of autonomy, and a slap in the face as much to the conservative, technophobic academy as to the technofetishist, male-dominated world of technology. I wish every art student to debut like this. But as I said, she is an artist.
Yet, in order to be an artist in her own way, Rebecca was forced to develop additional attitudes: she had to become a researcher, and an inventor. In 1978 she became one of the first three students (and the only artist) enrolled in the Architecture Machine Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she worked as a research assistant on various projects, included the seminal Aspen Movie Map and her own thesis, “Computer Rotoscoping with the Aid of Color Recognition”. After her MA, in 1980 she joined the Computer Graphics Laboratory at the New York Institute of Technology, as part of a team that designed and developed the first software systems for 3D computer modeling and animation. There, she co-developed the processes and tools that allowed her to animate one of the first 3D models of the human body, designed by Ed Catmull, a co-founder of Pixar (Swimmer, 1981); to generate a dancing character for the performance Catherine Wheel (1982) and the animations for some successful music videos, including Adventures in Success (1983), Smile (1983) and most notably Musique Non Stop (1986) for the German group Kraftwerk, which won another challenge: making a computer-generated character capable of expression.
However, I would like to stress that, in this environment, being a researcher and an inventor didn’t just mean researching the potential of emerging technologies and inventing new tools: even more, it meant researching alternative ways of being an artist and inventing an audience for an art practice that wasn’t welcome in the art world. In the media lab, Rebecca became proficient in programming and learned how to work with engineers and software developers; she tested on herself, by trial and errors, forms of learning and merging interdisciplinary competences that she would later apply in teaching and in designing a complete study programme, when in 1996 she was invited to found the UCLA Department of Design Media Art. She started a parallel career as a media designer and research consultant for technology companies, that would allow her to work on award winning projects such as One Laptop Per Child (2005-2007) and to collaborate with companies such as Nokia and Virgin Interactive. Finally, by collaborating with musicians, performers and producers, she was able to hijack the mass media and bring her video animations to a mass audience via television, without giving up with her artistic freedom.
Along this path, creation, research and invention always worked hand in hand, with creation leading the way and research and invention helping on the side to make creation possible. Along the Nineties, Rebecca’s original wish to bring the human body within a computer generated environment, and allow it to move, experience and feel, started going beyond animation, and again she realized that the tools to allow her to do what she wanted were missing. Emergence, the software environment for the creation of interactive art she designed with her UCLA students and used for her work The Bush Soul (1997-1999), came about for this reason; and the evolution of her artistic research, from animation to interaction to artificial life up to virtual and augmented reality, did not originate as an attempt to follow technology trends and hypes, nor as an answer to the prompts and requests of the companies she has been working with, but from the internal necessities of a creative work that doesn’t follow, but opens up new paths of technological evolution.
Would I sound too gender-deterministic, by saying that Rebecca’s extraordinary achievements are also a consequence of her being a woman artist? As she said in 2020: “What is really disturbing is that after all these decades new technology is still predominantly being invented by one type of person, a white male computer scientist or engineer, which is tragic. Diversity is still so desperately needed in the invention of a technology that is completely changing humanity.”
Far from being retrospective, this view always shaped her approach to technology. This is Rebecca on CBS in 1983: “We need to have people from psychology and education and art and music able to work on these machines and help define the machine personality.” By “trying very consciously to infiltrate the technology” with her humanity, femininity and artistic vision, Rebecca’s work is the living proof of how diversity can affect the history of technology.
As a consequence of all this, we might rightly say that Rebecca is a pioneer artist. I have to admit that I don’t like this highly abused word so much, for two main reasons: its roots in military language and its function within the language and ideology of innovation. Today, somebody or something from the past is deemed “pioneering” when they anticipate or open the way to some present development – the implicit assumption being that the past is relevant only in relation to the present. What’s important is what happens now. Against this teleological position, I prefer to look at the history of art, along with George Kubler, as a chain of “formal sequences”, made of a problem and its solutions over time. According to Kubler, the position of an artist along the formal sequence depends upon its entrance point; specific entrance points allow an artist to create prime objects, mutations in the chain of solutions; such artists can be understood as precursors – not in relation to the present, but of the eternal life of things and forms.
Adopting Kubler’s language, we can say that Rebecca definitely had a “good entrance”. As we have seen, she has been the first at many things. Yet, if being the first at anything does have any value, it’s more valuable in the field of invention or discovery than in the field of art. In art, being a pioneer is worth nothing, if the pioneering art is stuck in the past – if it’s not lively. In digital art, unfortunately this happens very often, as the languages and tools, hardware and softwares, possibilities and trends evolve so fast that obsolescence – technical, aesthetic and conceptual – is always around the corner. It would be an overstatement to say that this never happens in Rebecca Allen’s work. Yet, if some of her works have aged (quite well, indeed), in the best ones she was able to reach a level of autonomy from the limits of technology and the taste of a specific moment, to make them timeless and lively despite the passing time. Works like Girl Lifts Skirt (1974), Swimmer (1981), Music Non Stop (1986), The Bush Soul (1997-1999) or Life Without Matter (2018) are relevant today not just for their pioneering role, but for what they have to say on the virtualization of the body, on the simulation of life, on the relationship between mind and matter, on our life in an hybrid environment, on identity and gender, and for how they say it. They do not preserve, like a time capsule, a point of view from the past; they are not historical, or vintage; they can engage an effective conversation with works by artists from different generations and times. And this is, in my opinion, Rebecca’s best achievement.