Precarious (2018)

Precarious is an interactive installation that extends the historical practice of tracing human silhouettes with a mechanical apparatus on a backlit screen, by instead “tracing” gallery visitors with contemporary digital tools. Utterback uses a ceiling mounted depth camera to record peoples’ silhouettes as seen from above. Her software then continually interprets and redraws this data, rendering the silhouettes not with the stark fixedness of paper cut outs, but as tremulous outlines of bodies moving through time. The painterly aesthetic of Precarious builds on the algorithmically generated visual language which Utterback has refined over many years via her custom coded interactive drawing systems.

Entangled (2015)

In Utterback’s Entangled installation, participants interact with imagery projected onto two sides of a set of translucent scrims, which hang in the center of the installation space. Movements in the interaction areas on each side of the scrims cause imagery to appear, move, and disappear on the corresponding side’s projection.

The title of the work, Entangled, refers to the merging of participant’s physical traces on scrims in the installation, and also our ongoing emotional entanglement with digital systems in our lived environment.

Liquid Time Series (2000-2002)

In the Liquid Time Series installation, a participant’s physical motion in the installation space fragments time in a pre-recorded video clip. As the participant moves closer to the projection screen they push deeper into time—but only in the area of the screen directly in front of them. Beautiful and startling disruptions are created as people move through the installation space. As viewers move away, the fragmented image heals in their wake—like a pond returning to stillness. The interface of one’s body—which can only exist in one place, at one time—becomes the means to create a space in which multiple times and perspectives coexist. The resulting imagery can be described as video cubism. To create this imagery Utterback’s software deconstructs the video frame as the unit of playback. This piece destabilizes a basic premise of time based media—that the unit of recording is also the unit of playback.

The unexpected permanence of certain elements (and the transience of others) hint at how both personal and cultural memory have a physical component subject to the unpredictable nature of decay.