Barbier's Home Page: Iam.Colum.edu\ABarbier

BIOGRAPHY

Annette Barbier is an artist whose work began in sculpture and moved through video to new technologies including computer animation, virtual reality, and net art. Her work addresses home, domesticity, and the ways in which identity is bound up with one's environment.

Barbier graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with an MFA. She dropped out of college to spend a year in France which was formative in making issues of home, culture and identity central to her work. Years later, a Fulbright lectureship in India with her 3 year old daughter confirmed the importance of travel in questioning one's conceptions about the world, and resulted in a travel diary tape. More recent work is growing from a profoundly moving trip to Vietnam in 2003.

Barbier is Chair of the Interactive Arts and Media Department at Columbia College Chicago, and was previously Director of the Center for Art and Technology and an Associate Professor at Northwestern University. She teaches new media, computer animation, and video installation. Selected video work is distributed by the Video Data Bank.

Barbier lives on the edge of a forest preserve with her artist husband and frequent collaborator Drew Browning. She takes inspiration from this close connection to the natural environment, frequently spotting coyote, hawks, waterfowl, songbirds, and deer, watching the seasons change, and growing things.

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

Most of my life as an artist has been spent doing electronic media in one form or another, but my earliest roots in sculpture continue to have a profound influence on my work. I have always been fascinated with space and methods of shaping it, and that interest has extended itself into place and how it influences our lives. The place from which we come, our country, culture, homes, define who we are and how we see the world. Thus ideas about home, domesticity, the ways in which one's own home life interacts with and becomes the (implicit or explicit) subject of one's own work have been an abiding and central interest. This movement from space to place was catalyzed by a simple but provocative work I saw many years ago. Exhibited, under the title "Recent Work", polaroids of boxes of personal possessions about to be unpacked were tacked to the wall. This profound recontextualizing of a life situation shared by most people and its transformation into art led me to a series of reflections, and pieces, that have continued to preoccupy me to this day. Beginning in the early 80's with "Inside", a videotape about the gradual constriction of life concerns and experiences of an elderly woman, through "Kitchen Goddess" in the early 90's, videotapes concentrated on an exploration of the individual in relation to the home space. The expressive possibilities of new media, including the potential for interactivity, led to ongoing investigations of the same theme in computer graphics and web work. In the mid 90's, I created a Home Page which has continued to expand since that time. Naturally, it was about home. One portion of the site, "Home Invasion", is a personal war with telemarketers, and contains numerous recorded conversations. Excerpts of interviews with American expatriates about leaving home and establishing a new one in another culture also became part of the growing work.

In 1998 I received a grant from Northwestern University's Center for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts which allowed me to collaborate with other artists in the creation of "Home", an interactive environment created in 3-D computer graphics for the web. This is on line at: http://www.unreal-estates.com, and was shown in December 2000 at the International Society for Electronic Arts in Paris. The navigable environment, the spatialized sound, and the viewer-activated events gives this work an immersive quality that engages the audience more deeply than does previous, linear work. The concept of home, a private space, is destabilized by its existence in the most universal and place-less of public environments, the internet. In this era of increasing mobility and connectivity, the nature of home is open to reinterpretation. Viewers can engage that reinterpretation by interacting with objects, sounds, voices, and multi-media works in "Home". The technological medium of computers here serves as a meta-medium to make possible the contributions of numerous artists in the shaping of the work, since visual artists, screenwriters, filmmakers, and musicians all work with computers and can share their work seamlessly. This multiplicity of voices and visions is embodied in the work itself, and reflects the nature of the internet as a democratic, collaborative environment. In this work, interactivity as well as broad availability on the internet have proven central to its shape, direction, and meaning.

A subsequent version of "Home" created for the CAVE virtual reality environment was exhibited at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria in 2001. Re-creating the work for this environment allowed the creation of a truly viewer-centered experience with stereo vision and large scale virtual reality tools. In future works, the spectator will be able to change the environment, create new places, and find them when s/he returns.

I have long been fascinated with the potential of new technologies to engage the artist in unique and innovative ways of thinking. From early works with videosynthesis in the 70's to interactive 3-D environments at present, I have found the continual growth of technological media to be challenging and invigorating. I plan to continue my direction of using personal themes as a basis for exploration using new media tools.