DANIEL SAUTER: LIGHT ATTACK

Light Attack elaborates the concept of the 'moving moving' image - the projected moving imagery corresponds to the movement through the space while the character's behavior is influenced by the urban context and passers-by. The piece suggests projection as an emergent ubiquitous medium, raising questions about property and privacy. How public is public space? How do authorities deal with this question? How is projection, as a ubiquitous medium, changing the environment in which we live? In its first version, premiered in Los Angeles in 2004, Light Attack's focused on the ambiguous nature of the city, such as logics of place, neighborhood, environment, landscape and social context in the stereotyped neighborhoods of Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, Downtown, Watts, and Compton. In 2005 in the iconic architecture of Florence, Italy, the virtual character revealed and absorbed a radically different urban context through its own beam of light, engaging passers-by and architecture in a visual dialogue. Light Attack uses a custom mobile projection setup installed in a car to project an animated virtual character onto the cityscape.

DANIEL SAUTER is an artist who creates interactive installations and site-specific interventions dealing with the cultural and social implications of emergent technologies. His work spans a variety of disciplines, Electronic art, Performance art, Robotic art, Sound art, Interactive Sculpture, and Software art. While technology plays an important role in his work, it is not foregrounded. He uses technology as artistic material, embedded in larger social and cultural contexts. Sauter’s research is driven by a curiosity about the ways in which technologies shape and transform urban spaces, social relationships, and the human body. His current projects focus on mobile interventions exploring the phenomenon of projection in urban spaces.

Sauter received a Diploma in Communication Design from HfG/ZKM Karlsruhe in 2002 (State College of Design at the Center for Art and Media, Germany), and an MFA from the Design | Media Arts Department at UCLA in 2004 (University of California Los Angeles). He won the Nabi Special Honorary Mention for UNESCO Digital Arts Award 2005, the Bernay Kurland Grayson Award for Creative Excellence 2005, the Art In Motion Award 2005, and the EUROPRIX Top Talent Award 2001. In 2004, he was awarded a honorary mention in the category Interactive Art for the Prix Ars Electronica and received an Adjudicators' Recommendation at the 8th Japan Media Arts Festival. Sauter is currently an Assistant Professor and Program Coordinator at the University of Illinois at Chicago, School of Art and Design.

His works have been shown internationally, including the Ars Electronica Festival 2004, Linz, Austria, ACM SIGGRAPH 2006, Boston, USA; the 3rd Beijing International New Media Arts Exhibition, Beijing, China; the 8th Japan Media Arts Festival at the Metropolitan Museum of Photography in Tokyo, Japan; the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung, Taiwan; the Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art, 35th International Film Festival, Rotterdam, Netherlands; the Microwave International Media Art Festival, Hong Kong, China; the Art Center Nabi, Seoul, Korea; the MIXED MEDIA festival 2006, Milan, Italy; the Beyond Media Festival 05, Florence, Italy; the Nano exhibition at LACMALab, Los Angeles, USA; the telic gallery, Los Angeles, USA; the Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, USA;