Vibeke Sørensen

Vibeke Sorensen is an artist, composer, and professor working in digital multimedia and animation, stereography, interactive architectural installation, and networked visual music performance. Her work in experimental new media spans more than four decades and has been published and exhibited worldwide, including in books, galleries, museums, conferences, performances, film festivals, and on cable and broadcast television. She is known for her innovations in new media technologies stemming from art-science and art-engineering collaborations at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Princeton University, the University of Southern California, the University of California San Diego / San Diego Supercomputer Center, the Neurosciences Institute of La Jolla, and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

Since 1980, she taught and developed programs in media art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Art Center College of Design, California Institute of the Arts, and Princeton University. From 1984-94, she was Founding Director of the Computer Animation Laboratory (CAL) in the School of Film/Video at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), and from 1994-2005 she was Professor and Founding Chair of the Division of Animation and Digital Arts (DADA) in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California (USC). From 2005 – 2007, she was Professor of Film and Media Studies and Research Fellow in the Center for Film, Media, and Popular Culture in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University in Tempe and from 2007 – 2009, she was Professor and Chair of the Department of Media Study at the University at Buffalo, New York.

She was Professor at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore from 2009 – 2021 where she served as Chair (Head) of the School of Art, Design and Media (ADM) from 2009 – 2019. When she was first appointed to the position, the school was 4 years old and unranked; when she stepped down in 2019 it was ranked #30, one step below the Yale School of Art in the QS World University Rankings (Art and Design). At ADM she administered approximately 60 full-time faculty, 35 staff, 800 full-time and 1500 part-time students (undergraduate and post-graduate). She was also the Founding Director of the ADM Centre for Asian Art and Design (CAAD). From 2016-2019 she was Adjunct Professor of Design, Games and Interaction in the School of Media and Communication at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, RMIT University, in Melbourne, Australia.

Currently, she is Associate Faculty at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna (CSH Vienna) and a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University from September 2021.

Sorensen’s research and creative work has been supported by USC, NTU, the New York State Council on the Arts, the US National Science Foundation, and Intel Corporation, among others. She has been a consultant for Disney and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/NASA where she worked on space missions including Voyager, Mars Rover, Mars Observer, and VEEGA.

She is a 2001 Rockefeller Foundation Fellow in Film/Video/Multimedia, and the 2005 Knight Distinguished Visiting Lecturer (the highest award the University bestows) at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. She received the Catedra (career award) from the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil in 2006. In 2007 she was the Chair of the ACM SIGGRAPH Art Gallery: Global Eyes.

Her recent work is influenced by Asian conceptions of space-time and cosmologies of oneness. Her work Illuminations (2013) is a large scale illuminated folding screen, an interactive visual-music installation incorporating plant biofeedback, ubiquitous computing, and electro-acoustic music that she composed. In 2015 she produced Mayur, a 4K animation inspired by Asian textiles, symbols, and cosmologies which has won prizes at animation festivals worldwide. With the advent of Big Data and the Internet of Things (IoT), new possibilities for exploration of space-time at global scale emerged, leading to Mood of the Planet (2015), a kinetic light-sound sculpture employing real-time social media data to detect the current “mood” of people at diverse locations around our planet.

Her works Digital Amulet: Smart Necklace (2017) incorporates 3D printing and wearable computing and the Internet of Living Things (IoLT), with biofeedback and visual music for communication and meditation. In Other Wor(l)ds (2018) features textiles, physical computing, networks and global environmental data. It consists of a series of large scale illuminated tapestries that feature digitally printed textiles, embedded systems, networks and global environmental data. Inspired by the Chinese philosophy of Chi and Schoenberg’s quartet “I feel the air of a different planet”, In Other Wor(l)ds suggests that that the energy of the Universe and the Earth’s environmental signals envelope us like the air we breathe, and the winds of other places move the fabrics of our lives. And like curtains in a window, they touch us physically, intellectually and emotionally in constantly shifting breezes.

Sorensen also works with international scholars, including Balinese musicians, on several UNESCO World Heritage projects that include digital ethnography, art, design, and visual music. Prakempa (2018) and Calendar Music (2019) are inspired by a classical Balinese text of the same name, about the connections between cyclical calendars, gamelan music, offerings, and emotions. Sorensen created these works in collaboration with Balinese ethnomusicologist Prof Made Bandem and anthropologist John Stephen Lansing. She collaborated with Lansing on a 3-part exhibition at the First Sharjah Architecture Triennale (November 2019 – February 2020) entitled Priests and Programmers, based on a book by Lansing with the same title about Balinese culture. In 2020, Sorensen created the Tree Dress that consists of digital panoramic photographs of a tree in Singapore printed onto sustainable silk, with wearable technology and embedded systems providing real-time display (visualization and sonification) of networked data sent wirelessly from bio-sensors at the site of the same living tree. In this way, the tree is digitally ‘unwrapped’ and ‘re-wrapped’ onto the person wearing it as a living, ‘second skin’, and the real-time data displayed on the dress provides a way to expand our awareness of the condition of the tree and the rainforest in Singapore. In 2022, the Tree Dress was included in the ACM SIGGRAPH online exhibition The Earth, Our Home: Art, Technology and Critical Action and includes her video documentary short entitled The Forest, the Punan & the Tree Dress (2022).

In 2021, Sorensen produced Starlight in collaboration with theoretical physicists Prof Lock Yue Chew and Dr. Andri Pradana. Starlight is an interactive installation that visualizes Quantum Entanglement using actual data from the famous Cosmic Bell Experiment of 2018. More than 1.5 million data recordings originating from 2 ancient quasars located at opposite sides of the Universe are visualized and displayed on 2 sides of an arch / portal sculpture conceived and designed by Sorensen. The 2 sides of the arch are reflected in 2 walls of mirrors facing each side of the arch, which create an endless tunnel of shimmering light surrounding the viewer. When a viewer observes the photon streams from the quasars in the portal, the phenomenon of quantum entanglement is experienced as the viewer sees the actual entangled photon streams appear in the portal, replacing random flickering with coherent, seemingly endless tunnelling. When the viewer stops observing this entanglement, the entangled streams are replaced by the unentangled light seen by the observers at the two telescopes used in the Cosmic Bell experiment. In this way, viewers experience their connection to the starlight from distant quasars that ceaselessly falls on our world. The Starlight installation repurposes the arch / portal sculpture that runs Mood of the Planet, located at the ADM Lobby Entrance at NTU Singapore. Pure Data (Pd) / GEM Programming is by Vibeke Sorensen, with credit to Mr. Nagaraju Thummanapalli and Miller S. Puckette.

Her 2021 collaboration, Star Paths: From Bali to Kauai (2021), is a 30 minute 4K digital ethnographic documentary with experimental visual music that explores the temporal patterns and structures in archaeology, music, and navigation in ancient Hawaiian and contemporary Balinese cultures. It was co-written, co-directed and co-produced with Prof John Stephen Lansing.

Sorensen’s most recent talks include a presentation on the Ethics and Aesthetics of Electronic and Digital Media Art from the 1960s to the 2020s, in the Aesthetics and Ethics in the Digital Age conference hosted by the Philosophy Department at the Open University, and the Centre for Music and Science at the University of Cambridge, England on 8 July 2021. On 9 February 2022, she presented Explorations of Time, Space, and the Internet of Living Things (IOLT) at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University.