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Operator Profiles Rebecca Allen

In Part 1 of a series on artists using digital systems to subvert gender and sexuality norms, Rebecca Allen reflects on her pioneering work in digital art with Operator, the experiential artist duo of Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti. They discuss Allen's journey from inventing a new art form in the 1970s and 1980s to refining and integrating human emotion and sensuality into evolving technology from the 1990s onward.
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‍Operator: If you had to use only five words to describe your experience in the 1970s and 1980s making art with technology, what would they be?‍

‍Rebecca Allen: The first thing that came to mind was just “inventing a new art form.” That sums up what I was trying to do and thinking about during that time.

‍Operator: Would you use different words to describe your experience of the period working between the 1990s and today?‍

‍Rebecca Allen: That's a big, big period of time but I do feel that for me, it was just further defining this new art form and the tools, which were always changing. I've worked at this pretty much from the beginning. There was work in the 1960s using early digital technology. But I was making moving images, while a lot of the earlier works were still images and prints.

In the '90s, things really started to change. Though I would say, I feel that from the ‘90s onwards, there's been less invention. Most of the foundational work of using computers to make art had been done by that time.

From my perspective, since the '90s it's been about incrementally getting better, faster and more sophisticated. Because of that, different aesthetics and different kinds of art were coming through.

‍Operator: I wonder also if that has anything to do with the place and the role of technology in our lives now. Previously, you had to be a professional to access these tools, which greatly limited access to technology.‍

‍Rebecca Allen: Another subtle shift when I think of the ‘90s is the change in public interest because computers were now more mainstream and more pervasive starting around then. But I found there was less interest in computer art during that time compared to what I had experienced in the ‘80s. I think that was because in the ‘80s, there were no tools. This was such a brand new idea that there was natural interest, particularly from Europe—I didn't get much interest at all in the US. Artists and the public were asking questions, like, “What can artists do with what is essentially a new art form? What can artists do with this new technology?” But by the '90s, that interest had faded.

The internet was also coming up as something everybody could use. Net art started to emerge in the ‘90s and that was a shift too, even if it was not something I was particularly interested in. That’s because everything I did in the early days faced these extreme limitations. It was often: how do you do the most with the least to keep the level of quality that I wanted? Then the internet just brought the quality rate down, in my perspective.

Part of what happened was that the speed of the computer grew exponentially. That meant you could get more detail and quality. You could also start thinking about things like real-time simulation, which very much became an area I was interested in.

In the ‘70s and '80s, it was animation. You created a frame, recorded it and repeated the process. But in the '90s, you could start to have things happen in real time on the computer. Most particularly, it allowed for interaction, which overlaps with video games. In the early ‘90s, I joined Virgin Games with the title of “3D Visionary” to learn about games as the industry transitioned from 2D to 3D.

I could learn about interaction and the accepted rules of how games work, which I then applied to my own work.

‍Operator: That title, 3D Visionary, aligns with the new art form you said you were creating. Your job was essentially to do something that had never been done before.‍

‍Rebecca Allen: It was a dramatic shift for the entire industry. Before I arrived, games were made with assembly language. Often, the programmer was also the designer and artist of the two-dimensional game.

Then 3D opened up a whole new way to have to think about interactivity—about moving through a three-dimensional world, not just moving two-dimensionally around a flat space. My role was to help them figure all this out while making games as well.

Despite these rapid changes in the ‘90s, the interest wasn't there from the art world. They still weren’t accepting any of this stuff. Somehow they hit on the net art for a period of time. Somebody in the art world could relate to that in some way, but everything else happening with technology was being ignored by the art world pretty much.
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In the early 2000s, I saw the interest from the art world start to increase.

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By that time, everybody was living with computers. It became acceptable for artists to work with this new medium. People started to comprehend what digital art was and what it could be.
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‍Operator: You talk about the extreme limitations of technology that you've worked with in the past. When I was reading about Musique Non Stop, I felt such a connection to your description of how painstaking that process was. Most normal humans would ask the question, “Why would you do that to yourself?” Our friend Ian Rogers talks about abusing the medium and I love this because I feel that you do this as well. You're using something in a novel manner, pushing it to its most extreme limit and, in turn, creating a new art form.‍

‍At the same time, your work also includes human sensuality. Those two things are, or may seem to some to be, natively in opposition to each other. Could you talk about how working with cumbersome, tedious technology with so many limitations allows you to express the sensual?‍

‍Rebecca Allen: I was very much aware of the contradiction and played with that. In my work, there's this subtle sense of humor. Flirt and Girl Lifts Skirt are meant to be funny but also serious to me. When I started as an artist, I decided I wanted to dedicate myself to putting things in motion. But I was seeing it more from an animation side of creating lots of drawings to make animations. When I was in art school, my focus was on experimental art animation as a new form too, which was new regardless of using a computer. Moving images also weren't accepted in the art world until later. I just picked all the hard ones [laughs].

But if you're an animator, you're already obviously totally obsessive because you've got to make a drawing for each fraction of a second. It was clear that I already had the obsessive personality to achieve detail despite the tediousness.
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Using computers as an artist, I was saying, “The computer age is coming; it’s going to enable new ways of thinking and making.” Because animation was so tedious to do, I thought, “The computer can help.”

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‍Operator: How did you maintain sensuality and soul?‍

‍Rebecca Allen: At that time in the ‘70s, there was such a strong feminist movement. I grew up in the ‘50s and '60s, when women could do nothing but be the nurturers. They could be a teacher, a nurse or a secretary, if you weren't just a mother and a housewife—that was it. So working with technology was an all-male field, but so was the art world, pretty much. At the time, I hardly knew of any other women artists, even though, of course, now we know there were a lot more.
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The feminine had to be really strong for me because I knew it was so rare and missing. 

I was into sensuality and boldness because so often the female body was the subject of male-created art but with a very different purpose from the female side. Right away, the female body was important to me in my animation work because it wasn't so much the form of the body—it was the movement. I was studying human motion, nonverbal communication and how our emotions define our behaviors.
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I was also always a troublemaker. I always want to go where I'm not supposed to be. I entered technology knowing I was a complete outsider in addition to being an artist. 

Those days, a computer was thought to be this cold, emotionless machine—whatever that means. I liked the idea of adding sensuality, of really breaking that mold.

And the process then still involved punch cards. They were the only way to get into the machine at that time, which was really laborious. There was no computer interface. We're so used to the mouse, keyboard and, of course, touchscreens now.

But then there was such a separation between what you did and what you would finally see. Your keyboard wasn't attached to any kind of display. You were punching in numbers and then those cards had to be put into a machine. Only then could you see what you had created. It was a real removal from the final output.

‍Operator: To exude nuance from punch cards requires levels of control and expertise, as well as this element of intuition.‍

‍Rebecca Allen: The art is about the hands and the skill with the hands; it's a very physical body thing to me. I thought from the very beginning that the notion of interfacing with the computer was a man-computer interface rather than a human-computer interface. In the field of computers, interface design had more of a feminine quality. The thinking was, “Who cares about the interface? We all know what that code means. Why would we need any kind of interface?”

But I thought a lot about interface design. Even the tools I was using in the ‘80s, I designed the interface that I wanted to use. 
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Interface is the body connecting to the machine.

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‍Operator: You mentioned how the interaction between the human body and the machine was seen as feminine or less emphasized. You work questions that relationship, positing that it’s more about communication and interpretation between human and machine. It has to do with a way of understanding between two entities. Whereas I think it's cleaner for the ego to process it like, “I'm the master of this thing. We don't need to have a dialogue.” ‍

‍Rebecca Allen: Yes, one of the things I really have a problem with AI is that now it's supposed to be better that all I have to do is say, “Hey, I'm picturing a big tree with a red balloon on top and this and that.” And then you don't do anything. It just spits out your image.

I think that's just an evolution of where computers are and who is still defining everything about computers. And it isn't women who are doing that.

‍Operator: What does that suggest about the relationship between humans and computers, as well as the priorities and values driving innovation in computing?‍

‍Rebecca Allen: This field of technology comes from such a specific male perspective, even going all the way down to the operating system. That was such a hurdle to getting into anything with technology. I felt very comfortable in the male world and doing a lot of things guys do, too. So I didn't feel that separated from it but I know a lot of women did because it wasn't nice for them. The interface did not appeal and the languages were horrible—just to make this stuff. It was really tedious and technical in the early days but I was just driven. I was fortunate and I placed myself with the best minds in computer science who were creating the software. And I was helping them create it.
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I felt like it was really important for me to be there at the very beginning as an artist and a woman to—just by being there—ask different questions.

I was not timid. I would say, “We've got to try doing it this way.” Or, “No, no, it doesn't work that way.” It was just part of our way to think about how you could fluidly do something as complex as have a 3D model and figure out how to get it to move on the computer. What's the interface?

‍Operator: It's interesting how a more expressive, intuitive interface is often seen as less important. In reality, making computers more expressive is harder and requires a higher level of control and mastery to create a smooth experience.‍

‍Rebecca Allen: Basically, I wanted to metaphorically put the human in the computer because, in the early days, even the 3D models that existed were only geometric, mathematical forms.
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It was really important to me to get a humanness in there—even more important if that were a female human.

At MIT’s Architecture Machine Group, where I went after RISD [Rhode Island School of Design], it was all about interfaces. We were so far ahead. We had gesture interfaces, speech recognition and voice simulation. You could move your body. We were very aware of communicating with the machine like that. I learned a lot there.

Later, when I went to the NYIT Computer Graphics Lab in New York [NYIT], we were working on a tool to create 3D software. We had this interface with a joystick, which was somewhat innovative. But joysticks are these phallic things to move around and they are not very precise. My work, capturing human motion, was considered one of the hardest technical problems back then. Just getting figures to move and rotate the right way was extremely challenging.

I went to a military supply place for airplanes where they had these small, high-precision joysticks. You could move them with subtle little touches. This difference between a big joystick, where you couldn't be very subtle, and this little thing meant I could be much more precise.
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‍Operator: I did not expect to cover phallic joysticks, but I don't regret it [laughs].‍

‍Rebecca Allen: [Laughs] Subtlety was so important and it was haptic. So you got to feel vibrations. This was the best thing out there in the late-90s. I still collect them all on eBay because, to show my work, I still need them.

When I did Girl Lifts Skirt and Flirt, I’d put the punch cards in and then later come back to see the results and the guys in the computer lab would look and I could see them thinking, “What is this?” Being the young girl, I just sort of snuck out of there and didn't really engage in it. At RISD, we could take courses at Brown. Though I must say, women were only able to take courses there two or three years before that. So it was really just the beginning of women even being able to go to Brown.

RISD said, “No, no. Computers have nothing to do with art.” But I did it anyway, as I tend to do. The piece I made, E-Motion, was a study of how motion can evoke emotions and behaviors like sexuality and sensuality. Why was that so important to me? I think, partly because I was a young girl, I was playing with the notion that our bodies were all about sex and that seemed to be our role. E-Motion was a very feminist film I made with the idea of reclaiming sensuality and sexuality.

When we had our thesis—big theater—presentations, they wouldn't show my film at RISD. And to this day, I'm not even sure why. I don't know if it's because I had these sensual images of women. But come on, we're in art school.

‍Operator: While the subject of art has historically been the woman or the female form, it's often portrayed as muse or subject by men artists. When men depict a woman's body, that's okay but once a woman is depicting a woman's body, that's an issue.‍

‍Rebecca Allen: It just made me work harder, I suppose. Another thing I learned at RISD was that, if for some reason I wanted to go off and work at Disney or Warner Brothers or something, women weren't allowed to be animators. If you applied and showed some great work, they'd say, “Sorry, women aren't allowed to be animators.” They would do the banal work of coloring in and outlining stuff but the movement was only allowed by men.

Then I thought, “Okay, I can't even get a team together if I want to be an artist making more elaborate animated work.”
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So maybe the computer can do it and it can be me and the computer making this work so I don't have to struggle with trying to get a team of people together.

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‍Operator: It's similar to photography: women are allowed to be photographed but not the photographer. In dance, there’s the male genius with the vision and then there's the female bodies that are the materials that make the vision real. How did your work subvert notions of movement and the female form?‍

‍Rebecca Allen: I know a lot has changed, obviously, in that it's not just exclusively that today but it's shocking how little has changed too.

I've never been that interested in creating the forms themselves. It's more the motion that was attracting me. I was really happy to have this existing model—made by Ed Catmull, who went on to found Pixar—and then get her to move. The first movements were swimming. Then I created this piece called Steps (1982), which was about doing computer work, as in the steps of programs. But I was also literally trying to get them to walk and move that way. Everything I was doing technically, I could apply conceptually to my art.
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I loved that it was part of my mission to have that digital aesthetic—to really let everything about the computer soak in. It's learning your material; if it's wood or marble, you really learn about that material and then decide what can come out of working with it. You tune your work to the material itself. So that was a mission of mine.

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‍Operator: I really appreciate the intimacy that you have with the technology you use as a tool, as a material, as you're describing it now. Beyond this technical rigor, you also mention applying the conceptual aspects to the technology. Because of how pervasive technology has become in our lives, there's this consumerist-tech fetish. Whether it's good or bad for us, it doesn't matter; it's shiny, it's new and I want the upgrade.‍

‍We use technology so often in our practice and hate this separation of art and technology, as it puts such an emphasis on the technology itself. So we create rules for ourselves. And one of them is that—because tech doesn't age well, but concepts do—we always say, “No tech demos.” Instead of heroing the technology, which is likely to age not so well, at least the concept can be a kind of anti-aging serum. There's a message—a timeless message.‍

‍Rebecca Allen: Yes, and I was very conscious of that too, because everything was changing by the year, especially in the early days. What wowed people was something they had never seen before. It felt like a Renaissance, figuring out technical challenges like textures or transparency. It was like, “My god, here's how you can put textures onto a 3D shape” and “Here's how to even model a 3D shape and move things in 3D.”

In the mid-'80s, we were working with fractals and particle systems. To me, that was the next step in movement where you could use these procedural techniques to make natural physics-based movement.
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I was really excited about fractals and particle systems because, with some rules, you could get this complexity I could never have done any other way or done by hand.

Then I really did sort of lose interest once the tools were finally usable, like Photoshop and the whole suite of commercial design tools that were coming out. It was two different periods of time I felt between the major invention period and then the commercial tools. But it sure was easier to use the commercial tools.

‍Operator: I'd love to touch on your collaborations around that time in the mid-’80s, which included musicians like Kraftwerk and choreographer Twyla Tharp. How did these experiences inform your thoughts on collaboration?‍

‍Rebecca Allen: Working with motion-based art meant I had to think about time-based work and about sound. Should there be sound? What should it be? My mother was a musician so I grew up in a very musical environment. I even studied music. I wasn’t good enough or interested enough to make that my art form. But sound remained important to me anyway, which would mean collaborating with someone to do the sound, like Kraftwerk.

Then, of course, working with human motion, it naturally led me to choreographers or they found me. NYIT also had a commercial video facility. Twyla Tharp came there, looking for something with a video production. We were used to doing these demonstrations to wow people and then she saw some of my work, like Steps. I loved experimental dance, too. I had already seen The Catherine Wheel on Broadway and was familiar with her work. She was looking at video because she was doing a film of The Catherine Wheel that the BBC was producing.

Tharp could never figure out how to have St. Catherine represented in her dance. So I decided it would be a good way to use a human figure in motion. I liked that it was a saint because saints are superhuman—beyond human and capable of doing things humans can't do. Metaphorically, I really liked the idea of a saint.
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Due to the extreme limitations of the technology, it took me easily ten hours to create one second of motion because of everything involved, everything not working and all that you had to deal with back then. It was very laborious but exciting because of the idea that I could finally get some work out into the world. There wasn’t much interest in the art world but this work would actually be on TV. A public would get to see it, which was really motivating for me. So choreography and my strong interest in human motion, I saw them as having very similar motivations.

‍Operator: People have this idea of digital art or technology as being cold. And we want more people to understand that art in technology doesn't necessarily have a certain temperature or perspective.
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If you approach these tools from a specific point of view with a specific intention, then you can have very warm, sensual, embodied, physical experiences as a result of your encounter with these technologies. 

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‍But I think you just don't see or experience that much art or that much digital culture that is coming from those voices and is not coming with these intentions of bringing people closer to themselves, having an intimate experience, connecting people with each other, connecting people with their bodies. But we need this.‍

‍Rebecca Allen: We've removed ourselves. From the very beginning, certain things have been intuitively clear to me about technology and where it's going. It's kind of a mysterious thing to me and, yes, I put a lot of work into understanding the technology. But even from the beginning, my early feeling was that we're going to lose the human physical body with this.
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That was this whole early notion: I have to put the body in the computer.

Then, later in my work with sensors, I put the technology on the body but there was always this awareness that we were losing our physical world and our physical body. I got a strong sense that this was partly because for many men, the body wasn't important to them in that way, not even like a subject matter that would make sense in this way. It's women's art. The body is women's art and, my god, so is emotion.

That's why I use that word “E-Motion.” We can understand emotion with technology. I've been so aware of that being missing and there's really no reason that technology doesn't require it.
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Marble is cold, but you can do some really sensual things with it too.

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Rebecca Allen is an internationally recognized artist who has been at the forefront of exploring the intersection of art, technology and human perception for over four decades. Allen's pioneering work encompasses experimental video, large-scale performances, live simulations and virtual and augmented reality installations.

Allen’s work is exhibited internationally and is part of permanent collections, including Whitney Museum of American Art, Centre Georges Pompidou, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art (NY).

Operator is Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti, an award-winning experiential artist duo based in Madrid. Their collaborative practice, dating back to 2016, combines their expertise in immersive art, human-computer interaction, choreography and performance.