Lilla LoCurto and Bill Outcault are a collaborative team that produce video animations, prints, photographs, and installations that deconstruct the body and portray human frailty. They have recently been named Guggenheim Fellows and are featured in HVCCA's Body as Landscape exhibition which opened May 12th.
How do you see your work fitting within the overall vision
of Peekskill Project V and the Body as Landscape exhibition?
We understand the theme for this year's Peekskill Project V
is an exhibition that explores the human relationship to the landscape. Our
work focuses on the frailty of the human body and we use technology to map and
re-visualize the figure. Mapping is an alternate way to view the three-dimensional world around us; a flat street map being another way to experience
the round earth on which we live. As such, our geographic deconstructions of
the figure refer conceptually and visually to the body as a landscape.
Your process employs some advanced technologies. Could you
describe how you’ve made your recent pieces?
We've been using a three-dimensional whole body scanner to
place the figure into the computer in order to explore and manipulate it
virtually. With time-based, custom software we then make video animations by
generating choreographed imagery that allows us to investigate the human body
and alter the way we visualize it. In our most recent work, we've also
incorporated motion capture, tying the 3-D body scans to actual choreographed
performer's movements.
How do you have access to this device? What are these
scanners typically used for?
We've accessed the scanners usually through military and DOD
installations where they're used for anthropological and biometric data
gathering. We also work with institutions and universities that have motion
capture equipment and students who can assist with our projects. We have the
software at our studio to process and composite the different material.
How do you view the relationship between your subject
matter and your medium and process?
Our subject matter, the body's frailty and its relationship
to the culture, is influenced and mediated through the process of its digital
remapping and deconstruction within the computer. The medium we ultimately
choose to represent the ideas varies as we make prints, photographs, animations,
and objects.
How did you come to make the work you are making today?
Where do your major influences come from?
We both worked for a number of years more or less
conventionally as sculptors. Working in three dimensions via the computer is
not as far removed as it may sound and seemed to be a logical outgrowth of that
way of experiencing the world. We initially began using computer technology about
15 years ago in a project that created two-dimensional photographic maps from
our three-dimensionally scanned bodies. From there it was a natural
progression, partly as a result of the process itself, to represent the ideas
through moving imagery. There are numerous artists, especially those working in
video in the 70s, who have influenced our work, some for the audacity of their
vision as much as their content. We continually look at not just art, but other
things as well and learn from everyone. The map project, for example, began
after a chance encounter with Buckminster Fuller's icosahedron map projection
from the 1930s.
What are some upcoming projects or shows we can spot you
in?
This year we are recipients of a John Simon Guggenheim
Fellowship and a very exciting project that is coming up is a residency at the
Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tuebingen, Germany.
If you weren’t an artist, what would you be doing?
Lilla: This is a difficult question because it seems to
imply a job, a vocation where one earns one's living. There are many artists,
professionals by any measure, who earn their living “doing” something else and
at the same time still "do" art. I'm the daughter of a psychiatrist
and issues of perception and human vulnerability were ideas I grew up trying to
understand and reconcile in my mind. From an early age, art became a way to
explore my relationship to these feelings and I don't know of another field
that would have allowed me to do that as well.
Bill: By way of encouraging me to find a
rewarding career choice, my dad, who was a contractor, always told me I'd never
get anywhere working with my hands. As was often the case, I didn't pay much
attention to his advice and became an artist. There's an argument to be made,
of course, that he may have been on the right track, but by now I've been doing
this for so long I can't conceive of doing anything else.
