Considered a pioneer of interactive cinema, New York-based artist Toni Dove creates human operated instruments that tell stories. Using embodied interface, such as motion sensing and skeletal tracking, to manipulate media in real time, she creates genre mashing narratives that examine the impact of technological change on the world we live in as it evolves around us. She asks how these changes alter how we invent ourselves. Her disruptive practice, evolved over years, has produced machines that blur the boundaries between performance and installation and fuse film, game, experimental theater, robotics and artificial intelligence-based interaction to create immersive experience.

Dove’s current project in development Sunjammer Six: A Tale Told by a Solar Breeze is a mixed reality installation that uses proprietary AI to allow characters to interact with multiple audience members. It’s a story about Hypatia, a mathematician assassinated in 415 CE, who returns as a furious ghost and encounters a NASA engineer in the future building an off-world power station. Support for the project: Artist in Residence at: Bell Labs E.A.T. Program; Tandon School of Engineering, Integrated Digital Media, NYU; Pioneerworks Virtual Environments Lab. Grants from N.Y.S.C.A., and N.E.A. She is currently a fellow at Yale University, CCAM.