Above excerpt from Dreamscape (2005)

Vibeke Sorensen presented a retrospective of her work in abstract video and computer animation from 1974 - 2008 on March 2, 2009 at the Katzen Arts Center, American University, Washington D.C.

Starting as a musician/composer and architecture student, her original goal was to create 'liquid architecture', an exploration of the experience of architecture as a dynamic spatial, abstract experience through film, video, and multi-media. Combing the same elements as architecture, but considering architecture as organized information, she conceived of a meta-medium that would bring all media together as a kind of 'super-medium' that could literally connect the mind, natural and man-made environment on a global scale for contemplation as well creativity. As a musician and visual artist, she wanted to "perform space" in time the same way a musician performs a musical instrument, both solo and together with other musicians and their spaces, or architectural environments, located around the world. Conceived in 1972, she pursued her "global visual music" through many years, producing a series of works in a range of new media, sometimes inventing media in order to realize her works. This included a 3-year Intel Research Council Grant together with computer musician Miller S. Puckette and composer Rand Steiger from 1997 – 2000 for the "Global Visual Music Project".

Over the years, her work has involved the exploration of sensory experience, spiritual contemplation, and abstract thought, including mathematics, wave theory, language, and narrative. Her works engage organic gesture, text, stereography, as well as formal esthetic concerns such as pure color – sound relationships. While she has investigated synaesthesia, her work focuses more on the creation of 'a poetry of associations' that go beyond fundamental correspondences to the creation of new sensory and intellectual experiences. This includes her work with the Rutt/Etra Synthesizer in the early - mid 1970s, especially "Temple" and "TV Tubes" (1976) as well as her later collaborative work with Tom DeWitt and Dean Winkler most notably "Tempest" and "Voyage" (1981). Her piece "Calypso Cameo" (1983), her sculpture "Three Ring Circuit" (1986), and her multichannel work "Concurrents" (1989) focus on form, shape, color, and motion and the capabilities of the media to create new experiences unique to them. As she has stated, because the media are mathematically based, she worked with mathematical principles in tandem with the language of cinema as a way to extend and develop their unique esthetic possibilities. "Concurrents" can be seen to be extending action painting to 3-D space and sculptural time by using the video camera, with its zooms and pans, as a kind of paintbrush, one that is in continuous motion. Her work "Nloops" (1989), an homage to visual-music pioneer Oskar Fischinger, explored her concept of dynamic visual polyrhythms in 3-D computer generated space. Both "Nloops" and "Concurrents" are 9 monitor works that considered light a dynamic space-filling, sculptural element while at the same time allowing the artist to negotiate concepts of fragmentation and continuity.

"Maya" (1993) is a stereoscopic work that explores spatial polyrhythms in immersive space. Its title refers to the Hindu term for the conflict between illusion and reality. As she has stated, "all representation is an illusion, and all illusion is an abstraction. Therefore, all representation is an abstraction." She thus incorporates representational images at times in her work, as a way to reflect on the process of thinking and feeling that arises from the condition of being alive and part of nature and the world. Her work is non-objective, a pure artform deriving from the unique capabilities of the media she employs, but it is also synthetic, because electronic media uniquely and literally connect the physical and digital world into a larger network of associations. They are both poetic and formal, working with a synthesis of abstract and representational form.

In recent years, she has been concerned with multiculturalism in multimedia, worldviews and cosmology, the encoding and decoding of natural phenomena into dynamic symbols and gestures, especially on an international level. "Lemma I" (1997) and "Lemma II" (1999) work with digital media not only as a meta-instrument for visual music, but incorporate a number of cultural approaches to the association of sound, text, and image. Her interest in neuroscience has led her to her current research in pervasive media. "Sanctuary" (2005) and "Green Memories" (2005) take this further, reconnecting to architecture and nature as the foundation for abstract contemplation, poetry, and employing interactive media, including installation and networked performance, as a vehicle for externalizing it as a kind of multimodal and multicultural stream of consciousness.

Vibeke Sorensen is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of Media Study at the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York. For a biography and more information please see http://vibeke.info