“Toni Dove is one of the few artists to move beyond a simple explication of the interface, altering the viewer’s relationship to her work while advancing new concepts in cinematic genre and narrative.” - Bill Jones, Artbyte

Ghosts is an automated cinema performance event. Video and sound are controlled dynamically in real time onstage by performers playing an “instrument” like a visual theramin, that creates a live cinematic media improvisation. Singing, talking, virtual projection characters on dimensional robotic screens perform with musicians in duets. Musicians can program the Ghosts voices and incorporate that sound into their own musical performance.

The ghosts are both virtual and material. The virtual component is interactive media – the ghosts will talk, sing and materialize visually as an unstable and shifting flow of fragmented projection images that gel to form whole characters. They are given coherence of form by a series of robotic screens. The screens will be collapsible, multifaceted, and structured three dimensionally with scrim elements (think of complex umbrellas fused with Chinese lanterns). When they open, projected images will manifest as dimensional entities freed from the rectangle of the movie screen. The entities will appear simultaneously on multiple screens, or travel across screens that open and shut, as the entities inhabit them and depart. They are operated, mechanically and with dynamically controlled digital imagery, by a performer on the stage.

Mari Kimura (composer and violinist) and Elliott Sharp (composer and multi-instrumentalist) will work with us to develop the sonic and vocal sample base for the 'ghosts' characters and will collaborate to create musical compositions they will perform with the 'ghosts'.   The virtual robotic characters will sing, talk and dance. They might be virtual backup singers or the lead performer onstage with a musician.  They might perform as single entities or as multiples in a chorus.   They might also function as instrumental foils

Programmable screen-based video will be added in the second stage of development to create a feature length cinematic narrative performance event.  Conversations unfold between characters on the main screen and the ghosts as the narrative unfolds. Performer(s) control this interaction in real time and may include the audience.

My work exists in a Bermuda triangle between games, theater and film. Sometimes I feel like I’m making buildings out of movies -- allowing my viewers to navigate the space of stories -- or I’m an automaton creator or puppeteer -- making characters that are inhabitable and responsive.  I have always had the desire to spatialize cinema -- to make it dimensional in a way that tugs against the linearity of sequential story time and allows for a more immersive experience. My engines help me to analyze and re-construct time, memory and story-- to keep it constantly fluid and unfixed. They have a slipperiness that seems to offer me the ability to travel somewhere new and always undiscovered -- they surprise me into re-imagining time.

Toni Dove has produced works since the early 1990s that redefine the form of traditional narrative using interactive components. Her pieces are embodied hybrids of film, installation art, and experimental theater where performers or installation participants interact with an unfolding narrative movie, often using minimally invasive interface technologies such as speech recognition and motion sensing to allow users to "perform" their on-screen avatars. Her work has been presented in the United States, Europe and Canada as well as in print and on radio and television.  An interactive movie installation, Artificial Changelings, debuted at the Rotterdam Film Festival, 1998.  Her current project, Spectropia, premiered at the Wexner Center for the Arts Nov 1-3, 2007, and showed at REDCAT, LA Nov 2007.  It is currently touring.

Dove served by appointment on the 2000/2003 Government Advisory Committee on Information Technology and Creativity, Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council, USA.

Dove has received numerous grants and awards including support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, the Langlois Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, The LEF Foundation, and the Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts from M.I.T.