I began as someone who deeply appreciated abstract art. Loops seemed to be a way to work with abstraction and less representational forms.
Jennifer Steinkamp, interview with Sean Capone, “Animation and Abstraction: Jennifer Steinkamp interviewed by Sean Capone,” BOMB online, posted September 18, 2018, available at bombmagazine.org/articles/animation-and-abstraction-jennifer-steinkamp-interviewed.
Jennifer Steinkamp’s large-scale installations often cast the viewer’s shadow onto projected animations of abstract loops and grids, or digitally rendered stylized flowers and plants. They invite us to enter physically engaging aesthetic experiences that dissolve the boundary between viewer and object. She studied experimental animation at the California Institute of Technology with Gene Youngblood, author of the influential book Expanded Cinema (1970), who introduced her to computer-generated animation and structuralist film.1 Looking to early experimental, nonnarrative filmmaking—like Paul Sharits’ sensory-assaulting color flicker films and Michael Snow’s dual-sided projections2—that reveal the structure of their presentation, Steinkamp’s projections alert the viewer to their own physical presence within a space: “when you walk through it you disrupt the illusion and weave yourself into the work.”3
Jennifer Steinkamp, interview with Sean Capone, “Animation and Abstraction: Jennifer Steinkamp interviewed by Sean Capone,” BOMB online, posted September 18, 2018, available at bombmagazine.org/articles/animation-and-abstraction-jennifer-steinkamp-interviewed. ↩︎
Peter Lunenfeld, Snap to Grid: A User’s Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000), 151. ↩︎
Jennifer Steinkamp, quoted in Catherine Shaw, “Arts preview: Jennifer Steinkamp’s swirling 3-D digital installations,” South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), February 12, 2014, scmp.com/magazines/48hrs/article/1422967/arts-preview-jennifer-steinkamps-swirling-3-d-digital-installations. ↩︎
Fly to Mars (no. 1) (2004) is part of a computer-animated series of projections by the artist depicting hyperreal trees that twist and bend. Without beginning or end, they cycle through the seasons, bearing colorful blossoms then lush summer leaves and russet fall colors before losing their foliage. Influenced by experimental film, which often uses repetition rather than a storyline to focus viewer attention on film’s materiality rather than its content alone, Jennifer Steinkamp features the trees without narrative. Instead, their movement is abstract, “the motion of pattern and cycle.”1 The tree’s motion and changes over time imbue it with a kind of mortal energy mimicking our somatic experience of living, breathing, sleeping. They awaken sensations of our physical being, creating a “bond of sympathy”2 between our bodily experience and the projected image.
In Jennifer Steinkamp’s media installations, the spectator often becomes an element within the work. For Winter Fountains (2017), an outdoor installation along Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Steinkamp was inspired by the street’s twentieth-century fountains to develop a kind of media “fountain”—a spectacle of light and moving images projected onto four large fiberglass domes around which passersby gather. As people approach, their “skin becomes a canvas”1 for her otherworldly digital animations. Their bodies are transfigured in space among colliding ice particles, floating floral forms, and bolts of lightning, which allude to the legacy of Benjamin Franklin.
Peter Lunenfeld, Snap to Grid: A User’s Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000), 147. ↩︎
Jennifer Steinkamp uses computer graphics and three-dimensional animations to create pulsing and undulating visual fields of pattern and abstract motion that shift our perspective. Working within the architecture of buildings, her projected images reconfigure surfaces to create the illusion of passages and portals or play with doorways to render floating imagescapes; immaterial substances such as computer graphics and light manifest as corporeal. In One saw; the other saw (2001), a light and sound installation at Rice University Art Gallery on which she collaborated with the composer Jimmy Johnson, a projection on the gallery’s glass-front wall created the illusion of three dimensionality from both the interior and exterior of the space. “I use light to dematerialize architecture,” says Steinkamp.1 Using sensors to detect the movement of passersby, the projected image shifted in response to the viewer’s point of view so that the architecture itself seemed to be moving.2 Such motion-filled environments defy architecture’s space and material structure to induce visceral responses that border on vertigo and alter one’s mental state.
Jennifer Steinkamp and Jimmy Johnson: One saw; the other saw (2001), exhibition description on Rice University Art Gallery website, available at ricegallery.org/steinkamp-johnson. ↩︎
Rochelle Steiner, Wonderland (St. Louis: Saint Louis Art Museum, 2000), 24. ↩︎
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