IAN HEISTERS

Ian Heisters is a new media artist working with dance and installation. His works use digital film, custom software, and new technologies as entry points to an improvisation-based dance practice. A recurring theme of his work is the collision of social, political, and technological systems with our communities and bodies. Ian’s installations and performances have shown nationally and internationally at venues including Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Root Division, Goldsmith’s University, CounterPULSE, and Links Hall. In addition to his art practice, Ian works as a researcher and advisor specializing in performance, digital media, mixed reality, deep learning, and sensor systems for projects with UC Berkeley, Jim Campbell, Camille Utterback, and the open source community. He is currently collaborating with Berlin-based StratoFyzika, was a member of Anna Halprin's performance lab for several years, and enjoyed a multi-year collaboration with Smith/Wymore Disappearing Acts. A native of Northern California, he is based in the California Bay Area, where he tries to spend as much time as possible in the outdoors with his wife and two sons.

“Gestures is a series of films that consider how history and progress are encoded in the body. The films are made in a process of collaboration between the performers, an unreliable computer AI, and myself. Gesture #3 was performed by Sherwood Chen and Gabriel Christian in Richmond, California over the course of a single evening, after weeks of exhaustive rehearsal. I filmed their performance a couple dozen times, edited the raw footage, and passed the footage through custom software to generate a six-hour film.”

Gesture #3, 2018, Film

--Ian Hesiters