Schwarzman Session: Interactivity and Immersion

Schwarzman Sessions are peer-led gatherings where conversations generate collaborations and move ideas into action. Because seats are limited, registrants will be automatically placed on the waitlist and will be notified via email if they are selected to participate. 

The relationship between audience and performer is evolving as new interfaces change our relationship to accessing information and stories. When the interface is our bodies, it impacts how we see ourselves, how we move, and how we connect to each other. The line between audience and performer blurs as emerging technologies enter the performance space. Join visual artist and Doris Duke Performing Arts Technologies Lab grantee, Toni Dove, in a discussion around the development of performance technologies and tools. When does the audience become the performer? How does this disrupt conventional ideas of passive reception? 

Dove will be leading a workshop in collaboration with Yale Schwarzman Center and CCAM in 2025 exploring different kinds of potential audience behavior in relationship to building a new “instrument.”

Toni Dove

Considered a pioneer of interactive cinema, New York-based artist Toni Dove creates human operated instruments that tell stories. She is known for work that uses electronic media to create a narrative, often genre mashing, to examine the impact of technological change on consumer culture. How do these changes alter how we see ourselves and how can we use these insights to rethink cultural values? Her disruptive practice, developed over years, has created media machines that blur the boundaries between performance and installation and fuse film, game, experimental theater and artificial intelligence-based interaction.

Dove’s current project in development Sunjammer Six: A Tale Told by a Solar Breeze is a mixed reality installation that uses proprietary AI to allow characters to interact with multiple audience members. It’s a ghost story about Hypatia, a mathematician assassinated in 415 CE and a NASA engineer in the future building an off-world power station. Dove has received support for the project as an Artist in Residence at Bell Labs E.A.T. Program; Tandon School of Engineering, Integrated Digital Media, NYU; Pioneer Works Virtual Environments Lab and with grants from N.Y.S.C.A., and N.E.A. She is a Fellow at Yale University CCAM.

Toni Dove's work has been presented in the United States, Europe and Canada as well as in print and on radio and television. Projects include interactive installations: Archeology of a Mother Tongue, (virtual reality) Banff Centre for the Arts; Artificial Changelings, premiere: Rotterdam Film Festival, USA; Body Mécanique at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio; Spectropia: feature length live-mix movie performance: Lincoln Center, Scanners, the New York Video Festival 2006; Cleveland at the Ingenuity festival 2007; premiered: Wexner Center for the Arts; REDCAT, LA Nov 2007; the Zero1 Festival of Art on the Edge, San Jose, 2008, EMPAC, Troy NY, 2008, the Kitchen, NYC, 2010, Roulette, NY, 2012. Lucid Possession, a live mix music cinema performance, a co-production with Issue Project Room, Roulette and HERE, premiered in NYC in 2013 after a preview show at Center for the Arts at Virginia Tech. An interactive cinema and robotics installation The Dress That Eats Souls, premiered in a retrospective of Dove’s interactive work Embodied Machines at The Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida, 2018.

Dove was Hirshon Artist/Director in residence at the New School for Social Research in Media Studies 2014/15.  She 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 MediaThe Foundation. She received the Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts from M.I.T. and a lifetime achievement award from I.D.M.A.a.

Dove was appointed to the 2000/2003 Government Advisory Committee on Information Technology and Creativity, National Research Council, USA.

tonidove.com

tonidove@gmail.com