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Doris Vila A Flock of Words USA dorvila@earthlink.net

A Flock of Words, a cross-media collaboration with composer Robert Rowe, premiered at New York University. With a text from Canetti's Crowds and Power, an artificial life algorithm swarms words in and out of linear readability, set off by computer music signals. An interactive demonstration of this work was presented at Siggraph in August 1996. An installation version was first shown in Berlin in 1996 at the Musik+Licht festival sponsored by the Berlin Society for New Music. The public walked across the interactive floor, playing music and changing the swarming of the projected words.

Biography Recent Doings . . . Doris Vila has worked extensively with art and technology for many years in Europe and the United States. In Theatermachine in Bonn, Germany, viewers become players in a large interactive arena. Their moving bodies trigger famous key fragments from opera and film music, as they travel from zone to zone in the room. Their gestures also spark digital video projection onto three 8-foot spherical screens that float and bob overhead. See it on the web at: http://www.telebonn.gmd.de/cai/bec/th-masch.htm Other places on the web to see pages about her work are: http://www.interport.net/~outpost/34 http://nttad.com/asci/exhibit3.html In 1992 during a fellowship at the Academy of Media Art in Cologne, she first linked video projection with holographic playback in Device for the lifting of gravity and other serious situations. This installation in the window of the Telekom store, Cologne, Germany, was on the main pedestrian shopping street. As people walked down the street, a store security camera caught the live video feet of passersby and projected them onto a hologram of fire. Soon after, in The Book of Air, a full-room interactive installation, viewers walk across the room activating video projection, music and holographic lighting. This work received an award at the 1993 InterActiva Symposium in Cologne. In 1993 in The Spatial Rights Modulator, viewers navigate through an interactive computer projection by waving a flag at a holographic screen in front of an altar. Later that year, an experimental theater piece (A self-help survival guide to the} Global Village... combined video projection, optical effects and computer animation with a live performer on a computerresponsive stage. She has been awarded a number of residencies including one at the MIT Regional Laser Center; another at GMD, the German national computer research center, and three residencies at The MacDowell Colony. She has received grants from NYSCA, the Shearwater Foundation, Artists Space and the Cintas Foundation, among others. From 1986 to 1988, she taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as head of their Holography Department. From 1977 to 1979, she was a fine arts researcher and teacher in Mexico at the State University of Veracruz. She taught recently at the School of Visual Arts. Born in Miami of Cuban descent, she studied in California at UC Berkeley and City College of San Francisco. Her studies later continued through City University of New York at Hunter College. She frequently shows internationally, lectures widely and is a longtime observer of bird flocks.