Interaction 95
1999.09.01
David Rokeby Ed Tannenbaum

Ed Tannenbaum was born in New York City on February 14, 1953. He lives in Crockett, a small town near San Francisco, California.

Tannenbaum received his BFA in film/video from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1976 He has received an Individual Artist in Video, Interdisciplinary Arts, and a Composer’s Collaborative Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Tannenbaum has performed his interactive video/dance works “Technological Feets” in venues throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, and Japan. His interactive video artworks are permanently installed in museums worldwide including the Exploratorium of San Francisco..

While Tannenbaum’s formal education is in art, he has taught himself many aspects of electronic design and computer programming in order to actualize some of his artistic ideas.

Rainbow Echo III
Rainbow Echo III“Rainbow Echo” is known as “Recollections” in most of the world. I created the original when I was an Artist in Residence at the Exploratorium in San Francisco in 1981. The concept behind that first work was to create a time delayed mirror in which the participant / viewer would move in a space and see his or her movements a second or two later. I got the idea to create this “impossible mirror” in 1976, and had to wait until the technology was available and I had learned enough to design the electronics.

As I worked on it, I realized that the addition of color would bring the work out of the realm of a purely conceptual environmental piece and allow me to explore many other areas I was interested in; color field theory, minimal recognition, and human movement. These elements were fundamental to the Futurist movement in art 100 years ago. Rainbow Echo fuses these elements in a work that is not completed until the viewer interacts with it.

This latest version, Rainbow Echo III, adds the element of symmetry to the mix. Also, in addition to silhouettes, a form of painting with large “brushes” is possible. Since the electronics were just completed in May of this year, I’ve only begun to explore the programming possibilities of my new toy.


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E-Mail : info@iamas.ac.jp