I am a physical/media artist exploring dynamic interfaces between the body and technological systems. As an artist cultivated within a research university context, I am an artist/researcher, generating experiential knowledge in the form of vital 21st century artworks. My current art/research practice is a multi-faceted engagement with post-biological embodiment, augmented/mixed reality, 3D/stereoscopy, and immersive media composition. My repertoire of original work, generated over the past 20 years, includes performance, video, installation, interactive media, visual art, sound and electronic text.

My research utilizes a broad palette of technologies and aesthetic techniques, including:
• digital video
• 3D animation
• stereoscopy
• motion capture
• digital sound
• sensing and control systems
• generative/algorithmic programming
• telematics
• multimedia authoring for web, mobile, and gaming devices
• physical/digital choreography
• intermedia performance composition
• somatic practice and exploration of embodied knowledge

My artistic practice is rooted in modern dance and late 20th century performance. I began my career as a modern dancer with the Erick Hawkins Dance Company while concurrently pursuing my master’s degree at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). The juxtapositions embedded in this experience fascinated me, and established the framework for research and exploration that would unfold over the course of a diverse and expansive body of work. To summarize, the Hawkins Company was paramount in its pursuit of pure sensuous immediacy and live kinesthetic experience – to the extreme extent that it would never use recorded music in performance. In contrast, NYU’s ITP wrestled a dynamic rhizome of technology, code, and abstraction that torqued and contracted across a spectrum of materiality and immateriality in the birthing pangs of the digital age. My work harnesses this dichotomy, extending the spine of the sensuous, integrated Hawkins body into the expanded nervous system of digital culture and emerging post-biological framework – exploring the beauty and complexity inherent in this humanistic transformation.

Macrocosmically, my art/research practice is an exploration of 21st century mythos, informed by a convergence of perspectives from indigenous belief systems, science, engineering, humanities, and the arts. My approach to contemporary mythos is deeply inspired by the discoveries of quantum physics – specifically the interchangeability of the particle and the wave, describing the interaction between matter and energy, materiality and immateriality. In his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, quantum physicist David Bohm introduces an experiment in language he terms the rheomode, which expresses reality in terms of movement, flow, constant transformation, and nondifferentiation. Bohm posits the rheomode in contrast to our customary mode of language and perception, which reinforces the static, discrete perspective of the particle. Revealing and describing the mirror aspect of material form, the rheomode is the language of the quantum wave.

My exploration of mythos is synchronous – and often synonymous – with an exploration of the realm of the wave through the lens of the rheomode. Both are fundamental expressions of wholeness, an integrated totality, that is implicitly embodied and embedded within every molecule of our familiar, discrete, particle-bound reality. Both emerge and unfold across a dynamic dichotomy of material and immaterial form. When encountered perceptually, both offer a glimpse of the sublime – and awaken a perceptual framework that is uniquely relevant to our evolving world at this critical moment in time. My artwork articulates interfaces that open this dimension of experience.

Within DXARTS at the University of Washington, I have served as a lead instructor for the entire undergraduate digital arts core curriculum, which includes:

DXARTS 200: Digital Art and New Media – History, Theory and Practice
DXARTS 201: Fundamentals of Digital and Experimental Art I
DXARTS 202: Fundamentals of Digital and Experimental Art II
DXARTS 400: DXARTS Undergraduate Research Studio

These format for these courses span a range from large lecture to production studio to seminar.

I also collaborated with DXARTS Assistant Professor James Coupe and Director Richard Karpen to develop a digital arts research methodology for undergraduates, which is now being implemented as pedagogy in the DXARTS undergraduate research studio (see Digital Arts Writing Initiative). I am currently teaching Digital Art and New Media: History, Theory and Practice, DXARTS’ cornerstone lecture course that focuses on art, technology and the future, and serves students across the university.

My teaching at the University of Washington extended into several collaborations with the Dance Program. I developed and taught the undergraduate course Dance and Digital Media in collaboration with Associate Professor of Dance Jennifer Salk; and worked with Dance Artist-In-Residence Mark Haim to produce Dancing in the Digital Domain, a graduate student concert integrating dance performance with cutting-edge digital art and technological experimentation (see Dancing in the Digital Domain).

I also engaged in highly gratifying pedagogical experiences mentoring students through multiple independent studies.

Dancing in the Digital Domain was a live performance collaboration between DXARTS and the University of Washington Department of Dance. The concert, presented May 29 – June 1, 2008, was the culmination of yearlong collaborative dialogue exploring embodiment vis a vis digital technologies.

Five dance/technology artworks were presented in the concert. Participating artists included DXARTS PhD students, DXARTS undergraduate students, Dance MFA students, and Dance BFA students. Technologies utilized include video sculpture, ambisonic sound, realtime video and sound processing, stereoscopic projection, live digital interaction between dancers and musicians, and motion capture. The work was supported by a $70,000 grant from the Student Technology Fund, written by DXARTS graduate students, that developed a Performance and Embedded Technology Toolkit.

The collaborative process was led by myself and Dance Artist-in-Residence Mark Haim, in collaboration with Technical Director Peter Bracilano. Dancing in the Digital Domain built upon the collaborative foundation established by the undergraduate course Dance and Digital Media, which I co-taught with Dance Associate Professor Jennifer Salk in Spring 2007. Dance and Digital Media placed emphasis on learning about technical and creative processes that extend across disciplines, while creating a common language between dance and technology. For both the course and the concert, our intention was to build a collaborative vision. Projects encouraged multidisciplnary dialogue and collaborative development of ideas from the conceptual stage through working models to final performance.

The Digital Arts Writing Initiative is a project that I led with DXARTS Assistant Professor James Coupe, in collaboration and Cathy Beyer, Research Scientist in the University of Washington Office of Educational Assessment. The goal was to explore and develop writing within digital arts.

A comprehensive survey on writing in digital arts was given to all instructors in the DXARTS program. In addition, research was conducted into current approaches to digital arts writing, and convergences between digital arts and electronic text. Responses to the Digital Arts Writing Survey were analyzed, and basic strategies and foundational approaches for DXARTS writing were both deduced and formulated. A guiding premise was Cathy Beyer’s statement that “virtuosic writing in any discipline is transparent to the methodology in that discipline.” This powerful statement led us to analyze and thoughtfully consider DXARTS methodology – and methodology for the production of artwork in a research university context. It is important to note that, at this stage, there is no core paradigm for writing in the digital arts field. E-text as a writing discipline and new art form is presently in a flourishing formative stage, and writing as a research tool in digital art practice is largely undefined.

As DXARTS predominantly utilizes and values writing within a generative process for the creation of new art, the correlative of an artist’s sketchbook was introduced. The notion of a sketchbook or notebook naturally evolved into a sketchspace vis a vis both the predominantly web-based writing forms currently utilized within DXARTS, and the larger methodological context for generation of new work presented by DXARTS.

A sketchspace is a dynamic, fluid electronic writing space that generates, supports, catalyzes, documents, and reflects upon the creation of new digital/experimental artwork. Macrocosmically, it probes the semiotic systems engaged in the generative digital arts process, and explores how those semiotic systems can be most effectively engaged and represented in an etext context. A sketchspace is a catalyst for the development of idea into manifestation, an electronic artifact of the artwork, and a semiotic space that allows and absorbs reflection on the art as research. It potentially integrates elements of cultural research, technical foundations, historical connections, experimentation, scientific documentation, and critical reflection. It may employ a “grammar” or language structure that parallels the artist’s elements of form, thus offering a microcosmic reflection of the developing artwork.

Models for sketchspaces are currently being developed in both DXARTS undergraduate and graduate art research practices.

The Innovation component of the Sixth College Culture, Art, Technology (CAT) Program at the University of California San Diego facilitated art/technology collaboration and experimentation within an interdisciplinary undergraduate learning environment.

Collaborative digital art and experimental media projects included work with video, hypertext, digital imaging, site-specific performance, multimedia experience design, theater, dance, and interactive media.

Innovation projects were created by UCSD Sixth College undergraduate students, 2004-2006.

The Innovation Web site contains students work from the following “Resonance Webs” – large-scale, collaborative, web-based new media projects conducted within the CAT program:
Redefining Categories
Oedipus X
The Memory Palace
Questions Video
Digital Literacy Pilot Project

It also includes new media practicum projects, created in my New Media Design & Artmaking course, as well as documentation of events pioneered within the Innovation component of the CAT program.

The Digital Literacy Pilot project was a major academic research initiative within the Innovation component of the Sixth College Culture, Art, Technology Program at the University of California San Diego, conducted in Spring 2006.

Comprehensive goals for digital literacy within an undergraduate curriculum were defined and developed. A pilot project was then conducted within a large, required humanities course of first-year undergraduates.

The pilot featured a “Web Layer” which included course URLS, a digital image database, extensive forums, writing tools, an online evaulation and feedback system, digital video tutorials, digital imaging project resources, and a student project gallery.

The focal point of the pilot was a 3-part digital imaging project. In Phase 1: Sampling Space, students photographically “sampled” the local natural environment. In Phase 2: Depicting Change, students explored the variability of digital data by affecting some sort of change in the environment in light of the course material on natural disasters. In Phase 3: Myth, students wrote a myth explaining a change in the natural environment and created a digital visual composite to illuminate their myth.

At the end of the quarter, the pilot project was analyzed through extensive survey data, statistics, and evaluations.

SPECFLIC 1.0 was a large-scale telecommuncations media performance event directed by Visual Arts Associate Professor Adriene Jenik, with choreography, assistant direction, and curricular integration by Heather Raikes. The work was presented for the UCSD opening of Calit2.

SPECFLIC 1.0 projected 30 years into the future of public education and research at a public university to create a speculative cinema narrative enveloping the entire Calit2 building and research community. The performance utilized cutting edge transmission and display technologies to expand a critical dialogue (begun in science fiction literature and cinema) about the social effects of these very forms. It opened and facilitated a community dialogue and opportunity to imagine, envision, and reflect upon the dynamic role human culture plays in future technologies.

In fall 2005, Heather Raikes and Adriene Jenik led a seminar with 12 Sixth College students who collaboratively produced video projections for the project, and participated in nearly every aspect of the innovative production process.

As New Media Producer-In-Residence (2000-2003) and Assistant Professor of New Media (2003-2004) within the School of Communications and Theater at Temple University, I designed and taught the following courses:

New Media Performance Lab
Physical Media Lab
Virtual Environments: Media/Architecture
New Media Design/Aesthetics
Advanced Projects in New Media
Interdisciplinary New Media Production
Introduction to New Media
Broadband Authoring
New Media Colloquium
New Media Synthesis
Graduate Acting Media Performance Art Workshop
Advanced Web Development Workshop

The Temple University School of Communications and Theater New Media Performance Laboratory fosters the development of original works that utilize new technologies to synthesize artistic and communicative disciplines in the discovery of new messages and new means for their distribution.

The Laboratory represents an integration of the live, sensate elements of performance with the continuing evolution of the digital medium. The New Media Performance Laboratory takes media off of the desktop and weaves it into the fabric of our physicality, public spaces, human interactions, and personal and public rituals.

Toward the discovery of immersive, contemporary performance forms and fluid, transparent media interfaces, the New Media Performance Laboratory synthesizes film, video, theater, dance, architecture, music, multimedia, interface design, broadcast/Webcast, telecommunications, and the Internet into a dynamic dialogue that fosters 21st century expressions and ideas.

I served as founding director of the New Media Performance Lab 2000-2004. Courses developed and taught within the NMPL included Physical Media Lab, New Media Performance Lab, and Virtual Environments: Media/Architecture. Artistic projects included cosine + Voicebox, Spring’s Awakening, and The Wave.

Spring’s Awakening was a multimedia performance project performed by the Temple University Graduate Acting Program in Spring 2002, under the direction of Theater Associate Professor Kevin Cotter and New Media Producer-In-Residence Heather Raikes.

The experimental media performance work adapted Frank Wedekind’s The Awakening of Spring, and synthesized the text with Heiner Muller’s Hamletmachine and a collage of media elements derived from popular culture.

For the Graduate Acting Program, this project facilitated an expansion of classical theater performance techniques into a hybridized media/performance art form.

Any new medium carries within it the seeds for new conceptual models and new means of interaction. The ability to translate all media into a digital realm breaks the boundaries that previously separated various disciplines. New media is inventing itself on the margins between art and science; film and journalism; theory and theater; television and graphic design. It is in this interdisciplinary spirit that the New Media Interdisciplinary Concentration invites and facilitates collaborations across disciplines that aspire to invent new ideas and create divergent expression.

Integrating both media and content, the New Media Interdisciplinary Concentration considers not only how to work with the new technologies, but how to think about them in a cultural context. In addition to offering an in-depth introduction to new media production, the Concentration examines the impact of emerging technologies on our cultural framework. Developing practical and conceptual relationships to both the history and future of new media, current explorations focus on interactive multimedia, convergence technologies, experimental art forms, and the issues associated with digital culture.

I served as founding co-director of NMIC 2000-2003, and director 2003-2004.

Her artistic and research interests revolve around dynamic interfaces between the body and technology. She creates performance, video, installation, interactive media, visual art, sound and electronic text. Her work is fundamentally inspired by an interdisciplinary inquiry into contemporary mythos, informed by a convergence of perspectives from indigenous belief systems, science, engineering, humanities, and the arts.

Raikes recently received her PhD from DXARTS, the University of Washington’s Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media, and was awarded the Graduate Medal for the Arts. Her doctoral research was a multi-faceted engagement with physical/digital embodiment, augmented/mixed reality, digital performance, stereoscopy, and immersive media composition.

Raikes’ artwork has been presented throughout the world at such venues as HEREArt Mainstage (New York), Aaron Davis Hall (New York), On the Boards (Seattle), The Kennedy Center (Washington D.C.), SIGGRAPH (Boston), The International Festival of Performance (Barcelona), Culturgest (Lisbon), E-Poetry (Paris), Imaginaria International Film Festival (Conversano, Italy), Inscriptions In the Sand (Famagusta, Cyprus), the San Diego Museum of Art, and the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. Her writings have been published in Body/Space/Technology, The American Communication Journal Special Interactive Performance Edition, PoeticaNet, New River Journal, and in the book Technologically Expanded Dance.  The written component of her dissertation will be published in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Art, Culture and Design Technologies (IJACDT).  Conference presentations include Consciousness Reframed 2011 (Lisbon), ISEA2011 (Istanbul), iDMAa (Vancouver), MAIA: International Conference on Media Art and Information Aesthetics (Beijing), Technologically Expanded Dance (Lisbon), SCANZ 2009 (New Plymouth), Society of Dance History Scholars Conference (Palo Alto), and PixelRaiders: International Forum on Cross-Disciplinary Art and Digital Practice (Sheffield, UK). Recent awards include recognition from the Nebraska Digital Workshop, the National Stereoscopic Association, and the University of Washington.

Raikes grew up in Nebraska. She studied theater, dance, film/video and literary theory as an undergraduate at Duke University, and went on to earn her masters degree from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). Following ITP, Raikes was a founding partner in Silicon Alley media design company Media Farm, and worked extensively as an interactive designer in the New York new media industry of the 1990s.

Concurrent with her early digital work in New York, Raikes was a dancer with the Erick Hawkins Dance Company, performing classic modern dance repertory at such venues as The Joyce Theater, the American Dance Festival, and Jacob’s Pillow. She studied dance and physical artistry with Erick Hawkins, Cathy Ward, Gloria McLean, Todd Rosenlieb, Lynn Simonson, Katiti King, Diane McCarthy, Miguel Godreau, David Life, Sharon Gannon, and others, and was a soloist performing the choreography of legendary Hawkins dancer Cathy Ward. Raikes studied performance composition and with Anne Bogart, Richard Schechner, and Lucia Dlugosziewski. She developed early multimedia performance work in New York and San Francisco with the trio Gemini, in collaboration with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company dancer Daniel Russell Kubert and Erick Hawkins/MOMIX dancer Pi Keohavong; and with performance collective Harakti Multimedia, in collaboration with dancer/choreographer Kim Whittam.

From 2000-2006, Raikes held university positions at Temple University and the University of California San Diego. At Temple University, she piloted interdisciplinary initiatives as New Media Producer-In-Residence for the School of Communications and Theater, and Assistant Professor of New Media, and served as founding director of both the New Media Interdisciplinary Concentration and New Media Performance Laboratory. At the University of California San Diego, she was Research Associate with the Center for Research in Computing & the Arts (CRCA); Media Design Associate with the California Institute for Telecommunications & Information Technology (CALIT2), and Innovation Coordinator for the Culture, Art and Technology Program.

From 2006-2011, Raikes earned her doctorate at DXARTS while teaching at the University of Washington. She studied with Richard Karpen, Shawn Brixey, Juan Pampin, James Coupe, Stephanie Andrews, and Jennifer Salk, and conducted interdisciplinary research between DXARTS, the University of Washington Department of Computer Science & Engineering, the University of Washington Dance Program, and the University of California San Diego’s Performative Computing Lab in the Center for Research in Computing & the Arts (CRCA).

In 2011-2012, Raikes will join the Planetary Collegium as an Advanced Research Associate of CAiiA: the Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Integrative Arts, University of Plymouth, UK. Her postdoctoral work will encompass new physical/media installation artworks, and articulation of a new poetics focused on transformative convergences between bodies and technological systems.

Heather Raikes currently resides in the Seattle area with her husband and young daughter.

Expanded embodiment fundamentally refers to an extension of the sensate human body into dematerialized dimensions of experience, expression, and exchange. Expanded embodiment provides the foundation for experiential metaphor: a poetic dilation that is rooted in the physical body and unfolds metaphorically through its immaterial extended dimensions. A cumulative series of experiential metaphors creates the meta-body of technoetic mythos. Technoetic, referring to the merging of consciousness and technology, converges with the ancient history of human mythos through the prism of digital language.

The next two neopoetic aspects: matrix architecture and perceptual resonance, refer to the immersive media language structures through which the mythos is articulated. Matrix architecture provides the framework for the integration of visual, aural, temporal, spatial, and kinesthetic sensory experience. Perceptual resonance refers to the cathartic awakening of “the space between the senses” evoked by the alignment of perceptual elements through matrix architecture. From the immersive fluidity of perceptual resonance emerges the mythic, transformative experience of the rheomode.

In the 2011-2012 academic year, I will be developing Neopoetics as an Advanced Research Associate with CAiiA: the Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Integrative Arts, University of Plymouth, UK, as part of Roy Ascott’s Planetary Collegium.

The title Corpus Corvus refers to the body of the raven. The piece traverses the landscape of the Corpus Corvus through dilations into ten corporeal dimensions: formation, throat, wing, eye, talon, belly, heart, spine, brain, dissolution.  Each of the ten segments is a densely integrated 3-dimensional kinesthetic-audio-visual composition.

In live theatrical performance, Corpus Corvus utilizes a novel mixed reality performance environment that merges stereoscopic depth space with physical depth space, constructing the illusion that the performing body is immersed within a three-dimensional media projection. Formally and compositionally, the piece explores the relationship between movement of the physical body and stereoscopic animation in an immersive physical/digital three-dimensional image field.

The stereoscopic animation is generated from motion capture data and from gesture-based kinesthetic media composition processes based on physical choreography.  Through precise temporal alignment and stereoscopic theatrical effect, the projected animation is perceived to respond dynamically to movement of the body in time, and to surround the body in physical space.  This physical-virtual dance is completed by a sound score based upon ravens’ vocalizations abstracted through human imitation and technological processing.

The totality of the performance/technology infrastructure is conceived as an extension of the human nervous system, an expansion of the spine – the epicenter of sensation.  The sensate body of the Corpus Corvus loops from the wholly kinesthetic spine of the performer-as-animal through its extended digital peripheries.  This pulsation is the lifeforce of the Corpus Corvus, and reaches toward an integrated continuum of sensate embodiment that extends from the animalic to the immaterial.

Corpus Corvus is currently being adapted into a derivative stereoscopic cinema installation, in which the animation is composited with stereoscopic 3D video footage of the dancer and projected onto a wall, constructing a portal into a hyper-dimensional mythic space.

This work was manifested as a result of collaborative research between DXARTS: Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media, University of Washington; University of Washington Dance Program; University of Washington School of Music; University of Washington Department of Computer Science and Engineering; John M. Marzluff, Denman Professor of Sustainable Resource Sciences and Professor of Wildlife Science, College of Forest Resources, University of Washington; DepthQ Stereoscopic/Lightspeed Design, Inc.; CRCA: Center for Research in Computing & the Arts, University of California San Diego; and the University of California San Diego Department of Theatre & Dance.

Written documentation of Corpus Corvus is published in the July-December 2011 issue of the International Journal of Art, Culture and Design Technologies (IJACDT).

Concept & Direction: Heather Raikes
Stereoscopic Animation: Heather Raikes
Choreography: Heather Raikes
Sound: Richard Johnson Logan-Greene
Set: James Ryan/Tandem Fabrications & Heather Raikes
Lighting: Peter Bracilano
Costume: Heather Raikes
Performance for Premiere & Video Documentation: Julie Funk
Performance for Motion Capture: Eric Geiger
Movement Research: Eric Geiger & Heather Raikes

The somatic vayus are:
prana vayu – energy that draws inward and upward
apana vayu – energy that draws downward
vyana vayu – energy that expands omni-directionally from the core
udana vayu – energy that draws upward and outward
samana vayu – energy that draws inward to the core

As the interactor engages the vayus through the physical sequence, a computer vision system recognizes the gestures and responds with the corresponding movement of visual particles within a three-dimensional digital image field. This system is an initial exploration toward an experiential interface that integrates the body’s material and immaterial dimensions. Marshall McLuhan and others have commonly declared technology to be an extension of the body. However, the state of the body in relation to the digital has more often than not been described as a state of “disembodiment”. Vayu proposes an evolutionary understanding of the body based on a kinesthetic expansion of the nervous system that extends the body beyond its physical boundaries – integrating its material/sensate and immaterial/energetic dimensions.

A longer term outcome for this prototype is the development of a complete system of gestures – akin to a kind of full body sign language – comprised of dynamic positions and movements that evoke energetic alignment of the body and serve as a common vocabulary – or control language – between the physical body and digital machine.

Concept, direction, programming, animation and choreography by Heather Raikes.

In terms of form, Purnachandra Raktva explores a synthesis of stereo depth space and physical depth space in a theatrical context. Stereoscopic 3D animation derived from motion capture data and physical gesture is projected onto a downstage circular scrim. Parallax is adjusted such that the 3D image appears to occupy the same depth space as the physical performers, immersing the dancers in media spaces that are simultaneously extracted from and inhabited by the body.

Purnachandra Raktva was created in collaboration with choreographer Kent Lindemer, and manifested through collaborative research between DXARTS and the University of Washington Dance Program.

This work was recognized with a Special Award for Innovation, given by the National Stereoscopic Association to Digital Stereoscopic Cinema at the University of Washington, for pushing the medium of 3D stereography.

Concept & Direction: Heather Raikes & Kent Lindemer
Stereoscopic Animation: Heather Raikes
Sound: Heather Raikes
Choreography: Kent Lindemer
Lighting Design: Peter Bracilano
Costume Design: Heather Raikes & Kent Lindemer
Stage Design: Heather Raikes, Kent Lindemer & Elizabeth Buschmann
Performers: Jamie Hall (Soloist), Monique Courcy, Mariko Honda, Nathan Ma, Ahn Nguyen

The work was created using SuperCollider. Techniques included sinusoidal oscillators, beating tones, amplitude modulation, frequency modulation, recursive sequences, granular synthesis, soundfile processing, filters, DFT/FFT, noise, stochastics, and ambisonic spatialization.

accretion is a structure that accumulates through a creative interplay between physical movement, digital memory, human manipulation, and energetic manifestation.

Sculptural forms are generated from a sequence of motion captured choreographies describing a loose narrative. These nodules of sculptural cinema are the forms gathered from a creative interpretation of the body’s energetic journey in relating with digital space; discovery, attraction, the conflict of integration, and finally mutual absorption and expansion. It is an emotive gesture, exploring the growing pains in the co-evolution of human body and machine body. 

Choreographically, accretion utilizes somatic architectures that evolve sculpturally through time and space in fluctuating symbiosis between humanness and machination (see video excerpt). The movement was captured using a ViconiQ 2.5 motion capture system, and used as generative source material to produce sculptural forms, or “shells,” evocative of the fluid motion that defined their form.

This work was created with Stephanie Andrews, and manifested through collaborative research between DXARTS’ 3D Animation Studios and the University of Washington Department of Computer Science & Engineering.

Udo is the Latin root word for “rain”. It is fitting for this piece to take the name of a “root” because it is a generative starting point for electroacoustic composition. Moreover, the piece follows a subtle, poetic trace of various states of water in the cycle of rain. In the atmospheric first section, clouds form and moisture gathers and prepares to be unleashed. In the second section, rain falls and is absorbed into streams. In the third section, the streams flow back into the atmopsheric totality that shed the water and initiated the process. The piece as a whole is a sculpted, transforming continuum of sound that evokes a circle unfolded into time… a loop, a sine wave, an instance of a cycle.

This 9-minute solo work is performed by a dancer covered completely in white clothing and body paint positioned in front of a white vertical rectangular canvas. A 3D animation is projected onto the hybridized surface of her body/canvas. This small, integrated theatrical format explores contemporary iterations of futurist performance forms – i.e. extreme, innovative, self-contained performative syntheses of body and machine.

Theatrically, the dancer performs a series of slow, archetypal movements based on Michael Chekhov’s psychological gesture: a physical movement that evokes the essence of a complete emotional state within a performer. The gestures are based on four rasas. “Rasa” is a term from Hindu aesthetics that defies precise translation, but can be described as “juice”, “flavor”, “emotion”, “essence.” Rasa is arguably an archetype of sensate emotion. The gestural rasas are utilized as the basis for both physical choreography and kinetic 3D animation, which is projected back onto the canvas of the body, creating a poetic interfusion of sensate embodiment across a physical-digital spectrum.

Concept & Direction: Heather Raikes
3D Animation: Heather Raikes
Sound: Shahrokh Yadegari
Choreography: Heather Raikes
Performance: Julie Funk (Seattle), Heather Raikes (Lisbon)

Concept & Direction: Heather Raikes
3D Animation: Heather Raikes
Live Percussion: Kevin Cook

Video: Heather Raikes
Sound: Dogon, Rima Fand, Cathy Ward
Choreography: Heather Raikes and Eric Geiger
Performance for Video: Buffy Swallow

This work was produced at the University of California San Diego, with collaborative support from the UCSD Department of Theatre & Dance, Culture/Art/Technology Program, Center for Research in Computing & the Arts (CRCA), and Communications Department.

flower screened at Imaginaria International Film Festival 2006 (Conversano, Italy) and the San Francisco Short Film Festival 2006. In addition, two distinct dance performances in New York and San Diego were developed as embodied dimensions of the video.   The combined video/dance performances were presented in New York at the Merce Cunningham Studio Theater (choreography by Kim Whittam), and in San Diego at the San Diego Museum of Art (choreography by Allyson Green).

Concept & Direction: Heather Raikes
Video: Heather Raikes
Sound: SoNu

Manifested in collaboration with the University of California San Diego Center for Research in Computing & the Arts (CRCA). Special acknowledgment and gratitude to light installation artist Peter Terezakis.

Cumulatively, The Wave is a posthuman myth derivative of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth. The dancing body of a woman warrior embodies the fundamental metaphor. She encounters gods, goddesses, enigmas and archetypes, all of which are reflections of herself in virtual space. Her psyche is reflected, refracted, expanded, and transformed into vertical, virtual dimensions. She becomes a meta-body: an elusive, shape-shifting equation of light, intelligence, rupture, and complexity.



“The body is not just repositioned by new technologies but supplemented, extended, and remade into a material-information entity whose boundaries are continuously constructed and reconstructed in its interactions with instruments whose total cognitive capacity exceeds our individual knowledge.” – Adalaide Morris, New Media Poetics

Finally, The Wave is an electronic exploration of the format of the illuminated manuscript, most commonly associated with poet/artist William Blake. In traditional illuminated manuscripts, gold ink was used to represent the “light of God” illuminating the text. In this work, the light is electronic and represents the force of contemporary mythic experience through the exponentially expanding apertures of the digital.


Text: Heather Raikes
Video: Heather Raikes
Media Design: Heather Raikes
Music: Dogon, Rima Fand, Heather Raikes
Choreography: Eric Geiger, Heather Raikes, Cathy Ward
Dance Performance for the Screen: Buffy Swallow, Heather Raikes

Created with Flash.

The warrior embodies the fundamental digital metaphor as she encounters gods, goddesses, enigmas and archetypes – all of which are her avatars, or reflections in virtual space. Her psyche is reflected, refracted, expanded, and transformed into virtual dimensions. She becomes a meta-body: an elusive, shape-shifting equation of light, intelligence, rupture, and complexity. This meta-body is both a somatic expression and a body of ideas, which are expounded in The Wave Electronic Text.

Concept & Direction: Heather Raikes
Video: Heather Raikes
Sound: Dogon, Rima Fand, Heather Raikes
Text: Heather Raikes
Choreography: Heather Raikes with Cathy Ward
Set Design: Martin Dallago
Lighting Design: Martin Dallago

This work was developed in the Temple University New Media Performance Laboratory.

“Manifesting and realizing elements derived from the digital medium in physical space and performative context resulted in something that was, surprisingly, arguably a kind of architecture. When communicative building blocks of the digital medium – composited imagery, layered sound, dynamic structure, hypertext, metaphor, symbolic communication – meet in physical space, the sum of their parts becomes a multi-dimensional structure that can only be appropriately contained and described by an expression of space and dimension as well as communicative form. Language, when truly expanded into multiple media, becomes three dimensional, becomes a temporal-spatial dialogue of signifiers and stimuli in a dynamic, interactive, three-dimensional environment. Structure becomes a transparent vessel for synthesis and a crucible that contains and orchestrates a vast, symphonic collage of individual voices and communicative elements. Form becomes a dialogue between concepts, symbols, and multi-sensory stimuli. The result is a dynamic architecture made of composited language. And at the same moment that language becomes an architecture, architectural expression becomes mobile and fluid, dynamically responding to the fluctuations of language. This liminal synthesis of media and architecture I have termed ‘the architecture of the rheomode.’”

Written, designed and programmed in Macromedia Director by Heather Raikes, with collaborative contributions by architect Mathew Davis, composer Todd Shilhanek, choreographer Kim Whittam, video artist Jeremy B. Warner, and performer Daniel Russell Kubert.

Compositionally, cosine revolves around the exploration of the rheomode, a term coined by physicist David Bohm that describes perception according to the laws of the quantum wave.  cosine seeks to discover the language of the wave, both in terms of the structure required to communicate it, and the process of inner transformation required to perceive it. The laboratory of the cosine performance collaboration gave rise to the “architecture of the rheomode”: a template for a digitally-facilitated linguistic and perceptual evolution.

The work asked: What happens when architectural structure and kinesthetic communication come into direct relationship with one another? What type of resonating plurality can the senses perceive between simultaneous multiple tracks of visual imagery? What do we hear when confronted with a 24 layer collage of sound spiraling around an environment in 360 degrees? What is the threshold of our sensory perception and what happens when we push that envelope? How is our context for understanding communication and codifying meaning affected by a frame that is neither fixed nor singular, but continuously changing and dynamically recontextualizing itself and its contents? How are our minds, bodies, and senses reconfigured by Einstein’s pivotal discovery that the speed of light is the only universal constant, and by a communications technology infrastructure that is exponentially accelerating our cultural language toward this end? If Newtonian physics and corresponding notions of space and time provided the groundwork upon which the prevailing paradigms of the 19th and 20th centuries were constructed, what are the tenets of an Einsteinian paradigm that can give rise to 21st century modes of communication and understanding?

cosine was developed in the Temple University New Media Performance Laboratory.

Concept and Direction: Heather Raikes
Sound: Todd Shilhanek and Heather Raikes
Video: Heather Raikes and Jeremy B. Warner
Choreography: Kim Whittam
Media/Architecture Environment: Mathew Davis and Heather Raikes, in collaboration with the Temple University Architecture Design Studio
Lighting Design: Todd Shilhanek
3D Sound Design: Todd Shilhanek
Costume Design: Catherine Cabeen
Rigging: Martin Dallago
Photographs: Tony Dougherty
Performers: Pan Anderson, Eric R. Butler, Catherine Cabeen, Bethany Formica, Daniel Russell Kubert, Sofia Negron, Heather Raikes, Ashley Smith, Kim Whittam