Thecla Schiphorst

About

Thecla Schiphorst is a computer media artist, theorist, educator, computer systems designer, choreographer, and dancer. She is a member of the design team that has developed Life Forms, the computer compositional tool for choreography, and has been working with the world renowned choreographer, Merce Cunningham in New York City for the past seven years, supporting his creation of new dance using Life Forms. Thecla still travels with Cunningham to work with him and Life Forms in international dance communities. She has an interdisciplinary M.A. in computer compositional systems from SFU, and undergraduate degrees in dance and computer systems. She is currently Choreographic Consultant and Artist in Residence at the Computer Graphics and Multi-Media Research Lab at SFU where she is exploring the use of motion capture and gestural input as a real time interface. Thecla Schiphorst travels extensively internationally lecturing, facilitating workshops and showing her work. Most recently she has been invited to SIGGRAPH '97, Interaction '97 in Ogaki-City, Japan, Future Moves Festival in Rotterdam, Ars Electronica in Lintz Austria, 5CyberConf in Madrid, Torino Danza in Italy, Corps et Machines in Belgium, the LOKV Theatre Insitute in Amsterdam, the European Centre for Dance and Technology in Frankfurt Germany, Imagina in Monte Carlo, ISEA in Montreal and Sydney Australia, the NYU Interactive Performing Arts Workshop, and the New York School for the Visual Arts. Her latest interactive art work, Bodymaps: artifacts of touch has recently been exhibited at Ars Electroinica in Lintz Austria and the Western Front Gallery in Vancouver BC. Schiphorst and her latest work Bodymaps, is being featured in Wired magazine to be published in the October l996 issue. Thecla is also the Artistic Director of the award winning Cunningham multi-media Archival Project entitled immerce and sponsored by the Centre for Image and Sound Research, in Vancouver. This interactive media project enables dance from Merce Cunningham's Archive to be explored and navigated using an interface metaphor which aligns ideas of movement, the body, and Merce Cunningham's process to mechanisms for interactive selection. This piece has won three first place festival awards at the International Digital Media Awards Festival, and has been shown at the ARC awards in Los Angeles. Thecla Schiphorst has been a faculty member at the Simon Fraser University Computed Art Summer Intensive, and at the Emily Carr College of Art and Design in Vancouver. She is the past chair of the Conference on Dance and Technology held at Simon Fraser University in July of 1993. Thecla Schiphorst is the co-founder of Digital Earth, a new non-profit cultural society and co curator of the web-based project The Ecology of Communications, and Transverse Worlds. (source: www.art.net/~dtz/schipo1.html)

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