Vibeke Sorensen: Sanctuary
information
G111 Exhibitions
Art Rental Service
School of Art
University of Manitoba

Click here to read an
interview with Sorensen
by Cliff Eyland

Click here to view
videos of Sanctuary.


Click here to go to
Sorensen's web site.
Vibeke Sorensen
Vibeke Sorensen


An installation shot of Vibeke Sorensen's Sanctuary at Gallery One One One, courtesy the artist.

Vibeke Sorensen: Sanctuary

An interactive multimedia art installation by noted California artist Vibeke Sorensen had its world premiere in Gallery One One One in the School of Art at the University of Manitoba. As the University of Manitoba's Robert & Elizabeth Knight Distinguished Visiting Lecturer, Sorensen also gave a free public lecture about media art on Thursday 6 October, 8 PM in Room 343, Drake Centre on campus.

Sanctuary
opened to the public with a reception on Monday, October 17, 2005, from 4:00 pm to 7:00 pm and continued until 28 October. The exhibition was a painterly cross between documentary photography, animation and "wired" plants that employed touchable and sensory media in navigating thousands of images, sounds, texts and video recorded around the world.

Sorensen is an artist and professor of Film and Media Studies and Fellow in the Center for Film and Media Research at Arizona State University. She works in digital multimedia and animation, interactive architectural installation and networked visual-music performance. Her work in experimental new media spans three decades and her work has been published and exhibited worldwide, including in books, galleries, museums, conferences, performances, film festivals, on cable and broadcast television, and on the Internet.

Her work MindShipMind (1997), is a World Wide Web piece created in collaboration with Austrian composer Karlheinz Essl. It combines animation, music, found images on the web and links to many other sites, incorporating pseudo-random algorithms and weighted probabilities in recombining the many source elements to create new results each time the site is accessed. It can be accessed at: http://www.essl.at/works/mindshipmind.html

Sorensen was professor and Founding Chair of the Division of Animation and Digital Arts in the School of Cinema-Television at the University of Southern California from 1994-2005. She has been a consultant for Disney and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/NASA, and her research in new technologies has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the USC Annenberg Center for Communication and Zumberge Fund for Innovation in Research, as well as Intel Corporation.

She is a 2001 Rockefeller Foundation Fellow in Film/Video/Multimedia, and as mentioned the 2005 Knight Distinguished Visiting Lecturer at the University of Manitoba.

Dr. Emoke Szathmáry, president and vice-chancellor of the University of Manitoba, is enthusiastic about Sorensen and her new work. She notes: “Among other things, Vibeke Sorensen developed software used in the film industry to 'morph' shapes.... She is a very highly gifted visual artist who combines sight and sound to explore concepts such as consciousness and ethnic identity in cyberspace...

Sanctuary was made in collaboration with the midi@rte Laboratory of the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and Professors Miller Puckette and Shahrokh Yadegari of the University of California, San Diego.

Sanctuary was organized by the artist, Alex Poruchnyk, Ken Jacobson, Char Okell, Robert Epp, and Cliff Eyland. Special thanks to Celia Rabinovitch, Alex Poruchnyk and Sharon Alward for obtaining funding for this exhibition from the University of Manitoba and Collin Zipp and Jaymez Jansen for installation and videographic help.


Gallery One One One, School of Art, Main Floor, FitzGerald Building, University of Manitoba Fort Garry campus, Winnipeg, MB, CANADA R3T 2N2. Gallery Hours: Noon to 4 PM (weekdays only). TEL:204 474-9322 FAX:474-7605

For information please contact Robert Epp eppr@ms.umanitoba.ca