Toni Dove (1946 - )

Toni Dove is an artist who works primarily with electronic media, including virtual reality and interactive video laser disk installations that engage viewers in responsive and immersive narrative environments. She also creates linear narrative fictions. Her installation, Mesmer - Secrets of the Human Frame, was part of the 1990 Art in the Anchorage exhibition sponsered by Creative Time. A radio version of the piece was aired by New American Radio, a book based on this exhibition was published by Granary Books in the spring of '93 and an essay by the artist on the piece appeared in the Summer 1992 edition of the N.Y.U. Drama Journal TDR.
The performance/installation The Blessed Abyss - A Tale of Unmanageable Ecstasies, debuted at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris as part of the performance series Performing Bodies and Smart Machines, which Dove co-curated with Helen Thorington of New Radio and Performing Arts and Jeanette Vuocolo of the Whitney Museum. The soundtrack was commissioned by New American Radio for its 1991/92 series. The piece ran in October 1992 as an installation at the Thread Waxing Space in Soho and was presented at the New School in the spring of '93 as part of the Franklin Furnace performance series. Dove developed a collaborative virtual reality world, Archeology of a Mother Tongue, at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada with Michael Mackenzie, a British playwright and director living in Montreal. The installation was sponsered by the Banff Center; Art Matters, Inc., NYC; and a Canada Council Media Grant. She then completed a video installation Casual Workers, Hallucinations and Appropriate Ghosts for 42nd street sponsered by Creative Time and the 42nd Street Development Corp. for the 42nd Street Art Project Exhibition. Artificial Changelings, an interactive narrative installation (interactive movie) that uses video motion sensing to engage viewers in a responsive environment., debuted at the Rotterdam Film Festival, 1197-98. The piece, under development since late 1993, was supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The New York State Council on the Arts, The New York Foundation for the Arts, Art Matters, Inc., Harvestworks, Inc. and the Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts from M.I.T. It has been presented in lecture and video form as a work in progress at a number of conferences including ISEA, Montreal, 1995;
The Pong Festival, Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design, 1995; The 2 Grands Etats Generaux de L'Ecriture Interactive sponsered by Art 3000, Paris, 1996; The Summit at the Summit Conference on Interactive Media, co-sponsered by the Banff Centre for the Arts and Real World Media, Banff, Canada 1997; Consciousness Reframed, CAIIA, Wales, UK, 1997, ISEA, Chicago 1997. It was part of the exhibition Body Mécanique, at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio, from September 18, 1998 through January 3, 1999. A Catalog was published with the exhibition. Artificial Changelings was shown at the Instutute for Studies in the Arts at Arizona State University in March 2000 at the International Performance Studies Conference and was part of the exhibition "Wired" , 2000, with the Book-Ends Conference at the Art Center for the Capital Region, Troy, sponsered by SUNY Albany and RPI.
Her current project under development is Spectropia, a supernatural thriller about the infinite deferrals of desire. It will be an interactive feature film performed for an audience in a theatrical setting or exhibited as a serial installation. The second part of the project will be a version for the living room - an immersive date movie for two players on DVD and internet. Spectropia is supported in part by grants from the Greenwall Foundation, the Rockefeller foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, The New York State Council on the Arts, The New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Langlois Foundation. A fellowship from the Institute for Studies in the Arts at Arizona State University has produced the technology prototype. Project partners are The Institute for Studies in the Arts, A.S.U., Thundergulch, Inc., NYC and The Banff Centre for the Arts, Alberta, Canada.

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